I'm packing up for a trip to the US, having been invited to give a lecture at the
How Much Information? summit organized by UCSD and the
Global Information Industry Center. This is part of a research effort aiming to understand and
quantify the staggering amount of information produced globally. I look forward to bringing to an
otherwise technological discussion the point of view of the people using all that information, and
will be speaking about the dependence of the value of the information to its users on a variety of
factors.
Cheers,
In this issue News:Blogging IO. Reflection: Email and Meetings: the two big ones. From the Toolbox:
X1 Search What's New Blogging IO
I'd waited a long time, but at last decided it's time I contributed to the
Blogosphere my opinions on Information Overload. So, this month I started a new blog:
Challenge Information Overload. As always when launching a new web presence, this was fun to
design; I expect it will also be fun to write, especially if it can trigger some debate with the
blog's visitors. Take a look, and pass the word around!
Observations, reflections and opinions Email and Meetings: the two big ones I was in a meeting at a client company
called to discuss Email Overload, and the discussion started veering towards how to make meetings
more effective. This happens often: IO and Ineffective Meetings seem somehow connected, so speaking
of one leads managers to consider the other. What's the connection?
There are two ways to
look at this. First - and this is where my thinking was in earlier years - Information Overload is a
massive productivity issue in the enterprise, and Meetings are a massive productivity issue as well;
in fact, I've always considered these the two worst productivity problems we face in this
information age. So as a pair of twin issues, they may be linked in people's minds.
But if
you look closely you see a more direct link: IO plays a big role in meeting ineffectiveness. We've
all been in countless meetings where everyone is gazing at their screen with a glassy look in their
eyes, or peeking at a BlackBerry under (or above) the table. The urge to try and clean out the flow
of incoming messages makes people ignore the meeting they're part of, to the organization's
detriment.
This would be easy to fix if the chairperson were willing to edict a "closed
screens" policy; but this manager is too eager to clear their own Inbox... From the toolbox
X1 Search If you could take one utility to a desert island, what would
it be? For me, a strong candidate has always been Local Search. Ever since the first such product -
AltaVista Personal Edition - I've made a point of trying out any new tool that indexes your hard
disk and allows full-text search across all data types - files, emails, attachments within emails,
contacts, meetings, etc. Having this capability allows one to put less effort into filing things
carefully - you can always search and find them, wherever they reside.
There are many such
tools around you can choose from, including the free Google Desktop, but my personal favorite is the
X1 Search client. This not only finds everything anywhere on my machine - it really does find as
fast as you can type the query. And it has a built in previewer for most file types, too.
This kind of search technology is making its way into the OS, but for now I prefer the power of a
dedicated tool. Highly recommended!
Snapshots of Ingenuity Hats off to
Bernhard Schmidt's ingenious trick for
making
the "corrector plate" of his eponymous telescope. He warped a glass plate under a
vacuum and then polished it. After release of the vacuum, the lens would spring back into the
required shape. Foreseeing this required deep physics insight!
The Monthly Factoid It's miraculous enough that all our thoughts and
memories are crammed into a brain the size of a grapefruit. But when you consider the technical
details (and what engineer wouldn't?) you get a second shock, because all our thoughts and memories
are actually localized in the Neocortex, the convoluted outer layer of the brain - and this is only
some 2 mm thick! And you thought a Pentium chip was miniaturized?...
