We live in an online world filled with endless information. You can search and find anything online, and day by day that available information grows exponentially. There are even tools to search the web for you.

While at Web 2.0 Expo and Interop NY a couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to listen to Clay Shirky’s keynote on information overload. Several of his points made perfect sense to the audience since many (like me) were people who are constantly online.

Check out Clay’s keynote for yourself.

Clay discussed the idea that information overload is an institutional system design failure. But that’s not the real problem. What we’re suffering from now is “filter failure”. We need to filter for quality. Publishers of content (news media, corporations, the “average Joe” blogger) now have an easily accessible and free way to get information out. But how do you sort through all the “spam” in life and filter out unwanted and unnecessary information?

• If you are a social media, marketing, or PR consultant - you may filter information by only reading news that is important to your clients’ industry and business goals or your own business.
• If you are a student - you may filter information by only reading news that is relevant to your university (sports scores, announcements), your studies (research for a specific subject), or your friends (”Facebooking”).
• If you are an average adult going online - you may filter information by only reading news that is important to your career (industry news, announcements), family and friends (sports scores, movie reviews, politics, etc.) or hobbies (skiing, racecars, knitting, etc.).

No matter how you do it, maybe it all comes down to a simple point. You choose your own destiny, and you choose your own path in navigating the online world.

“Meanwhile, I’m not completely convinced information overload isn’t a problem, but filters are. For instance, no one is forcing you to have those 2,000 RSS feeds. No one is requiring you to Twitter non-stop. And really: How much of the information that swirls around you is all that important anyway? Take my inbox: I get a hundreds of emails a day. There may be 10 that are important. I could definitely manage my filters better, but that becomes a pain in the rear too. At some point you just have to say no and reckon that if something is super important it will get to you rather quickly anyway.” - Larry Dignan at ZDNet