Infotention

"With the unprecedented levels of published information, it is very difficult for Internet users to stay up to date on what matters to them. This situation is especially dramatic for information professionals that must remain aware of new happenings in order to stay ahead of the curve. Content curation is the process of picking the most relevant and valuable content for a specific audience. There is an important human component to content discovery and curation because only users can fully understand the context of the information they are working with. Technology can support content curation by computing large volumes of information on behalf of the user by helping to discover new pieces of Web information."

"It is no secret that big companies still uses email as their main collaborative tool. And this habit won’t change any time soon. Changing the office culture and the habits of maybe hundreds of employees may take years. But technology has moved on, and so should we. One step at a time. There are smarter and more time efficient technologies available today such as the enterprise wiki and we should all embrace it."

Constant interruptions can kill your concentration and put a crimp in your productivity. And according to recent research, you are probably suffering the tyranny of interruptions much more often than you realize.

"If you haven’t heard of it, the 10x effect is the anecdotal observation that great programmers aren’t just a little more productive than average ones (like 15-20%). They tend to be 10 times more productive. A similar effect can be found in other kinds of creative information work.

Can you transform yourself into a 10x person? If you meet certain qualifying conditions (by my estimate, maybe 1 in 4 people do), I think you can.

The 10x effect arises from the interaction of thrust and drag on the fundamental playing field of your life, your calendar.

If you understand how this works, and learn to manage the interaction, the benefits are enormous. Managing the interaction involves a rule that is about as close to magic as I’ve ever encountered: you just prioritize longer tasks in your scheduling."

"Tabbed browsing is perhaps the best thing invented since sliced bread. It allows us to browse multiple sites at once, and keeps the interface clutter-free to a great extent. That said, things get a bit messy for those who’re into a habit of opening more than 20 times at once, a habit, which is not that uncommon. If you’re on Chrome and are finding it difficult to deal with this tab overload, here are seven Chrome extensions that might come in handy."

"Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building."

(Forthcoming book -- I read a prepub copy and recommend it as an infotention resource) "According to Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt, we create more information every two days than we did throughout human history up to 2003. How can you cope with information overload? This insightful book makes a compelling case that information overload doesn't actually exist—the real problem is information overconsumption.

Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to a new form of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today's information age."