There was an interesting summary of a panel discussion held at Harvard Business School last month in the HBS Working Knowledge newsletter today. The event, “The Technology Revolution and its Implications for the Future,” centered on the internet as a means of communications. The discussion touched on some of the areas I spend my time thinking about, particularly social networking, knowledge management and privacy. While they do not call it knowledge management the popular social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace do spend a great deal of effort trying to make sense of all of the information being poured into them. Everyday gigabytes of blog posts, bulletins, notes and photos are added to a huge knowledge base about the network’s users. And, while the sites do provide varying means for the posters to give that content meaning, such as categories and tags, from an information management perspective, the data is far too disorganized to be that meaningful. Right now that is fine since the content is mainly viewed by users, or friends, who already have a relationship with the poster. These users can “fill in the gaps” with their personal knowledge of the poster. But increasingly the need to make money off of this information means that, from the site owner’s perspective, the most important consumer will be robot programs which draw meaning out of the raw postings to serve up highly targeted ads to the users of the network. We can see this type of concept being put into play with Google’s AdSense program which are the little ads you see on so many web pages. Google uses their web searching tools to find the key points of a page and then puts related ads onto that page. In a social network the big prize which they all are working towards is incorporating what they know about the user to further tailor the ads that user is presented with. Not only will the content be evaluated but they sites are attempting to figure out what a particular user is looking at on a particular page. This means they will be trying to figure out what the relationship between the viewer and the poster is. Will this mean they will go so far as evaluating the private messages the users have shared over the network? While actually disclosing those communications would be the downfall of any social network, using them to create a profile of the users and their relationship is not out of the question. The summary did not delve into this deeply but the discussion sparked the issue.
The discussion also involved how people use the technologies in their daily lives, in particular cell phones and the drive to interactive TV. It makes for interesting reading.