In the late nineties great advances were made in the storage and retrieval of information. This new access to information brought new opportunities in all areas of our lives. Information was the buzz word on everyone’s lips: information age, information super highway, information workers, etc. Indeed, it was the promise of easy access to vast amounts of information that started first Internet wave.

As that wave washed over us, a new information buzz word quickly became part of our vocabularies: information overload. With so much information so readily available, it quickly became unwieldy. Rather than being served by this new access to information, we were quickly being buried by it. Or, as my kids would say, we were victims of TMI (Too Much Information).

After a brief lull to catch our breath (courtesy of the dot-com crash), the next wave is picking up speed. Web 2.0, AJAX, RIAs, RSS, and so on. All are attempts to improve our interaction with the vast amounts of information that surround us. These technologies and techniques all work to hide, or cover, the information we don’t need, while bringing the information we do need to focus in a meaningful way.

These new developments have many people excited. New start-ups are popping up all over the map. Venture capitalists are handing out money again. Old companies are looking for new business models. This excitement is well founded (for the most part). While there is still a fair amount of fluff out there, new methods and models for interacting with information are yielding impressive results.

Most impressive is the ability to interact with information in ways that make that information more useful. Rather than just a book collecting dust on the shelf at the library, or a database taking up hard drive space, this is information that we can experience in new ways that spawn insight!

The wave is picking up speed. Each new insight propels us onward, and upward with greater force. You can see its effect almost everywhere: new medical breakthroughs, agriculture techniques for impoverished regions of the world, energy savings, the list goes on and on.

So, if you are suffering from a bit of information overload, or interaction hypersensitivity, step back for a minute, take a deep breath, and marvel how interaction with information is bringing about insights that truly are making the world a better place. Then go have a few insights yourself.