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Oh, the beauty of the web, this 24x7 great library in the sky. This fount of instant access to data on any and everything. This source of information, a plethora of information, a mind-boggling overwhelming often-unsubstantiated well of everything about anything you might wonder about.

My head was pounding something awful. Kept spiking worse and worse for days. By Friday afternoon the letters on the computer screen were like little bullets. I could hang in there for 10 minutes or so and then my eyes flapped shut.

So in those brief intervals of focus, I did what most of the wired world seems to do when faced with anything from a sniffle to a mysterious backache. I went searching for information.

We like fixes, you see. And one area that the web very quickly offered up from the very beginning was medical fixes. And medical information. Lots of it. Too Much Information.

One of the repeat advertisers during this week's baseball playoffs was WebMD, the health and medical site whose slogan is "Better Information. Better Health". The targeting of these ads was interesting - might the collective Red Sox Nation be suffering physical symptoms from errors on the field? Or is this simply a high rating mainstream audience? You be the judge.

WebMD offered up more than 2000 definitions of headache. Sadly, it also offered up really tiny type in the search results which made my shaky orbs quiver even more. And I was also sidetracked by a large promotion for "The Truth About Crocs" which promised to answer the burning question "Do those eye-catching shoes have a place in good foot care?" I can't tell you the answer though because right about then my eyelids rebelled.

Which is one of the problems of TMI. No, no, not the eyelids, but the ease at which it is to hop in wide ranging circles. In television, it all began with the channel changer, which quickly trained us to do a quick flip. The result is that we seem unable to watch more than 30 contiguous seconds of the same television content (unless it involves Josh Beckett, perhaps) and have developed visual analysis skills that let us quickly say 'nope, not interesting'. Click.

Which leads to a pretty natural online clicking skill too. If you believe research, this would follow the way our mind maps information, which is as a sort of highly interconnected web, with multiple ways of retrieving the bits and pieces of things floating around our brains.

One thought leads to another. Hyperlinked information mirrors our very own physical structures. Does that mean our brains by default contain TMI?

So I guess it should come as no surprise that a headache search led to strange and bizarre mosquito transmitted diseases of regions I have never set foot in. I found this information because, well, I could. It was out there on the web, linked by links.

Being only human I started to wonder how I could have been exposed to disease carrying exotic mosquitoes, which led me to Overstock.com, where I'd bought something from Worldstock. And maybe if I could check where that product came from I would find out that the mosquitoes came in the box with the rug. Which would explain the headache. Which was shutting down my eyes again.

When I re-engaged, I was distracted by another promotion and started looking at bed frames at Overstock, which I don't have any need for, except that one of the many 'causes of headache' results states that sleep issues were my problem and maybe if I could find a magic fix for a good nights sleep that would solve it once and for all ... since by now I figured out that mosquitoes from the far reaches of the globe had probably not leaped out and bit me.

Which is another problem of TMI. There is so much of it, so very much, that it is easy to lose a sense of foreground and background. Which is the relevant content and which is the background noise? The more you put into the equation, the harder this become to discern. Search engines have tried to solve that quandary, but with more than 30,400,000 results on 'headache,' even search engines can't solve the problem of sheer volume.

Of course, the needle in the haystack might be just the needle you need to solve your problem. And in medical issues, there are many stories of how that needle saved a life or brought closure to suffering or connected the dots that solved the mystery.

This is the flip side of TMI - that within it does lie potential, a potential that becomes reality because it is now possible to, with patience, access and explore vast volumes from many different source and geographies.

Ah ha - source! Source is the other key element here. Is a lack of passionflower, ginkgo or white willow bark behind the vise grip on my skull? Should I be consuming a supplement with the amino acid phenylalanine? Or do I just need another helping of Extra Strength Tylenol? WHO do I believe?

In TMI, being able know which voice to trust is a real challenge. How do you validate the information? Over the course of the past 24 hours, if I believed it all equally, I'd be searching out a tropical disease expert, be convinced I had a bizarre brain growth, have ordered 16 different supplements, and be wearing both ice and heat packs at the same time. Fortunately for me, my eyes have to slam shut every 10 minutes or so and when they do, my reality checker kicks in.

When it comes to medical information, specifically, one of the best uses of your tax dollars at work comes from the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. It is called Medline Plus. That's http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

It is well-written, well-organized, solid information. It has a great collection of links to information from other sources, but those sources have also been validated, so there is a confidence level of WHO. It's tagline? "Trusted Health Information for You"

TMI can be too much, but there's a way to manage it. It's called common sense and perspective, and it's the balance we need to keep in our own foreground. And to remember that sometimes a headache is just a headache.