Pile it high and sell it cheap
Jinfo Blog

11th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Ripples of anxiety about information quality seem to be unsettling the content industry currently. A new report calls for ‘intelligent information’ to mitigate data overload, a group is wondering about quality rating websites – and there’s concern at the rapidly growing use of Twitter, not as a medium for sounding off, but as a search engine. Coming shortly after Dow Jones’s Bad Info report (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29571 for background), a new study from Thomson Reuters finds that, when faced with unsorted, unverified ‘raw’ data, 60% of decision makers will make ‘intuitive’ decisions that can lead to poor outcomes. The solution posed in its report, Intelligence, Intuition and Information, launched recently at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival (http://www.aifestival.org/), is to build information systems round a Hierarchy of Information Need (HIN). Under this system, algorithms ensure the incoming data meets the three criteria of being trustworthy, connected and contextualised. Real time trading may have been Thomson Reuters’ first priority, but the need for contextual data, rapidly applied, in the wider legal and regulatory information market also drove the development of its WestlawNext search tool (summary and link to report at http://digbig.com/5bcacx). Coincidentally, Reuters is also one of the members of the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC), a group set up to look after the interests of those responsible for the controlled placement of identical content in multiple sources. According to recent articles in Media Week (http://digbig.com/5bcacy) and on CBS’s CNET technology website (http://digbig.com/5bcada), some of its members are worried about the growth of ‘content mills’ – services that that produce large numbers of cheaply sourced features, designed simply to maximise search engine hits and advertising revenue. To guard against this devaluation of content and associated ‘junking up’ of search engines, ICSC (http://www.internetsyndication.org/) is exploring the possibility of creating a public set of quality guidelines for Internet content, or even an accreditation process. However although such a system, if successful, could drive up use of conventionally syndicated content, it might also conceivably crowd out some expert blogs where comment, not factual reporting, is the value added. All the same, the need for quality control is becoming ever more urgent, if only because of the number of people who alarmingly now seem to be using Twitter for searching. Back at Aspen again, Twitter’s Biz Stone reported that search volume was up 33% since April; according to the Search Engine Land blog this means that it now nearly matches that of Yahoo and Bing put together (http://digbig.com/5bcadb). This is potentially worrying; as paidContent:UK pointed out, whatever their limitations, conventional search engines do at least cover considered, extended content as well as the more off-the-cuff variety (http://digbig.com/5bcadc). Basing business decisions on Google is alarming enough – but relying on Twitter…

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