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In a previous post I lamented on the information hyperinflation and called for digital noise reduction. Today I would like to point to problem with this approach: By reducing noise you may also narrow your horizon.

Digital techniques supposedly help you shifting through large amounts of information by reducing this avalanche to digestible pieces related to your interests.

Sounds great: A site filters out the non-relevant and shows you only what it thinks matters to you.

But…

By filtering out information that some system deems not relevant you will also filter out information that you personally would have thought to be relevant.

Eli Pariser wrote about this and our ensuing tunnel view of the world. He calls it the “Filter Bubble”. A kind of giant Truman Show. We are all predisposed to select and read only information sources whose views we share – have you recently read a political blog with contrarian views to your own?

He is of the opinion that commercial interests of the big players such as Google, Facebook, etc. are driving this development. If you want lots of people on your site, you want to provide them with relevant content and if you want to make money you also should provide them with relevant ads.

Your ensuing personal online profile becomes a tradable commodity: But x-profiles of a certain type into your sales funnel and you will sell y-amount of goods to this group. (Just to note: At Memonic we don’t sell any personal information and don’t do any profiling beyond user experience optimization).

But…

Live is not a straight line and a person cannot be identified singularly in a profile. Our personality develops, our living arrangements may change, so may our interests – today I like dancing, may be tomorrow cooking.

Serendipity – happenstance, coincidence and a chance encounter may put our live on a different trajectory.

Good knowledge curation takes note: It will not try to solve information overflow and digital noise reduction through computer algorithms alone. Human interposition in sourcing, selecting, and assessing stays relevant.

Finally it’s officially here, our latest baby: Memonic for Salesforce. The idea is simple: Combine the best of both.

Salesforce is a great tool for structured sales automation, yet it’s pretty difficult to add that client research to your lead or account record. Memonic is great note-taking application, and pretty good at exactly that: note taking and web clipping.

With the combination of both worlds you can now literally ‘Put the Web into Salesforce’.

Neat idea right? Salesforce thought so, too and voted us Runner-Up Best Cloud App 2011 at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

Find out all about this on our dedicated website Memonic for Salesforce, or even better test drive it on Salesforce’s AppExchange or read today’s press release.

Marc Diethelm, our senior frontend developer, is of the opinion that the days of H1-H6 heading elements should be numbered. Introduced in 1995 as part of the HTML 2.0 specification they quickly became embroiled in some controversy. Marc suggest a nice way out: get rid of the H1-H6 elements an replace them with a HD element with a level attribute. Read the details on his blog.

“Why Google+ rocks”. Aha. That assertion was brought to me multiple times on consecutive days. Here’s a recent screenshot of my Google+ stream: Same message, twice (additional duplicates omitted to save space).

The early praise was all about Google changing the social network game. After a few days though, non-distinct and re-posted messages started to take the front seat.

And I am lucky to be only exposed to this amount of re-sharing the already shared: Last year Forrester Research published research that shows that almost 70% of people using social media simply consumed content. They did not post, they did not comment, they did not interact. Would they, I’d need to skip the same post many times more.

Given this information inflation we need to find ways to readjust the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The SNR compares the level of desired information (signal) to undesired (background) noise. If it stands above 1 it indicates more signal than noise, below 1 more noise than signal. The trend? Towards ratios consistently below 1.

How can we reverse the trend?

A good place to start is information you deem worth keeping. A given collection of information snippets on a certain topic is a pretty good starting point to filter through the sea of information the Internet has become.

First such solutions sifting through your social media streams and filtering the relevant items are available; NewsMix.Me, Summify, Flipboard, TweetedTimes, etc. Here at Memonic we’re experimenting on such digital noise reduction techniques for the business space. With features such as the dashboard quite a bit is built into our product already (And much more is to come).

Filtering implies omission. This is good if it reduces above screenshot in half and simply would indicate which other person found this helpful, too. It is a problem if we look at the world at large only through such filters. More on that in a later post.

We’re all still quite excited about this week’s accolades and already it draws to a close with the last postcard pictures from San Francisco. Thank you all for your support. Keep on rockin’.