I just got back from being on a panel at Supernova entitled, “The Personal Infosphere.” The panel was moderated by Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech VC), and included Dalton Caldwell (imeem), Yael Elish (eSnips), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), and Tariq Krim (Netvibes).

The format included ~6 minutes of introductions/product demos, and then we dove deep into the discussion. Since most of the other panelists run businesses driven by user creation of rich media and the associated broad sharing and categorization of that media, we had some interesting debates related to:

• The relative value of social filtering (e.g. recommendations from people you know) vs. more collaborative filtering (i.e. relying on the wisdom of crowds to derive implicit recommendations/rankings)
• The ways in which the relatively unstructured modes of communication and sharing popular in consumer applications can get translated into a more structured enterprise environment
• Privacy and copyright issues
• Whether a lot of these sites are just creating new information silos, rather than promoting broad sharing and discoverability

All in all, a very interesting panel, although we studiously avoided any discussion of such mundane matters as business models or the applicability of some of these services in the broader marketplace. Plaxo was somewhat of an outlier in terms of the nature of the content we provide, maturity of the company and business model, users base, etc.

Dan Farber just posted an interesting write up of the panel.
Were you at the panel? Any thoughts?

Also, just a reminder that our own John McCrea will be on a panel at Supernova on Friday called Who Owns "You"?.

I just got back from being on a panel at Supernova entitled, “The Personal Infosphere.” The panel was moderated by Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech VC), and included Dalton Caldwell (imeem), Yael Elish (eSnips), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), and Tariq Krim (Netvibes). The format included ~6 minutes of introductions/product demos, and then we dove deep into the discussion. Since most of the other panelists run businesses driven by user creation of rich media and the associated broad sharing and categorization of that media, we had some interesting debates related to:

• The relative value of social filtering (e.g. recommendations from people you know) vs. more collaborative filtering (i.e. relying on the wisdom of crowds to derive implicit recommendations/rankings)
• The ways in which the relatively unstructured modes of communication and sharing popular in consumer applications can get translated into a more structured enterprise environment
• Privacy and copyright issues
• Whether a lot of these sites are just creating new information silos, rather than promoting broad sharing and discoverability

All in all, a very interesting panel, although we studiously avoided any discussion of such mundane matters as business models or the applicability of some of these services in the broader marketplace. Plaxo was somewhat of an outlier in terms of the nature of the content we provide, maturity of the company and business model, users base, etc. Dan Farber just posted an interesting write up of the panel. Were you at the panel? Any thoughts? Also, just a reminder that our own John McCrea will be on a panel at Supernova on Friday called Who Owns "You"?.