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I cringe and squirm at the sight of my mail box, overflowing with bits of information, some useful, some actionable, some from customers and some from people seeking money. Same story on the web, overload of search results, over flowing memes — How do I find that content nugget which is of importance to me? and which is important to me right now?

We bookmark (as in delicious) and seldom go back; enable saving of web surf history but Google does not augment the results; a lot of productivity boosting applications are still experimental. The big question is how to fix the overload? Good that we have information at least, but how do we find that one bit of information which is useful to me at this second.

This week Google, Microsoft, Symantec, IBM, etc. met for their first ever Information Overload Research Group (IORG Forum). Their mission is grassroots awareness and a vision/architecture of providing solutions for reducing the overload. I’m sure the members companies are interested in rolling out the tools but having them sit and think about this is a good step in itself. Their mission reads:

We work together to build awareness of the world’s greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.

This is very interesting. Like everybody else we have a deep interest in reducing the information overload of netizens and increasing everybody’s productivity. With 281 Exabytes of data being created, just in 2007, I’m sure this is big enough to get everybody’s attention.