I like Gist (a bunch). I use it all the time and I've begun to use it for more than just a tracking system for my social media tasks although, this alone I would pay large sums of money for.

The notion of a “gistonomy” falls out of my brief experience with ontologies while at Starbase almost 10 years ago. Ontologies are defined here better than I ever could, but the idea of blending a “taxonomy”, a less precise but well known method of information categorization, with Gist (ergo, “gistonomy”) is to suggest that in the context of a given business role, there ought to be an “…onomy” that can be easily mapped into Gist such that it provide discrete awareness of information in the context of that business role.

Imagine you're the business development officer of an equity funding company. Setting aside your own contacts and historical conversations, what information would that user expect in terms of information flows into Gist? If we assume the information diet should be based solely on the connective tissue of email conversations, contact data, and companies already in the users historical perspective, we rule out the ability of the user to gain advanced awareness of change in their respective market segment.

To be fair. Gist does a phenomenal job of finding information at the periphery of the conversation. In just a few minutes experiencing Gist, you'll know you're dealing with a whole new kind of smarts. But there are limits to how far Gist can take its predictive powers without making its users feel like they're watering potted plants with a fire-hose. Some information sources should be intentionally targeted and sculpted from independent sources.

Our own MyST Net Intelligence service is ideal for creating market intelligence feeds that enhance the Gist experience beyond the obvious benefits of tracking and developing deeper social identity awareness based on your legacy conversations and contacts.

This is the thought process that led me to the idea of gistonomies; discrete information feeds that provide Gist users with significant competitive advantages over a user who relies solely on their own legacy company and contact list.

While we've developed media and competitive intelligence solutions for companies such as Vail Resorts and Citrix, we haven't really focused on the benefits of using our media aggregation services for individuals, but Gist changes the dynamics of this thinking.

Today we have services in place to provide a team of Gist users with a core [secure] market intelligence platform complete with an annotation and collaborative environment. Integrating this information into Gist for a team of marketing professionals takes it up a notch - ergo, a gistonomy.

I've built three Gistonomies for test purposes and they're quite pleasurable to use as they call out news and information in social contexts that typically require lots of time to find and digest. My test gistonomies include:

• Startups/Funding
• Social Media Technology
• Environment and Climate Change

Customers and prospects call me all the time wondering why their traffic is down. They assume it’s something they’ve done (or not done) and they rarely think about outside forces. The idea that you (and you alone) are the cause for traffic reductions is just as silly as believing that you are the cause for the increases. Indeed, you can influence traffic, but any belief that you are the master of your SEO domain is an incomplete version of reality.

There’s a coin-flip chance (or better) that any drop in traffic is likely to correlate with a change in your competitive landscape. Furthermore, you must drill beyond the permafrost to understand causal indicators. Fact: traffic dropped; but traffic from where? It’s important you first isolate the nature of the drop before jumping to any conclusions. Is the drop mostly in organic search referrals? Is the drop mostly from one search engine? Is the drop mostly from a particular portal that always drives visitors to your site? There are dozens and perhaps a hundred causes for traffic dips.

Here are some things you can to do isolate causal effects of traffic or ranking changes - specifically those related to competitive pressure.

1. Search for your preferred key-phrases; note the competitors that rank above you and below you. Repeat this process weekly for a month to understand who is scoring higher and thus pushing you lower. Plot the top twenty positions on a graph; after four weekly measurements you’ll likely see a pattern.
2. Investigate the competitors that flow into the top twenty looking for clues why their content is performing so well for each important key-phrase. Note the page titles and other meta-tags that caused this content to invade your space. You’ll likely see a pattern.
3. Create intelligence channels that focus on these competitors and watch for new product announcements, news, and content items that are likely to put pressure on your own competitive posture. MyST provides automated intelligence-gathering channels to do this, but you can also craft a less-elegant solution with Google Alerts.
4. Compare your social media performance with your website performance to see if both content bodies are experiencing similar loss of traffic. If one is performing better than the other, try to determine the key differences; there’s probably a clue in there.
5. Subscribe to HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and watch for new articles that journalists are working on; get ahead of relevant stories in your industry by creating key-phrase-intensive content in advance of the release of these articles. MyST provides a service called PR-Connect which does this automatically and alerts you to upcoming articles in your industry.

Studying your competitors in terms of traffic is a key performance indicator – don’t assume the problems are related to your site, it’s SEO-ness, or its design.

In 2001, while working at Starbase Corporation as a senior information architect, I wrote about the atomization of information; the continual progression toward smaller chunks of content. It’s been seven years since I suggested knowledge artifacts would eventually be downsized to just a single thought or phrase, or perhaps a web address where a single thought or phrase lived.

My prediction came in the midst of a research project called Elmer; an attempt to unify information artifacts across multiple platforms used in software development. The goal was simple – make it easier to find stuff – specifically, relationships between related engineering processes and tasks.

Twitter is just one instance of my prediction which, at the time, seemed as natural a progression as the emerging read-write web. The trend to create and manage information artifacts with increasingly minute precision is fundamentally sound because it improves the odds that you can find artifacts more readily and employ them individually or collectively in unanticipated ways to solve or avoid problems.

The downside of this trend is the risk in making the assumption that small information objects, by themselves or even collections of objects, represent actionable knowledge. This (I believe) is where Twitter and other popular small-artifact systems drive its unsuspecting hoards of users off the cliff.

The use of 140-character systems to capture and organize information is not a bad thing in and of itself. Making assumptions or conclusions based on narrow information sources, is fundamentally risky behavior if your information diet is critical to good decision-making. If you’re pushing a grocery cart through the aisles at 7-Eleven, you probably have an eating disorder. Twitter is a poor substitute for a balanced information diet and dependence on Twitter to the exclusion of other forms of communication is likely to lead to twipoxemia.