Resources of the Week
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by Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
Natural disasters, stratospheric gas prices, a messy war in Iraq that goes on and on, two Supreme Court nominations on the line, evolution versus "intelligent design," privacy-threatening security breaches, and a whole raft of other social issues creating divisiveness in society... Is it just me, or does it seem like the number of rumors and hoaxes flying around the Internet is reaching critical mass? My current personal favorite? Killer dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, freed from a Naval research facility by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. Not that I really have time to go to the beach anyhow...
It's probably a good time to review some of the sites on the Web where you can go to check this stuff out before forwarding it along to 100 of your closest friends. (And don't we all have friends like this who are eager to "share" with us?)
+ Urban Legends Reference Pages: Always check here first, since this is the motherlode...and it's nicely organized, for browsing and searching. Links on the front page will take you to the newest and 25 hottest urban legends. Both pages have their own RSS feeds. For each tale, you'll learn where it came from (if possible) whether it is true, false, or undetermined/ambiguous. References and links to related information are often included. Killer dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico? Probably not. But they have been trained to detect mines, which could be useful.
+ CIAC Hoax Pages (Hoaxbusters): This website is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability. However, the site maintainers tell us, "At CIAC, we find that we spend much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus and Trojan incidents. These pages describe some of the warnings, offers, and pleas for help that are filling our mailboxes, clogging our mailservers, and that generally do not have any basis in fact." You can browse by category (including fake virus/malicious code warnings) or search the archive. There's also a Full Hoax Index that allows you to see, on a single page, the contents of all the other pages on the site. Also included is a comprehensive list of links to other hoax sites, as well as scam/fraud information and reporting sites.
+ About.com Urban Legends and Folklore: You can search and browse here as well, but as is typical for About.com sites, the cluttered interface can be distracting. Below the title of each entry, on the right, you'll see information about the origin of the rumor/hoax, its status and a link to a brief analysis. Clicking on Hoax Central on the lefthand nav bar takes you to a collection of stuff that is currently floating around, including Bogus Websites (remember the Bonsai Kitten?) and Faux Photos (always amusing). There's a top 25 list here as well, and an image quiz (real or fake?).
+ TruthOrFiction.com: While not as content-rich as the three sites mentioned above, there's a particularly good section on religious/spiritual rumors, including prayer requests, etc. Search or browse. Paid subscriptions are offered here for those who want to be promptly alerted to "the latest stories, eRumors, and hoaxes."
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
