"If you're feeling overwhelmed by information overload, you may not be alone. The amount of new information stored on various media such as hard drives has doubled in the past three years to five exabytes of new information produced in 2002 according to a study released Tuesday by the University of California, Berkeley.
That's exabytes, as in one byte with 18 zeros behind it, six zeros more than a terabyte. The amount of information put into storage in 2002, five exabytes, was equal to the contents of a half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collection of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, according to the study by professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. The professors estimated that between two and three exabytes of information was generated in 1999." (See InfoWorld: Study documents data boom and the original study is published here)...
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The amount of information being stored is now increasing my 30% a year, and this rate is itself growing exponentially. The information is much easier to access now than it was only a few years ago, but still, the haystack is enourmous and getting larger while the pin remains a tiny almost invisible speck hidden in the pile.
Knowledge managment is becoming of critical importance. Those who can quickly find, understand and take action on information are gaining a significant advantage over those who eschew the best tools for the task.
If you feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it all you are not alone. Begin a conscious effort to find the tools that will reduce your sense of frustration. The best of the alternatives have incredible power and are so easy to use that there is no user's manual--they just make sense and they do the job with little effort.
