Apture and the Information Firehose

I read a very interesting post on the information firehose today and about how all of us are being bombarded with more and more information and have a hard time processing and making sense of it all.

The video points out that more information will be generated in 2009, than was created in the past 5,000 years. That a weeks worth of the New York Times holds more information than most Americans living during the 18th century were likely to encounter in a lifetime. [...]Today, smart people who want to be “in the know” need to figure out how to filter the information fire hose. The challenge is not finding information, but finding trusted “filters” and then absorbing information through them while ignoring the rest.

I totally agree with the author but think there’s more to absorbing the right information than just filtering it down to the best parts. When we started working on Apture we wanted to give people a tool that helped them put new information into context by letting you view the most relevant rich media and guides without needing to leave the page to search for the material. We wanted to make the ideas expressed by the author, come to life. We believe that people will care more about events and ideas if they can relate to them, and that they will understand them better and relate them more deeply if they can put them in context. Good writing and story telling is a big part of that but we want to help everyone use the power of the web to communicate even more effectively.

Yes, more media can be even more overwhelming but by presenting it in the right way and allowing your users to discover more bit by bit, in chunks , instead of forcing them to drink from the fire hose we believe we can help make the things they do choose to read about more memorable and significant.

So if you want to show your readers what education in Eritrea looks like, how much you enjoyed the recent Coldplay concert, and how Large Hadron Collider works, Apture is here to help you do that more compellingly.