Still in the middle of writing deadlines, so just something that came to my mind yesterday before falling asleep…

I love cheese. I also grew up in a country with planned economy, so while there was a variety of cheeses produced there, you wouldn’t find more than one or two types on a shop shelves at any given moment.

cheese shop, Flickr photo by loop_oh

Now try to imagine how I felt during my first trip abroad in some regular British supermarket. Suddenly all kinds of cheeses were in front of me, ready to be picked up and enjoyed. I was overwhelmed and lost and didn’t know which one to choose. Also, it wasn’t only about cheese – there was great variety of other familiar products and lots of those that I didn’t know. There was abundance and lots of things to choose from…

That planned economy is part of the history now and I’m pretty used to the variety of cheese in supermarkets, only in well-to-do countries, but also in Russia. I still get overwhelmed getting into an unfamiliar supermarket once in a while, but I also know that there is some logic in there and it takes a couple of visits to find your way around. If I’m in a hurry I locate relevant parts and pick up things needed for dinner. If I have time I may look at new products, try to figure out how to use them and pick up a couple to try out. I don’t get stressed or think that it’s something extremely difficult to deal with.

The same with information overload. When you grew up in a world of information scarcity (or, at least, the world that felt that that way because accessing everything out there wasn’t easy), information abundance is overwhelming: you don’t know how to find your way around and to make choices. It’s even worse than my first supermarket experience – with internet it feels like you have to find stuff for your dinner with all supermarkets in the world.

But I guess it will pass: I’ve learnt to do shopping in a supermarkets, so with some learning we’ll figure out how to recognise patterns and make choices in the sea of information without feeling overloaded.

• Withdrawal from blogging: broken routines
• Information overload: concept map
• Lack of project data accessibility study

This post is part of the series describing the results of the study of blogger networking practices. Please take into account a couple of things:

• This is a draft. Healthy scepticism and comments are very welcome.
• Statements are linked to the names of people who talked about particular issue, those might be true or not true for others.

***

By providing an easy way to find and connect to interesting others, weblogs accelerate expansion of one’s network and increase the volume of potentially interesting information flowing through it. Nancy discusses how expansion of networks as a result of blogging creates a need to make choices: “if you choose to follow what blogging network exposes to you may accelerate expansion of the network and then you have to make choice how much to keep up with that”. Not only it is difficult to have a big number of meaningful connections that extension of one’s network brings, but it is also that “relations that these tools enable do not scale” (Euan). Contrary to offline relations that often fade as shared context disappears, weblog-mediated relations “do not go away” as the context and the interactions are “there” (Ton).

One way to deal it the challenges of a growing network is to limit its expansion. When discussing that she does not make as many connections now as when she started blogging Monica suggests that she is “not looking” for more people to connect:

…may be I have enough friends now. Like after getting married, you are not looking anymore. (Monica)

While not necessarily setting limits on a number of new connections, bloggers use the opportunity weblogs provide to get to know others from a distance to informed choices about those they want to engage further. Caution about the degree of engagement with new people is especially visible with Nancy, Euan and Dave, who had extended professional networks prior to starting blogging:

There are in a modest way more people who want to talk to me than I want and can talk to. So I have to manage that. (Euan)

I can’t afford the time to meet everybody I track or listen to. (Dave)

There is no way I can have a relation with everyone who has something important to say about the things I’m trying to learn. (Nancy)

Another way to manage network expansion is choosing not to connect personally with other bloggers. Nancy talks about “information relationships”: not engaging with people at a personal level while still having a meaningful interaction, as well as “trust in what they are producing, which may have nothing to do with trust in them as a human being”. When I try to discuss it in terms of weak and strong ties, she addresses this distinction as insufficient to describe the relations around artefacts that do not necessarily engage the person.

While others do not use the same term they often distinguish between weblogs of people they know and others that they read to monitor particular topics. For example, Dave says that some of weblogs he reads “just to keep an eye on things”, without engaging at more personal level. Shawn mentions not having any connection with some of the authors of the weblogs he subscribes to: “the majority are weak ties or not ties, 5% strong ties”.

Even when not engaging personally with all authors of interesting weblogs, the amount of potentially available information might be overwhelming. Bloggers deal with it by reading weblogs they follow selectively. Some participants describe elaborate strategies for using their networks to scan and filter information for them. For example, Dave has “about fifty science bloggers” in his reader – “they scan journals for me, so I don’t have myself”, “I’ve learnt to trust them over the years”, “it’s much better than summarisation surface”.

Ton is watching “two-three hundreds people” via their online traces and such monitoring what they are doing and writing gives him a “sense of what’s going on in the world” (he stopped reading newspaper and watching TV). He adds that those interactions are different from those with strangers on the street, as he knows the context behind what people write. He is primarily interested not in specific information, but the patterns in it, so he deals with an extendedness of his network by “taking a helicopter view” and then “diving deeper” when he has specific questions.

While not all participants describe such strategies, most of them talk about scanning through their subscriptions, not reading everything (“I read what I can, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t read everything”, Brett) or even not reading at all (“mostly I open new items just to see the bold disappear”, Monica). Some explicitly talk about not being afraid to miss important information and relying on their network to bring it to their attention:

If it’s important it will come back (Gabriela).

People will keep talking about it and it will come to me via different paths (Ton).

Relying on the network to make sense of what is happening in the world bloggers explicitly search for a diversity of topics and points of view in what they read. For example, when I ask about the risks of being in an ‘echochamber’ of likeminded others found through blogging, Euan tells that he likes to “be provoked to think differently” and selects weblogs accordingly. Although he admits that it might be a personal trait, he suggests “you can still choose to be in an echochamber, but it’s easier to choose not to be” as there are so many choices.

Bloggers deal with the expansion of their networks and the information it brings in multiple ways. They choose to limit the expansion by not connecting with new people or engaging in depth. Some of their connections could be described as “information relations”, where weblogs as sources of interesting information rather than as a way to connect personally with their authors. Bloggers manage the information that weblogs bring by reading them selectively (scanning, looking for patterns or not reading at all) at the same time maximising their exposure to a variety of perspectives and trusting that the network brings back what they might miss.

• How new tools change the way I connect with other bloggers
• BusinessWeek on stress, collaboration and work-life balance
• Something unspeakably alien

As a result of having less time to blog and increasing stress levels my blogging routines went broken:

Then I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

The social filtering mechanisms of weblogs and content delivery by RSS feeds are usually praised for their efficiency in allowing keeping up with many information sources, in my case a weblog-induced information overload became a reality. There are a few reasons for it:

Growing network. A relatively small circle of early-adopters writing about knowledge management and learning exploded over time, as more smart people started to blog.

Multidisciplinary blogging. My blogging reflects my interests in bridging multidisciplinary boundaries, so while I started mainly on KM and learning, it eventually turned into “personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance” and lots of other topics. Over time this got me into a contact with a diverse group of other bloggers.

RSS overload. There were periods of 1000+ subscribers to my RSS feed, but even without trying to keep up with all of them my weblog reading list grew to more than 200 weblogs and was a challenge to keep up.

Need to converge. Expansion of my weblog network and growing amount of potentially useful information coming through it came at the moment where my dissertation ideas started to converge. At that moment reducing information intake and the degree of engagement with others was essential for processing emerging insights and integrating them into a bigger whole. Reducing time spent reading other weblogs reflected at micro-level the suggestion to “stop reading and start writing” often given to PhD students struggling to incorporate recent publications in their work.

While the withdrawal from frequent and engaged blogging was a reflection of my personal and work circumstances at that period, the main challenge was adjusting my (blog-related) information processing strategies and habits. I can imagine that at a better moment I would be able to do it, but then I was simply trying to keep up and eventually gave up: I just stopped reading blogs systematically.

In turn, writing suffered:

• Since I wasn’t reading others, writing was stimulated mainly by my own thinking and work. Although I can’t check it fast, I can imagine that the amount of outgoing links dropped dramatically.
• I wasn’t seriously following on the feedback of others on what I wrote, so potential conversations died at birth. I can also imagine that for others it was less interesting to link and to comment to someone who wasn’t very responsive.
• At the end writing wasn’t much about engaging, but more about just putting things “out there”.

When Radio stopped working in January 2008, it was easy to take an extended break from blogging (additionally motivated by the fact that it was a natural point to “freeze” weblog archive to analyse it for my dissertation).

• On weblog audiences…
• Weblogs vs. journals
• Research on learning effects of (web)browsing?

Another turn on ‘E-mail is where knowledge goes to die’ and that blogs could solve the problem, but it’s not easy to ‘sell’ to managers (Andy, thanks for the pointer). And a very good comment by Tony Karrer:

I’ve seen a few other places that advocate this, BUT, how do you address the fact that email is relatively more of a push technology. In other words, in today’s corporate world, someone is more likely to read an email than an update to a web page.

Given my own blogging experiences I believe that this issue has to be taken seriously. There are a couple of reasons for that:

First, email serves many functions. Next to being a tool for communication, it could work reminder for to-dos, organiser of work and even turn into habitat at work (for those who want more – look at email management research and studies that touch email as part of personal information management research).

Suggesting that (part of) email communication should be replaced by blogging without taking into account those functions is likely to break existing personal information management practices of people. This could result in decreased personal productivity next to increased organisational productivity with questionable net gain.

Second, before we discuss increased organisational productivity as a result of (part of) personal email archives available on intranet we need to make sure that those bits will actually be found and used by others. And this is not that easy…

With email you have to deal with mainly with your own inbox. It’s already much of an email overload, since next to those really important ‘to do’ emails you are likely to have ‘FYI’ emails on things that might be interesting, ‘corporate spam’ (saw the term recently, don’t remember where) that you may not need at all, but someone in a company thinks that you need, personal emails and lots of other things. Or, using distinctions in my previous post, it includes things that don’t fit that are often difficult to process.

Now just imagine that next to your own mailbox you have access to mailboxes of others. The amount of things that don’t fit increases dramatically. The good side of it that it’s a source of unexpected insights, it’s searchable, it’s archived company-wide forever. The bad thing is that we are not equipped to deal with it.

Now to my personal example. When I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

So, I’d suggest that before evangelising blogs as an alternative to email we should figure out how people in a company are going to process increased amounts of available and potentially useful information when it comes out from hidden email archives. Otherwise we risk of moving a big chunk of information from email that at least read to a company-wide intranet that many people learnt to ignore (unless that important document is announced by an email from CEO).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1805; comments are here.

• Corporate blogs: food for thought
• Information overload workshop
• Aggregation can kill personal voices

Must read: BusinessWeek’s The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard… (via Ingo Forstenlechner).

It’s on many things: long working ours, information overload, overheads of unnecessary communication, social network profiling, knowledge mapping, an even blogs and wikis… A bit too much to mix, but definitely along the lines of the work we do, my PhD research and my personal struggles.

And a quote about things that I believe are behind many of those issues – knowledge work governance and knowledge worker flexibility:

…in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office.”

Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1679; comments are here.

• Lack of project data accessibility study
• Learning of knowledge workers
• Who knows what you know

I used to blog papers I read, but over last few months it wasn’t that much. Here is one from yesterday:

Neustaedter, C., Brush, A., and Smith, M., (2005) “Beyond “From” and “Received”: Exploring the Dynamics of Email Triage.” CHI 2005 Short Papers.

Abstract. Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.

Of course I didn’t know the word triage and I was surpised that to find out that it is “a process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment” (more details at Wikipedia).

The paper is 4 pages, so you can get an impression of the main findings byt yourself, but there are a couple of things that I find pretty much corresponding with the insights from interviews on information overload we did at work.

What we found most interesting was that the interview participants using the multi-pass strategy would routinely use a first pass to handle emails they consider to be not important or junk. This pass would involve finding emails they could quickly delete or get rid of.

We didn’t look at email handling directly, but it comes heavily while talking about information overload. When talking about their email handling strategies several people noted the same. I wonder why. I guess next to the fact that getting rid of not important stuff is easy, but probably also because endorphin release upon completing the task :)

But what I’ve also heard from our participants that sometimes cleaning and organising emails takes so much time that, although properly sorted, important emails do not get much time to be read or acted upon…

The second thing from the paper is one of the recurrent themes, not only in this interview round, but also in other studies on whatever technology for communication and knowledge sharing.

Regardless of the user type, we found that most people felt their strategy was pretty good, but realized there were likely other, more efficient strategies.

What I find out often that technology training people get are often stops at a level of functionality (“if you want to send email click this button”), while usually there is not much discussion about productivity, your own and others (“think before emailing – may be a colleague is next door and would actually enjoy a coffee break instead of one more message in a mailbox”). We are often taught how to use tools for what they designed, but not how to use them to make our life easier and more fun.

Anyway, what would be practical implications of it? Apart of reshaping existing technology trainings I’m thinking of ways to share personal effectiveness tricks and establishing shared communication practices that make life of everyone easier. Those probably could help, but then there are questions about starting the process:

• moving out of your own comfort zone (“if it doesn’t break don’t touch it”)
• finding ways to talk to others about practices which are usually hidden in our personal interactions with tools
• getting convinced that there is a value in comparing personal effectiveness tricks (this is a big issue – it’s easy to say “do it like me”, but most likely answer is “it doesn’t fit because I organise my work differently”) and figuring out how to pick up something that could be useful in spite of differences

Of course, you can design better tools, but I’m not convinced it would help – many times it’s not about having a good instrument, but about knowing how to use it in a good way :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/23.html#a1593; comments are here.

• Jan Schmidt on blogging practices
• What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Crafting one’s workplace to fit personal preferences

Just a concept map from information overload workshop. It’s a bit drafty… May be Carla will make a nicer copy (I sent this one to her for our project). Or may be I’ll find time to blog it properly…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/22.html#a1530; comments are here.

• From email to blogs: challenges of changing the channel
• BusinessWeek on stress, collaboration and work-life balance
• Blog networking study: dealing with a network expansion and filtering information it bring

From today’s workshop on information overload:

• my presenation (on two things: (1) connecting PKM and information overload, (2) some relevant input from personal information management research)
• Information strategies: exposure, channels, tools
• Information “properties”

• knowledge (value/relevance/etc.) – information (artefacts) – “meta-data” – “meta-meta-data” (Ton’s forest)
• categorised/not
• useful/not
• hot – warm – cold

[I wanted to add more things, it's not working that way, so just posting from drafts]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/03.html#a1513; comments are here.

• Reusing blog
• Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example
• Blog is down

After first steps in our research on information overload things get a bit more clear for me: it seems that it’s not about information overload, but our practices of dealing with information. Questions I find particularly interesting:

• How do you manage multitasking? Strategies, tips and tricks to handle multiple processes…
• How do you manage working with multiple sources needed for a task? Especially when there are a lot of them and they are in different formats (emails, files, paper documents, IM talks, coffee-table discussions).
• How do you manage awareness? How do you monitor multiple sources of information that could be useful in the future? (I use weblogs :)

Would be nice to find time to describe my own practices regarding those :)

Funny enough, those questions correspond with process, artefact and awareness categories from my thinking on PKM purposes and practices.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/23.html#a1505; comments are here.

• Blog is down
• Experiences of using del.icio.us
• Blogs to improve writing

Intel IT research white paper Information Overload: Inaccessible Data and a Knowledge Management Solution (bold is mine)

Problem: lack of project data accessibility

Date collection: semi-structured interviews (questionnaire is included) with users of project documents at different organisational levels and job functions

Inhibitors of finding documents

• Many document repositories exist. “Different groups used these repositories in different fashions and without a consistent process for depositing documents in any of the repositories”.
• Lack of communication about “where the documents were stored and what other document repositories exist”.
• Current location of a document is not known.
• “Information was not well archived with proper revision controls, resulting in the original version of the documents often being inaccessible and sometimes nonexistent”.
• Documents are mailed around and not posted to a common repository.
• Users rely on finding people involved in the project to find project information. These people could be busy or hard to find.
• Documents could be too long to be useful.

Impact

• Waste of paper, disk space and time
• Rework because of (1) changed, but not communicated requirements, or (2) inconsistent interpretation of requirements
• “In general people tended to share information only at its end state, when it was ready for consumption, and not during discovery” -> duplication of efforts
• Searching results in a significant loss of time
• “The difficulty in accessing the right information created a new behaviour trend for some users: They sought out information in meetings”
• “When documents were not easily accessible, users could get only a snapshot of the environment unless they knew whom to ask. To resolve this problem, specific groups or projects established unique processes to address this problem”.

Findings

• User segmentation is number one priority
• Different user needs regarding depth of the document (management summary vs. data about reasons for a specific decision made before). Two user segments were identified: “technical expertise” and “support and environment”.
• “Interviewees rarely had an inclusive picture of the different ways the project documents were used”
• Proposed user segmentation for further investigation: role or job function, prior experience, geographical location.

Recommendations

• Understanding users with the proposed segmentation
• Improving finding documents
  • Single repository with revision control and posting process + discipline to follow it
  • Adding metadata to documents
• Improving finding information in documents
  • Executive summaries
  • Using knowledge discovery in databases (=summary extraction)
  • Adding unique metadata tag to a specific piece (e.g. project requirement), so it’s possible to follow it through different documents

Hmm… It’s good as an example, but I wouldn’t call it “KM solution” :)

What is more interesting is look how people adapt to the situation: start relying more on meetings or on personal contacts. I guess that document searching behaviour should be studied together with informal communication (see public vs. private discussions), so at the end one can arrive to the solution that combines strengths of both sides.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/19.html#a467; comments are here.

• MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing
• From email to blogs: challenges of changing the channel
• What supermarket shopping has in common with information overload?