The Need for Better Knowledge Architecture

Grant McCracken wrote a salient blog post recently that discusses the difficulties of keeping up with all the information there is to keep up with. He voices the need for better “knowledge architecture” – new services that can discover, aggregate, filter and organize information in ways that are relevant, and make sense for individual users.

Grant talks about this need for better knowledge design:

The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.  I won’t pay anything for access to the New York Times.  This is an interesting aggregator, but it’s way too chunky for me to be exquisitely useful.  I want a combination of machine and human editing that gives me all but only the things I need, and for this I am prepared to pay handsomely.

It’s not that we won’t pay for editing.  It’s becoming clear, I think, that we are now eager to pay for editing, even to pay a premium for editing.  (After all, our careers now depend upon early warning, good information, timely intelligence.  Not to know what we need to know in a dynamic economy, what could this cost us?)

This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics: “Data Glutton, Data Pauper”