A note from a lazy Sunday…

My comment on a post by Dennis Howlett, Conversational fluidity: using the FriendFeed river:

I know I’m returning to an old post, but it’s been a subject on my mind for awhile, and with a recent crop of articles on the web about the value of user-generated content and our current processes for filtering and deciphering the noise, I found this to be an interesting discussion.

We constantly hear the refrain that there is too much “stuff” being created on the web, that blogging is dead, that real thought is being pushed behind the noise of daily trivial conversations. So what? How is that different from how we’ve ever interacted? What’s different now is that our localized, trivial, ephemeral conversations are no longer localized or ephemeral, but permanent, stored, logged for everyone to see, index, search. They are still trivial :)

I’ve been having a conversation close to this topic with @bryanlanders about how to present our data to other people; how do we present information and hold conversations in methods and manners preferred by the users and not the creators (site owners)?

There is no monolithic right answer and probably never will be. Some will want to dip into the stream at times, others will want to be constantly engaged in real-time, while others will want to come back to things they may have missed, and those different interaction methods create the need for different filtering tools and processes. We have different levels for “too much”, “too public”, “too private”, “too trivial” et. al.

We each create our own filtering systems for our own lives, and while there is great scope for innovation in the area of conversational tracking and management, the key will be less about creating the “right” method but in making sure that all our filtering methods and conversational tools work together.

While the amount of information we create will inevitably increase as we create more systems to passively monitor and distribute (privately and publicly) information about our lives, the amount of information we can actively process is unlikely to change dramatically.

So how will we get there? Do we need better algorithms or better people to filter through the information? (or most likely, both…)

How do we start? What is the right way to present our information to best address our customers’ perspective?

It’s something Bryan and I have been talking about offline and online, debating how to present old content, our lifestream data and our comments on other websites.

I don’t know the right answer. Frankly, I wonder if I ever will…

… but maybe that’s because I’m not 20 years old: Clay Shirkey (via Scott Heiferman):

“you never hear 20-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.”

I wonder what 20 year-olds will think in 20 years…