Brain overload: device too busy

It seems that the genius of connectedness offers us too many tempting directions to follow all at once. 

How often do you feel like the student in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, and are tempted to say, “Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full.”

A disk device can become so overwhelmed with Input / Output requests that at one point it will flash some warning messages asking you to increase your storage, or defragment it, or delete unneeded files. 

But what can we do when our brains are overwhelmed with information?

With all the benefits of the information and communications revolution, we also experience a well-known dark side: information overload and its close relative, attention deficit.

For example, in this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information.

The traditional process of ‘filter-then-publish‘– done by professional editors – has been inverted to ‘publish-then-filter‘. So now instead of relying on professional editors and librarians to make recommendations, we have to become experts ourselves.

Brain Overload - Visual Summary generated by WebSummarizer

The curious thing about this state is that seemingly accidental recommendations from many sources sometimes result in remarkably high quality ideas – see crowdsourcing.org . 

The challenge here is seeing how quickly we can discover them in the atomized universe; this is quite time consuming, which often leads to our brain overload. 

In parallel to the free-for-all publishing world, we also see trends for using collaborative methods for producing both aggregated and authoritative content that takes advantage of the limitless Web sources and yet can be trusted. Examples of such trends are Wikipedia and professional wikis. This community approach, with a peer review process, for sharing knowledge and learning, manifests our need for creating dependable and trustworthy information sources.

It seems that the genius of connectedness offers us too many tempting directions to follow all at once. Connectedness provides us with a very unrestrained way of seeing events, people, and the world where we are pressed hard to make sense from all the atomized information bits hitting us. This is why we are increasingly turning our attention to such applications as data mining, text mining, and big data.

Deep down, until there is a unified theory of the web, we often need to reach for some authoritative and curated content to keep us on dry land and save us from drowning in information overload and fragmenting our attention.

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About WebSummarizer:

WebSummarizer is a powerful text mining and visualization application.  It offers rapid summarization of web pages and documents, creation of personal and corporate knowledge bases. 

The summarization results are presented as:

•   Visual Summaries

•   Visual Knowledge Maps

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•   Keywords Cloud, and

•   Visual Summaries and Visual Knowledge Maps can be exported to HTML, word editors and mind mapping applications. 

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

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BlogSummarizer, WebSummarizer and WikiSummarizer are products of Context Discovery Inc.

Bringing the web back to human scale

Steven Rosenbaum says that:

"In a world of bandwidth and content abundance, we're overwhelmed with data, tweets, blogs, check in's and media. It used to be we surfed the web. Now the waves of the web are just too big. Curation is the new magic that makes the web work. Bringing the web back to human scale with human filters you trust and love. A powerful mix of passion and context turns noise back into signal."

 Digital curation is generally referred to the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of authoritative digital assets .Digital curation entails:

•  Collecting verifiable digital assets
•  Providing digital asset search and retrieval
•  Certification of the trustworthiness and integrity of the collection content
•  Semantic and ontological continuity and comparability of the collection content

 

Curation has been a hot topic especially in the world where social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg.Tumblr,  and Pinterest are the engines of this new curation trend. We are looking to people in our networks for opinions and references. Essentially we turn to human filtering and human judgment to make recommendations, validate the information sources and improve our experience on the web.

Here is a Visual Summary of an excellent article by Steve Rosenbaum: Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay


 

To navigate the Visual Summary:
 * click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map
 * or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons.   

  The Visual Summary was created by WikiSummarizer. 
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About WebSummarizer
WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer