It's generally accepted that we have access to more information than we could ever process in a lifetime.

Social and online media are especially great because they are inherently more manageable than offline media.

I suggest that users get information from 3 main categories online:

1. The Micro-Blog: Includes Twitter, Friend Feed, Facebook; and any other site that makes use of micro-interactions.
2. The Blog: This would include blogs; but would also include any site that's article-based.
3. The Email: Includes newsletters, promotional emails, and any other media sent to someone's inbox.

With those assumptions; here's the model:

There are inherent information management problems with each channel.

The Email

In this model, this will represent a message:

Email generally contains unidirectional messages, that come to one place (the user's e-mail address). In this model, our subject would have subscribed to several interesting entities that send periodic information via email. These emails might contain multiple messages, but will generally have unique content.

Primary Problem: Information quality - Receiving email means you're at the mercy of the publisher. You receive the information they deem to be relevant & often don't get to clarify any ambiguous content.

Solution: Sophisticated Email Client - many e-mail clients offer auto-storing; where you can have e-mails filtered and sorted into folders for your review. You can also use search tools to quickly locate the most relevant information.

The Blog

Enter the dynamic message:

Dynamic messages change over time. In the case of blogs, the primary variable in a given message is the ability to have readers add their comments to a post.

Enter the message cluster:

Often, blogs regurgitate messages found on other blogs; causing several duplicate, or similar messages to be read by the same user. I call these message clusters.

Blogs have both dynamic messages and message clusters which can pose information management issues. In this model, our subject bookmarks some blogs, checking for new content on a weekly basis, and subscribes to others via RSS. Blogs are delivered in a unidirectional way, but can be received dynamically. (Meaning, blogs are published by an entity, but provide subscription options to the user. A user can use RSS, bookmarks, e-mail, etc. to receive messages.)

Primary Problem: Message clusters - having some great filtering tools available; this channel's primary problem is less about quality of information than it is, repetitive information.

Solution: Manual identification - Other than manually scrubbing your RSS feeds for duplicates, I don't have a particularly effective solution to this problem.

The Micro-Blog

Enter the conversation:

Conversations are common in this channel. A conversation, in this model, is defined as several messages being dynamically exchanged between at least 2 users. The longer the conversation, the more messages are exchanged.

Micro-Blogs have unique information management issues. There are many tools available to help manage the flow of information. In this model, our subject uses Twitter and has subscribed to several users posts. This is a bi-directonal channel, that dynamically delivers its content. (Users post, and read posts; and can do that in a number of ways.)

Primary Problem: Message clusters - like blogs, users have substantial control over receiving valuable content but have issues with duplicate and repetitive content. In this case message clusters include conversations.

Solution: The problem with message clusters & conversations is that distilling them down to one post could strip out valuable content; however processing the repetitive messages often waste time. Ideally, the solution would be to automate threading; where similar posts are appended with a "similar to" tag which would identify those posts as "similar" posts. Ideally, similar posts could be automatically filtered out of a users stream and replaced with a numerical representation. Again, I haven't found an effective solution other than manually processing and filtering out related posts.

The more information we're given access to, the more we need tools to distill that information into valuable, bite-sized pieces. The invent of 3rd party applications, re-designs, and search engines are big steps towards ideal information distillation. We came a long way with search technology; but are now in an era of real-time filtering and management of massive amounts of information.

I think we still have some more work to do before we're able to effectively monitor, engage, and absorb all the valuable information being put forward without spending your entire day doing it. I think it's a pursuit that will make us smarter, more informed, and better connected than we have ever been.