RSS: Tooling Up the Information Brokers
December 9th, 2004Charlie Wood, over at Moonwatcher has a few thoughts about RSS and Information Brokers:
“There is a fundamental problem facing people whose job it is to gather and analyze data and communicate their findings: the volume of data available electronically is increasing exponentially, making the filtering function more difficult. On the other hand, increasing volumes of raw information make the analysis and filtering (or as Hagel and Singer termed it in 1999, “infomediary”) function much more important.
The good news for such information brokers is that information is increasingly being made available in machine-readable formats like RSS, making a new class of information aggregation, processing, and sharing tools possible.
The basic idea is communication, but beyond that, it’s rapidly and constantly aggregating, filtering (both automatically and manually), and selectively republishing, all within a single information network node (user)—then allowing nodes to connect themselves into networks based on relationships of authority.”
When I was attending library school, the term “information broker” was, to quote Paris Hilton, hot. Since then (about 2 years ago) I have heard that phrase used sparingly to describe what we do. This phrase could (read:should) be used in library school materials that are mailed to prospective students upon request. Take a look at the three paragraphs again. That’s what librarians do. We find information, filter it, and present it to our clients. It’s not such a far fetch then for librarians to be embracing weblogs and RSS technology because it is makes our finding, filtering, and presenting of information better and more efficient.
Hello. My name is Steven Cohen. And I am an Information Broker. (link via del.icio.us)