Visualizing Context in a Universe of Information
Taking contextual mechanics into the social publishing realm.
The Social Publishing Landscape
I’d like to take a few moments to share some of the things we’re working on at Faveeo. I’ve had the pleasure and good fortune of working with the team for over a year now, and I am enjoying my role as the company’s CIO.
There are lots of great platforms that curate information, and give people capabilities to publish content, as well as measure the impact that content has within a digital ecosystem.
Our mission at Faveeo is to focus on three primary (and very critical) elements:
· search as a function of discovery
· communities as forms of intelligence
· intelligence as a currency for understanding & building markets
Similar to the way Google and Yahoo! have built up their businesses concurrently on the enterprise and consumer sides, we are looking at building up a ‘social web index’ that connects networks through small data and rich content. The seminal investor, Marc Andreessen, has described this as a form of rebundling.
Rebundling as a Participatory Construct
Our CEO, Alexis Dufresne, elaborated further on the concept of rebundling when we were in Paris in December for LeWeb:
“We endeavor to build a whole new type of news organization through social web intelligence. That effort comprises a form of rebundling whereby we look at content within the social web as a far more participatory set of actions, created by users (people) and monetized in a decentralized way. ”
— Alexis Dufresne, Faveeo CEO
To provide some more context for you, here is a matrix of the ecosystem in which we currently play. There are four primary coordinates along the axes — data/analytics, content strength, influencer capabilities and network reach.
The central idea here is to develop what we consider to be opportunities around co-curation, in which influence is dimensionalized (and not based on superficial metrics), and content is contexualized (through great storytelling, and the collective wisdom of communities).
Some of these aspects are currently resident in social media ecosystems, but they are mostly muted or bifurcated by immense signal noise. Journalism itself suffers greatly from this phenomenon. As brands get deeper into the journalistic and curatorial mix, this is both a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility.
Enhancing UXD to Better Enable Information & Distribution
Here’s where and how the rubber starts to really meet the road, in our view.
First, we want to dispel the notion that normative search necessarily requires answers. This is not to say that search engines shouldn’t and won’t provide answers to certain queries (obviously they do and they will continue to be better at it), but more to say that the discovery pieces are what matter most to people and organizations that are looking to do better research, and more importantly, to build deeper relationships with audiences and readers. What catalyzes this is the ability to ask better questions (think of Quora or Reddit in reverse).
Second, we want to acknowledge that in doing so, we envision an opportunity for online publishers (to include brands, independents and non-profits) to capitalize on more egalitarian and distributive ways to sustain those relationships. People and groups who ask better questions — of themselves and each other — tend to develop stronger insights, and therefore, have the capability to reach audiences on more realistic and creative terms.
Third, we also see this as a means for people to tell stories and develop content in far more meaningful ways; if they are not confined to rigid revenue models, for one, they have the freedom to express more, to create more expansively, and to help others see their worlds differently and through unique, inspiring lenses.
So now to how this process actually works.
Take a theme or topic such as The Singularity; this is a subject matter area that is still elusive to most people for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it has many contextual implications and interpretations.
You can start with a simple query, and start to visualize the extent of how the context extends outwardly across networks.
As a person ‘sees’ the ecosystem of Singularity topics, he or she can start to interact with certain information, and get a better sense of what he or she intuits as being important or immediate with respect to that topic area.
The process of discovery expands; at the same time, the person is prompted to ‘filter’ and curate more and more. The discovery leads to patterns, which lead to connections, which lead to better understanding of the topic set, as well as how that person might be able to interact with it, through respective communities or tribes within a network.
An infocology develops as the person curates and starts to extract insight from the topic domain. Now, that person has a far better, deeper purview into what the information means to him or her, how it can be retold or developed journalistically, and how it can be leveraged across a network or series of networks.
This takes us from a paradigm based almost entirely on consumption, to one that instills the values and attributes around collaboration, co-creation and consensual (re)distribution.
This is, in our belief, what makes media truly social.
Turning Publishing Into Participatory Design
An infocological approach enables people to publish with clarity, relevancy and impact.
In a world in which ‘big data’ is hyped seemingly to no end, we are looking at small data and microtransactional behaviors as linchpins for the next big wave of the social web. Further, we see publishing as a design process in which information and media become artifacts that are developed with care, empathy and a profound respect for the ecosystem as a whole.
Many people we know are working on amazing intelligent design systems, and we want to play our role in contributing to that shift.
Imagine that phenomena like influence or community or brand are reinvented by virtue of the kinds of recursive and recombinant data and information integrity we can all oversee, as well as through the power of our own transparent networks.
Now imagine that infocology, web publishing and social networking are aligned in unprecedented ways, and the positive effects they will have on individuals, institutions and societies.
We are creating this, with you. Here’s to a very bright infofuture.
(Special thanks to Faveeo’s Cem Sever for his design chops!)
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