Tomorrow is Information Overload Awareness Day according to Basex, who are organizing a conference to call attention to a problem that, according to their research, costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in lowered productivity. While it seems strange to organize a conference to impart yet more information on Information Overload Awareness Day, they do seem to be trying to offset some of the problems…
Individual tickets for the Inaugural Event are $50 but individuals promising not to multi-task (IM, e-mail, Twitter, etc.) during the event receive a 50% discount
To help do my part to lower the amount of “information pollution”, I will not be posting any information online via social networks for 24 hours, starting at midnight tonight. If you would like to join me, to try something similar, or have any ideas on how to lower information overload, plaese leave a comment.
Update August 18, 2009
Thanks to Bobbi Newman for finding the following important, educational video on the dangers of Information Overload.
I am now an official TEDx licensee and will be organizing a TEDx event in Ontario for librarians in the fall of 2009 called, strangely enough, TEDxLibrarians.
If you would like to help or have any suggestions, please contact me. If you are on Twitter and would like to spread the word, the hashtag is #tedxlib.
Now deeply into the digital age, we find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media, provoking some unexpected questions. Giving It Away will confront these issues of access, diversity and democracy. Increasingly, the pressure is on the publishing industry to “give it away.” It has happened in the music business and it is starting to happen in the newspaper industry. Is book publishing next? Will it go beyond sampling and current marketing methods to the very core of what we do?
The first session was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Give It Away for Free with keynote speaker Rives, “the first 2.0 poet”. Along with performing his poems, Rives discussed his pop-up books, his grandmother’s fascination with his first patent, how he ended up writing commercials and almost marrying a supermodel and the wonderful story of his hero and earphones girl. I feel that the audience were expecting some structured advice but the presentation did an excellent job demonstrating the complexities of producing online content, what happens when you give it away and how it can impact your offline existence, without attempting to lay out an approach that would be redundant three months from now. I only wish we had more sessions like this at library conferences.
I attended the first BookCamp Toronto unconference over the weekend and left the iSchool with plenty to think about. I enjoyed it immensely and hope it will become an annual event. It was attended by small to large publishers, marketing people, authors, journalists and other interested parties and I found that the mix was a good one, with enough diversity of opinion to make the discussions interesting. I’ve included a list of the presentations I attended below, and I encourage you to go to the conference website and spend some time reading and following the links. You won’t be disappointed.
Artefatica: an open publishing experiment. Christine Prefontaine (Artefatica)
The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians, technologists and other interested people, talking about the present and future of libraries. It’s organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group.
