Larry Wall Quotes

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

For anyone who devours the web on a daily basis, the biggest problem is too much of a good thing. There's so much extraordinary content - from articles to images, videos and Tweets - that it's almost impossible to keep track of it.

I'm pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if it's become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic I'm interested in.

I'm just an early adopter; I subscribe to more things than normal people and have a high level of inbound and a high level of noise.

As more podcasts become available, it's becoming a challenge to keep everything in order.

There are lots of new products and new services making adding content easier. But there's not many people on the other side helping users digest that content.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.

The cure to information overload is more information.

The feed was probably the biggest innovation in social media of late. But the interesting thing about a feed is that the more content you consume, the farther in time you go.

I want Facebook to pick the best 20 items to show me every single time I refresh that screen.

I keep up with James Kochalka's online strip, and if I see a link somewhere or someone tells me about something, I'll look at it, but I don't usually keep up with any sites other than the 'American Elf.' I always have this feeling that there's not enough space in the screen, like everything's always getting cut off.

I think Facebook's biggest problem is the glut of information that Facebook's power users are overwhelmed with.

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

Facebook and Twitter have a ton of information they're trying to make sense of.

The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with thosewhich are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

What's important now? - To evaluate the past, focus on the future, and tell you what you have to do in the present

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.