Redundancy -- at about 5:00 a.m. yesterday the Czech prime minister announced that the Obama administration was not going to deploy a missile shield to protect Poland and the Czech Republic. More or less simultaneously several European news sources reported the same. Forty-one hundred tweets later -- about 1:00 a.m. last night -- I had learned five things in addition to the above. There was huge redundancy in this stream of communication. The problem is not that messages are repeated. The problem is one cannot find the new information sprinkled in among the many redundant messages. Google news handles this, rather roughly, by citing a story and telling one that there are x number more like that. But Google search goes on and on without attempting to reduce the redundancy. Communication aggregators have not attempted, as far as I know, to deal with redundancy. The word cloud, for example, is the 'opposite' of dealing with redundancy. It tells you about repetition. It does not tell you how to find those bits of new information hidden by the redundancy. If someone can imagine how to automatically 'sniff out' the new information in a torrent of redundancy they will have helped us all. - Bob Boynton from FriendFeed MT Plugin