Information Overload. I had an interesting conversation in a meeting with marketing about this last week. Apparently the term has been “over played” in the advertising world. Now I’m no advertising guru, so it may get too much use, but there is probably a reason for that. It remains a problem.

Though I don’t think the problem is actually too much information, in my mind you can never actually have enough. I think the problem is  the lack of tools to help us process and react to all of the information that seems to surround us, both in our personal and professional lives.

Email, social media, market research, meetings, blogs, advertisements, news, IM – the list seems to go on forever. How do you prioritize it? How do you make sure you don’t miss something crucial?

First let’s think about how we got to this point of ‘too much information’. The focus of information technology has been on the ability to create, store, and distribute information. Faster and larger databases, simpler tools to create information, more bandwidth and memory to transport it, and easy interfaces to share it.

Now consider the investment we have made in the ability to process that information, to analyze it. Outside of some very costly business intelligence and text mining tools for large enterprises, and some little known tools for the technocrats, we have one little search box. And that really just helps us find more information, not synthesize it. No wonder we have so much information to deal with.

Maybe the time has come for a fundamental shift in our focus on technology. Perhaps we should spend more time on the software, hardware, tools, and techniques to help us *use* information, instead of creating it.

I think this is what the promise of the semantic web actually holds for us. The way I look at it “Web 3.0″ (man do I hate that nomenclature) is all about helping computers understand how we want to use this plethora of information we are creating. Imagine if machines know what the data is, what it means, and how, when, and where we want to use it. We would have applications that take vast amounts of data (even more than we have to deal with today) and simplify it down to information we can understand and make use of.

Now how are we going to make this happen? How are we going to format all of the information out there in the appropriate manner, link it together, and present it to us poor information overloaded people? I think I’ll leave that up to my friends over at Synaptica Central to work out…

- Ken