Making Sense of the Masses

Way back in 99, I used to work for a company called iSyndicate, which made a product called Express, geared toward helping individual content creators (columnists, cartoonists, etc) distribute their content.

I still believe in the dream (and apparently, so does The Colbert Report) - where the masses can freely share information, ideas, research, and so forth. The problem these days (for most of the developed world) is no longer that there is not enough content, but that it's nearly impossible to make sense of it all and find anything actually useful.

Ever try Google blog search? The number of blogsites that pick up pieces of every release known to man in order to drive traffic is astonishing. My favorite one was when we had a product release about a "Search Extender for Google"...which was dutifully appended and retitled "Inxight adds Google Search (Penis extender) to discovery platform". I kid you not.

So how do we expect some cancer researcher to know about some important paper that's been published without having to wade through 10 million Viagra (in various "tricky" spelling variant) websites?

That's my rant. I'd like to posit that Inxight's entity and fact extraction would solve the whole problem, but it won't -- not alone and not without support from some large organization to help us continue to develop and evangelize the solution -- and not without more people rising up to say how unhappy they really are with search today.

Hello? Who wants to dive in?