An Opportunity in Information Exhaustion

There is so much information available to us today that it’s impossible for us to assimilate it all. This will give rise to companies that gather information filtered specifically for our own personal interests.

Since I spent so many years working in newsrooms (see “Journosaur,” previous), I have a fondness for old newspaper movies, some of which will be shown at the Vancouver Film Festival beginning this weekend.

Although they can be over-dramatized, these films did often capture the frenetic energy that used to inhabit newsrooms. I say “used to” on purpose. Those kinds of newsrooms don’t exist any more.

Newspapers were curators

The newspaper’s role, I believe, was to gather news of the day and deliver it to readers. Not all news, of course, but the news that was relevant to the particular general interests of the paper’s readers.

They didn’t call it that, but in a way, newspapers “curated” information for readers. Every day, editors would choose articles they thought most important to their readers from the dozens, hundreds or thousands of stories available. That’s why a local school story took precedence over some major event in a far off country; it had more relevance.

Today, with Google, blogs, online news services, Facebook, Twitter and specialty online newsletters on just about every conceivable subject, that kind of packaged delivery of news doesn’t happen.

The information torrent

Instead, we get a torrent of information – some good, most bad – that’s so tremendous we can’t handle it all. Certain subjects emerge from the river, largely because they’re shared or viewed by large numbers of people – i.e. the word “trending,” to mean what’s hot at this moment – but inevitably they disappear quickly to be replaced by another hot topic.

That’s why, I believe, one of the biggest trends in 2012 is going to be the aforementioned curation of information. Companies that supply this curation – a modern version of what the newspapers used to do – will be hot and probably become darlings of venture capitalists, especially if those companies can figure out how to make a buck from it.

I think we saw the beginning of this trend recently when Summify, the local company nurtured in the now defunct Bootup Labs, was bought by Twitter. Word is the giant microblogging operation wanted the Summify talent, but I believe the concept of curating social media to relevant interests was also part of it.

The shape of things to come

To me, Summify was a forerunner, a harbinger of things to come. We are all going to need intelligent services that aggregate information to our particular tastes and deliver it to us on a platter, so to speak. Smart companies will deliver those services.

Will the newspaper companies of old be the purveyors of those things to come? Potentially, if they can change their business models. Or some broader version of Summify will arrive.

I don’t pretend to know which form will win out. But I do know that people only have so much capacity for information, and unfettered access to all of it is in many ways a bigger problem than no access was.

To me, the next big business opportunity will come from information exhaustion.