This conversation at Supernova 2006 was essentially a data-laden recap of this DEMO 2006 theme on harnessing the community to organize content, via social tools that access the hive mind (or the wisdom of crowds, depending upon whose book you bought).
Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC led a handful of social toolmakers through quick turns on the soapbox. A couple of interesting snippets:
- Plaxo has become huge and possibly ominous. Most of the company's 13 million members have 300 entries; there are over one billion entries total, and 450 million are uniques. Ben Golub hopes that because of this aggregation, Plaxo will become the new Internet address book. I have trouble reconciling this with the concept of 'we don't share your data.'
- A ticklish quote from Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, who stated that "We're not going after the MySpace crowd, we're going after people like us with real lives and real needs." Now, I know that Brondmo meant to say something like 'we're going after an older demographic than 'tweens and teens,' but this was much more entertaining.
- Dalton Caldwell from imeem called out the difference between search and collaborative filtering -- search is when you are looking for something specific, filtering is when you want to only get information that has already earned its way to the top of the relevance heap.
The concerns in the room seemed to center on three core issues:
- The structuring of unstructured data. If we assume that unstructured access to data is not useful, and that a structured view is necessary for meaning, then there are big hurdles to address. Only a few people will invest the time into structuring data for the use of other people, and there's still no standard for the most effective way to autotag.
- Whether or not community wisdom will be effective in the enterprise. If enterprises don't get big enough, does that mean they can't be smart enough? How many people does it take to form a useful smart mob? Some folks in the room believed that you will soon have to bring the consumer mindset into the enterprise, for as Generation M enters the workforce they will be expect this lever to be available.
- What will happen to all of the "old" stores of data as new
technologies become adopted? Consumers may simply stop accessing their
old data stores, but in order for the new technologies to be adopted in
the enterprise, old stores must be included when views are taken into
the overall data landscape.
As publishers make public data crawlable and content creators add microformats, enabling web crawlers to address the issue of structuring data, it seems that we'll be left with the very human challenge of usefulness. Ultimately, market-standard solutions must orchestrate around both consumers expressing themselves, and business users focusing on immediacy and purpose.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys supernova supernova2006 plum plaxo technology
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