"Our job is to build the interface between the person and the tsunami of information," said Gladwell.

Sanders expounded: technology should not "give us what we ask for, [which is] more data. Give us better data."

Recently, I have been wrestling with my desire to overhaul and tweak the systems I use to store and organize data. I love knowing stuff, and I love knowing all kinds of stuff. I collect recipes, goofy pictures and videos, articles about string theory, and inspirational poems. I have over 1000 bookmarks to websites, and that is a shockingly low number to me.

And I love an application with good search. Google. Evernote. Even Windows 7. I love the idea that I can get at the massive pile of data I have forming.

And yet.

In practice, I simply remember the funny illustration I want to use for a lesson. Or remember that I have a recipe for Dutch Baby that I want to try. Or remember that I read once that I needed to change some fields in the database manually after upgrade. That information is in the big pile of data, but I search for it far less often than I thought I would.

And that means I am missing some things. I know that I have bookmarks, recipes, poems, code, and more that I saved but have never referenced. It's out there, but since I don't intuitively recall it, it remains lost to me.

This is the next big challenge for technology, to present data that is relevant and useful, rather than ALL the data. I can't wait until it is here, but for now I will continue to make my piles and hope that my intuition and Google's power can get it done.