Part 2/2: Please check the beginning of this article on the previous previous blog post

5) Information Overload: How to let the best content items magically surface out?

Finally the largest problem is not about dealing with all these issues of standardization, federation, metadata or tools overlaps but more about the proper prioritization and content curation of the tons of information you have to digest daily.

All the twitter fanatics following hundreds of people know how time consuming but addictive it is to permanently keep up with this permanent flow of data. So if such information streams want to be widely adopted by regular knowledge workers and not only by early adopters and tech savvies your company may want to be first sure that this will not be in disfavor of any white-collars efficiency.

Fig. 9: Reduce the Signal-to-noise ratio and help the best automatically surface out

Pete Cashmore from CNN mentioned “content curation as one of the 10 Web Trends to watch in 2010: The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint. In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.”

How many employees are suffering today from poor corporate email practices (“Reply to all” syndrome; Ping-pong of different document version s in attachments; Trivialities exchanged with half the company,…). But will this situation change with the addition of a new private microblogging system in your company? No, certainly not.

Catching the scarce attention of your microblogging audience is already becoming the next national contest. Implicit coding conventions already start to emerge and look like very similar to the one used previously as part of your old email labeling strategy: “[Urgent]”, “[Must read]” or other form of “>> +++“ is rapidly becoming a common practice.

User generated ratings should allow your communities of practice to rapidly tag and extract important news away from trivialities. Others systems are now working on enhancing new scoring algorithms by mixing other criteria such as the source of the information (e.g: your boss vs the new internship), your preferences and skills, the articles you recently read, the articles your colleagues recently read (based on the fact that an article read by one of your subject matter experts is certainly better than another article all things being equal) and many others. All these practices are related to finding ways to assess the importance and relevancy of an information update in regards of another one and to help you more rapidly extract the key information you were looking for.

Danah Boyd wrote: “We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don't think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.”

Starting from next year we should then see a clearer emphasize being put on how we could more intelligently consume data and no more on how we could still ease content creation.

But is there any other best way to rapidly consume content than your old good newspaper? Make a simple exercise next time your read a traditional paper based newspaper: compare how fast your brain can automatically surface out the best relevant articles compared to what similar time it would have taken with your email client or your social deck? Note how your brain is used to speed reading techniques with such a content consumption model rather than through digesting email, web pages or columns of tweets.

There are indeed hundreds of years of best practices as part of traditional newspapers on how end-users want and can more rapidly consume their daily content without greatly reducing comprehension or retention. This is probably why a new generation of applications such as Feedly, Lazyfeed, NewsCred and similar are today investigating such a path and are trying to emulate the creation of a personalized a digital newspaper by dynamically aggregating all your favorite content sources.

Fig. 10 : Screenshot of a personalized and dynamically aggregated digital magazine on NewsCred

The fast apparition of colored digital tablets will also certainly help change our content consumption behaviors. Who will still be interested to consume his emails, tweets or RSS feeds from a traditional manner when you could do it from a similar manner than the one proposed by the latest proof of concept done by Sport Illustrated.

Fig. 11:Imagine if this digital prototype for Sport Illustrated could be automatically and dynamically generated from all your various E2.0 information streams.

There will then be a convergence between traditional media and content syndicators (e.g: your Social decks or your RSS aggregators) towards the development and delivery of a new form of dynamic and personalized digital eZine.

Clearly speaking this is not about being able to subscribe and consume online such or such traditional newspapers. This is about being able to dynamically recreate your daily personalized digital magazine from all your heterogeneous sources of content whatever the sources (including your emails, your RSS feeds, your private or public-facing status updates and all other form of commercial content you subscribe to) and to be able to automatically generate the table of content and teasers which are the most relevant to you.

Wouldn’t you find more convenient to consume your daily content from this manner?

Synthesis:

In order to summarize this long blog post, we could highlight the following points:

1)      Avoid the “build and they will come” web-based only approach. This is not the way end-users want to consume today their information streams

2)      Every piece of software available in your company is getting social. Think of the consequences in term of unification and federation both from an IT and an end-user perspectives

3)      Do not try to find substitutes to email, IM or any other existing communication channels already available in your company with new emerging E2.0 tools. Rather try to integrate them altogether and to exploit each of them at best in the right context

4)      Try to think how you could best manage and leverage all the “mosaic identities” of your various end-users and communities of practices.

5)      Last but not least think on the best ways your end-users wants to consume their information today.

Focus for next years will certainly switch from content creation to improved content delivery. All E20 tools are still mainly focus on easing content updates (wiki, blog, microblogging,…) while traditional corporate Portals failed to ease content consumption. eZine as a new form of personalized, dynamic and multi-source Information Hub looks like being one of the key missing content feature in all the E2.0 initiatives.

Technically speaking, multi-channeling, improved content reuse and repurposing, better social lifecycle capabilities, user personalization and on the fly semantic analysis will rapidly become key required features to solve certain of the aforementioned problems. These features really look like being the one already available as part of more traditional CMS. It would not be a surprise then to see some levels of consolidation between Social software and Content Management offerings.

Lots more to say on this topic but this blog post is already much too long. I will keep them for some next posts.

Cheers,
Stéphane

Disclaimer: I maintain some personal relationships with Hyperweek as being part of their steering committee.