My June 2005 “Two orders of magnitude overload conjecture” claimed that each new technology that helped us ‘focus’ and ‘whittle down’ the information overload would itself lead to overload as users flocked to it, until we leapfrogged to ‘the next thing’. It went like this:
My conjecture is that tools like this (e.g. RSS aggregators) give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) ‘power boost’ in dealing with the ‘knowledge flow’ (forget ‘information’ and ‘content’) whipping around us. Indeed, such tools are particularly valuable in helping foster and even accelerate knowledge flow among other early adopters (who tend to correlate highly with the ‘thought leaders’ involved in the knowledge that you want to be, well, flowing)! But whenever there’s a three, four, five, or six orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) increase in ‘adopters of new technologies’, not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-orders-of-magnitude ‘power boost’ is insufficient, so we turn to new technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
The point is that if you target ‘interesting’ people to follow, then you find out interesting things – you can define ‘interesting’ for yourself: that’s the idea!
So now I get interesting tweets by following interesting people on Twitter.com, even when I’m too overloaded to read their blogs, and even the feeds that come from their blogs (this in turn inspired by a throwaway remark from Stowe Boyd a few weeks ago: “what, you don’t use Twitter?”). In that circumstance (not always, but on many occasions), Twitter can provide more focus and interesting pointers to new activities, not less as a knee-jerk reaction would suggest.
Stay tuned for a new banner on my blog that’ll have a cute new tweetbox….
