Context and Aggregation are king

Daniela recently pointed me to this Bear Stearns report via her blog post.

In it they make the same observations that I and others have been talking about for more than a year.

"User-Generated Content (UGC) Is Not a Fad...
Some investors remain skeptical that UGC is more than a passing fad. However, in our recent online video survey, UGC is the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular content category among men aged 18-34 (M18-34) and among all respondents, respectively. Moreover, if we define UGC as page views only from sites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Wikipedia.org, Blogger.com, and Digg.com (which is quite conservative), we estimate that UGC now accounts for 13% of total U.S. Internet traffic, up from 0%-1% in 2004. Based on these statistics, we submit that UGC is here to stay."

Although using the term UGC is not great, their conclusion sounds very familiar to anyone reading this blog.

"apparent to us that as supply of video content rises, value will shift from content producers to aggregators and packagers of content that can best aid users in finding content that fits their specific interests".

Of course, APML as a way of describing user interests, and Particls as a way of filtering and alerting users about new, personally relevant content, are both key technology pieces to this new media 2.0 reality.

Touchstone declared "Closest to being an Attention Management System"

The Burton Group recently released a report in their series on "Collaboration and Content Strategies".

Specifically this report covered "Techniques to Address Attention Fatigue and Info-Stress in the Too-Much-Information Age" which compares approaches, products and services for Attention Management in the enterprise.

Touchstone was reviewed as part of the vendor lineup. Here are some excerpts.

"[...] The concept of a hub-and-spoke architecture for processing messages and applying attention rules can be found in Touchstone (currently in alpha release) [...] Touchstone is the product on the market that is closest to being an attention management system [...] Touchstone is a useful example of how to specifically target the attention management problem and we look forward to following its development. The company expects to ship the product in early 2007."

I won't give away the ending for them - but suffice to say Information Overload is a significant and growing problem.

I'd like to thank Craig Roth and his team for their hard work in compiling this report to raise awareness of the growing Information Overload problem. We look forward to evolving Touchstone to maintain its position as the platform of choice for the Attention Management issues he outlined in his report and supporting APML for cross-vendor/application compatibility.

You can purchase the report from the Burton Group.

Update: There is a great podcast from Craig about the report and Attention Management themes in general. No mention of Touchstone here but he does describe the problem in simple to understand way.