Information is key for efficient business operations. The way it circulates must be facilitated and fluidified? Everything may be very valuable at a given moment for a given person while being useless for anybody else. Identifying week signals is critical but it implies to increase the amount of information that circulates through the enterprise. People can’t manage more than a given quantity of information but we know that if we want everyone to find what’s needed, more and more information will have to circulate.
Companies are not comfortable with this paradox : the need for making more and more information coming from many people accessible while protecting people from information overload and delivering a clear signal about “what matters”. Knowing that “what matters” depends on the people. So it’s not a surprise that for many businesses, even if they understand there’s a real potential, social media is seen as a source of confusion and information overload.
I often say that, in order to improve things, two main lines have to be explored at the same time
• a human line : trust your environment to filter. Knowing that people you are professionally close to share your concerns, the information filtered by your network is often relevant.
• a software line : tools have to identify “strong weak signals” from the informational hubbub.
Of course, we’re only at the beginning but we can see emerging initiatives that prefigure what things may look like tomorrow. To illustrate my words, let’s have a look at Microplaza.
I think we all agree that twitter is the greatest noise machine on the web. It’s used for so many purposes that all kinds of information can be found on it. In the other and, it’s because of the volume that we can, sometimes, find a golden nugget.
Generally speaking, it’s impossible to identify “hot topics” if you don’t read all what is published to make you own opinion. Sincerely, and I think most of you are in the same situation, I’ve other things to do instead of continuously reading twitter to be sure not to miss “the” information.
In the other hand, if I consider that I chose the people I follow for “intellectual proximity” reasons, because I trust them, we can think it’s a first filter. If they think an information is worth, it’s a second filter. Now, we only miss a tool that aggregates all that not on a people-centric point of view but according to the information itselft.
That what Microplaza does. It follows the links my contacts twitted and make emerge what was quoted the most. Simple…. but useful.
My contacts filter, Microplaza aggregates and sorts, and I can focus on what matters without losing my time. A first step to collaborative filtering logics where users and tools will operate together. You network will become your search engine, provided you defined it with relevance.
If you want to try Microplaza there are 20 invitations here. First come, first served.
filtre, Information / Connaissances, microplaza, moteur de recherche, réseau social, recherche, twitter, web-2.0
