Slashdot Mirror
Information Obesity
Roland Piquepaille writes "How many phone calls, emails, voicemails, memos or stories do you have to go through every day? Probably more than last year. And probably too much. This article from the Sydney Morning Herald looks at this problem of information overload and how to deal with it. Here is a quick and not well-known fact: Website content management author Gerry McGovern says that something like 70 per cent of most websites goes unread. Despite that, when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?" Good point. Check this column for a summary if you don't have time -- and who has? -- to read the original article."
#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
/. post more interesting.
# Makes your
print $stdin.readlines.to_s.split("").map { |x|
t = ["b","tt","i","strong"][rand(4)]
"<#{t}>#{rand>0.5 ? x.upcase : x.downcase}</#{t}>" }
I for one don't care to read this article.
Is that what all those stories last year about 23% of all Americans being obese were really about??
We're not the only one reading the articles?
But seriously, what's not of interest to some people may be exactly what one individual is searching for. I know I've found obscure information only available on a page or two in all of Google, and I know people have come to my sites on some pretty strange search terms.
Information overload? Spam outweighing your ham? Penis already long enough? Try Spambayes a doctor-recommended, safe and effective way to treat one symptom of too much information. Comes in Unix or Windows flavors (Outlook 2000 or XP).
Disclaimer: Spambayes is not an FDA-approved medication and is not a cure for impotence, hair-loss, depression, runny nose, or jungle fever. Pregnant women, men with hairy underarms and people in general who look like monkeys should not use.
It's interesting that this subject was brought up in an article that wasn't worth the bits it was printed on.
In that vein, though, I think that the number of times you have to say RTFA here demonstrates just how much people filter when they're immersed in this much information. I know it definitely applies to me.
HEY! I'm not obese, I'm just big vocabularied.
</cartman>
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Ruby? What the hell is that?
How about porting that to C.
If I were running TBS, I'd replace 'Dinner and a Movie' with some old games...even TWIB would do. You just don't see either these days...And I think the Cubs hardly ever show old games anymore during rain delays (I may be wrong, but I haven't seen one in a long time).
On the other hand, WGN may have burned out the tape of the Cubs clinching the 1984 Eastern Division...
Spambayes
Who has time to read the article? I have to put up another webpage about my cat!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
"Here is a quick and not well-known fact: Website content management author Gerry McGovern says that something like 70 per cent of most websites goes unread. Despite that, when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?""
That reminds of a site I know.. Oh yeah, Slashdot!
that 70% of all wesites now are blogs
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Another day in the office, which, according to one recent study, consists of handling 46 phone calls, 25 emails, 16 voicemails, 23 items of post, eight inter-office memos, 16 faxes and nine mobile phone calls.
The article wasn't really clear on this -- are we supposed to believe EACH employee is getting that much crap to deal with and respond to? Or, if that's spread out amongs the "100 to 499 staff", then it doesn't sound like much at all...
I would actually venture to say that no more than 3% of the content of any of *my* Web sites has ever been read by anyone but me.
when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?"
Is anybody really intersted in this?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Could we be starting to develop Nerve Attenuation Syndrome?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Does that 70% include this article. The last thing I need is someone to tell me I've got too much to read.
It's like someone yelling to me "hey, it's loud in here." Just because they're too old. Feh.
"rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?"
/.
That would be never in the case of
they must not be counting blogs...
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
i am a comment you will never, ever read
if you are reading this, then you have entered the ironic realm of self-referential commentary
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In this way, you become what you pay attention to. Watch a lot of TV?
#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
/. post more interesting.
b ','tt','i','strong'][rand(4)]}>#{rand>0.5?x.upcase : x.downcase}</#{t}>"}
# Makes your
print $stdin.readlines.to_s.split("").map{|x|
"<#{t=['
I am getting far less voice mail and email than this time last year. I think it is becuase we laid off a lot of the middle people. As a developer, I constantly have to answer questions from marketing types who really have nothing better to do then write a 50 page spec, of which 2 paragraphs describes what the system does... and those two paragraphs were cut/pasted from an email from me.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Website content management author Gerry McGovern says that something like 70 per cent of most websites goes unread
And something like 65% of all statistics are made up? To say 70% of most websites is a very broad statement and really needs narrowing of scope. And does he state anywhere how he came up with this figure? Any journal articles, documents outlining his research, etc?
Looking at the massive amount of blogs, personal sites, and other sites that hold little interest to those outside a set few, what about the percentage of websites that are read at all?
OK, so most people don't read every last word on every website that they visit. Big deal.
I don't read every last word in my morning paper and I certainly don't watch everything on TV.
But I do appreciate having the choice of being able to read what I want in my paper, or watching TV when I want. Similarly, I do appreciate being able to go to a website and pull information that's useful to me, when it's useful to me, regardless of how often it's been accessed in the past.
For example, I recently was putting an older hard disk drive in a PC, simply to see if it still worked reliably. If it did then I was going to keep it around for emergencies or perhaps donate it to someone else, if it didn't then I was going to recycle it.
Unfortunately, this drive didn't have its master/slave jumper settings, or even acceptable CHS (cylinder, heads and sectors) values on it, and the accompanying documentation had long since disappeared.
All I had to do to get the information that I needed was drill down to the relevant page of the manufacturer's website and, voila, I had the drive up and running within minutes.
Now, I can't imagine that there are many people who've looked at the same web page in the last year or two (after all, this was "only" a 540MB hard disk drive), but having that web page there where the information could easily be found made sense both for the manufacturer and for me.
The manufacturer spent next to nothing putting that information there where it could be found (and no doubt saved a lot of money that it would otherwise have spent on technical support calls) and I got what I wanted too, almost instantaneously. A win-win situation all around.
Now, why would the manufacturer care about how often the page has been accessed? It it somehow hurting it's bottom line to have that page sitting on a server somewhere? I don't think so.
Much as I loathe the phrase "information wants to be free", sometimes it does.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
First of all, it's hard to know what websites are going to "take off". Did the guys at homestarrunner.com expect the kind of response they got? Not initially, that's for sure.
Second, not every website is MEANT for lots of activity. I have a homepage, and it's meant for small traffic from people I know. It's probably low traffic enough to be counted as one of those sites that goes "unread", but it serves the purpose that I intended it for.
There's no denying that the web has plenty of bad abuses of HTML. (Many of which would be erased if Geocities and other sites would just clean out their inactive accounts). But it's not hard to avoid such sites and move on.
As one who cannot afford all the new masturbatory gadgets that come out, I often wonder how much they actually contribute to productivity, rather than further encumbering their users.
Sure we can pull some odd-ball statistic saying that 70% of web content isn't read, but is it the same 70% for all people? Of course not.
/. is without worth.
Your average internet user doesn't read slashdot, and doesn't care about slashdot news material. But that doesn't mean that
The same goes for just about any website. I don't need to read a website describing someone's two week ordeal that it took to get a salt-water fishtank in proper condition. I don't have fish, I might never have fish, but if I ever needed anecdotal advice it would now be there for the consideration.
The Internet is such a beautiful thing because of its high availability of information. As such, of course not all of it will be relavant to all people at all times. Frankly, I'm surprised the percentage is that low. I'd estimate that I view about one to two percent of web content at most.
W a S h i n G T O N , d c , m a Y 2 3 , 2 0 0 3 - W E L C o M e h O m e a m e r i c a ! m O R e A m E R i c A N S S A y t H e y W I l L e A t H o T D o G s i n t h E I R b A c K y a R d S t h i s S u m m E r T h a N A n y w H e R E e L s e , i N c L U d I N G T H e b a L L P a r K - A p E r E n N I a l f A V O r i t e - a N d a t P i C n I c S , A C C O r D i N g T O A n e W P O l L S P o n S o r e D b Y t H e N A T i O N a l H O T D o G & S A u S a G e c o U N c I L .
. T h E N a T I O N a l h O T D O g & s a U S A G
S U M m e R I s f i n a l L y U P O N u s A N d t h e H o m e i S D E F i n I t E L Y W H e r e h O T D o g s a r e E n J o Y e D
Well, I would post the full article here in case of slashdotting but, as you're going to ignore 70 percent of it, here's the first 30 percent:
... if we create more, we create more value," McGovern says.
Spinning around
By David Adams
May 20 2003
Next
Another day in the office, which, according to one recent study, consists of handling 46 phone calls, 25 emails, 16 voicemails, 23 items of post, eight inter-office memos, 16 faxes and nine mobile phone calls. While that sounds scary, its even more alarming to think that those figures - taken from a 2000 survey of companies employing between 100 and 499 staff conducted by Pitney Bowes in partnership with the US-based forecaster the Institute for the Future - are likely to have risen.
Enough to send you barmy? You may be right. Experts say information overload is a serious problem in many companies, adding to stress levels and resulting in a downturn in productivity (a report from Proudfoot Consulting last year found IT-related problems - such as information overload - were responsible for 8 per cent of lost time).
Irish website content management author and public speaker Gerry McGovern believes the problem known as information overload stems from the fact that since the founding of civilisation man has been operating on the premise that more is better. "(It's) the-more-the-merrier kind of concept
"But we have begun to shift into a digital-type of economy and society and I think the rules that operate within a digital economy are different from those which operate within the physical economy. Part of that is there is essentially no scarcity or there is very little scarcity in a digital economy. The constant movement is towards cheaper, faster processes, infinitely cheaper storage devices that can store vastly (greater) quantities of content or data."
McGovern says this impulse to do more and create more has resulted in a "glut situation".
"Information overload is a reflection of that almost genetic historic desire to do more," he says.
Brooklyn-based author David Shenk, who has written several books and articles on the issue including Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut (1997), uses the term "information obesity", saying that where once we lived in a world where food was scarce and people struggled to get enough calories to keep them alive, today the industrialised world has the opposite problem.
"Information is the same way," he says. "We need information and contact and stimulus but we're now in a situation where the challenge is not so much to get hold of it as it is to be discriminate about what we expose ourselves to. Most everyone in the industrialised world can get their hands on a silo full of data and stimulus in a matter of minutes. The challenge is to get the most relevant, meaningful, contextualised information so that we can turn that into useful knowledge and wisdom."
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Just because YOU don't ask yourself if anyone wants to read the comment, does not mean we don't. Any good developer is going to ask himself and the clients this very question. If you normally don't, I suggest you open your eyes.
But my parents always told me I was just information big-boned.
I knew I should have spent more time exercising and less time reading newspapers.
What diffrence does it make if no one ever reads it? Hard drive space is cheap, it's not like there is a 'limit' to the web.
Just having the information out there for someone to search and make use of is a benifit. Unless some harm can come from it, It should be online for someone who might need it to find it.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
A good example would be to ask how many people read the text anywhere on slashdo tbut main articles. I know I ignore everything else including the text to the right and left sides of the main screen.
I do security
All my friends say I've got way too much information on just about any subject possible... I work what's call an AWS schedule at work (Alternating work schedule) Which means it can be up to 3 days and a minimum or 2 days before I get back into the office to check voicemail, email, and learn new account information. I have asked for a laptop and vpn access, but am denied every time I bring it up... needless to say this in itself causes information overload and challenges the effectiveness of my job since I have to swallow up to a weeks worth of emails in under the 30min I make it into work early for. Did I mention I'm a call analyst? Which means I'll be on the phone for all my business. Information overload indeed... you will be assimilated...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Don't know where I heard this piece of wisdom.. anyhow, some guy is talking about the effectiveness of advertising. He's complaining some large fraction of his money is wasted on ads nobody pays attention to.
The problem is, he doesn't know what worked and what doesn't. While most of the information is never looked at, you don't know who it will benefit when. Since space is almost free these days - it's the bandwidth that matters - just leave the information online.
..don't panic
I tend to stay away from websites for a couple of reasons:
The pages are poorly organized or poorly laid out.
The navigation is terrible.
And the big issue:
The person cannot spell, has no idea what grammar means, and resorts to using four-letter words over and over.
Honestly, basic writing skills go a long way. I want to read something written by someone who has a brain. If they cannot even run spell check on their article, why should I care to read it?
Another thing to remember is that some websites are niches. I do not know how many sites I have run across that are fan sites for old television shows. For some reason a question comes up about the show and I go looking through Google for information. Those small fan sites can be awesome resources - when you have that particular need. I have seen counters in the double digits on sites that were virtual shrines to a children's show.
Ditto with information on other little things, like short stories by a certain writer. I do not need the information constantly, nor is there a lot for me to talk about Joseph Payne Brennan, but I wanted to find out about compilations of his work. A quick search turned up the names of his books. This is certain to work for writers many times more obscure.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
E-enema.
haha i kill me. Mod this down appropriately now.
Too Bad /. can also be labeled a "blog."
/.? Hell no, but it serves it's purpose, and that's why I do it. I also post photographs I take with some of the cameras I make. Is this content "worth" anything to you? Probably not. UNless you want to see pinhole photography.
blogs != crap
While I agree that most of the "blogs" out there are of little or no use - some are important to a small group of people. I have a blog, and my family and close friends read and post to it. Will it ever be
Don't be so quick to judge.
Please email all complaints to root@127.0.0.1 and the issue will be dealt with in due time.
That's exactly the point I came on here to make. It is impossible for the private Webmaster (and probably commercial Webmasters) to know what information might be useful.
I have an eclectic mix of information on my personal Web site. I doubt very many people would be interested in everything I post, but my Web site offers information found nowhere else on the Web that I know is of interest to several people. Several people have expressed interest and appreciation in the copy of Bagster's "History of English Translations and Translators" that I have on my site, and others have said they have enjoyed my story about my Navy experiences. Maybe someone else would be interested in my college class (Advanced Lasers) report on dye lasers? But, what is most relevant to the question of posting only interesting information would probably be my autobiography, which necessarily contains arcane details of limited appeal.
In matters of research, it is impossible to predict what little bit of information might make all the difference to a single reader. As someone who does a fair amount of research, more information generally is better than less, provided that the information is organized for rapid searching. I rarely need an entire document (the longer, the less-likely), but I often need some brief bit of information that often is not included in any article.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?"
I for one put stuff on my webpage as reference for myself. I do put some small content there for other to read, and the logs do show that it does get read.
Ok, so perhaps 70 percent of all content goes unread. It's still good to have it there. Even if the site's navigation controls are terrible, even if the site is poorly organized, even if it's not updated very frequently...
The information can still be Googled.
The fact that Google and other search engines index by content rather than by title, author, or whatever, means that when someone does go to look up a particular piece of information, if there's something relevant on your site, they'll find it there. If you think about it, this is the ultimate indexing system. Microsoft has been trying to make this work in Windows for nearly a decade (remember the abomination called 'Find Fast' - not to mention their latest attempt, WinFS?) and failing miserably. Google handles it with all manner of grace and speed.
So go ahead, put up that content. Put up as much content as you like. Someday, it's going to be just the thing somebody needs to read, and when they need it, they'll find it on your site.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
How can anything come without a warranty!? What if it marks an electronic greeting card as spam! I'd have no one to sue!
I tried making a joke about this in the open music license article yesterday, but moderators took it seriously. THIS IS A SARCASTIC JOKE.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
You, sir, are a true American hero. Hats off. God bless.
I do that because I know my way around the site. Some sites have a much cleaner design, mostly Blogs(Memepool for example), in which case I read like 98% of the page. Obviously this statistic varies.
...that I got from an old boss.
"The question you need to continue to ask yourself while writing anything is, 'Why should anyone care about what I'm writing.'"
When I bother to ask myself that question, I generally avoid the embarassment of writing pointless drivel, either here or on the various sites I've put up. Haven't always kept it in mind, but last I checked I was still human, so that's not surprising.
:: Thinks about it for a moment :: :: Resets page preferences to +4 ::
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
# ! / u s r / b I N / r u b Y- w # m A K e S Y O U r / . P O S T
m O r e i n t E R E s ti n G . p r i N t $ S t D I N . r
e A D L i n eS . T O _ s . S P l I t ( " " ) . M A p {
| x | " # { t = [ ' b ' , ' T
t ' , ' I ' , ' s T r o n g ' ] [ R a N D ( 4 ) ] } > #
{ r A N D > 0 . 5 ? x . u P C a S E : X . D o W n C A S E } /
# { T } > " }
Christ! I'm blind!
-phish
"As one who cannot afford all the new masturbatory gadgets that come out, I often wonder how much they actually contribute to productivity, rather than further encumbering their users."
Yes! I've often found it hard to walk with one of those gadgets in place.
Hey, I read it on the web, it *MUST* be true!!
(and if you actually read this then you must be among the observant 30%!)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I only read comments ranged 4-5, and MAYBE 3 if it's a slow day. the rest of those comments go ignored, and bloating the /. database.
if only people would check to see if someone had already posted the same thing, stay on topic, not flame, and once again ask 'does anyone want to read this'?
I my self am breaking a few of those rules right now. I know this same comment has already been posted, and I know most of you don't care about it, AND... my bet is it doesn't break 3.
no comment
"I tend to stay away from websites for a couple of reasons:..."
"And the big issue:
The person cannot spell, has no idea what grammar means, and resorts to using four-letter words over and over."
Another testimonial for reading only Freshmeat.
Simply put:
:)
- Producing good quality material takes time and patience.
- People have always cranked out "information' that really isn't. The forms may have become different (e.g. powerpoint slides with spiffy animations) but the real substance is more often lost.
+ Couple this with an uncontrolled profit motives and the situation is even more appalling (as an example, just recall how many "technical" presentations are just sales pitches in disguise).
- The abuse is much more rampant today as the good stuff is increasingly drowned out by the ever rising noise level.
enough said
Im sure a much higher percent of books in libraries goes unread. It is not a bad thing. We hoard information because it is never certain when it will be usefull. There are tons of books from ancient grece that we can't find now because no one kept copies. we only knoe they existed because they are referenced in other books we did keep. tons of scholars would kill to get their hands on those books that are now lost.
Information overload? 70% of the Internet goes unread? Hell, I for one know I don't read any of the articles Slashdot links to! And judging from the /. crowd, most of like to make those linked articles part of the 70% and get directly to the Funny Comments (mmmm, Beowulf, Soviet Russia, hot grits, and 1.2.3. profit jokes!)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Google News
Game Rankings
GameTab
I think sites like these are the future of info dissemination. I don't have the time to check out the separate game review and movie review watering holes. I have my local paper bookmarked, and BBC News, but all other news comes from Google. So on down the list. These meta-sites save a buttload of time and research.
When I do my online shopping, I always look for customer ratings. Now, I don't have to. Instead of the opinions of fifty average joes, I have the opinions of fifty paid professionals. Now, before you come at me and say that those reviewers might be paid to say something good, I can say from experience that bought opinions aren't as prevalent as you think and least come without a slew of spelling and grammar mistakes.
It's the wave of the future, like it or not. ve3d.com is fast becoming the unofficial hub of gaming news, despite the fact that you could fit its in-house content in a thimble and their admins' lack of journalistic ability is exposed on a daily basis.
And honestly, how many of you have /. as your primary info source? It's great, don't get me wrong, but it's another example of a meta-site...one where many people don't even take the time to RTFA. Content is not king once you realize the threshold of human consumption. You just end up bowling people over with sound and fury.
I don't have a cell phone, pager, or use IM, but I'm still overloaded by email. I have my primary email, my site registration email, my new primary since the old primary's shot through with spam, my work email, a website email, an alias for that website email...Then there are stock tickers, weather reports, sports scores, online banking...
I think, however, that the worst element is spam. Not just unsolicited email, but telemarketing calls, junk mail, door-to-door, etc. Then there are TV commercials, radio commercials, print media commercials. It's advertising that kills. Something like 80% of all email in the US is unsolicited. How many dinners have you completed without a sales call? How many days have you gone without another credit card in the mail? Yadda, yadda, yadda, and I wonder how many even read this far.
How many phone calls, emails, voicemails, memos or stories do I have to go through every day?
No more than 2, no more than 10, 0, 0, and 0, in that order.
swamped with information?.. okay...
I guess they're referring to signal to noise ratio...
My take on this is, You never know where a good idea will spring up. Go ahead and put an ear to the stream of content and develop your own filtering skills so you can absorb the good bits.
No way, you're totally wrong. Far from being encumbered, I'm now enjoying two-handed surfing!
Website content management author Gerry McGovern says that something like 70 per cent of most websites goes unread.
I thought the point was that information is available. Just because some books in the LOC goes unread is no reason to remove them or for similar books to stop being writen. Id rather have to search through a dozen webpages to find the information I need than for some person to decide that, since the chances that I will read it are slim, they simply wont included it.
-
Station ID: 33052768001
Station IO: 051403
Station T : 1210
I pulled out some statistics from my email activity for the past two and a half years:
Highest number of emails sent in one day: 14 May 2003, 26 emails
Highest number of emails received in one day: 10 Jan 2003, 80 emails
Average number of emails sent daily: 4.75 emails
Average number of emails received daily: 15.2
Total number of emails sent (to date): 1747
Total number of emails received (to date): 11355
Ratio of received to sent emails: 6.5 (ie. 1 email is sent for every 6.5 emails received)
The above numbers are spam-free. I use Lotus Notes to extract my email data to excel and use data analysis functions. My average received these days is more in the range of 50-70, since I got promoted from a lowly tech writer to a quality manager, *sigh*.
I was unable to segregate the number of emails where my name is in the "To:" list compared to the "CC:" list, this information would probably give me a better handle on how much of my mail actually matters. But my sent to receive ratio suggests roughly 5 out of 6 emails are not directly of interest to me, an 83.3% information obesity factor?
E.W. (as opposed to eeeeeww)
"rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?"
Yes. Big Brother is very interested in consuming all of this information.
Check this column for a summary if you don't have time -- and who has?
Big Brother has the time, the skills, the manpower and the hardware.
Google for Echelon, Carnivore, Patriot Act I & II,
etc... There are hundreds of articles in yro.slashdot.org covering these issues.
Keep the email flowing, it keeps Big Brother busy.....
It's no secret, the internet contains useless crap. mostly!! A lot of this useless crap supports what's good. Slashdot, for instance, is a great site, but bandwidth ain't free-- lo-and-behold banners, pop-ups, link-farms, etc. Persoanlly, I think that it's fine when folk have useless content online, it disturbs me when the crap overflows into the useful info (ie commercial crap).
What the article meant to say was that 70% of Slashdot posters don't actually read the article before posting to the thread...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
>>70 per cent of most websites goes unread.
That number must be larger, because I could only get through about 9% of the article before falling asleep.
Something about this article really set me off. Read if you're interested.
First off, the only way to solve the "too much crufty information" is to implement a central planning system of some sort. This doesn't have to be a "central committee" or anything like that. It can be as simple as marketing types deciding what's cool and what's not. Then you'd have to deny people the ability to put up (or at least have linked to) what you consider "uncool."
You'd have to do this to reduce the amount of cruft.
Of course, we've seen the success of these restrictive planning systems.
The funny thing is that the internet does this, after a fashion. Things that people aren't interested in are not linked to, and thus are far less likely to be found by search engines. If you wanted to eliminate cruft, you might just not pay attention to anything below a certain linking threshhold. It wouldn't be perfect, but it wouldn't be bad.
Also, a note about receiving crufty emails. Yes, it happens. People send you the strangest, most useless crap all the time. We have a situation where I work where two or three secrataries dominate my inbox by inundating it with "word tips," "lost and found notices," and seminar announcements. It makes up about 1/4 of my non-automated email every day. Can't delete it because important stuff is sometimes in there.
The problem is because the sender thinks that these things are important. Most likely, in her little microcosm, it is. If you ask a secretary the most important things about running an office, you'll probably get answers like "office supplies and appointments," or "maintaining a friendly atmosphere" (which they interpret to mean everyone helping everyone else).
Of course, she's not alone. All of us have different priorities for running the business. I think that keeping the main fileserver and code repository running is a big thing. Surprise, surprise, that's my main job.
I think the solution to many of these problems is not to filter the emails (though that certainly helps), nor is it to disallow the emails. I think the best solution is to provide an appropriate forum. A private usenet server is an excellent place to post seminar announcements. A web page or wiki is a great place to have end-users help end-users. Might also be a good spot to have that lost-and-found list.
We've put up a wiki, and I'm introducing people to it, especially the serious email bombers (or maybe they're strafers?). We'll see how it works out.
Another problem, of course, is making all of these tools available and usable in the right way without the tools consuming all of your work time. I don't know the solution to this, but I do think that proper tools and proper integration are the future path of the information world.
Anyways, let me know what you think.
eventually.
Too bad? Earth to dinkus... slashdot is shit!
If Slashdot readers actually READ this article, it could be the end of /. as we know it. At the very least, it would eliminate the static. And I could sure keep up with an article a day! :)
From the article: "Another day in the office, which, according to one recent study, consists of handling 46 phone calls, 25 emails, 16 voicemails, 23 items of post, eight inter-office memos, 16 faxes and nine mobile phone calls."
25? Only 25? I know coal miners that get more emails that that at work every day.
1.) In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters of hot grits imagine YOU! 2.) ??? 3.) profit
Anyone seen Johnny Mnemonic Sure it was just a movie made out of the RPG Shadowrun (IMO) but it was a fun little movie. The cause for NAS (nerve attenuation syndrome) is said by Spider to be information and technology overload. Just watch out for anyone with the black shakes, they are probably some white collar corporate grunt. Also watch out for the street preacher.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Despite that, when putting content on the web, "rarely do we ask the question: is anybody interested in reading that?"
Oh.. kind of like radio.slashdot.org
There's no denying that the web has plenty of bad abuses of HTML. (Many of which would be erased if Geocities and other sites would just clean out their inactive accounts).
Yeah, I've got a website that I lost the password to edit it several junky hard drives ago. I know, that did teach me that backing up my personal stuff was important too! Anyway, it was on Geocities and the management there is unresponsive to my requests to supply me a password or take it down.
Wouldn't be so bad if it didn't contain my badly outdated resume! The info on the resume is the only proof that the website was mine. I told them they were holding my information hostage, but you know they're just too busy to bother with an old Access 2.0 data manager. Wish I had put something a little scarier in my Curriculum Vitae!
Anyone else have a story like this?
I am the I.T. Director of a large corporation and when I looked for a P.A. I didn't get the best looking gal or the one with the greatest chest measurement, I employed someone who could do the job ! All e-mails, all letters, all faxes go through her and I only get to see the real information that could be of any use. Sure, there were teething problems in the first few months, but now she is an asset to the company.
You also need the flag. When my staff walk past my door they can see into my office. If the door is shut and the pirate flag is showing they know that I am only to be disturbed if it is a REAL emergency. That way I can have some time to work my way through the pile of information and actually do my job.
I'm sorry, but I'm an information junkie. I want all the novel stimuli to just keep coming at me faster and faster. I can't get enough of them. It's hard to even unplug for a weekend and not check my email.
Information Obesity? My ass... This is just a cop out for those who can't handle it.
Data has 0 calories.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Any salient bits in the article will be repeated in the commentary. Lots of salient bits that are not in the article will show up in the commentary.
The New York Times does not present its readers with information overload. You do not have to finish something to figure out you don't want to start reading it. Ever notice how a reporter's story always seems to fit the allocated space? It doesn't, really. Only what fits sees print. The remainder is just left out. The readers will read until they have read enough. At which point they will stop and go onto something else. Probably a less there for a lot of other things.
Sure, if it's a commercial site with ads, you want max viewers. But the goal of offering a website isn't necessarily to get the most people to view it.
In fact, one of the best things about the web to me is the number of small, specialized sites that are basically labors of love offered by enthusiastic amateurs. No ads, no Flash, just otherwise hard to find information brought together in one place.
Another reason people have websites is simply to store their stuff somewhere - sort of an online archive that happens to be viewable by anyone who's interested.
As for "blogs" (stupid word), people act as though it's some new craze, but I suspect most personal websites since the beginning of the web have more or less been blogs. Now there's software to make it simple, so more people can do it. BFD.
- Steve
My response:
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. I hope there was at least some subtext of irony there, chumpley.
Oh you've made this old Slashdotter an amused chump you have. Many Kudos! go out to you and your kin!
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
payper liesense, softwar gangster, stock markup whoredoggIE, ?pr? execrable. canN'T you smell that smell?
lookout bullow. the facts are coming into evidence.
consult with yOUR creator. that's the spirit.
Think of the WWW as a huge, unedited encyclopedia that also includes porn, gambling, urban myths, lies, scams, the goatse guy, rants, conspiracy theories ... you get the idea. Now, let's say you go to the ATI website to download the updated drivers for your video card. Are you going to read the whole website? Hell, NO! You're only going to read what you absolutely have to to get the drivers. That people don't read everything on every site they visit is a sign of selectivity, nothing more.
Some years ago I worked with an old guy who didn't want to have e-mail on his system.
I asked why and he started one of those "wise old uncle's fireside chat" sessions.
In it he said that 20+ years ago we had typewriters and carbon paper. Mistakes were difficult/impossible to correct. You could only make at most 5 copies. The upshot was you thought long and hard about WHAT you wrote and to WHOM you sent it.
Then came the photocopier - you could easily copy a memo and send it out to 20 or 30 people - so you did "just to be sure..."
Now we have e-mail, it's easy to write/edit and easier still to send it to the world and his wife. The upshot is that ALL communications get devalued as mass mailings of half baked ideas become commonplace [and that is before we even get started on the subject of spam].
Looking around the office I can see that there was a lot of prescient wisdom in his comments. E-mail (and the way we use it) is a fine way to create DATA but to destroy INFORMATION. It's all to common for person A sending a potentially sensitive item to person B to cc it to his/her boss. Person B does likewise and now there's 4 copies of the original data with precious little chance of change or document control. And that's just a simple case - scale it up and it's frightening!
Assuming that it is true that 70% of all web content goes unread, that does not mean that it was not worthwhile to post it. Someone somewhere may find that the said content, that is considered not to be read, is just what they needed. There are many niches out there that need to be filled.
Of course, now that you've piqued my interest in seeing pinhole photography (it's bound to be better than the crap we did in high school physics) you don't have a link to your site :)
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
From the article:
:D
"Don't use new technologies blindly. Don't use them just for the fun of it.
I'm _sure_ that will go over big here.
That's the whole point of the internet. People put information on the web because its not popular enough for a published book. If only popular info was on the web, who would want to use it? Isn't the amazing part of using google that you can find a site on a subject that you thought no one else in the world was interested in?
So what...
Google currently claims to be indexing around 3 billion pages. So if 70 % goes unread thats still about 1 billion pages that get read on a regular basis. That's amazing!
The cost of publication on the internet is so low that it just makes sense to include everything including the kitchen sink. The key is good design heirarchy so that the esoteric stuff doesn't distract the casual reader.
Many english courses require you to write a specific
number of words in your essay. This has taught us to write a lot of bs because it seems that quantity is more important than quality. Teachers usually don't care if the information is relevant or not as long as it stays in subject and that you formulate proper sentences. There's our influence!
Stuff that's put up by an individual is read and useful by definition. At work, I share my information as well as the company will let me. Even if no one else is interested in the details of what I'm doing, I am and want to have them wherever I am. It beats printing and lugging paper files. My personal web pages are looked at by people in my family. It's so much nicer to send an email with a link to pictures than it is to cram megabytes worth on them.
Corporate pages, on the other hand, can be driven by useless make work projects. The best of them are adverts and manuals, giving the public information they might want. It's no big deal when these things go unread, but it's good to have them. Internal pages are a nightmare that mimic internal memos. People put up loads of poorly designed junk that's devoid of useful content. I've seen pages that look like the author would have been happier selling used cars.
In any case, we can look at the figure positively. 30% is an astonishinly high read rate. The web has been here for 10 years and 30% of it has been read? Wow. What percentage of the local newspaper actually gets read? What percentage of books at the local library are even checked out? The web is astonishingly accesible, convienient and useful. As long as individuals continue to have publishing rights on it, it will continue to be a lively place. No, I don't mean blogs, I mean you can set up your 486 behind a cable modem and serve to the world. Anything less will make the web as sterile and useless as the local newspaper.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
3. Learn to research better. Be thorough about what you do. According to a survey conducted last year, only one in 20 people will scroll to the second page of search results.
*Better* researching indeed. Given multiple pages of results on Google (or another engine), I'd far rather submit a finer grained search than read every result. In fact, I rarely read past the first 5 entries of a search, but yet I don't often miss critical data.
I've seen an awful lot of web pages holding very little useful content (mostly stuff I accidently ran into while searching for something else), but they often seem to be put together by students learning HTML, or beginners simply excited they finally have a place they can call their own on the web.
Even if someone writes a page nobody reads, who's to say the learning experience of building it wasn't useful or important? Besides, they're not carved in stone. If the author realizes his/her site isn't getting any page views, he/she can always revise it - and maybe it'll become an excellent site someday.
Try asking them not to send you that stuff. If that does not work. Get four co-workers to auto reply "that's funny". They will quit when they get's 4 times as much mail as he puts out. It's an easy way to make the point.
Currently, I gotta write a status report every day of what I do. I'm a programmer. I get projects that last me weeks at a time. Writing, "I wrote a function" is kinda.. lame.
Share the reports out. If you are lucky enough to use Linux, run boa. If you suffer under a corporate M$ set up, use a windoze share and remember you computer's name. Not only do you get to see your information wherever you are, you can make a book mark or shortcut for anyone who ever had to ask you for one of those reports. No more emailing that lame crap and you can send a link as a reply to questions. Easy no? That's what the web was invented for, pull information!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The basic flaw with the argument is that any web site is the aggregate of all new content as well as all archived content. So, unlike a magazine, which only includes that week's/month's content, the site includes everything going back to the first issue, or whenever they decided to make the site. But saying "70% of all magazines, including every issue in the archive, go unread" is also probably true, however, it's all probably read when it first comes out.
every stain tells a story
Maybe I'm ahead of my time, but any time someone asks me for new web content or a new report or whatever I say, "OK, how many people are ACTUALLY going to look at this?" If they can't satisfy me they don't get the content.
Or maybe I'm just REALLY lazy.
An endless supply of content ranging from banal trivia to awe-inspiring knowledge is why the Internet has become the modern equivalant of the Greek Oracle.
There is literally no question that I can't Google an answer for within ten minutes. It really is the sum collection of all human knowledge and the idea of periodically "cleaning it up" is simply ridiculous.
[Coincidentally, I had written a large amount of text just to support the parent comment, but /. and IE messed it up.]
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I'm a Mac tech and I'm amazed at how many people out there have over 1000 messages in their in box (mostly unread) and have never set up the most basic filter. I go and show them how to set up a couple of filters and they think I'm some kind of email Odin, smiting spam with my spear and magic helmet. There's a reason I can charge $75.00/hour for basic setup.
As for my own email, I have over 100 filters that sort out email lists, friends, humor, spam, etc. Even after being on vacation for 10 days, I was able to go through all my email (around 500 real messages-spam goes to trash) in about 30 minutes. My daily stuff only takes about 10 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening.
With the humor email, I doubt if I read even one in ten. Usually, if my friends start talking about a piece, I'll go back and read it, but that's about all.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I feel unsatisfied by that tease of an article - it tells us how not to contribute to the info problem, not how to deal with it.
I have a pretty big problem with the information obesity issue. I get way too much email/mail/whatever everyday. My strategy is normally "touch it once" whenever I can. So if I get a bill, or any of the umpteen emails that require a simple response, I just write one as soon as I read it regardless of how I feel. If I have something I can't reply to right away (aka progress report on XXX that I have not starte yet) I set it aside to work on as soon as possible. Otherwise I get so far behind I never respond to people's emails.
Just be sure to include in your DAILY status report how much time you spent that day writing your status report.
I once had a monthly status report that consisted of two words, "On schedule."
Come on man! 'plemeljr' is all over Google.
The sixth result!
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
> Too Bad /. can also be labeled a "blog."
:)
>blogs != crap
Can you give a counter example then?
Just kidding..
And people wonder why their "eliminate the...[insert hated industry here] and go do it yourself" is poo pooed? But then unfounded illusions are easy to champion.
CLITORIS CHOPPERS.
Hi there you fucking Islamic career clerics, doctors of death, Waffen Schutzstaffel doctor Josef Mengele is a patron saint compared to you fucking ragheads. You suck. You aide and abet terror and death. You are partially responsible for the deaths of other fellow men. For this fratricide you shall pay dearly. Your soul is black with the stains of inaction, ineptitude and sympathies to those who walk the dark side. Your foul life is full of sins, not religious, just heinous, your karma is low, you don't confess, and you aren't in prison where you belong. You are your own dark, kept secret. I see through you, the worthless academic, the pseudo intellectual, the unproven unpublished un patented WASTE OF FUCKING FLESH. You are a drain on society, you are a member of the 1st world but pretend to not be. I hate you, you are a stained man.
Hi clitoris chopper, you islamists support clitoris carving. You are Islamic, and of course are a fucking animal. I hate you you pull-start camel jockey lover. Towelheads, Camel Jockies, Sand Niggers, Ackmids, Abeebs, Carpet Flyers, Dune Coons, Rag Heads, Sand Scratchers, Habeebs, Abba-Dabbas, Camel-Humpers, Demi-niggers, Fig-Gobblers, Hucka-luckas (hucka hlacka ghalcka ghugh), Lefties (If you steal, you lose the right hand so, since they are thieves...) Ocnods, Pull-Start-ables (imagine pull starting Ossama's dirty rag like a Briggs and Stratton), Roach-Ranchers (habibs cant kill roaches by a tenant of Is-slum), Sand Moolies.
Shut up all you dirty fucking Islamic pigfucking swinehundts and the pigs, the communist fuckin Islamic terrorist supporter.
Take your fucking Koran and cram it up your ass. The sooner the earth sees Islam leave it, the better off it will be. Your Koran is Goat Piss.
I hope if there is a God and a Hell, you have to drink the liquidy shit from a Pig's ass, and Jewish Rabbis defecate on you.
I hate the stupid ISLAM fucks who read into the trash they come up with. Saddam Hussein [who needs to take a dirt nap] is higher on my sanity list than fucking Muslim "clerics." In fact, I like Saddam more than most of the other Arab leaders because he is secular. We should fucking nuke the Saudis and Mecca and Medina and turn it into rubble, then tell Saddam to remove the heads of all the buttfucking "royalty" in the area.
I want to wipe my ass with Mohammad's shroud. I want to grind his body up into bone meal and fertilize my garden with it.
Our tortured dead scream out in HORROR, asking for vengeance:
Nuke their countries to hell.
Nuke them again.
Death to Islam.
I piss on Mecca. I wipe my ass with the Koran. I shit upon Mohammed. I wipe the cum for a freshly fucked pussy with Mohammed's shroud then throw it in the pig sty so it can mire in pig shit as it decomposes.