Broken filters

Sifting through Google Reader on a lazy sunday afternoon I came across two very interesting items. One was a post on PSFK about a small device called fitbit that tracks your fitness and sleep as well as displays information via what looks to be a web app. Think rescuetime and mint for your body. I quickly pre-ordered one because I am REALLY interested in devices and applications that teach you aboute yourself and your life via data tracking, visualization, info graphics etc. Mint changed my finances twofold by simply showing me what was going on via simple info graphics and tracking. Rescuetime is shaping up to make a major impact on the way I think about my day, what I do and what I want to be doing with my time. Hopefully fitbit will have similar results for sleep and fitness.

After slogging further through my unread items in Google Reader I came across a talk by Clay Shirky about information overload and how that concept has been framed, and in turn, how it needs to be re-framed. Shirky's main point seemed to be that info overload has been a state of being for us since the invention of moveable type, it is a constant. He made the point that after a problem remains present for a certain amount of time maybe it is less of a problem and more of a fact. The amount of information availble to us and the ways of accessing it are never going to stop growing in our lifetime. As a result of this fact the real focus needs to be on filtration not, "I cant handle all this information!" Part of information literacy for our generations will certainly be how to manage the various stream of information coming at us. Designers and engineers will continue to come up with amazing ways to filter information, but what is of most interest to me are the techniques and methods "normal" individuals start to develop as information overload begins to be seen less as problem that needs to be fixed and more of state of being. To quote Shirky we need to ask ourselves...

"what filter just broke?"

I remember months ago I was feeling overwhelmed by all of the content coming from Techcrunch, Mashable, Read/Writeweb and Orielly Radar, my favorite web industry news blogs. The amount of content those 4 sites generate in a week is more than most people care to keep up with. I like to keep up though, a lot, its part of the culture of our industry, its been a part of who I am since I fist got passionate about my hobbies. So in an effort to become more efficient I filtered each of those 4 tech blogs RSS feed by their most "engaged" posts using AideRSS, and then spliced the resulting feeds into a single feed using yahoo pipes that I dubbed ValleySpew. Now I get about 45 posts a week from this feed that I can easily keep track of if I don't have the time to read everything else. This wasnt the result of a mastermind engineer solving the worlds information overload problems, this was one person solving a personal filtering problem with the resources they had available. As we introduce more streams of information into our lives with devices and applications like fitbit that I mentioned before, these kinds of problem solving skills around filtration are going to become more and more interesting and important. Im a glutton for information punishment so I say bring on the data.

You can watch Clay Shirky's talk on information overload and filtering at PSFK.com.