Announcing… Techdirt InfoAdvisor. The Solution To Information Overload 2.0

from the Techdirt-at-work dept

As some of you may be aware, a bunch of us from Techdirt are here at Blogon in New York City to announce the next generation of our corporate service, Techdirt InfoAdvisor. Techdirt has been providing custom corporate intelligence to Fortune 500 level companies in a blog format for five years now — helping employees at those companies to deal with information overload by getting the right information to the right people at the right time, all written by Techdirt’s award winning team of analysts.

As everyone is trying to deal with information overload these days, there seem to be two basic approaches: algorithmic (often seen as yet another blog search engine) or community based (tags, social networks, etc.). Both of these have good things and bad things about them — Techdirt InfoAdvisor adds a human expert layer above them both — leveraging the best of both to provide our corporate customers with just the right information, without overwhelming them with technology terms and sites and services they don’t understand. Of course, it also solves the third approach that too many people have to information overload: ignoring it all completely. Click through to read the details.

The new service, Techdirt InfoAdvisor, takes the concept of a financial advisor and applies it to corporate information needs. Techdirt's analysts not only craft a custom internal blog of important information and analysis, but also create a special portfolio of information within our own platform to meet the different needs of people throughout the company -- because despite what some people claim, following online conversations is hard work. Our analyst team works with customers to understand their information needs -- and then crafts a custom portfolio of information made up of chosen feeds, filtered feeds, created feeds and even full websites, directly within the platform to make them easy to view and read on a regular basis, without getting overwhelmed. We put those sources into context for the user -- assigning them to folders, and even adding descriptions about the sources and the authors, and how it relates to the user specifically (ex. a blog written by someone who works at a competitor -- it's useful to know that info to understand the blog's viewpoint). We make sure the sources stay relevant and current to keep them from overwhelming users.

We then monitor and maintain those portfolios, always looking for new sources of information or seeing if older sources become less relevant. As things change, we're in constant contact with our customers to make sure the information is always relevant -- without having them get overwhelmed with too much information (too many of us know the experience of opening up an RSS reader and seeing thousands of new, unread items).

Some clients are already using the service, which will be generally available later this year. If you're interested in learning more about Techdirt InfoAdvisor, please contact us.

Also... Special bonus points to Todd and his eagle eyes over at GeekNewsCentral for spotting the new service a few weeks early.