Friday, September 23, 2005

Factiva Forum Part 2

In my Content Chaos presentation at Factiva Forum, I talked about what I see as the causes of the swirling mess of content we find ourselves in. I agree with something Bill Gates said recently: we're no longer faced with long-discussed problem of "information overload" (having too much information that's too difficult to manage) but we're really in a position of not having an easy way to get to the RIGHT information when we need it. Gates goes so far as to say we don't have enough information.

GYM (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) has gone a long way in providing us with pretty relevant documents on the first page, but better Web search is only part of the answer. There is plenty of information burried on pages 2 through N that we never see. We have to find ways to get that information into the path of our research.

So companies in the information industry are trying to help their clients get to the answers, not provide them with documents. I mean, no one is really running a search so they can find documents. They're running a search, so they can find answers. Moving technology forward so it can get people closer to the answers is our focus.

We see text mining as a big part of that solution.

I also talked about a few causes of this content chaos.
•Blogs Mean Everyone’s a Publisher
•‘Markets are Conversations’
•More dynamic news cycles

I'll write more on this soon.

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