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