I recently finished Tyler Cowen’s latest book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Like everything he writes, this book is worth reading and it will be of interest to those who follow technology policy debates since Cowen makes a passionate case for “Internet optimism” in the face of recent criticisms of the Internet and the Information Age in general.

I gave a presentation this week on decision-making, and someone in the audience asked me if I thought information overload was an impediment to effective decision-making. “Information overload…yes, I remember that concept. But no one cares about it anymore,” I replied. In fact, nobody ever did.

But why not? We’ve been reading articles in the press about information overload being the bane of productivity for almost twenty years

The subject line grabbed my attention-“Information Overload: The Impact on the Organization.”

The thought of spending time listening to the webcast was itself pressure. But I was feeling particularly overloaded that day, so I registered for the free event from the nonprofit group calling itself the Information Overload Research Group (IORG; https://iorgforum.org). A key company in the organization is Basex, Inc. (www.basex.com), which describes itself as a “knowledge economy research firm” that serves IT vendors and buyers with an expertise in knowledge worker management and productivity. Here’s the compelling statistic: Basex estimates, based on data it has gathered, that information overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion a year in lost productivity and reduced innovation. That’s a big number.

Your data is multiplying, your channels are extending, the chatter is never-ending. You’re already having trouble keeping up with the stream of information. What happens when that stream becomes a flood?

Relaxation is a whole lot more intense than it used to be. I realized this one recent lazy Sunday afternoon: Before assuming my position on the couch, I gathered the television remote control, my smartphone, a print magazine, and my laptop. Apparently this form of multitasking isn’t all that uncommon.

US intelligence officials, under pressure to better track terrorist threats, are hampered by their own vast bureaucracy and an overwhelming flow of information, analysts say.

President Barack Obama “has now discovered that he’s inherited an intelligence community in the United States which is bloated, bureaucratic and even with the best of intentions has become so large it finds it very hard to put together the pieces,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told AFP.

As I have been talking to many firms about their social networking strategy, a problem often comes up in the conversation that is more personal to the people involved. As they are, correctly, exploring the social media themselves, they begin to feel the effects of information overload and want to know how they should handle it.

I do not pretend I know all the answers on this subject. But I think it is something that all of us that play or work on line tend to feel at one point or another. And I know if my case, I have found a couple ways to deal with it.

Recent developments in the information and communication technology have made it possible to provide managers with large amounts of information. Although information technology has been instrumental in improving the access and flow of information, it has also been instrumental in creating an overload of this same information for businesses and organizations. (more…)

There is a ton of information out there on the Internet, but how do you handle it? How do you actually consume all of the information?

If you’re asking yourself those questions then you are suffering from information overload, and the best way to deal with it is to try and filter out the crap that comes through and focus only on the gold. There are a lot of websites out there that offer a ton of information on a daily basis – such as TechMeme and Digg – but most of the stuff they publish will not interest you, so don’t use them for information: filter them out.

This is a book for people who want to know what the future is going to look like and for people who want to know how to create the future.

Gershenfeld offers a glimpse at the brave new post-computerized world, where microchips work for us instead of against us. He argues that we waste the potential of the microchip when we confine it to a box on our desk: the real electronic revolution will come when computers have all but disappeared into the walls around us.

With everyone else paying attention to Y2K, the analysts at The Basex Group have had time to reflect on the great changes which have taken place since 1900, when electricity and telegraphy were first entering the popular consciousness.

In tribute to those years beginning with “19″, we have researched what we decided to name «19XX Milestones» and present these herewith…..