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We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting.

So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.

Judgement-based filtering is what people do.

In the first stage, teens are mostly text-messaging or instant-messaging friends and haunting sites such as Facebook — what the researchers call a "lightweight means" of maintaining friendships. "Messing around" begins when teens take an interest in media itself: composing music, editing photos or shooting video, driven more by interests than a desire to be with friends. "Geeking out" involves using new media in an "intense, autonomous and interest-driven way" that often leaves friends in the dust as teens seek out experts for help.