Managing the Flood of Information (Continued)

A while back, I wrote a post on managing electronic information. Since then, a number of new options for dealing with the e-flood have popped up.

I have been playing with the beta of Gist.com, which tries to pull together publicly-available data (blogs, Twitter posts, news articles, etc.) about your contacts. Think of it as a clipping service. I like it so far, but in order to make it effective, I have had to spend a lot of time massaging the data, as the site sometimes has a hard time organizing even such simple data as names, emails, and companies.

Social Minder, with which I've also been experimenting, has a more limited function: to help you remember that you haven't connected with certain people for a while. Gist does this, too, but for this one specific purpose, Social Minder has more options. It seems to be narrowly focused to appeal to those whose business relies on building and maintaining professional relationships.

Now Google has announced, to a great deal of fanfare, a project called Wave, that sounds like it will take Gist one step further -- by incorporating what Gist does directly into a Gmail-on-steroids web interface. It's not available yet, but the responses have been generally positive, although Mike Elgan raises some good points that may call for caution.

None of the new options has made me change the system I discussed for managing electronic information back in Februrary, but it will be interesting to see where things go in the next few months.