For now, the Wikipedia discussion page states,"Prior discussion has determined that Rorschach inkblots images shall be displayed in this article, and removal of pictures without consensus at Talk:Rorschach test/images [the discussion page] will be reverted."

Times reporter Noam Cohen writes about those against the posted images saying, "For them [the psychologists], the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year's SAT."

The fact that both of these tests are based on normative results adds another dimension to the Wikipedia debate - whether or not the inkblot test is a valid metric in the first place. In the late nineties, based on reviewing the demographics of students with the lowest averages in the country, critics called the SAT racist, urban-centric and classist. With the test determining college placement, scholarship eligibility and in some cases, job placement, it remains an important one. For this reason, it was redrafted in 2005 to be more tolerant of diversity and more reflective of classroom curriculum.

With the Rorschach inkblots having been established since the 1920's, what are the chances that each of us aren't already showing signs of major psychosis? If there's a doctor in the house, by all means, let us know if and how the psychological indicators of the test have changed over time.

There's no doubt that a number of those awaiting SATs and psychometric testing might choose to game the system. While higher SAT scores improve college eligibility, average Rorschach inkblot results might alleviate the fear of being estranged from friends and family. Unless the person being psychologically profiled wants to shirk criminal responsibility or can see themselves as a danger to themselves or others, it makes sense to want to establish "normality".

But why is Wikipedia more responsible to protect Rorschach testing than scientific journals or medical websites? Admittedly, I am not an expert in medicine, psychology or the forensic sciences and I have no idea how these Wikipedia images will affect the patient community. However, as a tech blogger, I understand this issue to be Wikipedia's dedication to free and educational content - even when that education is widely debated. It will be interesting to see if those against the inkblot posting will be able to determine a consensus to have them removed.

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.

Profiles with updates that are protected cannot be analyzed by TweetPsych.

Let's take a look inside the mind of a few Twitter users. Most of the social media elite tend to have fairly impersonal tweets; hence, their TweetPsych profiles are relatively homogeneous catalogs of upward mobility, obsession with professional affairs, and moral imperativism. Here's a profile of a photographer/mother/homemaker/blogger in Georgia:

In marked contrast, here's a 20-something, male entrepreneur in Virginia:

We thought TweetPsych was so nifty that we, a.k.a. Marshall Kirkpatrick, made a bookmarklet. Drag the text TweetPsych into your browser's bookmar bar, visit a Twitter profile, then click the bookmarket to see an analysis of a Twitter user's profile.

Other tweet-analyzing apps we love are Mailana, which shows Twitter conversations and links between different users within and beyond a given user's network, and WhenDidYouJoinTwitter, which shows the date a user joined Twitter (or the date the user implemented the most recent iteration of his username). The WhenDidYouJoinTwitter bookmarklet is also available at that link.

Here's Mailana at work:

This app is particularly good at showing the hubs or connectors in your network, and can also be useful for making new connections with other users. You can use the Mailana bookmarklet on any Twitter profile.

Best of all, try out Marshall's 3-in-1 bookmarklet LittleBirdie to see what each of these apps finds from the Twitter users you love best. Simply drag the text link into your browser's bookmarks bar, visit a Twitter profile, and start analyzing/judging the heck out or everyone you do (and don't) know.

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!

Without a thorough understanding of psychology, it's hard to determine whether those who keep up with the overload of information are somehow wired differently than those who become overwhelmed. We do know that there are varying levels of distractibility in children - the severely distracted are sometimes even diagnosed as suffering with a medical disorder. They are often treated with pharmaceuticals to combat this, so it seems entirely possible that that nature plays a role in how well we cope.

However, that's not to say that we all can't learn a few tricks to better manage our information overload. Below, we'll present some ideas to help fight this problem, but please share your ideas in the comments too, so we can all learn from each other.

Create a Routine

When facing a full inbox, new tweets, new posts on FriendFeed, and an RSS reader with 1000+ unread items, the stress often comes from not knowing where to begin. This is where having a routine can be important. An everyday ritual where you deal with A, then B, then C, etc. can help you put everything in order. Not everyone's routine will be the same - the trick is finding one that works for you, then sticking with it.

Last month, Jeremiah Owyang shared his morning habits on Twitter, which prompted a discussion on FriendFeed. For Jeremiah, he like to begin his day by reading then blogging for two hours before delving into email or work.

An earlier post by social media enthusiast Louis Gray also had him sharing his daily routine, something he called his "social media consumption workflow." This post seemed to conflict with a later post he wrote about continuous parallel attention, but, after speaking with Louis, we cleared up the confusion. For him, the trick is to begin the day with the routine, then continue the day in the parallel attention mode (more on that later).

For Louis, the routine is 1) Email, 2) Read RSS feeds, 3) Twitter, 4) FriendFeed, then 5) Miscellaneous Additional Activity. Others responded in the comments of that post and via blog posts with variations on this routine, but the elements were either very similar or the same, just in a different order.

Yes, structuring social media consumption sounds a lot like work, doesn't it? Well, considering the 8 or 10 hours some of us put in a day behind the computer screen, I'd argue that it most certainly is work. No matter what your personal routine is, the bottom line is to stick to it.

Easily Distracted? Dial Down the Noise...Temporarily

While it would be great to treat noise pollution like the goldmine it should be, the truth is, a good many people are easily distracted. Twitter, FriendFeed, email, IM, and RSS take away our focus when we're really concentrating and switching to and from each task can mess us up. Instead of pining away for the overstimulated sponge-like skills of Scoble, it may be time to embrace this quality about yourself and use it to your advantage. Just because you're not able to write a great post while concurrently dealing with new email and IMs, that doesn't mean there's anything inherently wrong with you that needs fixing.

Even the great American novelist Steven King admitted that when he's writing a novel, he locks himself in a room and commits to no distractions. In his book, On Writing, he says this about his writing room:

"Writing room: really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk...The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand...No telephone. It's wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it's best to try and take care of them before you write."

Want to eliminate your distractions, it's easy. Disable email alerts. Exit Twitter, sign out of IM or set yourself as "busy." Trying to write? Launch Darkroom, Notepad, or Windows Live Writer. Then just work...in peace.

Later on, as you become better at whatever it is that you're doing, noisiness can be slowly added back in, but you can't go from zero to sixty overnight.

That being said, it's not a good idea to spend an entire day in this state - as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote not too long ago, there are many reasons why online noise is good for you. However, if you need a quite half hour or hour to really focus, there's no harm in that. It's not the end of the world.

Learn To Embrace Distraction

No this isn't a contradiction to the section above, it's just what's next. You may find yourself easily distracted when performing a certain task whether at work or at home - like solving a complex problem, for example - but after that task is complete, you can turn up the volume again.

To get a crash course in this behavioral technique, we'll turn again to the post on "continuous partial attention" where Louis described how he deals with info overload. While it may seem unbelievable to some, Louis claims to be able to watch TV while writing blog posts or write emails while listening to music while reading RSS feeds and watching Twitter update.

"No way!," you think? It is possible - it might not come naturally to everyone, but you can, in fact, learn to do this...at least a bit. The trick here is to start small and not try to do this when performing those tasks that require the most concentration (as mentioned above). What throws people off is thinking themselves incapable of this type of multi-tasking because certain aspects of their work require more of their focused attention than others. You must first identify the areas of work where you need less distraction and turn down the volume. When those tasks are complete, crank it up again. Simple, right?

Create Your Own Filters

In order to process mass amounts of information, you'll also need to identify and attack what we'll called the unfiltered noise. This may be in the form of "bacn" in your inbox, busy Twitterers, RSS feeds spliced with links from del.icio.us, or extraneous information on FriendFeed. To get back in control, you have to invest time in structuring the noise.

For example, most email programs have rules or filters that you can use - whether it's Outlook at work or Gmail at home, you have to take the time to set these things up. Unless you're using the GTD method to immediately combat every piece of mail as it arrives - something which only certain people have been able to master - then you'll need to establish a routine to deal with the lower priority mail at a particular time. For social media users, the big problem in our inboxes is "bacn" - these are the informational, but non-critical messages from the networks and services we've signed up for. A suggestion here is to not let these messages constantly steal your focus - deal with them en masse on a regular basis, but have them automatically archived upon arrival.

For RSS, the trick is using folders wisely. Not all feeds are created equal. You can separate lower-priority feeds from high-priority ones, classify feeds by genre, or move the feeds from bloggers who write long, thoughtful blog posts into a folder so you can thoroughly read them at a later time. Whatever the method you choose, it's important to set up a structure so you know what to read and when.

For example, less important feeds could be in a folder that you can hop into at any point in the day and flip through quickly when you have a minute. Feeds that you only browse if you have time to kill can be put in a "Can Miss" folder. Feeds where you like to comment and participate can be put into a "Great Blogs" folder. Blogger Mrinal added he likes to use people as filters. for example, in Google Reader, your friends' shared items is a great place to find human filters for content. These are just a few ideas - all that matters is that it works for you.

For Twitter and FriendFeed or any other social network or service you're involved in, it's just a simple matter of time management. Don't get so caught up that you're spending every minute of your day there. Set a time of day when you're going to delve in and really participate and for the rest of the day just keep jumping in and out when you want to. Yes, you might miss something here and there, but it's OK. Really.

Conclusion

This is by no means a definitive guide to dealing with information management nor will these suggestions work for everyone. This is only meant to spark a conversation about the subject so we can learn new tips and techniques from each other. Please share yours in the comments.

Image Credits: Mobile Email: natala; Noise: GetEntrepreneurial

Surprisingly, answers to most of the basic type of questions, like those found on social networking sites, did not help users figure out what each other were "really" like. Instead, the researchers found that when a user posted things on their profile like their most embarrassing moment, proudest moment, or spirituality, their personalities were much better understood.

A Typical Facebook profile

Even by just posting a link to a funny online video, other people were better able to "get" the other person's personality more accurately that by basic questions alone.

Gosling was drawn to this research because he believed that how one is perceived online is more important than ever these days since social networks are often where other people get their first impression of you. He also mentioned that your social networking profile could also impact your employment opportunities as savvy employers have learned to search out the online profiles of potential new hires.

The full details on the findings of this research project will be presented Monday at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Seattle.

The main reason people were attracted to Paul, according to Lam, was because his message was so radically different from the rest of the Republican field. Early on, the campaign decided to take the opposite route from Obama in organizing online support. Where Obama turned his site into an organized, central social network, Paul's campaign used their site as a hub for pointing to various activities organized by the grassroots.

Though the campaign didn't manage it, the burgeoning grassroots support network responded to the call to organize themselves and famously began to overwhelm social media and news sites like YouTube and Digg with Ron Paul items. Seeing the fervor that was building among their core supporters, the campaign decided to see if they could harness it for fundraising purposes.

Last August, they held a contest to see which Paul Meetup group could raise the most money. Though the campaign raised $500,000, smaller groups complained that it was unfair -- they could never compete. So the Paul campaign changed its tack and asked supporters to try to meet certain fundraising goals. They used classic methods of motivation: putting people's names on screen, using a thermometer graphic to measure growth, and play to the crowd mentality.

The rub is that Paul's success -- at least financially -- is owed less to some magical new use of the Internet, but rather tapping into a support network that grew up organically around the campaign by using traditional motivational psychology. By setting specific goals, they were able to narrow the attention of supporters and direct people toward a set activity. According to Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, people have a specific need for achievement, respect, and the realization of their full potential. Playing off those needs, the Paul campaign was able to motivate people toward specific goals and keep energy among core supporters high.

This, of course, is not unique in politics. Every campaign utilized the same basic tactics. The difference was that Paul relied more heavily on letting the community organize the effort. This perhaps led to what social psychologist Gustave Le Bon would call "group mind," in which the crowd exerts influence over its members. Or in other words, the crowd acts on its own. That actually might have helped the Paul campaign reach its goals because it energized the grassroots to act as a single group with a uniform goal.

It also had drawbacks, however. Similar to how web sites that rely on user generated content cede a lot of power to users, Paul's network of grassroots supporters had a perhaps undue amount of power over the campaign. As Lam noted, for example, one of the things the grassroots network dreamed up was raising money for a blimp. The Paul campaign would have preferred to use the money on TV and radio advertisements, but the blimp idea caught on with supporters and they couldn't stop it (and dared not try).

In the end, Paul's success came down to two things: the emergence of a grassroots support network, presumably because of the uniqueness of his message compared with those of his opponents, and the use of basic motivational psychology techniques to encourage that grassroots network to organize itself. While Internet tools certainly helped to make that organization happen more easily and allowed message delivery to happen more quickly, I'm not sure they prompted anything very radical in terms of how the campaign was managed.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Image via Steak Rules.