Web 2.0 - Too much information!

A lot of articles describe how Web 2.0 allows the "under-used human potential at companies" - also called a "cognitive surplus" - to be tapped by these new "participatory tools." While I think this is true to a point, the flip side is that as more and more connections are formed and more and more data is dumped in these Web 2.0 spaces, the more complex our world becomes, and by extension the more confusing it can become.

These days, rather than simply checking our phone messages, we need to check all our social networks and browse 14 different blogs to make sure we're up to speed. Unless this volume is managed by "smart" tools that filter the noise for us, Web 2.0 will quickly become a place where "cognitive surplus" stagnates instead of resulting in any real value. While it's great to brain dump all our ideas out into the world via the Internet, there is no value until we can filter out the best ones and use them efficiently. The best tools of the future (I'm sure some already exist - like Bing - but they're hardly perfected yet) will go beyond RSS feeds and website aggregators and will actually pare down the information for us in an intelligent way.