In January 2008 The ISC Internet Domain Survey reported the number of hosts on the Internet at 541,677,360. As of March 2008 Internet World Stats counted over 1.4 billion Internet users globally. As of May 2007 it was estimated that the web consisted of over 19.2 billion documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. In the 2007 article "The Fight Against Infoglut" Mary Hayes Weier states "The numbers are barely comprehensible. The amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated last year was equal to 161 billion Gbytes, according to a recent IDC report, roughly equivalent to the contents of 12 stacks of books extending from the Earth to the sun. In 2010, IDC estimates, the info flow will reach 988 billion Gbytes... this year, for the first time, the amount of digital information generated will surpass the storage capacity available."
The Web is so enormous that we can only find things by using powerful search tools like Google. But with each passing year it's becoming obvious that even Google is losing the keyword-relevance search battle. Based on the enormous number of results returned, we barely get past the first two pages of results. What value lies in the remaining pages of Google search results that we don't have the time or patience to weed through?
In the enterprise, and now in our private lives we routinely see hundreds of daily email messages. Mesmo, an email consultancy, determined that three out of every four employees spend at least half of their day sifting through email messages and a quarter spend more than four hours per day. Consider these stats and projections from the Radicati Group cited in a Wall Street Journal article of 11/27/07:
- Over the next four years the number of e-mail users worldwide will approach two billion people
- The average number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day in 2008 is estimated to be 156. By the year 2011 that number will be 228
- By the year 2009 it is estimated that over 41% of the average workday will be spent managing email.
To compound this problem it is estimated that the average percentage of spam in mail traffic amounted to 86.4% in January 2008. On New Year's Day 2008 it was estimated that spam levels reached 97.4% for that day. It's been estimated that spam in 2007 reached an astounding cost of over $197 billion in lost productivity. Despite our futile attempts to eliminate or even reduce spam, it keeps rolling forward, hammering our systems with spyware, viruses, and scams.
Web 2.0 only contributed to yet another massive explosion of information consisting of social mediaâ€"video, wikis, forums, reviews, postings, micro-blogs, livecasting, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, social network postings, etc. etc. etc. In March 2007 Technorati was tracking over 74 million blogs and social network postings. Scarier yet, estimates show that the blogosphere has been doubling every six months.
As for Social Networks last estimates put global social networking subscriber growth rates at 47% year-over-year, expected to reach saturation somewhere around the year 2012. MySpace today has over 55 million subscribers, over 100 Billion rows of data with 14 Billion comments, 20 Billion mails, 50 Million mails per day, 10 Billion friend relationships, 1.5 Billion images (8 Million images uploaded each day), and 60,000 new videos uploaded daily-- mostly contributed by a mere 1% of the subscribers. According to the 90-9-1 rule only about 1% of users in any given community actually contribute to any significant degree. Imagine what would happen if that number doubled to a whopping 2%.
The overload of cheap information threatens our ability to function in cyberspace. We're generating information far faster than our individual capacity to process it. The term infoglut doesn't give it justice... it's more like an information tsunami. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching, sorting, and filtering just to find those valuable nuggets of information. At times it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. When overwhelmed, we simply start ignoring information and search results. It's the best we can do with our current technology. While the youth are still enamored by the faddish fun-and-game world of social networking, the ever-growing technically savvy professional herd is continuously gravitating toward anything that saves time... anything that provides real, bottom-line value. Time is an individual's most valuable asset. We have very little time and once it's gone, it's gone forever. No one on their deathbed ever said, 'I wish I spent more time at work.'
Directional Syndication is a concept I conceived and began working on in 2002-- and continue to work on to this very day. Directional Syndication describes a collective networked intelligence concept that continuously delivers, high-value, relevant information in a timely fashion, to its intended individual recipient(s). A Personal Relevance Agent (PR Agent), owned and controlled by the recipient learns about the recipient through their profile as well as their behavior. It picks up on things they read, sites they visit, things they belong to, people they are connected to and people they interact with, messages they write and messages they receive, as well as ratings and their personal contributions. Directional Syndication is based on the premise "that which is not relevant, is a waste of time." Too many people, too much information, not enough time, and things change, continuously. With Directional Syndication what you end up with is in essence a massive distributed intelligent content router. With Directional Syndication, you don't find information, information finds you.
Whether it's Directional Syndication or some other new-fangled technology, the time has come for a leap in technologyâ€"a technology that knows the receiverâ€"a technology that knows what is relevant and valuable to the receiverâ€"and delivers.