Information Relevance

As I posted before I believe that we need to be extremely selfish with our attention. One very productive way to start doing so is by ranking the relevance of the information we get from our systems and from our peers. Think of it: do you have someone you trust whom you ask about the best movie to watch? Yes, you have that. And for restaurants and books to read...Now think again: do you have anything like that in your company? Do you have your trusted sources for the best information about your company products, the competitors, your sales numbers,...?

And now think about this: can you rank the relevance of the information in your corporate systems? And can you rank the relevance of different people as information sources related to specific topics? If I can do what?? mmm, so then how do you think you're optimizing your attention?

I was very glad to discover that the most relevant topic at Gartner's Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in London last week was exactly Information Relevance. And the good news is that the use of Web 2.0 technologies and the combination of automatic and social relevance mechanisms are gaining ground: ratings, social networking, tagging, folksonomies,..., are now present in the discussion and generating great interest amongst users.