October 7, 2005
Robert Scoble is looking for an HDTV set and search is not working for him. If you read his blog entry, he talks about how search engines should anticipate a role a consumer is playing and reveal information correctly. That's one company attempting to anticipate thousands, if not millions, of possible requests. I think this is the wrong approach. In my opinion this is only one step better than broadcast marketing, at least Google has the chance to laydown several different "ads" and returns one that it hopes meets the consumer needs.
I think this is totally the wrong approach - at least for consumers wanting information on products/services that merchants wish to sell.
If I'm interested in something, I would like to "PUBLISH" that I am interested in some information, and that those that wish to service my needs should prepare that information (in the format that I specify), and leave it where I can review it at a time when I so choose.
Thats what I call - "Consumer Managed Marketing". Robert Scoble evangelises that RSS puts the consumer in control, and I agree that RSS does give consumers the choice to "listen" attentively, but what I want is the ability to manage the 'right" to speak to me!
The challenge is how to a) define what I'm looking for , b) get merchants to pay attention (really hard), and 3) how to tell me where I can do to pick it up when its ready (and not have my contract points spammed to death).
So what do you think blogosphere - how can we work together to take control of marketing?
That could avoid the need to search yourself - but what if you get lots of answers? Then you need to search again to find the pieces of information that match your needs most closely.
I'd try the straight approach: A kind of a blog, where one can post his/her information needs, which is forwarded to subscribers via RSS. - Currently, I have no concept, how to (a) define your information needs, but if a solution for that can be found, then there implicitely should be a way to automatically read that definition. Then it would be easy for a merchant to filter the postings and react if there's something requested he can supply. I think, under this circumstance it would become the merchant's interest to pay attention to that "channel".
Wolfram
First off - let me congratulate you on being my first comment!
In regard to your straight approach with RSS - RSS is really a new tool against an old concept. It simply allows you to broadcast your thoughts and ideas out on a channel. Those that are interested simply subscribe - sounds like TV doesn't it.
The problem with RSS is that with everyone speaking, it's simply getting noisy. The first answer is to introduce a sweet of services that allows the categorization and indexing of all the feeds. Google did it for web pages, and soon will follow for blogs. The challenge with blogs is that they can rapidly change and the search engines are trying to figure out how to know whom is updating what how often.
This still just leaves us to search, search, search. What I would like is something to dynamically match my current needs, with those that would like to address my needs. We have lots of issues here though and you mentioned one of them - so many people could answer that I would have to search that (although that would be a much, much smaller search that what Google is trying to do now). The other one that is going to really hurt is SPAM - if you have an invitation out, can you image the idiots that would be knocking on your "electronic" door and leaving stuff.
It's not a perfect world, but I have to believe that we can overcome it, and have something better than what we have now.