Many sites provide an invaluable service, a place to host your content so that other people can find it. Magnatune, Triond, Dreamstime, Revostock, Jamendo, Delicious, Wordpress, StumbleUpon are all sites that depend on user generated content, but have mutual advantages to offer in turn.

StumbleUpon gives you the awesome facility to be taken anywhere on the web, delicious keeps your bookmarks for you so that you can access them from anywhere, Dreamstime lets you profit from your photos, Magnatune offers a place where musicians can reach new audiences and sell their music, likewise Jamendo is a platform for musicians to upload their content and reach new users. Even social networking sites have their place, and have mutual benefits such as keeping in touch with friends.

Wikipedia is worth highlighting here as a very fulfilling site to contribute to, even though it offers nothing in return except the satisfaction of providing information or editing entries, it is a project that grapples with the sum total of all human knowledge, and in that boundless scope any contribution towards it is satisfying in itself. The fact that it has no adverts makes it easy to see the value in it; free, no catch, access to knowledge in so far as the users of the internet are able to collectively provide it. A vision to be cherished.

But in some social sites there is no mutual benefit. Yahoo Answers, for example wants users to answer questions. To encourage this it has a points system. Points are awarded for answering questions, and this encourages people to answer as many questions as possible up to their daily limit. This might seem at first to be something as useful as Wikipedia, however it is not. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly there is no guarantee that the questions will be answered by anyone with any knowledge of the subject.

How many times have you found an old Yahoo Answers entry only to cringe at the selected best answer, knowing fine well it's off the mark? Often the person who asked the question, is unable to select the answer that's correct. Answers are also rated by the community, if the asker fails to select a best one, and again there is no guarantee that any of them know what they are talking about either. Yahoo Answers has been described as the only place on the internet where 120 million users can be wrong!

It has also attracted a lot of criticism for this very reason, with the critics highlighting that it is more about Social Networking than providing accurate answers. Pessimists among us will note plenty of adverts, so Yahoo are making a pretty penny, wasting people's time by encouraging them to answer questions even if they don't know the answer, and filling up search engines with useless pages.

Those old enough to remember the days before “answers” sites appeared will recall it used to be the case that you could type a question into a search engine and find a forum entry where someone knowledgeable had answered the question for the sake of being helpful. Nowadays you only find screeds of “answers” sites encouraging unhelpful answers given for the sake of gaining points.

With Yahoo Answers if a user demonstrates themslves to be sufficiently knowledgeable within a specific category the they might receive an orange badge under their avatar name marking them as a "Top Contributor". This might have made it a satisfying pastime, but the user can lose this badge by not maintaining their level and quality of participation, rendering any benefits utterly pointless. Sounds more like a job than a rewarding hobby, and at least employers pay you money, and hobbies have model boats or stamps or physical fitness etc as side-effects of having fun. The rewards of participating in Yahoo Answers disappears as soon as you stop answering.

Some may say at this juncture, “but the reward is Answering the questions!” The only answer to this is; I hope the 120 million of you are pleased with yourselves, because any good answers that are out there are now obscured by a myriad of partially correct answers and plenty of plain wrong ones. To quote Jacob Leibenluft:

“The blockbuster success of Yahoo Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web. ”

from: Slate

So why is Yahoo Answers so popular? Perhaps it is to be helpful. But if that's the case we would do well to remember the words of Socrates, “Wisest is he who knows that he does not know” or in other words, be mindful that what we think we know is a tiny fraction in comparison to all the knowledge that is out there. Gaining knowledge and truth from a large group of people only works if each of those people individually practices restraint. This is why Wikipedia has been so successful at delivering reliable information. Wikipedians are often criticised as being deletionists, but deleting unimportant entries and focusing on revising and improving relevant entries has worked. By comparison Yahoo Answers focus on quantity has been a failure, and it's only redeeming feature is its popularity. But who profits from this popularity? The only answer is that Yahoo Answers takes without giving back.

Little did he realize what kind of magic the web was going to be !

My friend Sara, treats the Net, like a secret doctor, whose face she does not need to see. Faced with a weird leg pain one day, she searched and zeroed in , upon a term, called "claudication", and immediately got alarmed. Worried sick, she found out about blockages in the femoral artery that flows through the leg, and discovered, that a observant doctor can hear and differentiate between blood flowing sounds using the stethoscope, and tell whether there is a blockage, causing the aforementioned pain.

Her doctor, an amazingly wise and tolerant lady, and used to sudden scientific discoveries , as such, by Sara, did the needful checking on artery sounds, and declared Sara's arteries just fine.

Sara is in her thirties, but her apprehension, tension, loss of appetite and general state of anxiety affected her whole family till the puzzle was solved.

This is a minor example of what is happening all over the world today , like an uncontrolled explosion.

There is a huge tidal flow of information coming at us. Waves lapping at the feet are initially enjoyable, but the information wave is in danger of becoming a tsunami....

Think. ( On the other hand, maybe you should not ).

Every year, we publish a thousand books daily across the world. Every day, approximately 20 million words of technical information are recorded. A reader capable of reading 1000 words per minute would require 1.5 months, reading eight hours every day, to get through one day's output, and at the end of that period he would have fallen 5.5 years behind in his reading.....

America publishes nine thousand periodicals a year. Overall, more new information has been produced within the last 30 years than in the last 5000.

Electronic activities, like the telephone, email, fax, web cams, digital imaging, and , finally the World Wide Web, have been throwing up quantities of information so vast, that it is impossible to assimilate all of it, organize all of it, or understand this shortcoming.

Across the world whether its business, scientific studies, casual searches, advertising , or news propagation , people are finding it difficult to handle the flood of information directed at them. They are being faced with choices they never knew existed, and no one has time to look through all of them. In a classic mismatch between the speed of human thought and that of light, we are today facing and suffering from the symptoms of what may, be accurately defined as an Information Overload, or Information Fatigue Syndrome.

Its not a question of piles of transcribed papers on your desk; cluttered desks arise from cluttered minds; or maybe vice-versa. Bureaucrats, business executives, teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals, are aware that no sooner they get through the stuff on their desks, the computer will be ready to spew out more. Who is to go through this unlimited information, and how much of it will actually end up being "knowledge"? Does the additional information make you anxious about the fact that maybe you have not read the entire data, and that there may be more relevant stuff yet to come? How do you know when to stop ? At what point do you freeze everything and get on with your work , which was due, sometimes, yesterday ? Is the human brain equipped to handle information overloads like this ?

And so we come to what has been called "Information Fatigue Syndrome" or IFS by British psychologist David Lewis , who was researching the connection between Information overload and poor health, stress, tension, and sometimes, even lack on analytical ability. People with IFS become unable to perform in-depth analysis, which leads to difficulty in reaching conclusions. Other psychological problems involve irritability, tension, feelings of helplessness, and mental anguish. Fatigue, stomach pains, failing eyesight, insomnia, headaches, forgetfulness, bad temper, and computer rage, are some additional problems people face.

We plug in our minds to the great information socket and tune out. Never mind that most of the feedback we receive is irrelevant. The Internet has now become like a continuous TV program, with commercials indistinguishable from the actual program. Information keeps hitting you with regular waves, and the sheer quantity has disabled you from analyzing what is useful and what is not.

Being a consumerist society spoiled for choice is also an unavoidable side effect of having so many avenues for easy spitting-out of information. Do we need to know details of 20 different styles of jeans to choose from, 24 flavors of jam, 38 types of breakfast cereal and 22 models of mobile phone, and that is just naming maybe 5% of the items on which numerous choices are available ?

Children have not escaped the Information Fatigue Syndrome either.

Two hundred sixty-five Texas fourth and eighth graders responded to a survey asking them whether they had experienced information overload, what strategies they used to reduce the overload condition, and what words would describe their feelings while overloaded. Turns out that the fourth graders had a higher overload percentage than did the eighth graders, 86 percent compared to 67 percent . Can this say anything more about the increasing sophistication of the older children in manipulating masses of information and their growing experience with informational analysis and synthesis?

Among other questions, the students were queried about their feelings when overloaded with information.

Among fourth graders, the most prevalent feeling was that of being confused and frustrated. Then came, being mad, angry, or even furious. When asked to associate a physical symptom with a sense of being overloaded, they responded with headache, tiredness, depression, or sickness .

When eighth graders were queried in a similar manner, the findings were slightly different. Ten eighth graders, all male, responded with vulgarity. While boys responded with anger and cursing, the girls described themselves as tense, stressed, or experiencing panic. Interestingly, fourth grade girls felt as if they were exploding and bursting, and responded to overload with irritability. By eighth grade, fatigue and panic have set in. Either the older girls learned to internalize overload or their active anger had been socialized out.

Maybe we need to do a "rethink" on dealing with open ended searches that spew out tsunamis of information. Is Attention Deficit a defiant response that indicates a planned ignorance and inattention to the information overload ? Are adult stresses related to the realization that complete control over work activities is an impossible proposition ? Do we need to think of using faster and faster computer speeds in other ways ? Was there a life before the Internet, email and instant communications ?

There are some things we can do to avoid being a part of the Information Fatigue Syndrome.

STOP being an "informavore" (informavore (in.FORM.uh.vohr) n. A person who consumes information.)

Reduce passive information intake : This means we reduce interaction with any media that we do not actively interact with. If your search throws out 2,800 links, do not pursue a hundred of them in a wild quest for knowing more. There is just so much information you can process and remember. (Think of how you mindlessly watch asinine commercials when watching a TV program, without worrying about the utility of it all).

Be still : Learn to occasionally rest your mind. Different people have different techniques. Some folks can instinctively meditate anywhere. Some need to indulge in vigorous physical exercise to bring on mental peace. A rested mind is a smart mind. Tune out the "noise factor", and you will then see the main points.

Learn to "flow" : This is the complete opposite of information fatigue. "Flowing" is the ability to concentrate on one activity so as to be able to mentally exclude anything else. Have a daily checklist of stuff to do in the house before starting work. Make it a habit of doing that without fail, daily. (You actually check your email more regularly than that, don't you?)

Turn off email, your browser and all telephones (for a while everyday) : Alarming , as this may sound to some electronically challenged folks , there is a world beyond emails and browsers. There also existed a fairly peaceful world before cell phones appeared on the scene, and we were all doing just fine , thank you.

Get physically comfortable : An uncomfortable posture in a fashionable but stressfully shaped chair does nothing for you. Sit in a comfortable sofa, have some soothing music playing. Music that brings back memories is even better. Too many machines in the room and the thermostat setting going for a toss , either too cold or too hot , is an invitation for the onset of information fatigue. So pay attention to your physical environment and get comfortable.

And finally, whatever work you do, remember, that while you may be aware of the desired results, over focusing on the goal to the exclusion of everything else doesn't necessarily get you faster to the goal . A balanced approach with some pitfalls and troubles probably ends up teaching you a lot more in the long run.

Come to think of it, maybe acronyms came about consequent to people becoming lazy about writing the details, given the vast information sea they were drowning in. And so we had folks saying ROTFL and pretending to be smart, whereas it was much more fun to perform that and interact with someone else.

And only dumb types learned to say YMMV ; for heavens sake, EVERYONE'S mileage varies, that's what being a different person is all about and that's what makes everyone else exciting and interesting.

In one of the great ironies of information age , it appears that while information can be trivially copied and the information bandwidth continues to widen , the individual's attention bandwidth is as narrow as ever . You abuse the bandwidth, and network problems ensue. We see that everyday in offices of psychiatrists, psychologists, and school counselors.

Its all a question of balance.

At the end of the day, the human brain and human mind is vastly superior to the computer. Like someone said, if you drop a ton of apples on a computer, it will not come up with the theory of gravity.....

Maybe the solution to IFS is as simple as a wastepaper basket ?