TMI

I'm hearing more and more commentators describe our age as one of "information overload" or "digital distraction". More enlightened commentators are noting that the evolution of the internet is such that we are becoming as likely to participate in the creation of information as we are to consume it and this is a good thing.

In an age of TMI (too much information) it becomes important for every consumer to be able to put filters in place. The first phase was the simple ones - information blockers for parents, SPAM filters etc. This has X in it, so I don't want it. The second phase is relevancy - filters that sift through content to determine - based on the user's expressed or unexpressed needs - whether the content should get through, or whether it is irrelevant.

The first phase is big business for the providers, and the second phase is a big challenge. Is keyword searching about relevancy? Search engines return an enormous amount of links and many are not relevant, so really its not a great relevancy filter. The reason is because the understanding of the need is very limited in a simple keyword search. The application must have a relationship with the user over time - to understand behavior, build a profile, create some settings, ask some questions. The search engines can only do so much with a keyword search, in terms of relevancy filtering. The future of relevancy and filtering in an age of TMI is having a long-term relationship with the user so that the system can figure out really what the user wants to see and to know, and can filter out everything else. A keyword search on Google is about word matching, not relevancy - so in many ways the search engines perpetuate the TMI problem, they don't solve it.