Although I like to keep most personal news off of the ResourceShelf blog, a bit of personal news today.
Earlier this afternoon I learned that Ask.com is taking the company in a new and different direction and I will not be a part of it.
The story about the company's new direction is being announced right now. More here.
Sad news? Sure it is, but it has been a great experience and I'm glad I was able to be a part of. No tears, just smiles. It's time to move on.
This two year adventure (almost to the day) has been fun, educational, and all around a great time. It sure made getting up in the AM and/or waiting for delayed flight easy. It's so awesome to have a job you love and to be part of a product you believe in.
I learned a lot about the search business and made many friends at the company. Friends who I plan to have as friends for a long time. I would like to thank all of them. You made Ask.com a great place to work.
The product was good two years ago and hopefully I contributed just a bit to make Ask even better than it was before.
I would also like to thank all of my librarian/info pro colleagues for all of your support, ideas, and ears during the past two years. As one of my tasks It was cool to represent the info pro community inside the company.
Let's Go
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It's time to move forward and on to another full time job. Where it will be and what I will do is TBD but I am looking forward to seeing what's out there and where I might be able to contribute.
Moving Forward
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First, I plan on keeping all of my speaking commitments for 2008 that have been made so far.
Second, ResourceShelf and DocuTicker will continue. Would you expect anything less? :-)
Remember, both sites are now group efforts (thanks to the RS and DT team) and keeping the sites going, doing what we've been doing for seven years* will not stop. I would also like to thank Ask.com for allowing us to keep both sites running at full steam and independent.
Third, I will spend time looking for a new job.
* Btw, this week is the seventh anniversary of ResourceShelf. Wow! Thank you so much for your interest that continues to grow each and every day.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
