Social Internet

My passion project

So yesterday I was doing some research on how women and men behave online and stumbled upon scribd.com
I’ve known of that website for a long time but I never really used it because the interface didn’t please me and there are too many ads cluttering the home page. But when I landed on scribd.com yesterday, I end up spending over 45 minutes hunting through its archives and database and downloading interesting reports. I also found pdfs of Haruki Murakami’s Norweigan Wood and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. What really amazed me was the amount of information people are making available for others online. Scribd and Slideshare.net are both fantastic examples of a milder version of an online university.

There are basically two types of information people are sharing online: 1) Organized 2) Chaotic. Here’s how I breakdown both: The kind of information offered on sites like scribd.com and slideshare.net represents an individual’s organized thinking: perhaps about an idea, or a topic of interest to them. Their thoughts are usually clear and they articulate it in the form of a presentation or a document. I classify this kind of free information share as organized information — in which, you may not learn a lot about people, but you learn a lot about what they know.

The other type of information share that is happening online is chaotic - this information share is anecdotal, visual, literal and often metaphorical. It may even border on offensive to unnecessary. This type of information can be found on free photo and video sharing websites, blogs, microblog platforms and other avenues like 43things.com, post-secret and ihate.com. This type of chaotic information share can and is usually done behind a mask of anonymity.

As a strategist, I’m most interested in understanding how this information share can be turned to our advantage and how we can actually make sense and benefit from this share. How can we analyze and derive  conclusive learnings from this information share? I hear that several agencies and companies are already employing and using spiders and other web programs to gather the free information floating out on the web ether - but I’m more interested in discovering patterns and processes that surround this scenario and figuring out, if there is one, a universal and singular method that can successfully make sense of this massive database of information.

This is my passion project and has been on my mind for the last couple of months. I have some ideas around how to realize this and I’m using the help of some smart, enlightened strategists to help me take this to the next level - but I’m asking you as well — can you help me?

My idea hasn’t matured to the next level and a lot of critical thinking that hasn’t happened yet needs to happen before any of this can make sense to you but I’m excited and I return home from work every night to work on this…

And to add one point of clarification - I’m not looking to develop a system that trolls blogs and other media sites and spews out a reports. There are plenty of those out there already. I know what I am proposing does not have a one-size-fit-all solution — I’m not looking to create another aggregator. What I’m looking to do is simply provide a better means to make sense of the free-floating chaotic information to people like me, who want to better understand people/ consumers.

This idea stemmed out of my very recent experience in the agency-life - any new project undergoes (and rightfully so) massive amounts of primary and secondary research. What I’m trying to prove is, because people are already sharing intimate details of their lives on the web, there has got to be a better way to include those insights in our work.

Anyways…

Spring in New York is beautiful - and it feels like it might have finally arrived. This morning when I was getting ready to leave for work, my area was shrouded in mist. I live by the river in Jersey City/ Exchange Place. It’s only 4 minutes from NYC in the PATH trains but it’s an island of it’s own. Very slow -almost fairy tale like with subdued yellow lights and light-rails right out of an Enid Blyton book making up for the city-scape. (Atleast until you reach the umpteen construction sites…) Anyways, it’s a beautiful day today and I wish more days like today

Happy, almost, summer.