The stuff below is from Ghost_Riders latest blog entry.
pabrantes’ Weblog :: start/2006-05-24/1
Lately I’ve been asking myself some questions like: 1. How many daily visits I’m getting? 2. From where does those visits come from? 3. Which pages are the most viewed? 4. …
I want to know something though. At what point do we start having too much information. The post above is not really related to what I am talking about perse but it illustrates what I am talking about. If you have ever setup any kind of statistical system you know that you end up having tons and tons of information. Now on one hand thats great… we are getting all the information we might ever need, but on the other hand do we really get the information we need if we have to spend 3 minutes scrolling through pages and pages of data in order to find what we want?
Now this is in no way shape or form a bashing of statistical programs its more about bashing the information overload we are experiences now that we are past the gates of the Information Age. There are places like news.google.com, news.yahoo.com, torrents, rss feeds, atom feeds, digg.com, del.ico.us, myspace.com, awstats, webalizers, nagios, blogs, the Internet. That is a lot of information and I do not think we even have the beginnings of a decent system out there that allows us to sift through half of the information we have access to in order to get to the relevent stuff, or at least the stuff we want as an individual. We have so many information sources and data flows but we do not have a good system that organizes and gives things we want and not just 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces of data that might be interesting at some point but have nothing to do with what we need/want/deserve right now…
Dunno thats just my 2 cents on the Information Age and the inevetable Information Overload :).
{ 2 } Comments
Well I think that if the information is well presented you won’t feel that you’re spending 3 minutes to find something you want… But that’s beyond a simple user interface problem, it’s true there’s the usability factor but it should also be used a KISS (Keep IT Simple Stupid) philosophy, displaying only what is actually useful.
That arises another problem what is useful and relevant from the data? For different users that question might have diferent answers… So the idea would be to store everything but generate different reports, this would drop again a bit in the user interface, although with some domain logic. It’s a vicious cycle, but if you iterate this idea enough times to get a fix point, maybe you won’t get a information overload
Other thing, please update the URL for my blog… the pabrantes.dyndns.org hostname is deprecated since january that the pabrantes.net domain is active, so please if you don’t mind update for http://www.pabrantes.net ! I bough a domain for something
Oh and by the way…This theme is nicer than the other one…
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