NewCommForum 2006

Client Ron Rasmussen speaks on a panel at this year's NewCommForum in Palo Alto, with Bob Wyman of PubSub.

Ron talks about relevancy and what enterprise customers are asking for today. Relevant information pushed to you when you want it, where you want it. He uses the example of search criteria a consumer might want to find, such as information on cycling on 20 foot hills, a very specific query. Where does 'one' go to find that kind of information?

Says Bob on content overload. People are being flooded by too much data, when we’re complaining about overload, we’re actually complaining about information underload, meaning we can’t find the relevant information that we need, so we’re frustrated with too much irrelevant information.

He adds (I thought this was interesting and true) - the younger you are, the more focused you are on research (Yahoo, Google), the older you get, the more you’re focused on monitoring. (Technorati, PubSub).

If you’re dealing with a problem of monitoring and wanting to know when things 'change' rather than research, you want alerts from the NY Times or CNN Alerts. You also want to be plugged into search capabilities like services like PubSub and Technorat. There are also filtering technologies.

When you’re monitoring something in real time, i.e., broad media, linking makes sense, but when focusing on a particular activity, such as the cycling on 20 foot hills, linking probably isn’t very relevant here......yet they probably have more authority on the particular topic.

Ron adds, "by having content based subscriptions that are very precise, you’re more likely to get a uch more specific and focused return. You can also look at history, i.e., how many times they’ve been linked to.

Also, there's the importance of notifications services. "I don’t have time to look. I set up subscriptions, so I get notified seconds after they’re posted. I don’t have time to go visit their blogs, so getting notified about individual voices that you care about is great."

Bob pipes in, "people can be great filters of things that they think are good and what they post on their blog. Most people are safe at relying on intermediaries, people who are known as the aggregators, filters and editors of the information.

There’s a self emerging/constructing system that is growing and emerging from the blogosphere – these people are doing the filtering.