I’ve dedicated my whole career trying to elevate and deliver information above the noise, so Robert Scoble’s recent post on the value of tuning into the “noise” itself gave me reason for pause.

“I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news)…. Last year I got a tour of the Wall Street Journal’s West Coast printing plant. They print 60,000 copies an hour. At the end of the tour the head pressman said ‘I’ve been reading this six hours before you did for more than 15 years now and it hasn’t helped yet.’ Why? Cause the news isn’t where the action is: the high value bits are stuck in the noise.”

He’s on to something here. Wall Street wizards have been tuned to the “noise” since the creation of the Stock Market. It’s also something intelligence agencies have known for years and have practiced. In World War II, for example, British and American intelligence analysts tracked regional newspaper articles coming out of Germany, not for the face value of the news itself (which was propagandized), but to conduct content analysis. Piecing together reports of lines at stores, factory closings, and casualty lists helped weave a picture of what was happening on the other side.

Likewise, in recent years, you may have heard in the news intelligence analysts track and perform content analysis on the “chatter” that takes place between suspected terrorists and their sympathizers over email, telephone, and the Web. On a more local level, police departments fight crime by keeping their ears to the ground to get a feel for what’s happening and what’s being said on “the street.”

So, as Scoble puts it, the tools we have out our disposal these days — Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, MySpace, et al, deliver information long before the “official” sources get a hold of it.

The role of enterprise search, in fact, seeks to help pull nuggets of valuable information from the noise of text, relational data, graphics, and all sorts of other data and files flooding our organizations.

Scoble goes on to put it this way:

“I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.”

Our colleague right here, Rob Paterson, in fact, picked up upon this point in recent posts, noting that word of the China earthquake, as well as a rumbler in Virginia, was spreading across the Twitterverse almost real time. Plus, he notes how a corporate entity — H&R Block — is employing Twitter to listen to the “noise” to improve customer relationships.

So, it can be concluded that if you’re listening to the “noise” these days, it’s telling you that people are starting to listen to the noise.

But will there always be an informal, unstructured aspect to such analysis. Can these methodologies be institutionalized and made enterprise ready? Going to parties and gathering intel by listening to drunken stories is something that will never make its way into formal corporate processes. This is the old knowledge management conundrum — how can you capture and bottle informal, unstructured data? How do you capture serendipity — someone runs into a business colleague at an event, and learns that so-and-so is leaving because the company pulled support for a project? How do you take it out of peoples’ heads and digitize it?

Technology is helping to surface some of this serendipity — and pull nuggets from the noise. But some analysts still wonder if consumerish services such as Twitter are quite ready for the enterprise. Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett, for one, says Twitter appears squeamish about getting involved in legal tussles, even when it comes to enforcing its own terms of service. This doesn’t go over too well in building confidence in corporate settings, Dennis added. “Will enterprise trust a service that turns its back on the very community it seeks to foster? The answer to that is a resounding no.” In a previous post, Dennis also questioned whether Twitter’s infrastructure is ready to scale as it needs to meet burgeoning demand.