Flood of Information

I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin a few weeks back. Founded by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, it brought together individuals from all over the world to discuss social media and web 2.0 applications. It was a great experience. Stowe Boyd (the man that coined the term "social tools") really brought together everything I’ve been thinking about the last months. He described today’s social media explosion as the ”Tower of Babel” where everyone is fragmented and awash in a sea of information.

Today, you can post a blog entry, have it linked on Digg, viewed on someone’s desktop through an RSS feed and so on. You can comment on it using Twitter, Facebook and scores of other sites. Each of these provide individual areas to comment on your blog without ever going back to the original post. There can be several levels of communication about your blog post that never lead back to the original material.  

The Internet has changed, as has the way we use and perceive it. You no longer go online just to look up information, find the latest news or purchase tickets to an event. Today’s Internet is interactive and conversational. Blogging seems almost antiquated compared to the instant act/react ability of sites like Twitter or ReJaw. The ability to see and be seen is amazing. 

With so much fragmentation, how can you find out what is being said about you when you don’t even know where the conversation is? Imagine being able to keep track of where people are talking about your blog. Not just on other blogs, but in their comments as well. This is the next frontier. Whoever can get a jump on this will be the next "go to" site.

Today, if you have a website, a layer of social interaction is a standard addition. You can’t sell a product, read a review or a blog without there being a comments section or forum. People want to feel empowered when they go to a site. They may never use that option, but if it’s not there you can bet they won’t be back.

The flood of information is becoming greater day by day. Trying to track everything becomes more and more difficult. There are now sites like Netvibes that allow you to keep tracks of multiple fields of interest in a customizable front end. The future of the web isn’t finding information; it’s avoiding being overwhelmed by it and making sense of what you’re viewing.