Technology for smarter ignoring
Submitted by Merlin on October 3, 2007 - 9:31am.
Cory Doctorow has a short piece in Internet Evolution called “The Future of Ignoring Things” that really resonated with me. Excerpt:
Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread…
Figuring out what you can afford to ignore in life is starting to seem like an art form to me. Since failure to filter incoming stuff properly over time has consequences way beyond annoyance, I’m starting to think that getting it right may be another one of those emerging knowledge worker skills.
It’s definitely one I’m working on (and struggling with).
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Re: Technology for smarter ignoring
FogBugz has an interesting approach to sorting through incoming support email. It takes the same bayesian filtering algorithms used to filter spam, and uses them to sort out what project an email is associated with. It works surprisingly well, especially since legitimate email authors aren’t actively trying to route around the filters.