Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.