310Information

Combatting Information Overload

Staying informed is hard largely because of the overwhelming volume of inbound information that needs to be collected, sifted through and read every day. Deciding what to read depends on your task at the moment and each different task might have a variety of information sources. How do you collect the relevant documents and then choose which ones need to be read right now? And, once you have read that document how do you efficiently find the information it contains should you need it again in the future?

Our hypothesis is that if your web information was better organized, with better tools for managing the workflow of those stories, staying informed would be easier, requiring that you read only what is germane to the task at hand.

This is the issue 310Information is solving. Effectively time shifting information consumption from when you read it to when you need it.

The Premise of 310Information

Personal Knowledge Management Platform separates collection from consumption and allows managing information at each stage of its life cycle.

• Automatically collect information from your sources and hold it until you need it.
• Manually and/or automatically annotate, tag, rate documents and remember what is new and what has already been read.
• Keep what you want to keep for later reference and forget what you don’t.
• Search or browse articles based on topic, importance, date, etc.

The point is to efficiently recall, at just the right time, the document(s) most relevant to your immediate needs.

It’s like Email

Email works (arguably) well because it is a one-stop application for all of your email needs. The client application (ex, Outlook) collects all of your email messages in one place and gives you some OK tools to manage them. You can group messages according to context (work/personal) and sort by date, sender, subject, etc. As you move through the inbox you can reply, mark as read, skip, delete, flag for follow up, or file a message in a folder and easily find it again, late, just when you need it.

When you want to find an email message again, later, you don’t have to search across many different applications to find one message. They are all in one place.

The information inbox works just like an email client to collect, organize and manage your content from the web, your hard drive or any sources you want, so you can focus on reading what is important right now.

Job Search Tool

Our first application of this process, currently in alpha testing, is applied to the job-search market as a job-posting aggregation and management tool.

The Job Posting Management Tool automatically searches several different job-posting sites, aggregating the results into one list. The postings are automatically keyword-tagged allowing the user to view and easily take actions on some or all of the jobs in a particular category.

The system will recommend the most relevant jobs based on a user-defined score. For example, with one click you can review all of the new Project Management jobs, sort them by score, select any that are worth reviewing and discard the rest.

In the What’s New view, all of the unread jobs are aggregated and a word cloud of the most common keywords allows you to easily see what is new and what is hot.

Mark a job as an opportunity worth pursuing and the system adds that information to your profile, and  learns to suggest jobs that more closely match that profile.

See more on the Job Posting Management Tool page.

The Job Posting inbox works like your email client to collect, organize and manage job postings from the web, so you can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.