Being Notable

“How do people avoid information overload? I realized I had by ignoring lots of it.”

There’s even a name for this – “rational ignorance”.

It’s literally impossible to know everything that might be useful or everything you might find of interest. You have to draw the line somewhere. In essence, you (consciously or unconsciously) evaluate cost of acquiring information vs. the likely value of the information, and sometimes rationally decide to be ignorant about something.

Sometimes you make a mistake on estimating the value of the information. But that’s just part of the experience – you just can’t know it all.

Hello:

I am a hotmail user. I need a bit of help. I am NOT looking for a job or anything of that sort. But I need help, and since you work with Microsoft, I thought I’d write to you. I hope you will agree to help me/or atleast point me to correct resource.

My hotmail, gmail, and other accounts were hacked recently. This is what must have happened (guessing only):
This is what happened I think (guessing only):
1. Somebody hacked my hotmail
2. Requested gmail password reset link at my hotmail
3. Reset the gmail password, and checked my gmail etc. But did not change my hotmail password
4. Next day I try to login to gmail, but it wouldn’t work. So I got my password reset again.

That hacker (obviously) didn’t mean to hijack my account. Was just looking for information in my account.

I’ve contacted Microsoft (feedback forms, sending fax etc.) but no response yet. I am requesting
IP-address logs of my own hotmail account. I want to know all the IP addresses used to log in to my hotmail account (I mostly use outlook express though). I am thinking that, I’d recognize my own ip-addresses, and narrow down the ip-addresses which were not mine; and this way get a general idea of the hacker’s geographic location.

I don’t know what else I can do to find out the identity of the hacker. But I think the following would be useful:– that,Hotmail/Windows Live Mail staff, atleast tell me what all account-activity took place in my account in the period my account was hacked. What searches were made from my account? What emails were opened? Did hacker send(forward) any emails to anyone ? What emails were sent/forwarded ?
– This would atleast give me an idea of all the information that was compromised.

Do you think its a reasonable request on my part ? Can you help ?

Thanks.

Though it might seem counterintuitive, I find RSS to be very helpful in dealing with info overload.

See also Shelley Powers on biographical entries about women in Wikipedia:
http://weblog.burningbird.net/2005/12/20/ladies-wikipedia-is-ours/

C: we’ve already sent your post to the Hotmail team and will email you as to the resolution. Thanks!

C – I’m following up with you over email…I’ll try my best to get you some help!

Billy – thanks for the vocabulary…that make sense, and I think i’ll write some more about being rationally ignorant this week!

Marshall – How do you use RSS to avoid info overload? I found it to be one of my biggest sources of that…

I’ve found myself wondering the net reading info I never intended to for hours on end. It’s been a long while since I realized that everything is interesting to me, I mean EVERYTHING. That’s one of the reasons I developed a sensible way of surfing. Find what you need and get out before it sucks you in.

I agree that RSS is ths source of info overload. Everytime I open the browser they are right there and are too distracting. Even the time spent for rational ignorance has been a overkill.

I find that RSS helps when I:

1. organize my feeds into folders by priority
2. read the smaller number of items that come into high-priority folders first
3. read the “river of news” that Newsgator offers next, or however much I am able to at the time.
4. don’t lose sleep over thousands of unread items (they aren’t like emails)
5. and finally, use a system like http://immedi.at to notifiy me by IM when a really, really important feed has been updated.

Yup, that’s how I do it.

As we consume more and more of the Internet, the brain naturally starts to build its own filters about what and where to go, what to consume and not to consumer. Over time we build a mental meta map (including tags) of where we go each day and what we do. We actually dont stray too far from that map, but we do extend it now and then to accomodate new things. But overall we are creatures of habit. Tools like Technorati and Tag clouds only lead us down paths that we ourselves have define. This is how we cope with pretty much everything in life, the Internet is no different.

Has everyone ckecked out the Scoble page on wikipedia? It’s at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble

dashboardspy: just a note about my policy on Wikipedia. I never change that site myself. So everything you read there was written by other people.

@11. That’s the problem I have with Wikipedia. I never how much of it is accurate and how much of it is someone’s own view of the world. And I’ve not seen it to be consistent with willingness to address innacuracies. I believe in the wisdom of crowds and all, but I don’t see that always being represented in Wikipedia.

Not trying to be nitpicky – but if you are moderating comments and deleting those that “don’t add value to either my life or the lives of my readers”….why did you leave #2 in this thread?

Just wondering. Welcome back.

Patrick: good question. Bubba approved that one and I thought it was good to show that we answered it and moved on. It isn’t the kind of thing that really gets a thread off topic, and I have a pretty low bar for what qualifies as value. Certainly C is a reader and it was valueable to get an answer.

I agree 100%, Wiki is “weird weird weird” and when the entry is about a person, even weirder!

I think one thing that can be applied to the idea of information overload is latent inhibition. It’s the idea that your senses take in more information than your brain can handle so it creates a kind of filter, called latent inhibition, that blocks most of your sensory input.

I find I have almost the same thing with my RSS reader. Right now I have close to 100 feeds in my reader usually result in 300+ posts a day, far too much for me to handle. So I have a process that works like latent inhibition. Some feeds (CNN, Engadget, Kotuku) generate upwards of 30 posts each. I generally scan titles only for these and if it doen’t jump out, it gets dropped.

Like latent inhibition, this process occassionally blocks good posts, but for the most part I don’t even really think about it much.

I’m curious… why the need for a guest blogger when it’s your own personal blog?

Wow, are you guys a little slow on the moderation key or what? I know for sure I commented in here last night.

I often wonder if I should do more to avoid information overload by removing Scoble from my aggregator.