Until now, Prismatic has based its filtering and news recommendations primarily on a user’s activity on whatever social networks they wish to use to connect when they sign up: namely Twitter, Facebook or both. The service mined all of that behavior, including retweets and likes, and fed the data into its recommendation algorithm to produce a stream of content targeted around interests — and users have been able to “follow” topics and sources such as a newspaper or blog. But Cross said something has been missing, and the last piece of the puzzle arrived Tuesday, with the ability to follow specific users. That following data will make it even easier to target content that is relevant, he said:

With most services it’s usually a pain in the ass to do this kind of stuff — there’s either lots of noise, or you have to spend all this time configuring it in order to get it to work right. We’ve got it working pretty well, but the addition of people allows us to inject even more serendipity and a sort of editorial voice into your stream.

Cross said that the addition of people-following will provide even more signals the Prismatic algorithm can use to recommend content, and the goal is to provide as much serendipity as possible — that is, to show users content they may not have explicitly said they are interested in, but that fits their profile or interest graph. “People following gives us another dimension to connect across different interest areas,” he said. “It’s like the internet you’re not seeing on Facebook or other social networks.” Twitter is also clearly focused on the value of its follower graph: that’s what it recently told Tumblr and Instagram they could no longer access.

Prismatic connects to Twitter, but no longer relies on it

Prismatic used to base most of its algorithm on data from Twitter and other social networks, but as the service has grown it has built up its own database around what users choose to share with each other through Prismatic, and that has meant less reliance on Twitter. Cross — a data scientist who used to run a hedge fund based on semantic learning algorithms before he started the company — said that the percentage of users who share content on Prismatic is much higher than it is for Twitter, because “our relevance level is way beyond anything else that’s out there right now.”

Cross said that Prismatic has also been moving away from a reliance on Twitter data over the past six months because it became obvious that the larger network was starting to clamp down on what external services could do with its content, and he realized that posed a potential risk. “It’s just a business risk that you have to look at objectively,” the Prismatic founder said. “We look at it as an awesome partnership, where we get data and we share back to the network, but we aren’t relying on them.” Prismatic is also working with Facebook to share more content through that network as well. Added Cross:

“If people want to play social-network war games, that’s fine — we’ll connect with whoever wants to connect with us, and we’ll be committed to all possible protocols you might want to use to distribute your stuff. We’re just going to assume that differentiation wins, and if we can’t build something that’s different enough from what Twitter or Flipboard or whoever is building, then that’s our own fault.”

Everyone is trying to solve the relevance problem, the Prismatic founder said, in part because “whoever gets this right is going to have a huge business, because there are some obvious revenue models” associated with being able to recommend relevant content in something approaching real time — hence the profusion of filters and aggregators such as Zite and News360 and even Flipboard, and Twitter’s desire to do the same. But social networks like Twitter and Facebook, he says, started with social connections and have been trying to add relevance filtering, while Prismatic has done the opposite.

“All we want is to be a matchmaker for people and content — like a giant relevance engine,” he said. “For us, it’s always been about relevance, and the social aspect is just another part of that.” Others may see the addition of following features as Prismatic getting into the ring with App.net and Twitter in some kind of social-network fight to the death, says Cross, but the startup has its sights on a much bigger prize. “We don’t want to just build some kind of copy-cat social network or some new social ghost town,” he said. “We want to completely reinvent the way media works.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih

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As the BBC reported last week, the U.K. government is circulating a discussion paper which looks at a range of censorship options, including full, mandatory adult content blocks for everyone. But the preferred option appears to be a system that is one step down from a total ban. The paper proposes a service that — by law — automatically puts a content filter into place for new internet subscribers, but gives them the option to lift the block later.

The latest system, called “active choice-plus”, is aimed at reaching a compromise.

It would automatically block adult content, but would set users a question, along the lines of whether they want to change this to gain access to sites promoting pornography, violence and other adult-only themes.
This is partly based on “Nudge” theory, a US concept which states that persuasion, rather than enforcement, can be an effective way of changing behaviour. Downing Street has set up a unit to explore such ideas.

The consultation had already been trailed earlier this year, but even so it has given some civil liberties advocates a reason to get their placards out to protest.

“Giving parents tools is great, but ‘Nanny State’ filtering using government approved technologies is bound to fail the people it is designed to protect,” said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group. “This is a Government looking for headline grabbing solutions to complex solutions. They need to think again.”

It’s worth remembering that nobody here is suggesting that children should be forced to stare at hardcore adult videos online for hours on end. This isn’t some mirror of A Clockwork Orange. But still, the pro-censorship campaign has driven on with its family values message, circulating a petition in favor of mandatory blocks with that now has 100,000 signatures.

Forget about the rhetoric or the controversy or the guiding philosophy, though. There is a much more simple — and much more real — problem facing the U.K.’s proposals to make porn filters opt-out.

The porn filters they’re talking about are absolutely terrible at doing the job they’re being asked to.

Here’s how it works

Given that any filters which are put in place will need to be built and operated by ISPs, I contacted Britain’s four biggest internet providers to ask them about the filtering services they have in place already. And the reality is that their methods are all very similar — and widely criticized.

BT, which has more than 6 million subscribers in Britain, told me that it uses already uses “active choice”, meaning it presents new users with an unavoidable choice over whether to apply parental controls or not. And if people do opt for controls, they’re subject to a software-based system developed by McAfee that runs alongside another ISP-level filtering system, Cleanfeed.

“It filters out 35 categories of content, including porn, adult, suicide, anorexia etc,” said a spokesman. “The blacklist, as such, is developed by McAfee.”

Sky also operates a McAfee-based system, while Virgin Media uses one developed by Trend Micro.

TalkTalk, meanwhile, uses a network-level filtering system called Homesafe, which was launched a little over a year ago. It, too, works on a categorization basis. You can ask it to filter out all sorts of things, based on a range of broad subjects: websites about drugs and alcohol, gambling, games, pornography and more.

The categorization and filtering is based on technology from Huawei Symantec, the joint venture between the Chinese electronics company and the American security company.

But the problem with these services — and TalkTalk’s in particular — is that they are full of holes.

Basic flaws

Last December The Daily Telegraph reported how Homesafe failed to block access to Pornhub, the world’s third-largest pornography provider.

And things haven’t improved: an investigation by PC Pro last week found “basic flaws” that meant it was still possible to access a wide range of pornographic images through nothing more complicated than a simple Google search. And other filters were equally ropey.

TalkTalk’s filters are also hugely inconsistent in what they choose to blacklist. Social network controls bar access to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not to Google+, StumbleUpon or reddit – including “subreddits” dedicated to sexual content. Likewise, photography site Flickr was banned, but not the “nude” section of fellow photography site 500px.

The reality is not just that TalkTalk’s provisions are weak. It’s that category filters rarely work. They’re either too broadly applied, or not broadly applied enough. They’re arbitrary. They’re easily circumvented. And they’re unable to keep up with change.

And it’s not just journalists fishing for gotchas, either. On an anecdotal basis, the same is true.

@bobbiejohnson Have tried TalkTalk’s and it is underwhelming. Wrongly blocks sites as porn + poor at responding to reports of mistakes

— Mark Pack (@markpack) June 30, 2012

As we discovered when we looked into the content filters used by Britain’s mobile operators, these categorizations are often haphazard and extremely broadly applied. It’s the kind of patchwork approach that ends up with GigaOM blocked (because all blogs get blocked as a matter of course) and yet leaves the door open to all kinds of unpleasant content. It’s a lottery. It’s Swiss cheese.

So even if you think the mandatory filters are a good idea, the question has to be whether these filters are worthwhile. And if they are not, what is it exactly that you are advocating? An idea? An ambition? A hope that we can achieve better living through technology?

Or are you just advocating vaporware that settles the mind without ever really fixing the problem?

Nobody wants children to be subjected to inappropriate content, but a false sense of security is no security at all.

Illusionist photograph copyright Shutterstock/Olly

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According to a report this week from Open Rights Group and the London School of Economics, many local mobile operators are using aggressive — but haphazard — child protection filters by default, leaving adult customers unable to see perfectly ordinary websites instead of preventing kids from accessing adult material.

As the report says (PDF):

“There are serious consequences to badly implemented, default child protection blocking systems. They include restrictions on markets, censorship, a failure to address young people’s diverse needs and a false sense of security for parents.”

The document outlines more than 60 reported cases where websites have been erroneously flagged as containing adult content — and these are just the small number of cases reported to the Open Rights Group’s blocked.org.uk complaint service.

This really isn’t just an oddity. I regularly run into blocks when browsing news or data online on my phone, which is on a business tariff with Vodafone — surely a product most kids wouldn’t be using.

And in fact, just yesterday we received a message saying that the adult filter for France Telecom-owned Orange was blocking GigaOM.

Now, I know we’re a site for grown-ups, but that’s just silly.

If your operator is deciding on your behalf that what we write is off limits — including now, of course, the fact that we’re telling you that these blocks are faulty — then there’s really no reason to suspect it couldn’t happen to anybody, at any time.

Spreading censorship

And it’s not just in Britain, either. This sort of approach is happening all over Europe, in a variety of ways.

In a piece for Foreign Policy, the author and activist Rebecca Mackinnon outlines some of the incursions being made — and points out that, crucially, none of this is happening because of regulatory pressure.

“This type of problem is serious enough, in enough countries, to have made its way to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Last year, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, delivered an official report to the council that not only condemned the censorship and surveillance practices of authoritarian countries, but also warned of dangerous trends in the democratic world that threaten citizen rights to free expression in the Internet age.

“One of his major concerns is ‘over-broad private censorship, often without transparency and the due process of the law’. He singled out two examples of how governments are, ironically, using law to delegate enforcement responsibilities and functions to the private sector: Britain’s Digital Economy Act, which could potentially disconnect Internet users suspected of illegal downloading, and France’s similar ‘three strikes’ law.

The result of all this?

In the name of protecting us, mobile operators are now becoming the de facto censors of the web, whether we’ve asked them to or not.

Photograph copyright Shutterstock/Pixel 4 images

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What did the printed newspaper provide in its heyday as the information-delivery system of choice? A collection of news and other interesting content, selected by knowledgeable editors from a wide range of sources, presented in an easy-to-scan format. Now, the supply of information we have available to us is almost never-ending — but we still need an easy and efficient way to filter it, and find what is interesting and relevant, and share it with others. The field is filled with contenders who believe they can solve that problem, including News.me and Flipboard and Zite, and one of the newest is a San Francisco-based startup called Prismatic.

What became Prismatic started over a year ago as a two-man venture called Woven, which co-founder Bradford Cross talked about at the time as a way to harness the power of social media and what Om has called the “democratization of distribution” to come up with a better way of consuming information online — one that would blend the best aspects of tools like Twitter with the kind of automated process that many people used to rely on RSS readers for. Ideally, he said, it would fulfill the same kind of function that a newspaper used to, but with a much broader range of sources.

Like a newspaper, but in real time and social

One of the interesting things about Prismatic is that Cross doesn’t have a background in media — his specialty is data analysis and machine learning. Before he started Prismatic, he was the head of research at Flightcaster, a Y Combinator-funded startup that used multiple data sources to estimate real-time flight information. After it was acquired, Cross decided that he wanted to work on a much larger problem, and the nature of information consumption seemed like it fit the bill. As he described it:

It’s not just about personalization… it’s about how media is consumed now. In the old days, you could just go to the New York Times and get all your news, or whatever. But that’s not the case any more, and it will likely never be the case again. The news is all distributed now, to a thousand different places.

What Prismatic does is analyze as much as it can about you when you connect to it with your Twitter account (Cross says that support for Facebook and other networks will be coming, as will a mobile app — for now it is desktop only) and then start recommending things to you based on what it thinks your interests are, using semantic-filtering algorithms and so on. You can click an X to hide an article, or you can click a plus sign, which is both a vote for that content and a way of saving it to an internal bookmark list (support for Instapaper and other methods is also in the works, Cross says). You can also tweet directly from a post, or retweet someone who has posted it.

What the company offers isn’t all that different from what News.me or Zite or several other services are trying to do: News.me, a Betaworks venture, started with an iPad app that allowed you to eavesdrop on the streams of certain Twitter users and now has a mobile client it is trying to turn into an “Instagram for news.” Zite, a Canadian startup that was acquired by CNN last year, uses Twitter feeds and RSS feeds to recommend articles and also allows you to vote whether you like them or not. And even Twitter is trying to build some strength in the “curation” game, by buying Summify and reworking its Discover tab to provide more suggested topics, and more context.

Understanding people’s interests through data

So what makes Prismatic special? Cross says it is the data analysis and algorithms and other processes that it is able to apply to that massive stream of content that flows through a user’s social graph — and hence, the quality of the suggestions that it can make about topics or stories of interest. In many ways, this is the holy grail of any curation-based service: if it comes up with too many “false positives” over a certain period, users will simply abandon it. And ideally it will also have enough of a serendipity factor that it exposes users to things they weren’t already looking for (something newspapers do well).

In my use of Prismatic — and comparisons with News.me, Zite, Flipboard, News360, Pulse and a half dozen other similar services — I’ve found the selections I get are consistently relevant. There is the occasional hit and miss, but it is as good as or better than Zite and orders of magnitude better than even the revamped Discover tab on Twitter. Cross says that while the user base is still small, he is seeing a high level of engagement:

We want to be like the daily newspaper for our generation, and so we wanted to see people visiting multiple times a day and hopefully about six days a week at least — and we are definitely seeing that, which really shows our concept is working.

According to Cross, many users are saying Prismatic is replacing sites they used to go to such as Google News or Y Combinator’s Hacker News. For me, it — along with Twitter itself — has become a replacement for my RSS reader, which I wasn’t using much anyway. I have built lists within Twitter around different topic areas, but in many ways Prismatic makes it a lot easier to find relevant content (especially since Twitter seems to be making it harder to manage lists). It’s like what Google News might be, if Google actually applied any of its brainpower to rethinking how content works now.

As for who will win this race, Cross says there is so much upheaval occurring in the media and content businesses that it’s almost impossible to say. “It’s easy to look at what we’re doing and what Flipboard or Twitter or Facebook is doing and say they’re all doing the same thing,” he says. “But I think the media industry in a few years is going to be completely transformed — all of these things will look very different. So we’re just focusing on how we can help people discover the things they are interested in.”

Prismatic raised $1.5 million in venture financing last year, and Cross says the service is experimenting with a number of different monetization options, including affiliate links to Amazon products such as books that are related to the content being shown. The company is also interested in partnering with traditional media outlets, he said.

We’ll be talking with leaders in tech, media and investing about how to make the most of today’s opportunities, blurred lines and all, at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads, May 23, at The TimesCenter in New York. Join us.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Shironeko Euro

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As the tide of information coming from the web and through social networks like Twitter and Facebook continues to increase by the day, a range of services have sprung up that try to help us filter that tide — or at least surf it more easily. Tools like Storify allow individuals to hand-curate information, while others such as Zite use algorithms to suggest topics worth following. One of the newest services in this area is called Bottlenose, which just launched as an invitation-only beta, and it’s interesting in part because co-founder Nova Spivack is a long-time web entrepreneur. But while it has some interesting filtering features, I’m not sure Bottlenose is going to appeal to the average digital-information junkie — at least, not in its current form.

Bottlenose got some buzz earlier this year when there was a report that Twitter was interested in acquiring the company, although that has never been confirmed by anyone at Twitter — and Spivack has said only that he and his co-founder Dominiek ter Heide had discussions with the real-time information network, but that it made more sense for the company to “be neutral.” Bottlenose currently connects to and pulls information from your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and Spivack has said that the service also plans to add support for Yammer and other social-media streams in the future.

It’s never been easier to share — or harder to filter

The company says that it wants to provide a “social dashboard” to help users filter out the noise from their streams and find the things that are relevant or important. Spivack, who was a co-founder of EarthWeb (one of the original web hosting companies) as well as an early attempt at an algorithm-driven social network called Twine, has written about what he calls the “sharepocalypse” — that is, the explosion of activity that comes through social networks. As the Bottlenose CEO put it:

It’s never been easier to share — People are sharing more kinds of information, more often, with more people, than ever before. And it’s requiring less thought too — because the messages themselves are so short. This is resulting in a collective overshare of unimagined proportions.

Bottlenose tries to filter all of this information in a number of ways, but one of the most interesting is through the use of algorithm-driven “assistants” — in effect, widgets that you can activate and add to your dashboard. These show you messages and other content from people that the service thinks you would be interested in, and Spivack says they will learn from your activity on those networks. So you can choose to see news from those who are most influential on Twitter (as ranked by the influence engine at Klout, a company that Spivack is also an investor in) and you can see posts that Bottlenose thinks you might want to share — which are presumably based on your prior retweeting or sharing activity.

We all need better filters, not just “power users”

The other interesting element to Bottlenose is what the service calls its “sonar” view: this is a graphic representation that can show either the topics that are being discussed in your social sphere or the individuals who are closest to you. It’s a little like a similar graphic feature in Google+ (which Bottlenose doesn’t support yet) called Ripples, which shows the connections from your social network who shared or commented on a specific post. My only issue with this kind of feature is that while they look pretty and can be fun to play around with, I’m not convinced that they have a huge amount of utility for the average user — most of whom I suspect will never actually use them.

That’s part of my criticism of Bottlenose as a whole, in fact. It’s a little too complicated for the average social-network user, with its various features and settings (and a user interface that could use some work, in my view). The company says that it is aiming itself at “power users” such as those who run social-media accounts and campaigns for companies and brands — which puts it in the same market as other tools such as Tweetdeck, HootSuite and Seesmic (which also shows you a user’s Klout score next to their tweets). But it’s not clear to me that Bottlenose has a compelling advantage.

When I read some of the early reports about the service, I was hoping that Bottlenose would provide the kind of lightweight filtering that would help anyone — not just power users and social-media strategists — sort through the streams of activity from their social graphs. I agree with Spivack that this seems like a growing problem that requires solving, and could be a big market opportunity, but I’m not convinced Bottlenose has solved it — not yet, anyway. If you want to try the service out, the first 1,000 readers of this post can get access to the beta by using the code “GigaOm.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Ed Kohler

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Updated: If there’s one thing that defines Marshall Kirkpatrick’s career as a technology blogger, both at ReadWriteWeb and elsewhere, it is his love of — and fascination with — data and all the various ways of collecting and sifting it for clues about interesting information and potential stories. Now, Kirkpatrick has announced that he is leaving his post as lead writer and co-editor of ReadWriteWeb to start a company based on those principles: known as Plexus Engine, the long-time blogger says that it will help companies filter the massive amounts of data that flow through the web every day by using data-mining and aggregation tools that Marshall developed while working as a web journalist.

When I asked the ReadWriteWeb blogger why he chose now to leave his job and start a company (in the interests of full disclosure, I consider Marshall a friend) he said:

There’s so much information and so many voices and so much opportunity online now that I think people miss because they don’t have the tools yet to suit the opportunity. The rise of semi-structured data + automation + strategy + design = new capabilities in listening and communication. I think that’s awesome and I want to productize it.

When I asked how long he had been thinking of starting a data-focused company, Marshall said he has been working on the ideas behind Plexus Engine for years, but the idea for a startup came about a year and a half ago when he was working on a consulting project for a large company (in addition to being a writer and editor at ReadWriteWeb, Kirkpatrick also runs a personal consulting business). Although he hasn’t provided a lot of details about the new company or what kind of services it will provide — or the funding model — he described it in his post as:

An app and data platform that discovers emerging topical information. It’s a learning-curve busting, “first mover’s advantage” as a service, technology for information workers who want to win. It’s about helping users “skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.”

Kirkpatrick is the fourth high-profile blogger to leave his position for a startup venture in the past year: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington caused a wave of controversy earlier this year when he created a venture-capital fund while still the editor of the tech blog (which was acquired by AOL last year) and he later left that position and was joined by TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler. Another writer for the blog, Paul Carr, is working on a digital-magazine startup, and former VentureBeat writer and editor Owen Thomas left his position there earlier this year to work for an online-media startup called The Daily Dot. (Update: Business Insider blogger Dan Frommer also left earlier this year to start his own tech-focused blog called SplatF)

Whatever the ultimate fate of Marshall’s startup is (and he noted that he would continue to blog occasionally at ReadWriteWeb) there’s no question that both individuals and companies need help sifting through the oceans of social data and other information that streams by every day, as we’ve described at GigaOM a number of times. Tools like Storify and Storyful and others have made it somewhat easier to filter that firehose, but we could always use more help in that department, and so we wish Marshall well in his new venture.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Josh Hallett

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As the avalanche of information coming through social networks and real-time tools like Twitter continues to grow, the need for filters to make sense of that tsunami of data also increases, and it seems as though everyone has a different way of trying to solve that problem. Facebook threw its hat into the ring this week with what it says is an improved “newspaper-style” news feed that highlights important content, while Digg has just launched “newsrooms” aimed at doing the same thing, and online influence-ranking service Klout is rolling out topic pages based on what’s being shared by those with influence. But will any of these be able to solve the filtering problem, or will they just add another source of noise?

Facebook says that its changes (which my colleague Colleen covered for GigaOM) are designed to create “your own personal newspaper” when you log in to the social network, by showing you what the site believes are the most important items at the top of your news feed. In effect, this merges what Facebook used to call “top news” — which you previously had to select from a drop-down menu — with your regular news stream. And Facebook is also going to use its algorithms to show you different items based on when you last logged in to the site, so that what you see is always “new.”

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. [Now] News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top.

Facebook wants to be your newspaper

The repeated use of the term “newspaper” makes it obvious that Facebook wants this new feature to be about more than just seeing updates from your friend’s birthday party — and it could become especially interesting when combined with another new Facebook feature: the launch of the “Subscribe” service, which allows users to follow and get updates from people or sources they are not friends with, in much the same way that Twitter does. Facebook has been promoting that feature as a way to stay connected to what celebrities and journalists are doing, and it seems likely that many of those items could wind up on the top of your “personal newspaper” thanks to the news feed changes.

Digg, meanwhile, also seems to be betting that it can help sort the news for people via what it is calling topic-based “newsrooms” — and that launching this kind of option might help restore some of the site’s faded glory, which took a beating after a disastrous relaunch in 2010 that caused many users to flee. One of the elements of that redesign was a focus on news from mainstream sources such as traditional media outlets, which seemed to irritate many long-time Digg fans. The “newsroom” launch takes a different tack: instead of allowing media outlets to plug their RSS feeds directly into Digg, the service is creating pages that will feature content that has been shared by highly-ranked users.

This is similar to what Klout is trying to do with its topic pages, which the site says are currently in limited beta, but will be rolled out to all users soon. While Digg is basing its “newroom” content on what gets shared by users who are ranked highly by other members of Digg, the topic pages at Klout are created from content shared by those who the service’s algorithms have determined have a lot of influence about a certain topic — based on their activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social networks (including Google+, which the service just recently started including in its rankings).

Relevance is a tricky problem to solve

For me, both the Digg and Klout approaches suffer from the same kind of problem that many other filtering services do — including iPad apps such as News.me and Zite, or web-based services such as Summify: either they are filled with the same content I’ve have already seen in other places, or the links simply aren’t relevant. Klout’s topic pages in particular contain all kinds of things that are barely even related to the topic, although that could be because they are still tweaking their algorithms. And recommendation systems are one of those things that can seem almost useless even when they are getting a lot of things right, because the parts that are wrong are so glaringly obvious.

As for Facebook’s attempt to create a “personalized newspaper,” the biggest issue for Facebook is that it is still used primarily as a social network for connecting with friends and family, and so doesn’t function as a real-time news and information network in the same way that Twitter does — or rather, it is a news and information network, but that news is still primarily personal. There’s a place for that, obviously, but it doesn’t really help filter the “news” in a broader sense. The launch of a subscription feature is clearly an attempt to move Facebook in that direction, but so far — as I’ve argued before — Twitter still seems to be winning that particular game.

It’s good that plenty of services are trying to solve the news-filtering problem, and different users may choose different solutions: for some, Twitter will be the best because it is brief, while others might prefer Google+ or the summaries that they get once a day from services like Summify or an app like AOL’s Editions. So far, no one seems to have come up with the one-size-fits-all solution to this modern dilemma.

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Bible informed students earlier this week that a temporary Netflix block would go into effect Monday night, saying that the video service is “the largest single consumer of our Internet capacity.” School technicians tried to block Netflix twice that night, but instead shut off net access entirely. They finally gave up and instead instituted a 5Mbps download limit per residence hall user. It’s unclear whether this will help much, since most Netflix streams are 3800kbps or less.

Ohio U’s Technology Department said on its website Tuesday that streaming media now accounts for 60 percent of all traffic on its campus network. Netflix alone is responsible for 28 percent. The school received a 10 percent bandwidth increase in February, but is still regularly maxing out on available bandwidth. The post was illustrated with the following bandwidth graph:

The incident brings back memories of a time when file sharing services like Napster and later BitTorrent were saturating campus networks. Many schools — including Ohio University — instituted bans on all P2P protocols at the time, only to later switch to models that target specific acts of infringement. However, it looks like P2P only plays a minor role in network congestion these days. At Ohio University, only six percent of all bandwidth is consumed by BitTorrent.

No TV image courtesy of Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

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We all want to keep up with the latest news and trends in our industry along with learning more about other areas of interest, like our hobbies. With only so many hours in the day, people often struggle with finding the information they need to be successful while not spending too much time sorting through massive quantities of data. Here are a few tips to help you whittle the information down from a fire hose to a trickle of only the most relevant content.

RSS Readers

If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you should find one, since this is the best way to get only the information that you want pushed to you while being able to easily see which posts you have read and which you have not. Google Reader and Netvibes are good places to start. For the rest of you who already use RSS, there are many ways to make it more effective.

Firstly, change the way you think about RSS; it’s more like a newspaper than email. If you fall behind on the daily newspaper, you aren’t going to keep trying to catch up and read papers that are months old. RSS is just like a newspaper, so don’t worry if you don’t get to everything, and don’t feel like you need to catch up. Right now, I have thousands of unread items in Google Reader, but I am OK with it. If that big number of unread items bothers you, simply take advantage of the “mark all as read” feature once a week if it makes you feel better or, better yet, use an RSS readers that lets you hide the number of unread items.

Secondly, do some pruning and get rid of the dead wood. Spend a couple of hours looking at which feeds give you the most value and get rid of the rest. If you are feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, you are probably oversubscribed. Some RSS readers even have tools to help you find feeds that you rarely read or are rarely updated.

Third, spend as little time as possible in your RSS reader by prioritizing your feeds. I use folders in Google Reader to group my feeds, and I put the most critical feeds right at the top. I make sure that I read through those high priority feeds first to spend more time on what I need to know while hopefully having some time left over to read a little extra. I also encourage you to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your RSS reader, since this can shorten your RSS reading time.

News Aggregation

While RSS readers are great for the things you know you want to read, they are not the best way to find new sources of information or news from unexpected sources; this is where news aggregators really excel. My favorite aggregator is Twitter Tim.es, since it takes the links from the people that I follow on Twitter and displays them in newspaper-like format, with the links that have been posted by more of my friends appearing as headlines on my Twitter Tim.es page. I also use Techmeme to find the topics that people are discussing online. Depending on your interests, you might be able to find other news aggregation sources focused on your areas of expertise.

Filtering

Filtering RSS feeds takes a little work, but it is worth it in the long run if it helps you find only the information on the topics that you want to see. While there are many filtering tools, my tool of choice is Yahoo Pipes. I use Yahoo Pipes to find out when people are talking about me or the topics that I am most interested in. For example, I have Pipes that comb through industry analyst feeds looking for a few specific keywords, which allows me to find the reports from analysts on those topics while ignoring the rest.

The best thing you can do to avoid overload is to stay focused on the most important information while not worrying about what you might be missing. If you can become more efficient at finding and consuming the right information for your needs, you can easily stay informed while minimizing the feeling of being overwhelmed. Read what you can and don’t stress about what you don’t have time to read.

What are your tips for managing content information overload?

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Photo by Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

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