InfoUSA''s OneSource Information Services Inc. has been focusing on these human-scaled problems in sales and Customer Relationship Management content integration and has started to apply data mining techniques to provide dramatic improvements to the sales development process. OneSource today announced extensions to its Business Browser and AppLink interfaces that accomplish this on two levels. Its new Company Insights module uses data mining techniques to scan news and research articles assembled from premium content sources to identify and extract text defining strategic initiatives that companies are undertaking, as well as deriving SWOT (strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats) analysis from the same text sources - the kinds of insights that salespeople need to zero in on sales suspects that may have a need for their products and services.  The Company Insights module also uses mining techniques to assemble corporate relationship data that may give a salesperson an inside edge - identifying a client''s key customers and competitors ("Quick, Joe, take XYZCo out of the demo and put in BrandZ!"). The new Executive Insights module assembles detailed profiles of key company, including bio information assembled from Web site information - structured "Googling," if you will - with additional details on key memberships and relationships of executives that may provide new entry points into establishing a meaningful sales relationship. All of this derived from premium and open Web sources that had the information imbedded in them but had nobody unlocking the key to this kind of advanced analytical value.

By deriving content value from less-tamed sources that can be used by a broad professional audience, aggregators such as OneSource are pushing the value of techniques such as data mining to the fore of premium publishing and aggregation. What are some of the key factors to be learned from this trend? A few thoughts come to mind:

•  Aggregators as fabricators rather than collectors. A lot of energy goes into the concept of supporting the workflow of professionals in adding value to content aggregation services. Supporting workflows is important, but eventually someone else comes along with a better piece of technology and the game is back to overcoming the commoditization of a content collection. Today''s competitive environment requires content aggregators and publishers to look at the creative process that they use to assemble content collections and to consider how to fabricate new value out of sources that were previously considered too raw to be of any further value. There is a need for constant and curious innovation in fabricating unique content value today that is moving further away from the importance of specific content collections in providing that value.
• Quality assurance is important, but the value of the materials being checked is the key. Not long ago content from the open Web would have been considered low quality by most premium content vendors. While Web content can be far from perfect, the preponderance of individuals and institutions using the Web for displaying their public profiles to the world is providing a certain degree of self-regulating quality control that is making Web-derived content more valuable than ever. If you''re in a serious business and know that you''re going to be "Googled" - or have to respond to corporate regulatory requirements for public statements - then your public information is going to be very fresh and authoritative. As a result premium content aggregation is moving rapidly from a service to simplify premium publications subscription to a capability that identifies the most valued content available regardless of its source. In the choice between quality assurance on raw diamonds and refined quartz, more content consumers are opting for the diamonds.
• Owning a human solution is more important than owning the content or the technology desktop. The beauty of solutions such as OneSource''s new modules is that they take data mining beyond the realm of fact extraction and towards the realm of context extraction, content that makes sense to people in a human context to solve a human-scaled problem. While OneSource provides services for a wide range of businesses, its strategy of solving specific kinds of business problems for specific kinds of professionals - sales, in this instance - is fast becoming a norm in a content industry that is learning how to place human-oriented solutions above both traditional publishing and pure technology. In this user-centric environment that Shore calls The New Aggregation , being all over your users'' needs is far more important than being all over a published collection or a particular technology platform. It''s a different kind of business for many publishers and aggregators, but one that successful companies such as OneSource are learning rapidly.

Data mining is allowing publishers and aggregators to move from distributors of information to enablers of deep human insight, using sophisticated techniques to identify and deliver what people value most. It''s not a panacea for all content problems, but being a part of the personal solution that most content users need today is the key positioning that publishers and aggregators have to move towards as quickly as possible. As content delves ever deeper into technology, it gets closer to our true human selves. Strange, yet true.

- John Blossom