That’s Sillicon Valley thinking. Information "overload" is a Sillicon Valley type of problem. Such problems are mostly a matter of choice, exist in a very small sub-culture — and have virtually no baring on the real lives of normal people.

Normal Information Consumption Enjoyment

The vast majority of people out there are living quite regular lives. They have a small group of friends and family, some co-workers. Their private email is pleasant with photos from kids attached, some forwarded jokes. Their work email is boring. Often they’re included in emails for God knows what reason. Of course most people don’t have work email…

At no point is the richness in choice between news programs, television show, or available magazines experienced as some kind of "problem".

True, it is bugging at times when two shows and a great movie collide in the TV schedule or when you have to choose which magazine to buy because you should only reasonably spend money on one, but this isn’t the end of the world. It’s not something you’re going to discuss with John when you meet him at the grocery store.

But YOU…

But that’s "them".

You; your life is much more complicated, sophisticated, and you — you have information overload.

Right. Now let’s be honest with each other for a moment there and see what you’ve got, OK?

You’re being all busy and important with 387 RSS feeds, 2871 Twitter followers, and 819 Facebook friends.

You have a ton load of links you follow because the title captures your "oh look, a shiny object!" fascination.

Your private email is pleasant although you might have less of it than "regular people" because people who complain about information "overload" live very special kinds of little lives where everybody is wayyyy above the "FWD: FWD: FWD: Kitten Photos tooooooo cute!!!" emails people normally sent to be pleasant amongst each other.

Your work email is boring. You have it but it’s mainly so your boss and co-workers can send you things to do or ask you questions.

What Information Overload Really Is

Information overload is when you have so much freaking relevant data you can’t ignore that your head can’t hold it all at once.

It’s when the amount of data coming in is larger than the capacity of the systems that process it.

It’s SETI. Not you.

Get real.

It’s a special, magical feeling both in Summer and Winter; Winters are dark here.

Then again, I also like the evening and night. Some of my best ideas come from that time. I used to think some of my best work comes from those time slots as well … but I’m no longer so sure.

I suspect that the idea that our best, most creative work happens late at night or early in the morning is somewhat like the illusion that your best work comes out of a bottle of red wine (artist), scotch (writer), or from a solid joint (can’t remember who this one would be).

Of course, neither morning nor night are special times. Maybe they correspond better with your active periods but that’s all.

Taken by themselves they don’t cause you to be happy, productive or creative. Taken by themselves these times can be downright depressing if you didn’t do what you wanted to do, didn’t accomplish anything.

What makes these times into Special Events for us, into Experiences, Moments We Lived, is that we look back and see; I did so much. Or; I finally really relaxed.

It’s not about the time – it’s about how you use live the time.

You’re given a richness of Time today. Unbuyable for those who’ve ran out or are about to.

How are you going to spend your Time today?

Besides the fact that it is just … odd … it’s also increasingly impractical. Like not having a car to extend the range within which you can work, not having an online presence is limiting the number of times you’re going to be accepted for a job.

Why You Have To Be Present Online

When nary the geek could get online and “do” HTML to make a web page, online presence needn’t apply to everyone.

When Geocities made What You See Is What You Get (sort of…) web page designers or when Blogger launched – you still didn’t need an online presence because back then being online was just that: being online.

Since the rise of social media and now social networking it has become: being online.

Nicknames & The Second Profile

Back in the day” we used nicknames. Remember? Online was dangerous and you needed to remain somewhat anonymous.

So when Jane would join a fishing board she would be “flylady18” or when John would sign into his parenting forum he’d be “DaDude” or something.

What we experience now is that by being online as ourselves, we have no privacy. The lady going to the beach while “sick” is spotted via Facebook and fired. The disgruntled employee airing via Twitter has made a company enemy for life.

So the next wave will be regular people maintaining multiple social networking accounts; one under their own real name and at least one other under an assumed name.

These nickname profiles will enable people to be themselves online without fear. To vent. To talk about books, songs, movies, artists, that are otherwise just “not done”.

They’ll allow people to be on vacation, post to their close friends and relatives and not have the boss expect them to therefore be in reach of the telephone and thus work.

See also:

• How to Quit Facebook Without Actually Quitting Facebook
• Should Employers Be Forbidden to Facebook You?

Movies. Movies too. From heart wrenching Sophie’s Choice to "must see again" Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Oh and music! Let’s not forget about music. Sure, you might want to after you see me do a silly high-hat groove-that-bass move in the kitchen – but music sure does add that *snap*, doesn’t it? Right on…

And have you seen some of these articles? Some issues of the New York Times read like a monthly magazine – only it comes out daily! Hellooo!

All this stuff, all this content comes from somewhere; it’s made by people who need to earn a solid, reliable long-term living. Just like you.

For us to keep on having these "I just love…" conversations, making content needs to be a viable living option.

Now, making a living making content isn’t so much about selling content itself.

Selling content is what Van Gogh did. Make a painting. Sell it. Do it again.

But most of a creator’s income comes from selling content carriers, not content; a book, a DVD, a CD, a newspaper, a magazine.

Content itself is often prohibitively expensive. To make the content that is the movie Avatar costs 237 million dollar. The book Gone With The Wind was written over roughly 7 years: what would that set you back?

Content carriers on the other hand are insanely cheap. Once a copy of the creator’s content is added, their price is mainly augmented by value add (e.g., jacket design), necessity (e.g., distribution) and of course simply making a buck or two.

When physical content carriers were the only thing around things were pretty simple.

Physical items carry physical costs so every piece of content was charged for even if only to cover the cost of the content carrier.

If conflicted about the price you wouldn’t buy it. Most of us refrained from physically removing the item from a store without paying for it. That would have been theft and theft is not cool.

Digital content carriers changed every step of that process.

They don’t carry any real cost and if they do, they’re not perceivable to normal people like you and me.

Because digital content carriers don’t cost anything, a lot of content is made available free to us too.

A lot of content still costs money, even when the content carrier is an almost intangible digital download.

But when conflicted about the price you can easily obtain an exact copy of the digital content carrier at no cost at all.

This two-pillar model of free content and free piracy provides tremendous, frugal value.

It’s also unsustainable; the model destroys itself.

For us to continue enjoying new content we have to ensure content creators can keep on making a living; can earn money.

If not, if we fail, we’re doomed to consume what already existed and no more. Or what existed and what a lone lunatic will make. Or wait for the odd, driven artist who we’ll then rob blind.

Arguments for Piracy

As is the case with other faceless theft, such as insurance fraud, piracy has arguments in favor or in defense of the act.

These arguments are aimed at nullifying the result (theft of someone’s income somewhere somehow) of the action (piracy).

Although many and varied, in essence they cover two broad subjects as well as their intersections: marketing and economics.

MARKETING

The notion that digital theft somehow helps to promote a product by making it more commonly known and available.

Do you notice how we don’t apply this argument to, say, shop lifting? And that whilst the popularity of Rolex would certainly be increased once more people had (free!) access to it.

We recognize that the motive of a shoplifter isn’t to help promote a new line of computer devices ("but the iPad will be so much more popular!") but to reap some sort of personal gain from it.

Yes, popularity can be built through increased availability but this type of argument has several flaws. The goal isn’t popularity: content creators seek income before popularity. The choice isn’t ours: content creators decide what to give away, when. And taken through its logical next steps the argument results in a pyramid scheme without any monetary transaction at any level: that’s insane.

ECONOMICS: SOCIAL-ECONOMICAL JUSTICE

Artists don’t get any/enough of the sales price anyway.

Again, we don’t apply this argument to any physical product. Despite the fact that the people who invested most of the creativity in designing the iPad will make the least amount of money of it, we don’t steal iPad’s. We don’t encourage it either and when someone is caught doing it and claims to do it to redistribute wealth in a more just way we thumb our nose and say "yeah, right!"

Whether or not artists get enough of what rightfully is theirs – I don’t know; it’s beside the point.

What I do know is that a guy like me is sweeping the floors in an office, a woman like my wife is overseeing distribution somewhere, and that not paying for the product their company is involved with amounts to theft from them too.

"Follow the money": sales impact stores, distributors, publishers, artists – and everything and everyone around them.

ECONOMICS: I WOULDN’T BUY IT

It’s not really theft because I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. Sometimes applied as a "costs too much" argument (think PhotoShop).

That makes no sense. If it’s crap you wouldn’t pay for, you wouldn’t have it while if it’s worth having – why isn’t it worth paying for?

See also: we don’t apply this to any physical product in the physical world.

ECONOMICS: I CAN’T AFFORD IT

People whose discretionary income is so low for such a long time that they’re effectively cut out of the consumer economy…

At worst we say "so what? suffer". At best we say "I understand" and step on a sliding scale.

Premium Content: Value Found in Piracy

We pay for a physical medium (book, DVD, CD). When the medium is digital we’re less inclined to pay: there is nothing – and the nothing can be copied with perfection.

While the real value is in the content, we apply the price to the "thing" and not to what it contains.

That’s a pretty important point: digital products are almost worthless.

The widespread ecosystem of piracy couples four key values: low price, abundance, ease, simplicity.

For any new model to succeed it has to do the same: provide great value through easy abundance.

Because there is a willingness to pay. Make no doubt about it. People pay $10-$30 per month to premium Usenet providers to have access to thousands of illegal files.

The money is there. People are paying.

Perhaps the answer then lays in mass access to mass (subscription) libraries of content: imagine Amazon’s digital content at $30/month…

Society & Your Family

Picture yourself explaining and instructing your kids where and how to download illegal content. Does that make sense? Is that who you want to be? Is that who you want them to be?

While you may buy most of your content and piracy is just another way for you to get "stuff", an Internet generation is coming of age for whom piracy has become the default way of owning music.

MP3 players come with storage space that, when filled with bought music, would literally costs tens of thousands of dollars to fill.

The rising popularity of e-books will bring a huge increase in e-book piracy especially when coupled with publisher’s current, short-sighted price hiking.

Movies in any quality and genre can be had "for free".

"Free", my economic teacher taught me, "means somebody else pays".

Other sides & more info:

• There’s No Such Thing As Free Content: "it feels like I’m giving money to a feed-the-children charity when I’m really just paying for something that should have never been free in the first place"
• The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content: "[…] for every one-percent increase in users who move to online buying of music, there’s a six-percent decrease in album sales"
• How is the Library Different from Piracy? "From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book "lending" takes place in "libraries". On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a "card"."

Inspired by a couple of posts by Bruce Keener^[1] regarding reduction of unnecessary information inputs and a short email back-and-forth with him which mentioned the value of reducing Twitter time as well, I went into my 3-day weekend by editing my hosts file and pointing the domain twitter.com to my own computer.

Other computers in the house remained able to access the domain and at one point I did lapse, snacking on some non-essential RSS stories and using the Share on Twitter ability of my6sense’s interface to post a number of them to Twitter.

The Result

What I noticed almost right away was the number of times I wanted to media-snack "just in between".

Similar to "I’m just checking my email", I noticed a desire to detour to especially Twitter just before wanting to do something on the computer.

Not able to go there certainly left a feeling of a loss of destination, a feeling of "OK… so now what?" akin to the one experienced when your Internet connection or – worse — the electricity goes down.

That did force my thinking in other directions. Longer, more focused.

It definitely was calmer inside. In an odd way the weekend had more structure to it, felt less hectic. Less scattered.

Vacation

The last time I felt calm and relaxed like that was during my two vacations last year. When I was camping for example. Thinking, eating, making coffee, providing, doing some reading.

Think about it. When left to your own accord, when you have all the time in the world; what do we do?

We expose ourselves to less inputs each of which provides less input, the effect of which is that we have longgggg stretches of time to enjoy and just … be.

What’s Going On?

There’s something addictive with social media; the rapid stimulus, rapid feedback pattern makes it so.

Whether it is the "check in, post, reply, wait for reply – repeat" of Twitter (or Facebook, a forum, Usenet, email, etc.) or the flicking through stories until something interesting is always sure to catch your eyes – it is self-reinforcing behavior.

In a way it reminds me of those late night cable TV evenings. Remember? Flicking through the channels until somehow you find yourself watching an infomercial or a documentary on the white shark. It’s not necessarily bad – but it’s not what you want to be doing with your life either.

1. Reflections on 2009 and Adjusting Your Information Flow part one & part two

Someone asked for something just like this so I thought I would throw this out there.

When I used it I used it as a function in functions.php; I prefer to keep most of my stuff there vs. running plugins. I’m releasing the code in plugin form though.

Usual applies: no warranties, no promises, if it’s broke it’s your problem, yadah yadah.

Instructions

Download the file below by right-clicking on the link and Save As…

Open the file and insert your Adsense code in the $adsense variable.

Rename the file from .txt to .php, upload to your plugin folder and activate.

Alternatively you can add the add_filter and function to the functions file in your template folder. If that makes no sense or raises more questions, you’re better off with the plugin option :)

Download

Right-click here & Save As

Here’s what I have to say – from a social networking perspective.

Two Reasons

There are, I believe, two reasons why the Geocities model failed in popularity. And I say Geocities but I could also say Blogger or LiveJournal…

One, we don’t want to built web sites, easy page makers or not. Making new pages, figuring out where or how to add them to the navigation – not cool.

Two, audience. Family and friends we proudly told about our site came once. Then the incentive was gone and they didn’t come anymore.

All We Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun

In the end, all we wanted to do is:

· Share some links to stuff we found cool (the “forwards”)

· Show our photos (the “kids & cats”)

· Show our videos (without figuring out codecs or embedding)

· Post status updates and comments (make “statements”)

What we didn’t want to do is

· Write articles (or “posts”)

· Built web sites

· Author blogs

Empowered, Connected

Social networking sites have given us the things we want. The easy posting, the easy sharing, no responsibility to maintain the framework of the site.

And better yet – it comes with audience and participation built-in.

House Bar vc. Cheers

That built-in audience and participation relates to Geocities vs. Facebook the same way setting up a house bar relates to a café.

At home, you have to build or get the bar. Add drinks, yourself. Then invite friends. Who are thrilled to celebrate your proud acquisition this Friday but not every coming Friday.

The bar around the corner on the other hand has built-in audience and participation. I bet if you go there today and open the door, people go “Norm!!” and are ready to listen to your latest status updates stories.

What It Says About Social

It shows that at this stage of the social networking development, we the public require something of a walled city with something like social town squares.

We’re often the keepers of those town squares; we choose who to follow or which things to show in our Facebook stream, for example. But it’s a town square that otherwise would be lacking.

Can aggregators or social dashboards take over that function then? Yes, but only if their use, either as a service of a software, is as common that we naturally expect people to use it the same way we currently expect someone to have, see and use email.

Images by: dmentia and xverges

There’s no native option to print the note list but don’t let that stop you.

I use a “scrolling window” profile in the screen capture program SnagIt to capture the note titles I want to print.

In snagit I crop the list to only have the title and tags columns visible; you might have your own preference.

The note font is quite small but before printing you can play with the page setup: stretching the image makes it more readable at times.

During the Weekly Review I print out two of these lists: one with personal to do’s/someday’s, and one with work related to do’s/someday’s.

For slightly deeper data digging some of us might be tagging our notes and use the [tag:] query to get to very specific notes.

The problem begins when you need that note with that Word document attached to it. Or when you want to pull all your notes with .ppt attachments.

Go ahead, give it a try. I’ll wait.

“Finding” Files the Evernote Way

You won’t find any guidance on how to do this in the Evernote help files. The information is buried deep inside the developer notes and reads something like;

resource:[MIME type string] - will match notes that have a resource with a MIME type that matches the argument.

Which is almost not true.

So before you go off on a Google chase to figure out which MIME type Microsoft Word is then, let me tell you that even with that information, you’ll only find a fraction of the amount of files you know are in your Evernote.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Evernote had a search like has:pdf or from:whomever or…

Finding Files the Easy Way

Setup and use a tag structure which emulates precisely the type of queries you would want to perform in Evernote.

For example, I might tag a note with has:file, has:word, is:template. Or: has:file, has:image, has:photo, is:scanned.

You can already see how this folds back into specific queries:

[tag:has:pdf] finds all my PDF files.

[tag:has:word –tag:is:template] finds all my Word documents which aren’t templates.

I have these tag structures listed in a way which helps me remember visually that something special is going on here – but you can organize this any which way you like.

Taking Query Tagging to the Next Level

Although you have to be careful not to go all out crazy and create tagging structures like people:family:mom:events:birthdays … there are some tempting query-like tags you can setup.

I often come across software that strikes me as very handy because it does A or B. I often download and/or buy it. Problem is that when the time comes that I think “boy, do I need to do B!” … I have no recollection of the software solution I have at hand :)

So, these days when I read the description of a product or service, I clip it into Evernote and tag it with one of my tool: query tags.

Need Portable software? [tag:tool:portable]

Graphic apps? [tag:tool:graphic]

Any software? [tag:tool:*]

You Can Go Your Own Way

Apart from the file/attachment specific queries above, which I think we all need at one point or another, the examples above are really very specific to my user scenarios.

When you get back to your Evernote install or web setup, you have to apply this the way it makes sense in your life.

Questions & Answers

• Do I have to use the : in these tags?
  No, not at all. In fact, putting a period there is much faster. I just like how it looks like a regular query this way :)
• Do I have to start these tag structures with has or is or tool?
  No; pick whatever works for you.
• Why do you use word:word? Why not simply add two tags?
  Because at times I need very specific searches. When I have notes tagged with “word”, “file”, “template” … those notes are just as likely to be about those thing vs. being those things.
  In other words, the above structure allows me to separate tags into information about the note’s content (what it’s about) and information about the note itself (where it comes from or what it contains).

This week I added to that the global hotkey CTRL + ALT + T to create a new To Do item from any application.

The hotkey is made in AutoHotkey (widely used freeware macro utility).

The script to add is:

^!t::
send ^!n
WinWait, All Notebooks - ruudhein - Evernote
send ^!n
Sleep, 1000
send ^+C
return

Now, when you press CTRL + ALT + T, the script opens Evernote by “pressing” CTRL + SHIFT + N, puts the focus on the note by again pressing CTRL + SHIFT + N, waits one second to allow Evernote to prepare the new note, and then it inserts a checkbox. Now you can start writing your note :)