Clive Thompson Stole My Phrase: Information Overlord

I can’t be 100% sure, but I think WIRED Magazine writer Clive Thompson is lurking around my blog. He’s never made a comment, but I believe its only because that would surely be used as evidence that he, in fact, reads Friday Traffic Report and steals my ideas.

Smart move Clive. Smart move.

In January 2007 I wrote what was, in my mind, a Pulitzer Prize winning piece on how to deal with the mass of information an authority site publisher must wrangle in order to keep up on their niche.

The the conclusion I included a sub head “Go From Information Overload to Information Overlord.” This is how I know that Thompson is not only a reader of the Friday Traffic Report, but that he’s been lurking here for quite some time.

In this month’s WIRED, Thompson has an article called…wait for it…”Information Overlord.” I could rest my case here in most circles and wait for the court’s decision.

But it gets even worser.

Thompson’s article is all about the problems associated with social media, multiple accounts on social sites, avalanches of emails, and general discord in managing the mass of information production on the web today. I know, I just got goosebumps too. Eerie! Its like he’s stalking me!

The saving grace for Thompson, idea stealing aside, is his mention of a neat tool called Twine. Twine is a semantic robot helper for information overlords. It can pour through all your data from emails to websites of any and all kinds and recommend things you might be interested in based on a semantic data crunching of all your, well, data.

What’s cool is that no matter how much you try to stay organized and on top of your market, there is just way too much information out there in most niches to keep up on. Plop social sites and all the websites you frequent regardless of the “category” they fall into, and you are definitely missing some cool stuff.

Twine seeks to help us Overlords by finding the nuggets we miss and presenting them to us like a loyal dog looking for a scratch behind the ear and an “atta boy!”

From Twine.com: “Powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about interests and makes recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it gets to know you and the more useful it becomes.”

Thompson cautions that Twine is “a rickety pioneer…its interface is pretty awful; if often cannot mine a badly designed Web page” (Thompson, WIRED, “Information Overlord,” 2008) but we have to allow machines time to learn. Otherwise who is going to take our kids to school for us or farm the human population for our precious electric power generation in 2025?

Twine is in Beta, invite only. When the machines are ready for you, they will allow you access.

-Jack Humphrey

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