There’s a lot of different things in the information overload problem. One I think is that we’ve — culturally, we’ve all developed bad habits with the tools that we have. And two, we send too much email when we don’t need to send email. We send big documents that don’t need to be big documents. We provide so much information these days and we have so many people who work with their brain.

All the information is important. I’m not saying it’s not important but we’re not very good at distributing it and we’re not very good at managing it which of course is the problem. And I think what we need to do is culturally, we need to learn new versions of the bad habits so that we throw away the bad habits and develop better ones. You and I would have this. I mean, if I read every Twitter message that went past me every day, I would do nothing but read Twitter messages and I still wouldn’t read them all. There’s too many.

So we need to learn to pick the things that are important to us. Not to look at email constantly, not to look at Twitter constantly, not to look at the web constantly but to only go and use those things when it’s critical. It’s new habits to learn and it’s very, very hard. And I don’t think I have a solution but we can learn better ways I think.

I could sit down for a week and I could design and dream up and perfect collaboration tool. I’m sure you would have a list very similar. It would have chat, it would have creating documents, it would have calendars, it would have messaging, it would have blogging-type tools, it would have document-building tools. It would have all these things in it and sure all the things like Jive and SharePoint, and all these things. They all do these but they do it based on what we’ve done for the last 20 years. Not a really open — there’s no rules.

So yes, if we can push out the boundaries of where we imagine a calendar or a document or a messaging platform or whatever; if we push the boundaries out in terms of imagining what those things do, I think that’s what we need to try. Try a new way of getting people to understand when their appointments are. Sure, we tied into date and times and you’d have to present it on a calendar. But imagine if it was, the way you could do it was create it on your collaboration platform and your phone syncs and your Gmail syncs and whatever your corporate calendar is syncs.

And sometime in the future your Internet connected car knows that at 9:00 you’ve got an appointment. And you get into the car in the morning at half past eight to drive to work and it says, hey you’ve got an appointment. You need to take the fast lane on the freeway to get to your appointment. This is all possible. We just need to want to do it.

Yes. IP, it’s happened interestingly in Australia, for example most of my work being in Camberra, I work mostly with government. The government’s made two really interesting decisions in the last 12 months. One, that information that’s produced for government organizations about their projects if it’s not private information, because if it’s information about you then obviously it’s very private. But information that’s produced may it be math information or health information, that doesn’t have people’s information, must be made open licensed so maybe creative comments.

And the other really important thing is that we need to release it before it’s asked for. So not only do you make creative commons but you make it available automatically to the public. That’s changed the way intellectual property particularly in government is being looked at. It’s very different because in Australia, it used to be the government had a special type of copyright. And it was very difficult to get access to the information that the government produced. In a useful way, you might get it in a report, or whatever but it wasn’t something that you and I can take say like XML and reuse and combine with other data to make it useful.

Now that’s very much changed. There’s a long way to go. Not all the information is yet available but more and more government agencies here in Australia are using creative comments and making huge amounts of information very easily available. And listening to the public about how they should produce the data so the public can use it.

For private companies, that’s a much harder question because they have to make money with the information that they, and the knowledge that they produce. So the question is, how do you resolve things like intellectual property laws and patents. So that if you’re an inventor in an organization, you can create something that’s going to make the organization money but it’s also going to create good for the public. It’s a very hard balance. And again, I have no answer. I don’t think anyone does.

And if you look at organizations, they are starting to make the right steps. Take away the offices so that senior people aren’t in the offices. They’re on the floor with the people who are doing the work so that they see what’s going on every day. And put them in close with their teams so that they see what’s going on, so they see the noise and they see the distraction and they figure out the best way.

Give people good tools. Don’t make people work on three and four and five year old machines because that doesn’t work. Don’t restrict them to stay at an environment. Don’t say, you only get Microsoft Office or you only get Lotus or you only get — let people work. It relies on the tools makers as well. So it relies on the Microsoft and the IBM and everyone to say, let’s use and open standard for our documents and let’s use an open standard for financial information and let’s use open standard for whatever the data is.

We need to solve all these problems and when we solve these problems, the capacity for you and me to do what we’re doing now, and say, so what is your idea and it doesn’t matter. There’s no right ideas or wrong ideas. There’s just ideas and then when we test them, then we’re in a position to say, well that’s the good idea and now we can turn it into something that maybe will make money for the company or whatever.