The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~Tommy Smothers

In what had an eerie resemblance to a No Email Friday but which occurred for very different reasons, portions of the Internet went dark last week.

On January 18, major Web sites including Wikipedia and Reddit were closed to business. Google did not shut down but covered up its logo with a large black bar, making it look as if the site had been censored.

These were all part of a grassroots effort to protest anti-piracy legislation, namely the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect I.P. Act (PIPA), which had been working their way through Congress.

This is the first time in history that major Web sites banded together in protest and it was largely led by information providers (i.e. Wikipedia and Google), which get more traffic than other sites.

After the protest, dozens of members of Congress as well as the White House dropped their support of the bills and the sponsors of SOPA and PIPA are contemplating considerable changes to the bills.

While some of the Internet sites went a bit overboard with scare tactics about SOPA and PIPA, ultimately the power of the people – and information providers – prevailed. The people spoke and the government listened and made an abrupt about face.

And regardless of any future legislation that may address anti-piracy, January 18, 2012 was a notable day in information history.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

On Feb. 25, in San Francisco, the Information Overload Research Group will host “Overloaded 2012″, a gathering of people from a diversity of domains such as business, academia, technology, journalism, psychology, and research, committed to the battle against information overload. We’ve intentionally decided to make this an “un-conference”, a more informal and intimate event than a full blown conference, where the focus will be on creating a lively dialog, crossing organizational and domain boundaries, and developing new insight into the state of information overload as well as the latest solutions.
In my experience, getting professional colleagues who usually interact remotely into one physical room liberates incredible energy. Ideas flow, knowledge is shared, innovative thinking is triggered, collaborations are born, friendships are cemented… in fact, IORG itself was born in the aftermath of such a gathering a few years ago. I look forward to attending this day in San Francisco with much pleasant anticipation!

If you share our passion, please join us there! Reserve your place by registering here. We look forward to meeting you in what promises to be a productive, interesting and (not least) fun coming together of like minds.

Nathan Zeldes is the president of the Information Overload Research Group.

The future is murky...

On New Year’s Eve, we generally like to take stock of where we are, take a deep breath, prepare for a fresh new year with some resolutions, and of course, make wild predictions about the future.

IBM is getting into the spirit of the season with its 5 in 5, a list of five innovations that will change our lives in five years.  This is the sixth year that the company has released its list of predictions, which are driven by market data, social trends, and innovations taking place in IBM research labs.

Before we look ahead, let’s look at how IBM has done with its past predictions.  In 2006 IBM predicated that, by 2011, we would have digitized medical records and be using advanced video teleconferencing systems to speak and interact with our doctors.  We are not completely there, but we are on the way.  The company also predicted context-aware mobile devices and nanotechnology being used to control our environment.  Mobile devices have certainly evolved in that direction, and we are using advanced nanotechnology to improve solar energy collection.

In the fail column, IBM also believed that, by 2011, we would be immersed in a 3-D Internet (Snow Crash, anyone?) and that real-time translation (Star Trek-style) would be possible.

In the area of Information Overload, we previously predicted that Information Overload would continue to increase despite attempts by us and on the part of others to raise awareness of the high cost and the negative impact it has.  Unfortunately, we were correct in our prediction and the amount of Information Overload rose in lockstep with the increase in the amount of information created over the past year.

Looking to the year ahead, the trend will continue and we can expect more of the same, namely more information and more Information Overload.

This year, in its 5 in 5 forecast and on a more positive note, IBM is banking on the following:

1.)  People power.  Advances in renewable energy technology will allow for the harnessing of kinetic energy from movement such as walking or jogging, or even residual heat from individuals or machines.

2.)  Multi-factor biometrics.  Passwords will become obsolete as we increasingly rely on identification via biometric data such as facial definitions, retinal scans, and voice recognition.

3.)  Mind reading.  No, really.  Bioinformatics is the field of harnessing electronic brain activity with advanced sensors to understand facial expressions, concentration levels, and thoughts of a person.  The technology can be applied to controlling mobile devices, medical testing, and the gaming industry.

4.)  Death of the digital divide.  IBM believes that the ubiquity of mobile devices will all but eliminate the gap between those who have information access and those who do not.  The company estimates that in the next five years there will be 5.6 billion mobile devices sold, giving 80% of the 7 billion people on earth access to such a device.

5.)  Junk mail will become useful?  With both spam filters and targeted advertising becoming more precise, IBM thinks that real-time analytics will become so advanced that the technology will be able to accurately determine what you really want.  An example of this kind of predictive, targeted advertising would be reserving concert tickets for your favorite band on a night that you have a free space on your calendar, all without asking you.

This year’s 5 in 5 predictions are interesting and fun, and it is easy to see how trends support some of the ideas.  Biometrics, control of technology via brain waves, and harnessing kinetic energy in particular seem very plausible.  Eliminating the digital divide that separates the information haves from the have nots and solving the junk mail problem seem a bit trickier, but in the spirit of the holidays lets be optimistic.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

(Image courtesy of John Stephen Dwyer)

Cheers!

It’s hard to believe, but the New Year is almost upon us.  In the interest of not contributing further to your overload, dear reader, I’ll keep my resolutions brief.

E-mail – as demonstrated by the amount of coverage that the Atos e-mail ban received in recent weeks – is still a hot topic, so let’s try to fix it for 2012.

First, when preparing an e-mail message for the consumption of others, write it with the recipient in mind and please take a moment and read it for comprehension before clicking on Send.

Second, when replying to an e-mail, please read the entire message you are replying to.  It’s amazing how many people reply asking a question about what the writer very clearly covered in paragraph seven of the original e-mail.

Third, on the topic of even having a paragraph seven in an e-mail message, keep e-mail messages short and on topic.  Cramming three or four (or 10 or 20) topics and questions into one e-mail simply means that most of them will be ignored and unread.

I can’t promise this will remedy all of the ills of the world but following these three easy steps will Lower the Overload in 2012.

Happy Holidays! Happy New Year! Prosit Neujahr!

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Last week, Atos, a French IT company, announced a ban on internal e-mail.  Atos’ management justified the action as a way to stop wasteful messaging.  It says that staffers get an average of 200 e-mail messages per day (the average, according to our calculations, 93), and that most are not “critical.”

Atos wants to move conversations that would take place in e-mail to tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator instant messaging and face-to-face discussions.  Aside from the fact that managers there should read my “What Works Better When?” treatise, I have to wonder how it was determined that “most” of the e-mail exchanges were not necessary.

It’s quite true that e-mail can be wasteful, and furthermore I’m willing to bet that Atos didn’t even begin to calculate the cost of “unnecessary” interruptions, which would magnify the presumed cost of wasteful e-mail exchanges five fold in many cases.

What does trouble me to some extent is the amount of press that Atos’ action has gotten.  While Atos’ management may have indeed given some though to the problem, other managers may simply read the headlines (“Huge Company Bans Internal E-mail” was a popular one) and decide to pull the plug.

Does anyone remember No E-mail Wednesdays?  They were immediately followed by E-mail Tsunami Thursdays.

E-mail has become the prime means of moving information both within an enterprise and beyond its borders.  Is it the ideal means?  No, of course not.  But to paraphrase Sir Winston, e-mail is the worst form of messaging except for all the others that have been tried.

Instant messaging and social networks all have their place, but there are still many types of messages, ranging from out-of-office communications to thoughts that require a longer explanation, where e-mail is still the best medium.

Now, if we could all exercise a bit of control when it comes to the number of recipients…

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

You have very pretty lights TrapIt, but can you find me good content?

Finding relevant content is tricky business; not only is there an abundance of irrelevant content to confuse us and muddy the waters, but we often simply don’t know something exists until we see it.  Traditional search fails us here because that method assumes we know what we are looking for in the first place, or that we possess the forethought to make some assumptions and pick out some key words to enter into the search bar.  Perhaps what we really need are intelligent tools that suggest things to us before we even know we are looking for them.

TrapIt, a new online content discovery tool, aims to meet that need.  TrapIt was developed by the same minds that created and then sold Siri to Apple (the Siri technology has now been fully integrated into the iPhone 4S).  Both offerings leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology that was developed as part of the CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, an AI project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).   Originally intended for military use, the cognitive software was designed to learn from experience, take orders, explain its own actions, and respond to unexpected input.

The key difference between the two is that Siri is a virtual assistant that responds to your verbal commands to do tasks such as setting reminders or searching for information while TrapIt is designed to seek out the things that it has determined you will find relevant, without you having to ask for them.

TrapIt is currently in beta and delivers personalized content from over 100,000 sources based on “traps”, which are essentially search terms that the user sets up.  Once created, a trap will automatically refresh itself with new content to be read when the user logs in, building a personalized homepage that reflect the user’s interests.  Creating the trap “tablet usage” for instance creates a stream of content that relates to tablets and usage data.  The user is then prompted to give thumbs up or down to the content to indicate whether it is what he was looking for or  not.  When giving a thumbs down, there are options to indicate why, such as because it was not interesting, the source was not trusted, or the content was spam.  This helps to further refine the content that is suggested going forward.

The content that TrapIt collects is refined as TrapIt analyzes how often the user clicks on specific types of content, as well as through the thumbs up or down mechanism.    Because the AI learns as TrapIt is used, it is too early to tell from my tests how effective it will be at providing relevant content, but results so far are encouraging.

Siri, the first commercial application of the CALO AI, has been well received and is quickly becoming a popular feature of the iPhone (as well as being hacked to run on older iPhone models and platforms such as Android, or even to control thermostats).  Now that TrapIt is applying the same underlying technology to content discovery, we will have a chance to see how effective the AI really is, and if it can recommend content in a way that helps to cut through the clutter of information and get us the information we really need.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

Just one more text...

If you’re staying up late reading and/or writing e-mail, doing work, reading online forums and news, catching up on social networks – and then find yourself sleep-deprived the next day, you’re not alone.

Sleep deficiency is a major problem for knowledge workers who, due to increased mobility, are now more likely then ever to continue their work from home after leaving the office.  Even setting aside the pressure (some would even say the necessity) of answering e-mail messages or working on projects late into the night, the temptation of late-night recreational Internet and technology use is omnipresent.

Such behavior is considered poor sleep hygiene, a term that refers to one’s habits and practices at bedtime as well as environmental factors that may influence the length and quality of one’s sleep.

Consider the following statistics from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 “Sleep in America” poll:

- 39% of Americans bring their mobile phone into bed with them and end up using it in the hour before they go to sleep.  The number is even higher for younger Americans, 67% of 19-29 year olds.  21% of Americans end up texting during this time.

- Those individuals that end up texting in the hour before sleep are more likely to report bad sleep and not feeling refreshed.

- 1 in 10 Americans is woken up by mobile phone alerts from texts, calls, and e-mail.  The number rises to nearly 1 in 5 for 19-29 year olds.

- 36% of Americans use their laptop in bed before they go to sleep, and this group reports that it is less likely to get a good night’s sleep.

Why does this matter?  Surely we are able to deal with the loss of a little sleep in exchange for getting out that important e-mail or sending that last text of the day, right?

Unfortunately not, according to the UK-based Mental Health Foundation.  The organization’s 2011 “Sleep Matters” report notes that individuals who experience even mild sleep disorders are four times more likely to have relationship problems, three times more likely to lack concentration during their work day, three times more likely to struggle to accomplish tasks at work or during their day, and over twice as likely to suffer from energy deficiency.

Last week (in case you missed it due to being tired) was Drowsy Driving Prevention Week, a public awareness campaign by the National Sleep Foundation to highlight the issue of sleep safety.  To put the problem in perspective, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that drowsy driving results in 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and more than 100,000 accidents each year.  The National Sleep Foundation estimates that drowsy driving is involved in about one in six deadly crashes and one in eight crashes resulting in hospitalization.

Presuming you are not nodding off while reading this, consider how lack of sleep might be impacting your productivity and effectiveness.  Before going to sleep, lay off e-mail and texting, and maybe even try just turning all of your devices completely off.

Sweet dreams.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

Is there a reply in there somewhere?

How many times do you send an e-mail message to someone and not get a reply?  Fairly often, I’d wager.

But how do you know and keep track of times when you don’t get a reply?

Sometimes I think back, oh, I sent an e-mail and so-and-so doesn’t seem to have replied.  When did I send it?  What was the subject?  Did I miss the reply?

When this happens, I first have to search for the e-mail that I had originally sent.  Sometimes that takes just a second, sometimes it takes a while.  Then I have to determine whether the question or issue is still important and, if so, what the next course of action might be.

I could send another e-mail but that could go unnoticed as well.  I don’t know if the recipient saw the first e-mail or even if it actually arrived (e-mail delivery is not infallible).

I can then resend it, forward it, or forward the e-mail to someone else who may be able to help me.  In some cases, it might make far more sense to switch communications channels altogether and make a phone call or send an instant message (especially internally).

Of course, this is all predicated on my being able to recall that a.) I had sent the e-mail and b.) that no reply had been forthcoming.  Much e-mail goes unreplied to and some of it is actually important.

In the meantime, some important issues go overlooked and much time is wasted.  I probably become aware of at least one unanswered e-mail each day and figuring out what the status of that message is, as well what actions are required can take anywhere from five to 15 minutes.  If every knowledge worker in the U.S. dealt with this issue on a daily basis, we would find we lose 12.576  million hours on a given day, at a cost of $264 million (this is based on 78.6 million knowledge workers and 10 minutes or 16% of one hour lost).

Of course, what could be even more costly are the ramifications of an e-mail message which has perhaps not been acted upon or read or replied to.  It’s impossible to calculate these costs but, in some cases, they can be significant, resulting in a loss of business, missed opportunity, or simply confusion and frustration for the knowledge worker who does not know if the e-mail was ever received and acted upon.

While there are several third-party Microsoft Outlook plug-ins and tools that address this issue, what we really need is an option in the out-of-the-box e-mail client (IBM, Microsoft are you listening?) that allows me to set a time period for receiving replies to flagged e-mail so that, when no reply is forthcoming within this timeframe, the e-mail client alerts me.  Sounds like an easy fix to me.

UPDATE – Since this Commentary was published on Tuesday, a reader pointed out that he uses the follow-up feature in Microsoft Outlook (there is a similar feature in Lotus Notes, which is what I use). The problem is that this requires the sender of the e-mail to set up the follow-up flag when sending (although it can also be set at a later point in time), and the feature serves only as a reminder for further action since it does not know whether the recipient has or has not replied to the e-mail.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Since Basex:TechWatch was founded in 1997, its mission has been to present a weekly digest of news and information on topics and offerings relating to knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Over the past 14 years, the amount of stuff (the only word that really describes it) that could conceivably fall into these categories has expanded exponentially.  As a result, Basex:TechWatch became somewhat bloated and almost doubled in size.

Given our increased focus on the problem of Information Overload in recent years, we have decided to put Basex:TechWatch on a diet of sorts.  We will do this by sharpening our focus around knowledge sharing and collaboration with an eye towards tools that could help knowledge workers deal in a better manner with the burden of too much information.

An example of this is the dramatic increase in the number of mobile devices such as smartphones that seem to come onto the market each week.  Since the difference between many of these devices is minimal, we have reduced our coverage accordingly and will only include those which we feel are innovative and relevant to the topic at hand.

This won’t happen overnight but we do think you’ll find the new, slimmed-down Basex:TechWatch to be more on topic and even more useful in providing you with a quick overview of new products, offerings, services, and updates that have been announced in the preceding week.

We’ll continue to work to fine tune Basex:TechWatch, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to e-mail us at btwsuggest@basex.com.

Click here if you would like to sign up for a free subscription to  Basex:TechWatch.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Lower the Overload, send less e-mail

Information Overload Awareness Day (IOAD) continued the dialog I sought to begin three years ago with the first IOAD.

To be candid, for the past few months, I’ve been a bit overloaded as have my colleagues at Basex and we were considering on moving IOAD to December.

We were therefore surprised a few weeks ago when we noticed articles announcing that Information Overload Awareness Day 2011 would be on October 20 once again.  A phone conversation I had with Marsha Egan, who runs the aptly named InBoxDetox.com and has supported IOAD all three years, was enlightening to say the least.  It’s ironic, Marsha pointed out, that we are so overloaded that we couldn’t even turn off IOAD.

I had created IOAD but by year three, it had taken on a life of its own.

To “celebrate” IOAD, I asked knowledge workers around the world to send 10% fewer e-mail messages each day.  E-mail by itself is just one manifestation of Information Overload but it may well be the poster child.  I was pleased to see countless bloggers and journalists pick up the call this year and ask their readers to Lower the Overload by sending fewer electronic missives.

I’ve done a lot of speaking about Information Overload in the past few months and I just returned from Scottsdale, Arizona, where I spoke at a meeting of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection.  The meeting specifically addressed Cybersecurity Through A Behavioral Lens and I was asked to speak about Information Overload.

It was a gratifying talk in part because the Q&A that followed almost didn’t end (it eventually had to end because many of the participants had flown out that same day and were still on east coast time and my keynote followed the dinner hour) and in part because the attendees were some of the leading thinkers in the field.  As it turned out, the behavioral observations my colleagues and I were making about Information Overload had great applicability to cybersecurity issues and the questions and discussion largely centered on building a bridge between the two disciplines.

It turns out that even cybersecurity experts and academicians in this field are not immune to the problems of Information Overload and this group in particular related to the story told to me by Col. Peter Marksteiner of the rogue e-mail that was forwarded and forwarded until it brought down the e-mail servers at Maxwell Air Force Base – during a cybersecurity event there in June 2008.

If you haven’t yet started to Lower the Overload, you can still take stock of your own information habits and take the first step by sending fewer e-mail messages to fewer recipients.  If we all do this, it will make a difference.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.