Infotention

"Renowned social theorist Hartmut Rosa talks about social acceleration in modernity, and its consequences for religion, immortality, health, and the commercialization of time" (8 minute video)

"To help visualize the complex information flows that every knowledge worker and every organization must navigate, I often use the metaphor of a bow-tie. This helps me to understand and conceptualize Information Overload, and it may be helpful to you as well. To start, simply picture the shape of a bow-tie (yes, the fancy one that goes around the neck).
On the left side of the bow-tie is the complex incoming information in the form of communications, news and reports, meetings, and any other information input, no matter how small. This flow includes sources both internal and external to the organization that are filtered down and processed in the middle of the bow-tie, the knot. The knot is where the complex flow of information is reduced, simplified, and digested so that it can be used to produce complex outcomes on the other side of the knot. The right side of the bow-tie is where the structured and digested information is applied to business problems and used to create profit and gain advantage.
The bow-tie is a powerful model because it allows for complex inputs to be reduced to manageable blocks that are then used to drive complex outcomes. The problem is that the knot of the bow-tie, and by extension the organization, team, or individual knowledge worker, is vulnerable to becoming overloaded. If the knot fails and is overwhelmed by the incoming information on the left side, then the important outcomes being produced on the right side will suffer."

"Blekko is looking to change how we think of the Internet, and what we can learn from it. With a new tool called WebGrepper that will let you find not only high-level data but also the minutiae that lie under the macro scale. What sort of information? According to a blog post from Blekko, just about anything:

One of the advantages of having your own search engine is that you have access to all sorts of data that no one else does. Really, really cool data. And when you tell your friends you have all this data, you get lots of people asking you for stuff. Interesting questions like: “Can you give me a list of every site that uses Facebook Connect? In rank order?” Or: “Can you send me a list of sites that have the Google +1 button on them?”"

"One problem they kept circling around was the struggle to keep from drowning in the flood of news, cool new sites and videos surging through their Twitter accounts and RSS feeds, a glut that makes it difficult to digest more than a sliver of that material in a given day.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I bet I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” Mr. Chen said. “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on.”

He added, “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”"

Percolate is an online platform that curates content from Twitter and RSS feeds. The sheer amount of information that passes through a typical social media user’s path in a day can be tremendously overwhelming. Percolate, however, using an algorithm, will organize content according to what you’re interested in.

What’s so innovative about Percolate is how much emphasis is placed on reaction. With buttons like “awesome,” “interesting,” and of course the Internet-friendly “win” and “fail,” Percolate lets you say what’s on your mind. Furthermore, users are able to add a tag of their own to customize the experience further. Percolate is also an apt business tool in that it allows brands to not only to create content, but also identify content related to the business itself.