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Are People Really Overloaded With Information?

Well I am and that's the whole reason I started Six Degrees of Data - so I really hope that people are overloaded ...

Luckily, just about everyone I talk too agrees with me but I have now finally had the chance to do some original research into this assertion.

 But first a little context. I decided to invite 1,300 people on my LinkedIn network to answer a set of questions about their reading habits, needs and strategies. I quickly received over 120 completed responses and the results were (I think) very interesting. Detailed survey results appear below but the headlines are:

• Professionals are still reading a lot of documents with more than 40% reading 50 or more a week
• 87% are required to consume large amounts of information in order to be able to do their job well
• 65% can't read everything that they should
• Computers deliver the majority of these documents to 87% of us
• But 80% of us don't have any special software to help us read and understand
• 92% believe that intelligent summaries and analysis would help.

Here are the answers to all 21 questions:

If you would like to keep in touch as any further research we do is published or simply want to be kept up to date as we launch our first products, then go to our web site at www.6ddbridger.com or drop me a line at [email protected] and I will add you to our (no-spam) mailing list.

Pocket and Bridger

Bridger is intended to be a universal document and web content analyser and we want to have it play nice with as many file types, applications and platforms as is possible. Of course, not all companies are as open as they perhaps could be so we do our best.

We developed the Bridger user interface specifically for smartphones and it works well on Android and iOS iPhones. We also quickly discovered that it does a pretty good job on the iPad as well and we are also working on supporting desktops - although this may only be possible using Safari or Chrome at this stage.

More news on this soon.

This openness is possible for a little startup company like Six Degrees Of Data because we use a very agile set of technologies. These include HTML5, CSS 3.1, jQuery Mobile and others and we've tried to be as open as is possible. But this only takes us so far.

Take off-line reading applications like Pocket, Readability and the like. Both are excellent apps that I use a lot on my desktop browser and smartphone. Like for millions of others, these apps have become embedded in my daily browsing habits. One problem however is that they really only delay the inevitable. If I'm going to get any value out of the documents I've saved, then I'm going have to read them. And this is where things fall down.

I often never get around to reading this growing pile of stuff sitting waiting for me in Pocket and Readability.

The unfortunate reality is that the virtual world mimics my physical world habits. Just like my bedside table is piled high with books and magazines I want to read - so are my virtual repositories: not just Pocket and Readability, but also email, Zinio, Flipboard, Kindle, iBooks, Instapaper and the like.

Now there are precious few things that I am certain of in life but I know for a fact that I will never read everything that I have squirreled away in these apps!

And that's the motivation behind Bridger. It Bridger continues to develop like I plan, then I can use it to extract the value trapped in these documents. But I digress - because there are speed bumps on my road to document nirvana.

For example, Readability uses some url mapping tricks to do what it does and this currently stops us using Bridger to analyse readability documents. A pity, but we will keep persevering until all avenues are exhausted.

Pocket, on the other hand has been easy to integrate into our work habits and the following short video shows you how Bridger can analyse all the documents saved in your Pocket app: