Filtering out the information noise in 3 steps!

Is Information Overload really your problem or have brains been overloaded ever since the first library was built thousands of years ago?

In actual fact, what you need to solve is how to filter out the noise so that you only get what is relevant to you. Out of the thousands of articles coming in, which ones are important to you?

In our experience, a stepwise process using a combination of automatic tools and manual judgment can filter out low quality information. For each step the information noise becomes less and less:

1. Start with quality. Obviously, the higher quality content that goes in from the beginning, the higher relevancy. Evaluate and select high quality sources that you trust (i.e not the whole internet…). Be prepared to pay for premium content.
2. Categorize. Set up search rules that automatically filters and categorizes the selected sources according to you view of the world.
3. Approval. Use analysts or editors to manually approve relevant articles for publishing to users and readers.
4. Personalize by using alerts and views. Show users how to set up e-mail alerts that only get sent when a threshold is reached in an area of interest.
5. Visualize. Use visual tools such as heat maps and word clouds to give quick snap shots of trends and what important, before digging in further.