Info overload is real

Too much information! It's not just a complaint, it's a statement of fact.

Researchers have determined that the total amount of information in the world increases at about 30 percent a year, so there's now twice as much as there was just three years ago, science writer Tom Paulson notes in today's P-I.

Alas, such a net increase in the sum total of human knowledge doesn't necessarily mean it's a valuable increase -- and a big chunk of it might actually be spam.

"Unfortunately, much of this information being created out there is not very dense in terms of its interest," said Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates chairman of computer science at the University of Washington. It's mostly boring and of little use to most people, he said.

As this mountain of spam, technical data and other largely useless information continues to pile up at an alarming rate, Lazowska said, the need to find new tools for digging our way out of it becomes even more urgent.

"If we don't do something, the Internet will become useless," agreed [Jim Gray, manager of the Microsoft Research unit in San Francisco.] If you think getting a few hundred spam e-mails a day is bad, he said, imagine getting 10,000 a day.