Anthony J. BradleyI had a meeting with NewsGator today to talk about their Social Software capability. What struck me most was their differentiated focus on information “discoverability” (not e-discovery). I have posted previously on my opinion that enterprises have an unhealthy focus on enterprise search and are missing the importance of a broader approach to information discoverability. I espouse a 5Ss strategy to information discovery (search, sort, surf, subscribe, and social).
The NewsGator platform has an underpinning of metadata management that enables a recommendation engine for alerting participants to content that may be of interest. This focus on a push approach (active or passive subscribing) to information discoverability is a critical element of a broader information discoverability strategy that can deliver serendipitous content awareness.
The explosion of information resulting from Web 2.0 via user contributed content (UCC) requires a more sophisticated approach to finding the good stuff. A focus on enterprise search only is very Web 1.0.
Category: social solutions Tags: discoverability
1 response so far ↓
1 Don Neely February 13, 2009 at 9:18 am
IBM recognizes that contextual search is insufficient given the breadth of data w/i an enterprises confines and the very human way it is categorized, so IBM’s strategy extends into social tagging, such as found in the IBM Lotus Connections family – http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/ – to search for subject matter experts and people who know those subject matter experts. Recently at Lotusphere 2009, IBM Research demonstrated SaND (Social Networks & Discovery) which integrates search with social network analysis to reveal social networks and how best to connect with them. More information on this aggregation platform for information discovery and analysis can be found on the IBM Center for Social Software site @ http://www.research.ibm.com/social/