To solve the puzzle presented by the excess of information we adopted a series of mechanisms to gather and organize online content.
Search Engines were one of the first tools used, they index all the information and content they can find, to later gather it based on our search term and organize it by hierarchy according to both relevance and the website’s credibility which in turn is set by a private algorithm.
Useful as they may be, search engines are not a magic solution. Digg and Delicious are a different approach to solving the same problem: they both allow users to gather and organize information as they see fit.
However, the excess of information is not just a problem in organizing and filtering information, it also poses a problem regarding the maintenance and quality of that information. Wikis are one way to keep information accurate, allowing users to take charge and giving them a simple way to correct imprecisions and omissions.
All and all, we have moved from a single solution where large search engines presented the information we searched for, to a more diversified option where groups os users do their best to keep information organized and accurate. Each of these solutions as its shortcomings, but together they seem to be working well enough.
The idea of “publish, then filter” comes from Clay Shirky in the book “Here Comes Everybody”
