The third in a series on the ideas we received

Undoubtedly one of the key challenges in today’s world is managing the ever growing information tsunami. Accessing and creating huge quantities of information is easy, but sorting the wheat from the chaff is the problem. A significant number of responses from our idea collection drive challenged The Economist to present a solution.

Enthusiastic readers of The Economist often hail the publication as their primary trusted source of global news and analysis. While they may read traditional newspapers daily, either in print or online, their weekly issue of The Economist provides the aggregation of the most important issues of that week plus analysis and opinion. In our idea collection, many contributors suggested expanding The Economist’s service of “trusted advisor and overseer” and applying it to information available online.

There was strong support among idea contributors for The Economist to become the “gateway” or “sorter” of a wider body of information beyond that purely generated by itself. Colin Henderson wrote: “I trust the Economist, I trust the content, I trust their analysis and their predictions. But I get all the rest of the information from the internet sorted through Google…..I need a trusted source…that assimilates all the news and information, assesses it, within my personal context and presents it to me.”

Many internet users are already taking advantage of using and “readers” (such as ) to streamline their online information intake, but this is often based on the user having previously visited a site and having chosen to receive the information feeds from it. Colin’s proposal suggests The Economist becomes the user’s primary respected source which also trawls the internet on the user’s behalf delivering content it feels is most appropriate based on The Economist’s assessment of value, reliability and news-worthiness.

“It learns from me as I read”, Collin adds. This type of benefit can, to some extent, be achieved with community feedback, as suggested by Earl Killian. With the ability to rate articles and add comments before sharing one’s reading with one’s friends, you build a communal system of receiving information which is most likely to meet your fields of interest. and currently allow this type of interaction with their “tagging” and “posting to friends” functionality. In one of our brainstroming sessions we also came up with the thought of somehow collecting data of our subscribers’ surfing behaviour to compile lists, such as “The Economist’s reader’s favorite websites” and “what other readers of this article have read”. Sites like and Last.fm - go some way to carrying out this type of action.

Iain Wicking was on the same train of thought with his proposal suggesting readers could set up specific preferences of their interests, to guide the delivery of preferred information. As Iain notes, “the issue is not the quantity of information but the difficulty of finding, making use of and sharing relevant information”.

An Economist Intelligence Unit colleague suggested exploring the application of tools which show the interrelationships between concepts, as a possible solution. Such services can ease information overload or highlight information clusters. Dann Anthony Maurno suggested a point’n'click globe: Economist data and analysis overlaid on allowing the reader to scan the globe and zero in on a location of interest to access the relevant country and regional data. Reuters have a Beta version of a map that does something similar (see below). Alternatively, one could move the mouse over a timeline which tells you about major events by time and a keyword.

Such developments look like they could be implemented by primarily using new and developing technology, but another contributor, Jing (who doesn’t want us to publish the surname), points out that “people still like an editorial staff to screen for quality and relevance”. Its this kind of thinking that suggests to me that the traditional role of publisher could move from their managing their own-produced content to managing a “standard”. Jing’s idea was more specifically related to consolidating and summarising the blogosphere, but the principle could be applied to other online content: that a respected source like The Economist could present for its readers the dominant viewpoints, showcase the various views for debate and even link to wider related event coverage, including multi-lingual reporting.

Shannon Bauman is supportive of a similar concept of multi-level news access, further proposing this to be available as a mobile, audio version allowing one to delve deeper, or skip and skim the various articles as suits one’s requirements.

The Economist and other publishers of much loved media are in the very fortunate position that they already provide their readership a service for which they are often well regarded and respected. Rather than sounding the death knell of such media, the internet may, by its own complicated nature, provide the new direction by which such media can flourish in the future: as the font of all knowledge, in your chosen publisher’s colour.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, thank you to all those who have contributed suggestions relating to managing information.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Innovation, Web 2.0, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.