Sorry for the hiatus, everyone. I’ve been at the World Science Fiction Convention since Friday, and unexpected hardware problems and unanticipated busy-ness levels kept me from posting while there.

I had a terrific time this weekend, and gathered a nice backlog o’ URLs that I’ll be posting through the day.

I’m back now and I’m finally ploughing through the backlog of new material and email that came in while I was in Philly. It’s a very, very deep backlog. I got something like 2,000 emails over the weekend, and even after clearing out the spam and dumping the low-priority stuff, there’re still several hundred messages demanding my attention.

Coincidentally, Slashdot is running this editorial from Jon Katz on the growing problem of information overload — god, can I ever sympathize.

There is a sense of feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the problems e-mail creates (also acute for people not in college, since the vast majority of Americans are still on dial-up systems). Employers get frustrated because workers spend so much time messaging one another with questions, problems and data sent merely because it’s so easy. As we move towards an instantaneous model of communicating information, the pressure on everyone to manage information rises. Most people aren’t getting much help.

Link Discuss