Information Is Social

Outsell has just published their 2006 Information Industry Outlook report (free reg. req’d), which is chock-full of great findings on how individuals and enterprises are using information their day-to-day and business lives. One of the headlines that jumped out of the report: Information is Social and Peer-to-Peer. Outsell:

“Now, instead of looking ‘up’ to oracles, users are looking sideways – to peers and to social contexts on the Internet, where published information is instantly unveiled, vetted, praised, condemned, corrected, and altered through the ‘wisdom of the masses.'”

This subsection of the report goes on to note the following items as evidence:

• The increasing reliance on colleagues and peers as a source of information
• Blogs and other social publishing media are becoming a key resource for knowledge workers
• The emergence of open models in scientific publishing
• Instant verification (or refutation) of news and peer reaction to events
• Credibility derives from scrutiny of peers
• Youth are sharing and remixing information and will continue to do so (and adults do, too)
• Information intermediaries are still relevant in order to relieve users from the information glut

The points above are from pp. 10-11 of the report, which runs about 30 pages.