Bertrand Duperrin has an interesting post on informational competence, a key competence of knowledge workers. Reminded me of an article in the NYT I found via Marcel Weiß (btw, that’s the mechanism at work) holding that the “If the news is that important, it will find me”-attitude is gaining momentum:
[…] younger [people] tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
Bertrands point of view adds to this a twist on intraorganizational provision of information, the you know “what’s needed, at the right point in time to the right people and so on”, arguing both that finding, extracting, evaluating, and making efficient use of information demands new competencies and that
[…] The problem is not the mass of infomation, it’s the amount of relevant information (what I need to know to do my job now) in relation to the global quantity.
[while] the information I receive through RSS feeds because I wanted to follow it, because it comes from well-targeted search agents, because it’s filtered by my network, is enormous in quantity but provides me with real benefits. It takes time for me to manage it ? It saves many people’s time in my company when I publish things and bookmarks on our intranet, or on the internet when I publish my bookmarks.