“What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload.”

“It is also my daily average amount of information received, sampled over a two-week period. That’s right—that much in every category every day. I suppose that is why I was called upon to write an article about coping with information overload (IO). I am still here, I am still alive, and my brain has yet to explode, so somehow I must be finding a way to make it work. At least, that is what other people tell me.”

“There is a unique relationship between librarians and the concept of information overload. Processing information appropriately is key to the success of our profession and key to the success of each of us as professionals. People look to us to help them process information, to pick what information on which to concentrate, and to discard irrelevant information. Librarians are trained to evaluate information, and to choose the best of the best. One would think, therefore, that we would be more adept in dealing with the problem of information overload. We have the skills necessary for evaluating, organising, and collecting information in ways that allow for efficient processing and retrieval. Those skills are central to the success of many of our colleagues, librarians or not.”

“John D. Halamka describes how, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, they have replaced libraries with information commons and renamed the librarians ‘information specialists’ and the libraries themselves were renamed as the ‘Department of Knowledge Services.’ [6] The renaming itself was most certainly a superficial symptom of the reorganisation and reprioritisation in the institution’s libraries (pardon me, the Department of Knowledge Services). The key was the new emphasis on the importance of information—the focus on the content. As more and more information floods into businesses and other organisations, we information professionals, or whatever we are called, will be indispensable in helping our co-workers and users to process their data, thereby helping the institution overall.”

Sarah mentions Ten Techniques to Manage the Overload:

1. General Organisational Techniques
2. Filtering Information Received
3. RSS Overload Techniques
4. Interruptive Technology Overload Techniques
5. Phone Overload Techniques
6. Email Overload Techniques
7. Print Media Overload Techniques
8. Multimedia Overload Techniques
9. Social Network Overload Techniques
10. Time and Stress Management

For the whole article:

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/houghton-jan/

Info via LibrarianInBlack:

http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/09/being-wired-or.html

Posted by Rich

44% say they are hooked on email
7% even hide checking email from family
87% watch their spelling and punctuation when typing emails
70% are irked by misspellings
23% have declared “email bankruptcy”, deleting all of their email messages to start anew, etc.
30% have gotten a new email address
62% checked their emails from the bathroom
68% in bed in their pajamas
76% in a restaurant
48% while driving

“The average email user in Boston checks personal email at work 3.6 times per day. Meanwhile, they also check work email nearly 3 times in a given weekend.”

Here’s the link to the AOL Boston email survey:

http://o.aolcdn.com/cdn.webmail.aol.com/survey/aol/en-us/boston.htm

Here’s the national results:

“The study of 4,000 users also showed people checking their email with regularity from the following unusual and perhaps inappropriate locales:

• In bed in their pajamas: 67%
• From the bathroom: 59%
• While driving: 50%
• In a bar or club: 39%
• In a business meeting: 38%
• During happy hour: 34%
• While on a date: 25%
• From church: 15% (up from 12% last year)

Info via Mashable:

http://mashable.com/2008/07/30/email-addiction/

Posted by Rich

Be very careful about e-mails from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considering taxes. I received an e-mail claiming to be from the IRS asking for my bank account information so they can deposit a refund check. The chances of it being from the IRS are incredibly slim. The IRS itself says “The IRS does not initiate taxpayer communications through e-mail.” I don’t remember ever giving them an email address; and, had I done so, it wouldn’t be the email address to which this email was sent. The URL the email asks me to use to give my personal information does not appear to go to irs.gov. I’m suspicious and am not going to follow the link or act on the email. If you receive one, I encourage you to be suspicious, too. Be smart about e-mails like this one. I shudder when I think about how people are probably falling for it.

Per information on the IRS’ Web site, I forwarded the email to them so they can choose to investigate.

“I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists because they frequently contain useful information, but being subscribed to these lists using the email account provided by our hospital would be problematic. The volume of postings on some lists would clutter up the acount, making it more difficult to manage and making it more likely I’d miss other, more important emails from inside our organization.

So I subscribe to lists using a Gmail account. Here’s why:

* Separating list emails into a separate account allows me to treat them, as a whole, in a different manner than emails from higher-priority senders (patrons, co-workers, etc.). This lets me keep my attention focused where it needs to be.

* Because list emails are in a separate account, I also never have to annoy other list subscribers with “out-of-office” messages that get sent to whole list- because there’s never need to turn on an “out-of-office” message for this account.

* Threaded conversation: Instead of having one line per each email received, Gmail inboxes have one line for each conversation. That means that my Gmail lists inbox doesn’t get as cluttered. It also lets me efficiently manage whole conversations instead of individual emails, even if a particular email is sent to multiple lists I subscribe to. Example image below shows that all (23) emails on the topic of “abortion” being made a stopword in POPLINE are one (expandable) line item in my Gmail inbox:

# Mute function: If there’s a particular conversation(/thread) that I’m not interested in continuing to follow, I can “mute” the conversation and not need to see any further emails in that thread.

# Gmail’s search capabilities are awesome. If I want to find a MEDLIB-L email I remember was sent by Michelle Kraft about OvidSP, I can search for label:medlib-l from:Kraft OvidSP and find it really, really quickly.

# Gmail’s filters are powerful and easy to use.

* Assigning labels: You can set up your Gmail filters to automatically assign colorful labels based on information that lets you scan your email quickly. For example, you could set your account up to automatically assign colored labels based on which list the conversation is from.”

http://davidrothman.net/2008/04/09/how-to-use-gmail-to-manage-list-emails/

Posted by Rich

Thanks for the link, Jim!

Blog Spam

Jessica Baumgart
MIT Spam Conference
Friday, March 30, 2007

Why am I here?

• Been blogging since 2003

• Seen way too much blog spam
• Leads a local group for bloggers

Some Definitions

• Weblogs – software that enables the ability to quickly update a Web site.

• Blog comments – words people can attach to someone else’s blog post and weblog. Blogs frequently have comments.
• Trackback – one way a server can tell another server someone’s pointing to something on it. Many weblogs display trackbacks.

How Spammers Use Weblogs

• Comment spam

• Trackback spam
• Spam blogs (splogs)

Why Use Weblogs?

• Some search engines rank sites higher based on who links to them. If a site can trick a search engine into thinking they have lots of incoming links from a reputable server, their page rank increases.

Comment Spam

• Some people manually add comment spam to weblogs

• Lots of spam appears courtesy of scripts & other automated attacks

Comment Spam Examples

• “Hey, nice site!” posted multiple times with a URL to something completely unrelated

• “You might find my site interesting” with a URL to something unrelated
• gibberish with links
• Repetitive crazy rants

Trackback Spam

• Lots of bots and scripts and fake server pings

Trackback Spam Examples

• Some medical product sales

Spam Blogs or Splogs

• Spammers and spam bots can set up weblogs on free blog services

• Causes problems for search engines, like Feedster and Technorati

Splogs

• Search for viagra or cialis in one of the weblog search tools and see what happens

Tools

Tools to Control Spam

• Comment moderation

• Trackback moderation
• Server options
• nofollow

How Far Ahead Are Spammers?

• Many spammers seem to be ahead of the tech tools that block spam

• How do we cope with or react to that?
• How can we catch spammers?

Dream Tools to Control Spam

• Image recognition

• Server blocks
• Cans

How bad can blog spam get?

• An anecdote about changs to Harvard’s blog server

Thank You!

After giving the talk, I realized I omitted referer spam. It’s a way for spammers to sneak referers into your log showing who links to your blog to try to trick you into visiting various spam sites.

Some experts believe the amount of spam has doubled in the last year.

Surprise, surprise: I’ll be speaking about blog spam.

Back in the days of Manila, I could put a note in the sidebar listing my upcoming talks. I don’t think that’s possible in WordPress Multiuser because I can’t edit the sidebar. I don’t have that many upcoming talks, so it’s not that big of a deal.

(Seriously, the organizers are very accommodating of my schedule restraints on Friday and I’m happy to speak first.)

Addendum 3/28: Someone is now scheduled to give a ten minute presentation before mine, so I am no longer speaking first.

“Based on a large sample of touted stocks listed on the Pink Sheets quotation system, we find that stocks experience a significantly positive return on days prior to heavy touting via spam. Volume of trading responds positively and significantly to heavy touting. For a stock that is touted at some point during our sample period, the probability of it being the most actively traded stock in our sample jumps from 4% on a day when there is no touting activity to 70% on a day when there is touting activity. Returns in the days following touting are significantly negative. “

The abstract goes on to say the spammers might possibly be buying the stocks, spamming people to increase the price, then trying to sell while the price is high. The success of that behavior could mean this kind of spam will continue to be quite popular.

*holds out hands like scales*

Hhhmmm … making money on the stock market vs. spam.

Please don’t try this experiment at home based on the spam you receive.

Remember: I am not a financial adviser. The information in this blog post is not financial advice.