I’ve been thinking lately about information overload. It’s ironic, in a way, because I’m pretty convinced that what needs to happen in order for the semantic web to take hold is for more people, sites, and organizations to expose their data. There are a lot of control issues involved – trust, security, confidentiality, copyright – but there’s also a real danger of accelerating the general movement towards digital saturation.

I haven’t used Twhirl, but apparently it prompted Erick Schonfeld to speculate about Web 3.0’s noise cancelling powers over on TechCrunch. I’ve heard it said many times that one of the goals of the semantic web is to deal with complexity. There’s definitely a need for it, and that need is only going to get more urgent as the information-providing services multiply. Bring on the intelligent information-filtering services!