Backwash.com, inc is a privately held company located in Boston, Mass USA.  We were founded on the belief that there is too much information and most of it is of poor quality. It is too hard to find content of quality or interest. You must be proactive and know what you want in order to find it but how do you know you want it if you don't even know what IT is?

OVERVIEW: Our goal at Backwash is to save you from Information Overload. To filter all content, not just news, and weed out the dross. We do this by grouping people into collaborative surfing communities which let like-minded people find content and products across all subjects. In effect, we are filtering and sorting the Internet by personalities rather than subject matter.

DETAILS: The Internet was supposed to be about the democratization of the media. The tools to create your own magazine, publish your own novel, release your own music are now at the fingertips of everyone. At first, this seemed like a good thing.

Unfortunately, what most people forgot was that while the big media conglomerates prevented diverse or narrowly-targeted voices to speak,  they also kept a reasonable lid on the quantity of information available to the average person.

Thanks to the Internet, those great artists and writers and musicians who were once excluded from the media now have easy access to the public. The problem: so does everyone else. The result: information overload.

Here at Backwash, we identify the problem using a phrase coined by Douglas Coupland in the novel 'Generation X': Option Paralysis -- the tendency when given unlimited choices to make none.

What do you do when you sign onto the Internet? Probably, you've somehow found a few favorite haunts and you visit them every day, rarely exploring. Who has time to randomly wander around for hours on end in hopes of finding anything of quality? Maybe you find a quality site through one of those Best of the Web directories. But so what? They just direct you to the front door of a site. Go to Kazaa: millions of songs and files you can download. Now all you need is someone to tell you which, if any, are any good.

Dozens of companies have tried various ways of filtering information to the public. Some used directories segmented by subject matter, like Yahoo or About.  To use these, you must be looking for content that falls under a specific subject. Plus, you must be proactive. You need to have a rough idea of what you're looking for in order to find it. Finally, these sites just take you to the front doors of websites. I know Kazaa is a great service but that doesn't do me a whole hell of a lot of good finding specific songs to download, does it?

Other sites like Yahoo News or Excite Newstracker filter the news based on various criteria you select. Some sites even email you the links to these news stories each day. They use automation to do this, so no human ever looks at the content and determines its quality before delivering it to you. Nevertheless, this is a nice feature, but it is also very limited. News accounts for just a fraction of the content on the Internet.

So the question is, outside of news, how do you find out about new things of interest? Do you have a friend whose tastes match your own and is an avid reader who lets you know when she finds a great book you might love? Maybe you have a friend who stays current with all the new bands and tells you when he finds a great CD. Or maybe you instead trust a celebrity like Oprah Winfrey or Rosie O'Donnell or even Howard Stern.

Like most people, you probably rely on a network of friends, and probably miss out on a great deal of content that you'd enjoy if only you knew about it.

Backwash was created to deal with all of these issues. Our goal is to harness "Word of Mouth" Our goal is to filter the Internet -- all the content, not just news. Our goal is to be a trusted recommendation center. And our goal is to let you easily meet other people with shared interests to make friends and exchange recommendations with each other.

We do this by harnessing the collaborative nature of the Internet and communities. We have recruited individuals who spend a lot of time on the Internet. These people essentially recommend the best articles, radio stations, streaming video, products, novels, MP3s, games, software downloads, chat rooms, pretty much everything under the sun. We then create a small Websurfing Community around each member.

All that you need to do is go to our directory and using the brief descriptions provided, find the Backwash Surfer whose tastes most closely match your own and then go to their pages and let them do the surfing for you. We've provided message boards and chat rooms for the members of each community to talk to each other. You will also find the email of each Backwash Surfer. We encourage you to write in, share with everyone anything of quality you find.

Additionally, we have grouped the columnists and their content into larger more subject-oriented communities, and added a Surf By Subject directory to allow those interested in narrow topics. But you will also notice content filtered by Flavors - broad demographic based groupings. And of course, with every link to content off-site we recommend, we accompany it with a link to the columnist who recommended it so that you may more easily find the specific columnists whose tastes and world-view match your own. It is also accompanied with related items such as communities, newsletters and other links you may be interested in.

Essentially, we are breaking the Internet down by personality and making our delivery of recommendations to you more proactive based on your own tastes. We are also filtering the content you see to save you time and ensure you are aware of the best things the world has to offer. And of course, helping you meet other people with similar personalities as your own.

If you are interested in becoming a columnist, click on the "Write for Us" link at the bottom of any page. We currently have three types of columnists - Regular Columnist who writes a column and recommends link, Contributor who simply recommends links but doesn’t write a column, and Lit Columnist for more Literary type content such as serial novels and short stories. Lit Columnists are not required to recommend links.

In the near future, we will be launching much more robust features allowing for stronger personalization and allowing you to interact and meet other people with similar personalities.

In the meantime, enjoy your Backwash.