All content about information overload

Getting the Best Results: Combining Expert Knowledge with Crowdsourcing

After just returning to my last trip in US (read a couple of thoughts about it here), I am reading via ☞ Fred Wilson about two new services for finding hotels while traveling.

Oyster ☞

See the truth before you travel — thousands of undoctored hotel photos, and the world’s most comprehensive, professional hotel reviews.

or in Fred’s words:

Oyster, a web service dedicated to honest and excellent hotel reviews. They literally send out a person to stay in the hotel for a few days, take their own undoctored photos, and present in a clear and concise format.

Hunch ☞

Hunch is a more generic service that covers more than hotels. Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people similar to you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room.

I think that best results will come from combining expert knowledge and crowdsourcing.

Posted November 29, 2009 at 10:55pm in expert-system, crowdsourcing, recommendation, information overload,

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Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload. The other problem is information underload. Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 7, 2006

Posted October 24, 2009 at 3:07am in information overload, future,

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made…. How many other things are we missing?
Appreciating Your Immediate World

This is just another, much more complex, example of information overload that is continuously shrinking our attention span.

Posted September 28, 2009 at 1:22am in information overload,

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The Information Overload Era: TV by 2015 ☞

According to the Intel’s Chief of Labs, Justin Rattner:

You can imagine 15 billion consumer devices that will be capable of delivering TV content in that timeframe with 100’s of billions of hours of video. We’ll need much more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand.

Based on the tons of statistics about YouTube, Hulu, etc, we can safely say that video and TV represent just another type of information overload. And considering the video usability current state the problem will be much more difficult to solve. But I do expect to see huge innovations in the field.

☞

Posted August 31, 2009 at 7:29pm in information overload, video,

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The Information Overload Era: A Subscribers’ Behavior Experiment

Very interesting experiment for testing the behavior of potential subscribers:

[…] the Economist, at one time, showed three options for their potential subscribers: online-only for $59.00, print-only for $125.00, or online and print for $125.00. He designed an experiment, using his students, in which 84% chose the $125.00 for print and online, 0% chose print-only, and only 16% chose online-only. Any rational manager would say the $125.00 offer print-only offer was useless. But when Dan removed the $125.00 print-only offer, 68% of people bought the online product for $59.00 while only 32% shelled out for the $125.00 bundle! In other words, the higher-priced option was chosen less than half as often. By having the decoy of $125.00 for print-only, the customer could make an easy comparison to the other $125.00 offer in which they got online for “free.” Even something as simple as choosing a magazine has enough complexity in it that a decoy choice can radically change buyer behavior.

— Design Your Customer’s Decisions

The conclusion is not new and I’ve mentioned it myself when writing about the shift from search to recommendations in content consumption: