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Wikipedia is aflutter with angry psychologists demanding that the community take down reproductions of 10 original Rorschach inkblot plates and their statistically common responses. The Rorschach tests have been used since the 1920's to determine psychological disorders through the analysis of images. Twenty-five percent of all forensic cases utilize the Rorschach test in assessing defendant competency and criminal responsibility. According to the New York Times, Dr. James Heilman of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan originally uploaded the files and discussion has exploded ever since with doctors on both sides of the argument.

Tomorrow morning, social media and marketing researcher Dan Zarrella is debuting a new way to see into the minds of Twitter users by analyzing their most recent 1,000 tweets.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.

This is post #2 of a 2-part post on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Please read part 1 here.

The information overload problem has reached a critical point. Workers drowning in their inboxes and jumping from task to task have now cost the nation $650 billion in lost productivity. A research group attempting to understand and combat the problem has recently been formed. We can either wait for answers for them, or we can start finding solutions ourselves. Let's do what social media addicts do best: let's crowdsource this thing!