I have been dwelling on Tom Matrullo’s thoughtful post, An Adjacency of Opposites, which put the spotlight on Clare Hart’s and David Weinberger’s back-to-back talks at FASTforward08, and their apparent differences in approach to the emergence of the user revolution. (If you haven’t yet, check out Jerry Michalski’s interviews with Clare and David here on the fastforward blog.)

First, I should acknowledge the compliment Tom extended us at FAST in stating: “…it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both.” (Clare and David’s perspectives, that is.) But it was actually a simple decision, as their perspectives represent what we view as adjacent planes in a larger conversation about uncovering meaning in an online world where answers hide in plain sight.

One big reason it made sense to slot Clare and David together is that they have what amounts to very similar backgrounds in confronting some of the largest and most challenging problems in online information access and provisioning. They didn’t just arrive on the FASTforward08 big stage with a bunch of fresh and innovative ideas; for each of them, the ideas have been developing over careers that have spanned a couple of decades. In David’s case, it included time at Open Text and some serious familiarity with the pioneer legacy of Tim Bray’s search index of the Oxford English Dictionary and the mid-‘90’s Open Text Index of the Web, at one point among the largest of Web search engines. In Clare’s case, it included grappling with the issues of aggregating news and professionally published journals - thousands of sources and hundreds of thousands of incremental items daily - from the early days of dial-in Dow Jones News Retrieval to today’s almost unrecognizably improved Factiva experience (the dashboard that she shared with the gathering in Orlando).

So adjacency is the strong concept, uncovering meaning is the practice. I would propose to Tom that it is not so much about there being two opposites here as about evidence of complementary practices where the user is concerned. We might think of adjacent opposites in the sense of two sides of a coin. “Heads” and “tails” can serve as powerful differentiators, if we want to decide quickly between two options. But if we want to get the benefit of the coin’s “practice” as money, we have to use the whole coin.

For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of “the new front page” is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content.

But most of the time, we are not interacting with information just for its own sake – we don’t search because we decided to come into work in the morning and spend 45’ searching – we are interacting with information because we want to accomplish something. And there’s great news! As David says, we now can use metadata as a lever to pry what we need out of the amazing sea of data and content out there. And in the Factiva work toward provisioning role-based interfaces that aggregate news and journal content and blogs and videos for a number of common professions in business, Clare is taking a lead in shaping the generic use of metadata into a practice that allows the users’ context to construct at least algorithmically emergent “dashboard” environments. And these can leverage that web messiness to help people get very specific things accomplished quickly. Is this an objectionable overlay of structure? Ask the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t work without their Bloomberg machines.

To leverage the user revolution, we need both Clare’s and David’s perspectives to engage in the next-gen practice of sense making in a “read-write” world. We need to promote the “messiness” of the web’s contributed and participatory metadata while at the same time we need search and provisioning tools that keep us from being buried in the very mess that creates the additional value. In the conversation between these two “corners,” as Tom calls them, we are just now starting to see where the search patterns will emerge to drive the web experiences we will choose — as people and as professionals.