New Tools to Help Ease Information Overload

When researching a particular topic for your nonprofit on the Internet, have you ever wished there were a better way to sift through the myriad of information? The very abundance of online content can also be an impediment; after all, the Web is only valuable if you can use it to find what you need.

Fortunately, emerging technologies — in conjunction with a potentially new breed of online professional — can help you not only find the information you need more quickly, but also put it to better use.

A New Kind of Information Service

Robin Good, an independent online publisher who works out of Rome, Italy, helps empower individuals to sustain themselves ethically through the creative use of new media. In addition to his Web sites — Master New Media, which covers new media; Master Views International, which focuses on designing for international audiences; and Kolabora, which covers online collaboration — Good publishes the Communication Agents Journal, a project that provides support to those interested in promoting social change. He is also producer and director of The Weblog Project, the first open-source movie about blogs.

Managing this much content, Good understands — perhaps even better than most plugged-in nonprofit technology professionals — just how easy it is to become afflicted with information overload. Which is why he is pioneering the idea of a new type of knowledge worker he calls a NewsMaster.

NewsMasters

A NewsMaster, Good says, acts as a "curator" of the huge stream of new information that comes at us every day. With so much constant information, it is extremely difficult to keep up with everything; thus, the decision often comes down to, "What can I afford to not read?"

After all, while the number of media outlets — and voices in the media — are constantly increasing, the hubs where information can be meaningfully aggregated and filtered have not kept up. By delivering only what is most relevant to any given field or organization, Good believes, NewsMasters can improve the efficiency, accessibility, and utility of information an organization receives.

The responsibility of a NewsMaster, he says, is to transform information overload into something of value that increases recipients' access to information and their ability to respond to key events quickly.

Searching and Filtering

Central to NewsMastering is the concept of filtering. Filtering, Good says, can be as simple as subscribing to RSS feeds of a large number of news sources, search queries, and other dynamic resources, then splicing them together with a tool like Feed Digest, which parses, regenerates, and syndicates feeds. The NewsMaster then sorts through the results of these subscriptions using a combination of automated software and personal expertise. The most important information resulting from these filters is then delivered to end users, either by RSS, email, a Web site, or other appropriate communication tool.

Lest NewsMastering sounds as easy, Good points out that the task in fact requires both passion and a fairly detailed level of knowledge about the topic at hand. In order to select, edit, and manage the real informational gems in any sector, a NewsMaster must be able to recognize news and resources in their proper context.

One of the primary ways a NewsMaster filters content is via RSS feeds, using terms and phrases most likely to bring up relevant content. An informed NewsMaster, Good notes, should be able to both determine what phrases will bring up the most valuable existing online documents and make educated guesses about what terms could unearth important content in the future.

Searches that are overly broad will bring in too many results and require too much processing, Good cautions; instead, he advises that NewsMasters subscribe to highly targeted searches that will generate specific, useful results. A good search subscription may not deliver any results for days at a time, but when results do arrive, they will be of high value; in other words, Good says, creating many small pipelines that filter in premium information is a better strategy than using big pipes for the immediate psychological reward of seeing many (albeit lower-value) results.

A Universe of Sources

When setting up a suite of queries on a topic of general interest, Good recommends the following "universe" of sources.

1. News

   Yahoo! News is Good's favorite source for news searches.

2. Blogs.

   Technorati is Good's preferred blog-search feed source. He suggests that NewsMasters subscribe to tag searches either instead of, or in addition to, full text searches.

3. Social bookmarking.

   Harness the power of everyone else's research by subscribing to feeds in del.icio.us or digg. (The author also recommends Furl for some subjects.)

4. Press releases.

   Many companies only put out their information via press releases. The best place to subscribe to a query feed on these releases, according to Good, is at Newspad, which uses press releases from PRWeb.

NewsMastering Tools

When it comes to NewsMastering software suites, Good recommends looking into MySyndicaat and Hexamail's News2Web.

Other exciting new feed-creation technologies use RSS to offer alerts in conjunction with instant messaging and short message service. Tools like FeedYes, Ponyfish, Mail2RSS, and — one of the most established in its class — FeedFire let you create RSS feeds to subscribe to updates from sites that don't offer their own feeds.

Feed-creation technologies are characteristic of a new breed of emerging technologies, where early adopters evangelize about groundbreaking tools even as they develop them. Many of the tools available to Newsmasters are experimental, and carry certain risks; they can crash, for instance, when overwhelmed by too many users.

Yet for every feed-manipulation tool that fades out of existence, two more will appear that are more capable, professional, and supported. Good considers this "carousel" of tools, an incredible opportunity for innovation: While there is some risk in investing in these emerging technologies, he notes, that risk is mitigated by the fact that RSS is an open-source format that won't leave users locked into any particular vendor.

Good is quick to point out, however, that inexpensive software solutions that claim to automatically deliver the best information on a given topic are no match for the combined power of a flexible software strategy and a well-informed human mind.

Return on Investment

So is there a clear return on investment for organizations that use NewsMasters? While Good acknowledges that the payoff has yet to be quantified, he says that NewsMasters fulfill an undeniable and powerful purpose for stakeholders. NewsMastering can help an organization overcome information overload; increase its reputation as an information provider; and aggregate a body of high-quality content that can be used in newsletters, on the Web, in briefings, and in research.

One thing is for certain: the landscape of tools and best practices for mining the living Web will continue to develop rapidly as long as too much information remains an obstacle to finding the right information.

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