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The Internet Technology

Knock, Knock: Information Pollution Is Here 211

Posted by timothy from the does-this-bother-you-does-this-bother-you dept.
CowboyRobot writes ""Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media to describe unwanted phone calls, faxes, emails, etc. Jakob Nielsen, known for his critiques of user interfaces has an article about the problems of unwanted instant messaging interruptions. Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining. In the article he describes the current problem, then proposes a 'control panel' as a centralized interface to manage all the communications one would make via the computer."
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Knock, Knock: Information Pollution Is Here More

Knock, Knock: Information Pollution Is Here

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  • really... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:19PM (#7824288) Homepage
    Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining.

    I hate to sound like I'm just bashing the guy, but he's a huge hypocrite. I started reading his site back in the day, and after signing up, I got spam for years afterwards.

    "Information Pollution" my ass. Up until he decides something's bad and coins some clever term, he'll do it with no compunction.

    • Buzz-phrases (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:07PM (#7824538) Journal

      "Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media ...

      Hmmm. Funny thing is that I've always considered those buzz-phrases that are so often bandied about by 'various media' as Information Pollution in their own right. The by-products of processing good information down into a more-assimilabable (but less rich) format for consumption by the masses.

      GMD

      • Re:Buzz-phrases (Score:3, Interesting)

        by NTmatter ( 589153 )

        Serial Experiments Lain had a much more appropriate term for the pollution (dilution?) of information with [insert ad here] useless blather to amuse the minds of the masses: "Infornography"

        A summary of the episode named after it can be found here [bitbear.com].

    • Re:really... (Score:3, Funny)

      by catbutt ( 469582 )
      Bash away. His site [useit.com] is simply awful. It is the ugliest site I have ever seen that says "web design" in the title. If "usable" means it has to be that drab, then no thanks.
    • "Information Pollution" my ass. Up until he decides something's bad and coins some clever term, he'll do it with no compunction.
      Why would he have a reason to not do something if he hasn't decided it's bad yet?
  • As in : Start > Settings > Control Panel (> Internet Options, > Networking, >Add/Remove Programs...)?
    The tools are there already, even in Windows.All anyone needs to do is use them.

    • Berkeley? (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by rduke15 ( 721841 )
      There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

      Berkeley? LSD came out of Basel, Switzerland (that's in Europe), in the forties.

      (Hopefully commenting on a signature will help me burn out some excess karma before year's end.)

      • LSD came out of Basel, Switzerland (that's in Europe), in the forties.

        LSD was invented in Switzerland, and Unix was invented in New Jersey. However, the idiom "Y comes out of X" doesn't mean it was invented there, just that X is a major center of production. E.g.:

        Berkeley was a noted production center of LSD and Unix (technically a Unix-like system, Unix is a tra

  • With all the spam ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gulfan ( 524955 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:20PM (#7824293)
    With all the spam on the Internet these days I find it harder and harder to find information on what I want. I was searching for information on teens in general for a project that my company was working on and majority of the results were adult related. When searching for products such as Cell Phones I'll be shown thousands of results for Antenna Boosters, Free unlocking Kits and more. Is anyone else having the same problems?
    • I have been looking myself for information about MIDP and information on writing midlets, and all I can find on google when I search for java and cell phones is "FREE RING TONES" and other assorted ads. There is such a thing as information pollution, and ya I've got a problem with it.

      • Re:With all the spam ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Aussie ( 10167 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:57PM (#7824486) Journal
        all I can find on google when I search for java and cell phones is "FREE RING TONES"

        Yeah, that is becoming a real problem, any search for anything that is remotely connected to mobile/cell phones returns the dreaded "FREE RING TONES".

        Unless you go to the manufacturers site all you get is crap.

        Googles next challenge I guess.

        • Yeah, that is becoming a real problem, any search for anything that is remotely connected to mobile/cell phones returns the dreaded "FREE RING TONES".

          Ironically, I've actually been trying to find a ringtone to give a friend as a Christmas gift. But information pollution (read: search engine spam) has made it impossible for me to find a decent version of the tune or clear instructions on how to install it on her phone. I'm even willing to pay!

    • Re:With all the spam ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by The Cydonian ( 603441 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:30PM (#7824606) Homepage Journal
      Try Alltheweb [alltheweb.com]. Zero porn content in a random search for teens.

      (Of course, helps that I switched the Offensive Content Filter to 'on')

    • With google, if you go to the 'advanced search' you can give keywords that should not appear in the results.

      This is very useful for removing crap *cough*blogs*cough* from the results.

    • Junk in search results? Where? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hkmwbz ( 531650 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:31PM (#7824989) Journal
      What exactly did you search for?

      A search for teens [google.com] using Google didn't show any adult sites on the first four pages at least. I just had a quick look, and on page four I didn't bother going any further.

      And the other comments about ring tones. What are you people searching for? I don't seem to have these problems at all.

      Enlighten me.

      • Re:Junk in search results? Where? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by robogun ( 466062 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @11:21PM (#7825532)
        Google did a good job of cleaning up THAT pollution as described here [slashdot.org]. A month ago many common pop culture searches would have turned up nothing but auto-generated commercial pages, all alike.

        For example, searching on Paris Hilton [google.com] after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.

        Similarly, searching on an obscure actor would return hundreds of sites all wanting to sell you posters, DVDs and videos of the movie they had their bit parts in, but little actual information.

        That is a good example of information pollution, a term I heard first from Earthlink.

        It is the result of affiliation, combined with legions of small-time marketers who all think their affiliate page should be number one in a category. Using the services of firms like Web Position Gold, [webdeveloper.com] many succeeded, pushing relevant results off the first ten pages.

        Also, Amazon and Ebay have seized most of the keywords, which Google is slowly forcing off onto the paid listings.

        I had actually quit Google and went over to MSN [msn.com], as it had received much less attention by the page spammers and was able to return much more relevant results. But I prefer to browse using an early version of Netscape and for some reason doesn't load MSN well at all.

        Google looks a lot cleaner, but spammers still seem to be trying their tricks. For instance, Google cleaned up that meta-refresh fault which would index the text full of keywords and ship you off to the spammed site once you went for it.

        But spammers have come back with a javascript substitute that does the same thing.

        • Out of idle curiosity, which early version of Netscape? My *preferred* browser is NS3.04, js and images off. :)

          One recent scam I found Google prey to, I discovered when I did a search for a printer model that I own (was looking for toner carts). One text string that came back was from my own site, and it used MY domain name -- but in the page displayed, my domain as displayed was LINKED to a linkfarm where ALL the links were built that way. Needless to say, I complained to Google about this, hopefully with
          • I use 3.04 non-gold with java and js turned off, images on. It worked pretty well until last year... now a lot of sites seem to be IE-only. Even some Ebay sellers (who you would think want everyone possible to be able to see their ad) make that mistake.

            When forced off Netscape, I use IE 6 with Popup Cop ( a shareware prog) blocking all the webcrap. IE really sucks though -- why oh why does it keep so much default cache (2 gig on my machine). If you run IE, try PurgeIE (another shareware prog) after emptyin
            • I also prefer 3.04 non-gold over the Gold edition, mainly for the context menu ordering. Netscape is THE app that weaned me off WFWG, because it addicted me to Right-click. :) It still works fine for everyday use on 90-95% of the sites I need to see. I don't load images partly because in the 14.4k era it was too slow, and even when I had 56k (26.4k now, having moved to a bad phone area) I found I *prefer* images off, because it was less junk in my face and in most cases, actually made it *easier* to naviga
              • I have 3.04 installed on several computers, but I fear it is slowly getting obsoleted.
                I actually used the mail feature in Netscape 3.04 until I recently switched servers. For some reason nothing I do will make the new POP server accept the mail password if it sent from Netscape. If it comes from Outbreak Express or my spam filter program it takes it just fine. Weird. Similarly, I used to use the news feature but it doesn't do Yenc which seems to be the method of encoding binaries currently in style.
                • One nice thing about 3.04 is that it will tolerate being merely dumped onto a system, and doesn't require a proper installing. I've been migrating the same copy that way for years.

                  If an NNTP server fails to actively *request* the password in the prescribed fashion, Netscape will report a failed login due to "bad password". The Wildcat 5.x NNTP server has that bug, so it doesn't work with NS3.x. I suppose it's possible that your ISP's new POP server is either misconfigured or has a similar bug. Anyway, it'

                  • Yenc is a joke. It, and years ago, Base-64 were merely attempts by Usenet users to lose AOLers (me-too'ers) and more recently Outlook users by obsoleting their client software.

                    Of course, eventually their software gets updated and they come back. In the meantime Usenet is filled with their complaints and the attendant responses from the Usenet intelligentia, who daily demonstrate their superiority by instructing them to "Get a Real Newsreader (tm)."

                    They won't, and after their software updates things will q
                    • Actually, Base64 was annoying BBS folk long before Usenet was popular. Most QWK readers didn't handle it (of those few that handled attachments at all) and most BBS software mangled multipart Base64 attachments anyway, even if they handled the older UUEncodes properly. EQCity BBS's Real Sysop (I'm tne co-sysop-at-large -- yes, we still have a dialup BBS!) wrote a little utility that fixes the problem for Wildcat 4.x QWK packets.

                      While most people just use whatever is popular and don't realise how it shuts o
            • I use exclusively Linux on my desktop and have no issues with IE-only sites. Except for a very select few, most sites render fine in Firebird, Mozilla, or Konqueror. I know offhand of one that only seems to work in Opera, and maybe two more that render fine but without certain features they have on IE, like dropdown menues. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but everything seems to be fine.

              Perhaps the issue is not that they are designed to work only in IE, but that they are using web standards that wer

        • > For example, searching on Paris Hilton after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.

          And while we're at it, how the hell is any poor bastard trying to rent a room at a Hilton-operated hotel in capital of France ever going to find out whether such a hotel exists or not. (Then again, who cares? :)

    • Re:With all the spam ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by lurker412 ( 706164 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @10:44PM (#7825373)
      Yeah. I've been unemployed for a while. If you want to search for jobs you need to remember to include -blow in your query.
    • I was searching for information on teens in general... majority of the results were adult related

      I know what you mean. It's obvious they're not teens, so why call them that?

      And why say "amateur" when they mean "ugly"?

  • Even very effective spam filters today (SpamAssassin, et. al) still produce false positives sometimes. I don't want any and all electronic communication coming to me to be subject to some Internet Control Panel's idea of its usefulness to me - what happens when my boss sends me an email and it gets rejected by the control panel and I never see it? I do use SpamAssassin myself but still have to check the junk folders from time to time because it occasionally sticks stuff in there that I really did need or
    • It isnt the control panel that you need. No matter how much junk you reject you get too much useful email. In a business there is a cure for it. You make it *painful* to write too much email. Simple supply/demand economics. Give people a limited number of emails per day based on actual work need, and the ability to request more, and guess what happens. .. Email goes relevant.

      Its an experiment done multiple times with the same results, and similar effects are achieved by charging per email received between
      • Give people a limited number of emails per day based on actual work need...

        A few anecdotes:

        A problem I get (and sometimes contribute to) is the quick shoot from the hip email, and two minutes later a postscript, and 10 minutes later a recantation and quite different position. Or working on correcting a long document someone sends me a separate email for every single correction instead of combining the dozen or more total into one.

        Eudora had a feature that was supposed to reduce flames by rating your m

  • And this helps how? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:23PM (#7824311)
    '...then proposes a 'control panel' as a centralized interface to manage all the communications one would make via the computer."'

    What are the options? Drop nuke on spammer's house? Send in the black helicopters? The problem isn't so much on the receiver's end as it on the sender's end. Instead of forcing users to jump through flaming hoop after flaming hoop why don't we develop systems that make it more difficult to send spam in the first place? Jakob Neilsen, of all people, should know better than to suggest such a wasteful UI to solve a much deeper problem with the system itself. If you want total anonymity on the internet than you have to deal with these problems. You can't say only certain peolpe get to be anonymous and the people I don't like can't. You want to be able to spoof headers? Be prepared for spammers to take advantage of this "feature". You want to have the ability to have open relays? Get ready for the flood of spam that will use them.

  • control panel.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:24PM (#7824319) Homepage Journal
    like a modern cellular phone? that's where it's heading anyways, an all-around communication device.

    . you know, sms is quite a bit like im(well, ..doh, it is instant messaging) and you can use im services(irc,aim,whatever i guess) from most new phones(i know, the j2me irc sucks, virca that is.. but wirelessirc for series60 is pretty good, most phones also come with email clients as well). already I use more the online services made possible by cheap enough gprs than what I use my phone for actual talking(gprs is ways much cheaper than sms's in most cases and obviously you get the added benefit of contacting all your friends who are online at once when they're on the same channel).

    • Re:control panel.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:27PM (#7824340) Homepage Journal
      oh fuck, i only rtfa after i wrote a comment.

      the guy is making no sense. his control panel is just an app for idiots to filter the mail they subscribed for.. wtf, that's supposed to be new, auto filtering into boxes? geez, somebody drag this guy into 2003 before it's too late!

      that is supposed to be an article!?!?!? it's just a bitching up!

  • Poll - Who's more annoying: Nielsen or Bowie Poag? (Score:5, Funny)

    by smitty45 ( 657682 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:24PM (#7824321)
    Or...how to categorize anything they say:

    A- Conceited without reason
    B- Self-interested to astronomic proportions
    C- Frustratingly condescending and tunnel-visioned
    D- Doesn't matter, it's all idiocy to me.

    Get your votes in fast.

  • This Was A Big Problem For Me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gurustu ( 542259 ) <gurustu@nosPAM.att.net> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:31PM (#7824357)
    So I solved it by setting up two separate computers. One's my "work box" with my editors, shells, DB clients, etc. The other is my "communications box" with my email client, IM client, calendar, IRC clients, etc. Once I turned off all the alarms/alerts on the latter (except for the calendar), and once I made it so that I couldn't see the latter except by switching over to that box, my efficiency (and job satisfaction) skyrocketed.

    Initially, it made me less available and less responsive, and that bothered me. However, my work habits started to change in response to it. Because I now control my exposure to communications, I find that I can flip to the other box, scan for messages, and flip back to my work box without exiting the flow state.

    This has had some other really positive side effects. For example, people are aware that I'm in my office, even if I'm not responding to IM. That means that if something's really important, they'll often just drop by, replacing the thirty back-and-forth email with a simple 5 minute conversation. Sure, I lose my flow state, but high priority problems bubble up to the top of the list and get resolved in the most effective way (ie; face to face) possible.

    • Re:This Was A Big Problem For Me (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sapped ( 208174 ) <mlangenhoven AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:03PM (#7824511)
      This has had some other really positive side effects. For example, people are aware that I'm in my office, even if I'm not responding to IM. That means that if something's really important, they'll often just drop by, replacing the thirty back-and-forth email with a simple 5 minute conversation.

      This is great if you are in a position to do so. On my last project we had 3 management types who "communicated" with us continuously on such useful topics such as "File time sheets by 4pm". Yeah, like that was worth breaking my concentration! However, I tried to combat this problem first by talking to them about it and then later by simply not logging onto the company IM system anymore when I needed to concentrate. This was rewarded with a public reprimand branding me as combatitive and I was told I had to be logged into the IM and be available to management at all times otherwise they would refuse to sign off on my billing.

      Needless to say the useless twits "managed" themselves and us out of jobs when their constant nitpicking eventually killed the project. 3 years working with a 45+ team in four countries and not a thing to show for it today. Go you wonderful corporate giant!
      • IM has no place being used in most company environments. It's a fundamentally interruptive medium and makes the cost of interrupting somebody too low for the interrupter. Especially if you are managing a team of thought-workers, like programmers. If you have an important issue to discuss with somebody in the office, pick up your phone, or drop by their cube/office. If it's not important or immediate enough for that, email them and let them respond when they are taking a break. Or if it involves more pe
      • Makes me feel so much better about a project I was on where the manager's idea of version control was a big metal filing rack. We spent 20% of our time printing up reams of useless crap for his "system" when everything was in CVS anyway. He blew through a million bucks and then fired the whole team with nothing but a stack of proofs of concepts for the most obviously feasible technologies to show for it. Amazingly, he still has _his_ job. Personally, I'd prefer being IM'ed to death to the endless hour-long

  • But what of the quailty of the information? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:31PM (#7824358) Homepage
    The idea for solving "Information Pollution" is interesting, but what of the quality of the information that is delivered? In this day and age when you can find web sites devoted to "Proof we never made it to the moon" [moonmovie.com] and hard facts are often replaced with "that sounds about right" isn't the real pollution the content we supposedly want - and not the advertisers?

    Find me a system to easily and quickly verify the "facts" with something I can trust.

    AngryPeopleRule [angrypeoplerule.com]
    • The idea for solving "Information Pollution" is interesting, but what of the quality of the information that is delivered? In this day and age when you can find web sites devoted to "Proof we never made it to the moon" and hard facts are often replaced with "that sounds about right" isn't the real pollution the content we supposedly want - and not the advertisers?

      Find me a system to easily and quickly verify the "facts" with something I can trust.

      I find this whole concept fascinating. So much of the info

      • Truth may not exist, but truths exist.

        Truth is an abstract concept that probably doesn't have a well defined boundary. But I definitely got out of bed this morning. And I have socks on my feet. Etc. (One could quibble about dreams seeming real, but they've never seemed real to me. I just never think to question them until they're over.)

        OTOH, once we get beyond personal experience...if you assert that you got out of bed this morning, I'll probably believe you. But is it Truth? I have no reason to dou

  • Some thoughts... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeepDarkSky ( 111382 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:34PM (#7824373)
    1. Do you ever use your email like an instant messenger? Meaning, do you and another person sit there writing messages to each other in almost real-time? You sit there pathetically pressing refresh or check email, waiting for the next reply? I have.

    2. A control panel for monitoring information flow is not a bad idea - just that it needs to be implemented to cover everything and be easy to use. You should be able to easily define rules (like spam rules) that says what to do with the messages if they meet certain criteria.
    Of course, it defeats the purpose of IM - after all, if you don't want to be available, or just don't want to be interrupted, just turn the thing off!

    3. I think that instead of finding a technical solution (yet another program that will cure all, bring world peace, and improve worker productivity - remember that's what they said about email? Instead of all of these, just sit down and take some time and figure out the best routine for yourself. Everybody has different work habits, and a control panel, no matter how flexible, is not going to accommodate everyone's requirements. If you don't want to be interrupted, then just turn those notifications off, change your IM status to "away" or "do not interrupt"

    4. Some workers don't "want" to be productive. They want to be interrupted.

    • Re:Some thoughts... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DonGar ( 204570 )
      1. Do you ever use your email like an instant messenger? Meaning, do you and another person sit there writing messages to each other in almost real-time? You sit there pathetically pressing refresh or check email, waiting for the next reply? I have.

      Yes, but not normally when instant messaging is available. I the long ago, bad old days (before ICQ existed) I was emailing back and forth with a friend that had moved to Boston university. He never replied to a message I was expecting, and SIX MONTHs later it

  • Blah (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rhetoric ( 735114 ) <rhetoricNO@SPAMcolumbus.rr.com> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:35PM (#7824377)
    Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining.

    But he is just complaining!

    From the article [acmqueue.com]: "It is naive to believe that IM is the answer to the information overload that's ailing e-mail. Continue current trends a few years and most people will get so much IM that they will have to tune it out to get any work done."

    This is the problem he's trying to address it would seem, and his solution is a nice pretty control panel that does everything for him. Now this is obviously a problem, as many many other people have pointed out, but what is Nielsen doing about it? Whining that someone else should write a program apparently. If he believes this control panel is the end-all-be-all solution he should write it and try to sell it, but I'm not buying it. Until some public key standard ala PGP is made idiot proof and seamless enough for the average suburban housewife to use, consumers and big media will keep complaining, imho.

  • Self Control (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xanthan ( 83225 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:37PM (#7824384)
    This may be hard for some to fathom, but try this: turn it off. No really. I mean it. When I need to work, I minimize email, go "invisible" on IM, and let voicemail pick up the phone. My cell phone has caller ID so I can ID my wife and know to pick up the phone.

    All of these technologies have a way of being turned off and queueing messages for you. Use it. When you're ready for a break or it's just that time again, process them in bulk and get them over with. When I was programming, I only processed email 2-3 times a day (morning, right before lunch, and towards the end of the day) and this worked very well. Having a gig in marketing land has changed my job requirements where I'm actually judged by how often I interact with the sales team and customers so I check mail more often -- but, when I need to get a document written up or read and comment on something else, I minimize it all and focus.

    One last note about IM -- have strict rules about IM. I don't socialize over IM when I'm working. I tell friends that are on my buddy lists to not expect a response during typical working hours if they just want to chat. I won't respond. If you want to send a social comment, send it via email to my personal mailbox and I'll get to it when I've got time to socialize.
    • All of these technologies have a way of being turned off and queueing messages for you. Use it.

      At my last contact, management forced us to keep IM on all the time so that they could blurb us during the day with useless trivia. No amount of telling them they were killing our productivity made any difference.

      In the end we were proved correct when the whole project folded.

      In those kinds of situations you are unfortunately hosed as management would insist that the proposed control panel would not allow
      • Ya. I'm to the point I simply don't run IM, no matter how much they beg. There is no value in the chat interface. I'm in enough contact. Remember that no one's time is remotely as important as they would like you to believe it is.

        That lumpy black thing on your desk is called a phone. Internal communications are free and internally routed. Cool.
    • When I was programming, I only processed email 2-3 times a day (morning, right before lunch, and towards the end of the day) and this worked very well.

      Don't work too well if some of the email comes from the change control system and says, in effect, "drop what you're doing and fix this bug now because there are five people waiting for it".

  • No interruptions (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tedric ( 8215 )
    I think he makes a good point with the statement that a one minute interruption can cost 10 to 15 minutes of productivity. Maybe productivity is the wrong word here because it translates so easily into money these days. Concentration would be much better. I for myself need a room that can be locked, a telephone line that can be unplugged and a quiet and relaxed atmosphere to concentrate on the work I want to do or that I have to do.

    Unfortunatly this seems to be impossible in "modern" offices, there's lots

    • Re:No interruptions (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iSwitched ( 609716 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:18PM (#7824570)
      First off, don't get me wrong, I actually agree with everything you've said, I would love to have this level of concentration available to me daily -- others have posted this sentiment, but every time I read it I find myself thinking, what would the average PHB think, and it goes something like this:

      Question:
      Financial implications aside, what is the difference between a tech guy in my office who I can only communicate with peridodically, usually via email, and rarely ever see; And some coder working for an Indian mega-consultancy in a cube in Bangalore.

      Answer:
      Not a damn thing...

      Companies are groups of people working together for a common purpose, hell its why they're called a 'company'. For better or worse, they have eveolved into very social entities, with all the benefits and problems that entails.

      One clear advantage the average local geek has over his outsourced counterpart is that he can be reachable, responsive, even friendly. I've played that card extensively over the last couple years, sure I get interrupted alot, but I've never been outsourced.

      Just food for thought, not meant as a flame.

    • What is this 'knock' of which you speak? I haven't had an office with a door since I entered the IT industry in 1996. We live in cubes nowadays, most of us, which means we are interrupted not only by our own cube-lurkers and phone calls, but the cube conversations and phone calls of those ten or fifteen cubes that are within earshot, and don't even get me started on IM, and people who configure their email clients to alert them when they receive new email, in both their work and personal email accounts. Bet

      • And I didn't even mention (Score:4, Insightful)

        by webwench_72 ( 541358 ) <webwench_72@yaho o . c om> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:28PM (#7824969) Homepage
        And I didn't even mention the worst new irritant: the accumulated ringings of everyone's personal cellphones, all of which are set up to ring with the most annoying and lengthy ringtone possible, at the highest possible volume.
        • "And I didn't even mention the worst new irritant: the accumulated ringings of everyone's personal cellphones, all of which are set up to ring with the most annoying and lengthy ringtone possible, at the highest possible volume. "

          I've found a good way to deal with this problem. I approach the person and say "Could you pleases turn down your ringer?" For some reason, it took a month for somebody to do that at my office.

          Be careful, though. I found out that turning off an investor's cell phone is a nono,
        • Try the combination of one person listening to the "local" ClearChannel country station (a match made in hell if ever there was one) and having The Star Spangled Banner as his (loud) ring tone.

          My roommate gets nigh-hysterical at hearing a phone ring when he's concentrating on something computer-related. Personally, if I'm really focused, I don't even hear people when they're talking directly to me. Some part of my brain registers speech, but that's it. But I'm usually not so intense, and the rest of the

  • IM? Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 ) <tms&infamous,net> on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:39PM (#7824394) Homepage
    say that they now prefer instant messaging (IM) over e-mail as their medium of choice for computer-mediated communication

    Good grief, why? IM seems to me to combine the worst features of the telephone and e-mail. I've never understood its allure. E-mail is quite fast enough for non-interactive communication, and if you want interactive communication pick up the phone (or better yet get off your ass and walk over to me, if we're in the sam building, I hate intra-office telephoning) and we can be much more interactive when we don't have to type at each other. And many people have e-mail through work, but not IM accounts. (Sadly, spammers are not amoung them, as IM spam is apparently becoming common.) Plus, the IM space is fragmented.

    So, can anyone convince me that I should sign up for an IM account?

    • Re:IM? Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 )
      Chat, what else. Like IRC, only in most cases between just 2 people.

      It's pretty convenient too. Email is not suited to some purposes. Like say, you want to help somebody troubleshoot something. Email is very inconvenient for this. Sure you can mail lots of messages, but those things go slowly. IM is fast, and convenient because you could simply paste URLs, error messages, etc, instead of going through the whole process of opening a new email window, selecting who to send it to...

      In the office IM is nice b

    • Re:IM? Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by howlatthemoon ( 718490 )
      I don't think IM is for everyone or every situation.

      It works for me at my location. I am one of a dozen consultants stationed throughout my institution. With IM, I can find out who is available (sort of a virtual in/out board and get quick answers to questions. If it clear another medium is better (phone or e-mail) we switch. I can usually get "have you seen this problem" question with a URL answer in less than a minute. I have found for our group, that phone calls almost always lead to other things
    • I use IM to have real-time conversations with my friends from my year in germany, ever seen internation calling rates? Yes e-mail works, but IM is more like a conversation.

      I also use iChat AV to talk to some of my friends who live in other states, yes, that's an IM account, being able to telephone.

      Or what about when I need help online? I talk to several of my computer-geek friends at once to try to find a solution, cheap and easy communication.

      Just because you have Instant Messanger or something similar

  • Use magical filters! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:41PM (#7824402)
    Don't like the email you get? Use Bayesian filters!

    Want to only read the articles that interest you? Use Bayesian filters!

    Yes, use Magic Beans, er, Bayesian filters and everything will be wonderful! We don't understand what they are or how they work, but by god, we'll recommend them for any kind of content filtering! Don't like TV? Use Bayesian filters!

    This brought to you by the Bayesian filter marketing board -- you wouldn't have seen this if you used Bayesian filters.

  • Just take a look at your tv screen.

    Those annoying network logos that sit on the tv screen constantly, except during commercials are the worst form of info pollution.

    Do the nets really think that we won't know what channel we're watching if we don't see a constant reminder of it?

    I suppose they see it as 'branding', increasing their profile in the Consumer's psyche, but it's really overkill.

    It's one reason I got rid of cable tv last year and rarely watch broadcast tv.

    I wouldn't be surprised if they deci
    • I often have no idea what channel I am watching. Tivo grabs all sorts of shows and I never know or care when it was or what channel it was on.

      Even in cases where I know what channel I expect a show to be on I can be surprised. My daughter likes Blue's Clues from Nickelodeon. Sometimes it shows a syndication on CBS Kids.

      Of course, this doesn't excuse those damnable logos, or worse, when they strip something across the bottom 1/4 of the screen about upcoming shows. Even PBS does it, the bastards.

    • You know what's scarier is I can remember a time when branding was "new" and the real channels didn't do it...

      And I'm only 21!!!

      [Well, heck I remember quality shows like SquareOne, Mathnet, ewok adventures, etc...]

      I think it all this "polution" is just people not appreciating the laws of diminishing returns. TBS for example, runs ads every 81 seconds, puts animations all over the bottom.... and right now I'm watching the discovery channel.

      CNN promotes their "we're right because when we covered it first

  • Your polluting yourself with information (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:44PM (#7824412)
    I don't get this. People bring much of this interruptedness upon themselves. Ya know what, when I don't want to get cell phone calls, I turn off my cell phone or just turn off the ringer and don't answer it. I will check my messages when I feel like it and get back to somebody when I get a chance. Email, polluted as it is by spam, is by design a non-interruptive form of communication. Sure, I'm as addicted as the next guy - but if I have work to do or I'm focused on something intently, I'll go 3, 4 hours without checking my email.


    IM is no different. It's just that IM is by design an interruptive form of communication. This just makes it all the more important that you don't leave it on all day long like many people do. If you leave your IM client on and complain that people keep interrupting you, I have no sympathy. There are some companies these days that seem to think using IM for work is a good idea. If somebody in the office wants to get in touch with you, they should walk over to your cube, or call you on your office phone. If it's not important enough for that, then an email is a better idea.


    Check your email once every few hours, no more. If you must more often, for work, at least try to reeducate people - don't reply to emails immediately, train them to use more direct forms of communication when they need an immediate reply. Only turn on your IM client in the evenings when you don't expect to do productive work, and are just surfing the web. Learn to turn off your cell phone, and make sure the people you work with understand the rules for contacting you outside of work hours - leave a message, you'll get back to them. Be in control of your life and your time, you don't need some magic technotool, just a little self-restraint and discipline.

  • Information pollution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Merik ( 172436 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:50PM (#7824438) Homepage
    A better definition from Nielson [useit.com]:
    "Excessive word count and worthless details are making it harder for people to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message."
  • The Web is a junkyard.

    To which he is contributing to the problem he's bitching about with this.

    Do you want to keep track of your eBay auctions? Instead of five e-mails per auction, all scattered throughout your inbox, you would have a single flag in the control panel. Discussion groups? The control panel would show when hot topics of interest to you are being discussed and would call attention to discussions with contributions by writers you particularly respect.

    It's almost 2004, and this guy still doe

  • Opportunity Knocking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:52PM (#7824449) Homepage Journal
    It reads like a golden opportunity for entreprenurial programmers.

  • Mental Environmentalism (Score:5, Informative)

    by Merik ( 172436 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @07:57PM (#7824484) Homepage
    Our inbox mirrors our daily life.(even the penis enlarger ads[enzyte]).
    3000 commercial messages a day are rammed [adbusters.org] into the average persons head wether they like it or not.
    Adbusters [adbusters.org] argues that our mental environment is becoming polluted. "information pollution" has been a focus of their "mental environmentalism [adbusters.org]" since '89.
  • ...what this Jacob Nielsen hype is all about. Seriously.
    I've tried to figure, I've scimmed one of his books and some of his ideas are way into bullshitting territory while others arent't complete bogus. But to constantly parade this person as the incarnation of the web design god appears just silly to me.
    It even emphasises what I am inclined to think: That this guy is nothing but an excuse for wannabees to go and make believe they know what webdesign is all about and that's mostly what makes up his 'fame'.

  • Quality vs Quantity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by B5_geek ( 638928 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:10PM (#7824551)

    I think our biggest problem isn't the amount of SP*M (hehe it is a 4 letter word you know) we get, or the unrelenting advertising that we get bombarded with. I think 90% of our discontent arises from not being able to weed out the content that we do want.

    I would give my left kidney if I could do a google search for an item and exclude all places that try to sell me the widget.

    Google search: widget -sale

    then I would gladly wade through the 5,000 sites that had INFORMATION on the widget.

  • Good tools help you deal with information, bad tools don't. Your email system should be able to classify email - throwing probable spam in one folder, dividing mailing lists into their own folders, server alerts into another folder, etc. If the email is important enough, it should have the ability to flag you in some manner.

    Your IM software should be able to stay quiet in the background unless you want to be interrupted. Again, like your mail handling system, it should be able to classify messages a

  • Old Problems, New World (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thenomain ( 537937 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @08:18PM (#7824568) Homepage
    "Information Polution" isn't a new thing, we're just mainstreaming an old problem. I certainly don't want to put up with billboards, telemarketers, sidewalk evangelists or any of the advertising that comes up in my mailbox every day. I'm sure people used to complain at length about the illegitimacy of newspapers or magazines. (Okay, so they still do.)

    Nowadays we don't have just a few dozen channels for information at any given time, but literally thousands, possibly more, arranged and biased exactly the way you want it. If Mr. Nielson can't handle the two he's most concerned about -- and he's more concerned about workflow than personal use -- there are existing options. Email not fast enough? Pick up the phone. IM causing worker inattention? Block it.

    Small "Internet Control Panels" exist, in limited-information capacities. I have no idea how many "e-bay tracker" applications there are out there, but my guess of "a lot" would probably be an understatement. And the message-filtering abilities of many modern e-mail clients means you could easily sort everything into the locale you want. (I'm not talking spam-filtering, but scripts to filter mail from a general pool into folders.)

    E-mail is hardly dead, or sick, or dying. It's abused, and like many things that are abused people will either abandon it or find a way to change it into usefulness. Both are proper social reactions. People use and adapt to the most useful channels of communication.

    Mr. Nielson appears to be so far behind the issue that he probably thinks he's ahead.
  • Can we just ban this man from ever getting posted on slashdot again? This has to be the most convoluted piece of drivile that I have seen linked from the front page of slashdot in a long time, it is so bad that I don't even know where to start to attack it.
    • Email is not IM
    • We can all ignore the phone, how is IM any different
    • If closing a door can benift programmer productivity (as suggested in the article) then turning off IM and email can do the same
    • If user cant filter mail/block unwanted IM's how is ano
  • I have found myself on the wrong end of information pollution as described in this article, I went out of my way to do exactly what this fella describes.

    My desktop has no icons, My start bar has 4 icons based on priority and then by catagory (1 icon is for freq used programs the others for 3 main catagories of programs) I keep my start menu in pretty good shape, and I use a program called samurize to keep all my data summerized and unobtrusively check e-mail and tell me when my box has mail.

    yes it helps,

  • Isn't Jakob Nielson mixed up with Macromedia [macromedia.com]?
    What he's describing sounds a lot like their vision for Central [macromedia.com]

    Coincidence?

  • The obnoxious part of this idea, to me, is that it seems to ignore the problem of creating a program, or control panel, that would be able to determine what is of interest to a particular person at a particular time and what is not. This problem is unlikely to be be solved by smart filters and summarizing programs anytime soon, because what is interesting to a person is very much dependent on that person's state of mind at the moment. What may be interesting and diverting news while you're sipping your mo

  • Communication Pollution (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media to describe unwanted phone calls, faxes, emails, etc.

    That's not "information pollution," at best that's "communication pollution".

    "Information pollution" is a glut of information, so much so that it is difficult to locate, understand, and/or disseminate information that is correct and relevant.

    An example of information pollution is an Ask Slashdot requesting comparisons of the Linux and *BSD VM subsystems answered by

  • Mr Nielsen... (Score:3, Funny)

    by hysterion ( 231229 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:14PM (#7824885) Homepage

    Your article about unwanted X is unwanted.

    Spam filtering, popup killing, troll killfiling, instant message yanking...

    we are overloaded by information about information overload.

    Please go away.

    Thank you.

  • is that he thinks there's some magical universal solution that will work for every person. It's not true.

    I remember reading Clay Shirky's open letter to him and they were debating the same sort of thing over web standards compliance. Clay Shirky was taking the position that diversity and experimentation in user interface design ultimately creates a better system. I tend to agree with that.

    Anyway, back to the topic. While I agree IM is not the best solution to everything, it works for me quite well.

    I

  • Information pollution may be a new buzzphrase (Score:3, Informative)

    by wiresquire ( 457486 ) on Sunday December 28, 2003 @09:52PM (#7825109) Journal
    but is not exactly a new conycept. It's been around in the knowledge management world for many years.Eg, here's [kmnews.com] a link that mentions it from 1998, but I'm sure that there were a number of research papers that refer to this from earlier.
  • ICQ and AIM the top two messagers both allow you to appear offline, and still be able to initiate messages. I have used this functionality for many years during work hours, or while I don't want to be bugged by a quick "UH-OH" or Aim chime and a 5-10 minute conversation.
  • I don't have a gatekeeper- because I don't have that kind of 'gate'. No IM here. I won't deal with it, and in fact I have my phone ringer off as well.
    What I do find is that I need help keeping track of the information I do want. I once wrote a program named 'Staccato' to do that: it ran on boot and reminded me what was up that day.
    I went to OSX and was in the puzzling situation of trying to dig through loads of information to find the same thing, as freeware, but in the end I did something totally different
  • I use an ancient BSD program called sysline for monitoring my email. When email arrives, I see the sender's name, the subject, and as much of the text as fits in a one-line window. And if I choose not to read the mail a single asterisk appears at the right side of the window until I do.

    I am able to triage incoming mail in approximately 2 seconds. If the message is short like "call home" or "meeting in 5 minutes" I can absorb it without opening my mail client. If it is longer I can almost always determ

  • Less than it appears at first glance... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cody Hatch ( 136430 ) <cody@@@chaos...net...nz> on Monday December 29, 2003 @01:56AM (#7826110) Homepage
    ...but still interesting.

    If (and this is a really big if) it was well done, I might be interested in a program that sat between me and usenet, irc, IM, email (and whatever other mediums comes along), and filtered out the worst, brought the urgent stuff to my attention, and just stored the rest.

    My initial negative reaction to his article was because for the technically savvy user, email (his major focus) is (or can be) like he wants. A bit of fiddling with procmail, install a bayesian filter, a bit of training, and email isn't really a problem.

    That still leaves two fairly important problems which do need adressing - perhaps even by his "control panel". First, the tools need to get easier for the non-tech-savvy to use (although that's a much lesser problem than it was, given the integration of bayesian filtering in current versions of Mozilla). Second, the tools need to be expanded and integrated. My usenet client supports filtering using a static ruleset - but in its own "special" format. My email client uses bayesian filtering - but my IM client doesn't do any at all!

    What would be nice is a single place where you write rules and/or feed stuff into bayesian filters for ALL your incoming communications. That'd be the tech-savvy version of Nielsen's "control panel", should be useful, and might not even be that hard to implement.

    For a start, how hard would it be to write an IM to email gateway? That is, an IM client that accepts incoming IM messages, converts them into emails and feeds them into your MDA (procmail, say) where you could run it through whatever filters you wanted? Google turns up this project [aland.us], but it looks to be nothing more than a rough outline of an initial design doc so far.

    Still, if you took the concept and extended it, your MDA and MUA would become your CDA (communications delivery agent) and CUA (communications user agent) - methods for filtering, managing, and displaying all sorts of communications, not just email. If filters can keep pace with the spam, then that should solve the problen...
  • She's got cigarette on each arm
    She's got the lilly-white cavity crazes
    She's go a carborator tied to the moon
    Pink eyes looking to the food of the ages

    She's alone in the new pollution
    She's alone in the new pollution

    she's got a hand on a wheel of pain
    She can talk to the mangling strangers
    She can sleep in a fiery bog
    Throwing troubles to the dying embers

    She's alone in the new pollution
    She's alone in the new pollution

    She's alone in the new pollution
    She's alone in the new pollution

    She's got a paradise caoflau
  • How about this GNOME project that relates all your messaging (and other) info into a consolidated dashboard [nat.org]? A better metaphor than a desktop, especially for mobile devices like "phones".

  • Pollution (Score:3, Funny)

    by ProfKyne ( 149971 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @06:22AM (#7826718)

    It's 6:18 in the morning so I'm a little groggy, but I honestly thought the headline read

    "Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media to describe unwanted phone calls, faxes, emails, Jakob Nielsen, etc.

    Also, this guy has a another funny point [maniacalrage.net] about Jakob Nielsen's press photos.

  • Some people are "voer wired", that is hooked to cellphones, beepers, internet, IM all the time. You dont need all that. You learn to choose what is important and what to discard.
  • I noticed a new form of information pollution this xmas. Several of my relatives were toting around laptops on which they had loaded thousands of digital slides and hours of digital videos of there summer vacations, pet antics, and other thrilling subjects. I realize the ubergeeks have had this capability for some years, but now it has perculated to the unwashed masses.

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