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Matt Weeks
CEO and Founder , EyeTMedia (Owner)
Redwood City, California, United States
Business owner
Member since: November 06, 2007
CEO and Founder , EyeTMedia (Owner)
Redwood City, California, United States
Business owner
Member since: November 06, 2007
About Matt
Education
| 1976 - 1980 Amherst College , BA |
Matt's connections (5)
| Lorenzo Carver | CEO, Liquid Scenarios (bpCentral, Inc.) |
| Mark Evans | Managing Principal, Bancroft Research Group |
| Craig J. Stadler | CEO, find that file |
| Craig J. Stadler | CEO, buddyfetch |
| Craig J. Stadler | CEO, sexaudia |
View all »
Matt's comments (1)
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When information and data become "accessible" the challenge becomes not to unlock the data, but to sift, sort, and find meaning and context for the data. Then it becomes "information" and has the potential to become useful and actionable. This process regresses back to a kind of "discovery" that we recognize from our early search engine experiences. What's new and often more frustrating is that today we often already possess the raw data, and need help organizing, sifting and visualizing it in order to gain value from it (and to make it "actionable").
What we need next is "interpretation."
What we don't have yet are robust tools and processes to make sense of the data that we experience.
One of my colleagues is working on what he calls "sense-making" - to help organize machine-sorting into patterns and tuning tools that reflect human sorting and mapping.
Aggregation is part of the solution, but it also adds to the sheer volume of noise. It is a great start nonetheless.
In the aggregation category, I was excited at seeing the ease-of-use exemplified by friendfeed.com. It also has the hint of sorting ("fake follow"). Until they add some real sifting /sorting and contextual tuning, they will remain in the legacy "aggregation" category, which eventually won't add much value except as a tool, and as a conduit to a smart system further on down the line. I'm sure they're thinking along these lines. I hope they avoid becoming the plumbing.
We call so much data to ourselves in feeds, subscriptions, alerts that it becomes the proverbial fire-hose. Not to mention the "ocean" of data out there that we don't (yet) even know about. Discovery and contextual sense-making" will be a combination of machine tools (including "smart" interpretation tools) and sorting/sifting tools, as well as the use of community discovery and sorting, which is where I see so much promise. Often it is friends and colleagues (who "know how I think, and what is important to me") who alert me to the most actionable and valuable information. They mimic what the "sense-making" software will be doing to a great extent. What if I could tap a dozen or even a hundred people who "think like I do" and "care about what I care about" to piggyback their sifting, and reduce the fire-hose to a garden-hose, and then let me use the tools to organizes, tune and sift? This is what some of us are working to figure out.
on Managing the mob (August 27, 2008)
