3 ms·

The "fundamentally new" system for defining relevance is the social graph. It's why Facebook and Twitter are so hot.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
That's partly true, but given the way that the social graph is used today, I don't think it can satisfy the entire need. The social graph is essentially a personal thing, not professional. Assuming that we see a need to partition our professional and personal lives (and that should be true, in order to protect both sides), then the professional side isn't going to be reflected well in the personal graph. So long as our networking tools don't recognize this split, they are going to be (relatively) starved for content that is strongly oriented towards the professional world. For example, I wouldn't expect my wife to be able to find deep information about Medicare reimbursement if we relied on mining social sites.
- johnzabroski 16y ago
  For a lot of professional needs, the most valuable information is hidden in the deep web. For example, many MIS/DSS/ERP/CRM/TLA systems don't provide a lot of public information about how their systems work, so if you are trying to evaluate the market place, it would probably take you 3-6 months of research. For example, I work at a healthcare services start-up, and we have one person full-time researching our competitors and figuring out how to differentiate us in the marketplace, as well as figure out what keywords someone might search for to find this kind of product. We're mainly mathematicians and smart programmers who found a way to break into the market initially, not marketers, so our terminology doesn't match domain experts well. Anecdotally, I think most users are VERY bad at ranking how valuable information is. For example, we'll get paid $100,000/year for something that takes 1 week and provides zero insight into their business, and then they will refuse to pay us at all for something that makes them $30,000,000 a year! This is so common that I am wondering if its more a symptom of human nature than our customers.
  - schwabacher 16y ago
    I am really curious what makes them $30,000,000 a year? Are they getting it for free, or are they loosing out on the income?
    - johnzabroski 16y ago
      Fixing their billing procedures and optimizing their price list for services. This is pretty tricky stuff and easy to get wrong, because there are many factors that influence how hospitals get paid, such as stoploss rules, carve outs, worker's compensation groupers, various mother-baby rules, etc. Often times hospitals receive $0 for something they should be getting $10 million per year for, just because nobody ever contests the NOPAY response. Finding that sort of error isn't easy.

That's partly true, but given the way that the social graph is used today, I don't think it can satisfy the entire need. The social graph is essentially a personal thing, not professional. Assuming that we see a need to partition our professional and personal lives (and that should be true, in order to protect both sides), then the professional side isn't going to be reflected well in the personal graph. So long as our networking tools don't recognize this split, they are going to be (relatively) starved for content that is strongly oriented towards the professional world. For example, I wouldn't expect my wife to be able to find deep information about Medicare reimbursement if we relied on mining social sites.

johnzabroski 16y ago
For a lot of professional needs, the most valuable information is hidden in the deep web. For example, many MIS/DSS/ERP/CRM/TLA systems don't provide a lot of public information about how their systems work, so if you are trying to evaluate the market place, it would probably take you 3-6 months of research. For example, I work at a healthcare services start-up, and we have one person full-time researching our competitors and figuring out how to differentiate us in the marketplace, as well as figure out what keywords someone might search for to find this kind of product. We're mainly mathematicians and smart programmers who found a way to break into the market initially, not marketers, so our terminology doesn't match domain experts well. Anecdotally, I think most users are VERY bad at ranking how valuable information is. For example, we'll get paid $100,000/year for something that takes 1 week and provides zero insight into their business, and then they will refuse to pay us at all for something that makes them $30,000,000 a year! This is so common that I am wondering if its more a symptom of human nature than our customers.
- schwabacher 16y ago
  I am really curious what makes them $30,000,000 a year? Are they getting it for free, or are they loosing out on the income?
  - johnzabroski 16y ago
    Fixing their billing procedures and optimizing their price list for services. This is pretty tricky stuff and easy to get wrong, because there are many factors that influence how hospitals get paid, such as stoploss rules, carve outs, worker's compensation groupers, various mother-baby rules, etc. Often times hospitals receive $0 for something they should be getting $10 million per year for, just because nobody ever contests the NOPAY response. Finding that sort of error isn't easy.