When the #motrinmoms thing blew up recently I added the keyword as a Filtr to my Filtrbox account. After skimming the results for a few days and noticing the volume of conversations were dying down quickly wanted to see what that would look like visually. Here's a graph for the last 15 days... Net-Net: Don't piss off mommy bloggers...ever. I wasn't even tracking tweets with this account and there were 60 posts on this topic in a single day.

I was doing pretty well for awhile. The whole Inbox Zero thing was working for me, even though its mostly BS. I managed to stay on top of the inbox clutter for about 4 months. Then something happened, some increase in busy and decrease in time, and inbox zero faded into the rearview mirror like a geriatric in the slow lane. My inbox is now at 1400 messages. This works for some people but not for me...I can't help but feel I've dropped the ball on 1400 items somehow.    I keep thinking I'm going to get the time back, or that I should just wipe the whole inbox and admit defeat. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to recover and process 300 messages a week of the backlog. Most get deleted, some require responses. I have noticed a 90/10 rule in effect also - 10% of the emails require 90% of the time to deal with. The other 90% of the emails are easy to file or delete. Wish me luck...

Tools/Services mentioned at Defrag

1. Filtrbox - monitor and filter online content to help cut through the noise
2. BackType - comment aggregation, searching, notifications. Mentioned during a panel
3. Sxipper - waiting for 3.0 but should be interesting

I'm at the Defrag conference today with lots of other folks who care about "accelerating the ah-ha moment!", according to the conference. Really, this conference is all about putting meaning and context around the insane amount of information available online. What I care about, even more, is how we find the RIGHT information in a timely and painless manner and deliver that in a way that is effective. I just saw a screenshot-demo for a product called Sxipper, the current version holds your passwords but I already use 1Password for that. The new version brings a vast amount of meta-info to the browsing experience - this is being called a "flow app" and I think it has promise (think "adaptive blue" for social info). As I listen to the discussions, there is an underlying conversation around doing better filtering, separating information, dealing with information overload, and finding the value in all the info. Of course this all is very much related to Filtrbox's mission and is why I'm here.  There is much we can (and should) do at Filtrbox to deliver valuable meta-information around the content we discover. Presenting the right meta-info without just amplifying the noise problem is something we are focused on. It will be interesting to see if "flow apps" like Me.dium or Sxipper can figure out how to do this in a more streamlined manner. I don't think sidebars/sidecar browser apps are it. For me these are too distracting and make the problem worse, even though the info they provide is helpful. What is clear to me is that as smart as we humans can be, and no matter how good and intelligent we try to make the filters and the software, there is, and will be a NEVER-ENDING quest for the better, smarter filter. Although humans can be predictable, the brain is not a binary system, and predicting what we care about or don't care about at a given moment is non-trivial. When the information and its profile is contstantly changing, and the attention, interest and focus of the mind is changing - finding those patterns programattically is a "holy-grail" mission. Lets see how far we can get...