Why is Microsoft buying Fast and why should we care?

David Weinberger will be speaking at the Fast Forward conference in Feb. I mention this in the context of his helpful thoughts about how the world is going to be “organized” when there is so much content available.

The world no longer has to be organized in a hierarchy.  It can be found instead.

It appears that Micorsoft sees the value in enabling people within enterprises to discover the “Wisdom of Crowds”. No longer does the Enterprise have to Organize its information in an ever more cumbersome and complex hierarchy. What Microsoft hope they can offer the user is easy access to anyhting inside the organization – just as Google is allowing us such access outside. With this approach to search, the full power of the enterprise knowledge can be accessed relatively easily. This might actually start to change things?

This leads me to another point about Media, TV and Radio.

TV and radio Content is today largely organized as a library or worse. Much of the content is simply a set of lists or even worse a set of Banker’s Boxes with stuff in it that you have to rummage through to find. Look around station or Producers sites – I wont embarrasss them by linking. You will see a catalog or worse a long, long list of stuff with no way of finding it or finding out whether the content is worth looking at.
My sister lost a 4 carat diamond a few years ago while cleaning out the horses in her barn. The diamond remains latently valuable but only if a person was to find it. That is what it is like for most stations and producers. If you have diamonds, they are in the shit somewhere and no one knows how big they are. PS her old farm is in new Jersey.

So many in TV and Radio have not got one of the key value issues in the new media. If I cannot find it easily and if I cannot evaluate whether I should use my precious time, no matter how good the content is – it has little or no value.

Organizing content to be found and to be evaluated will be a critical source of value in the new media when content will approach the infinite.

More later