Information Excess vs. Value Added Aggregation

There's a new web site for business authors called Insightory.com, where you can post your business reports and research work. It's a great resource for professionals and academics who are looking for a larger audience for their work.

I recently posted a few white papers there and within a week or so they've had dozens of views. The most popular document on Insightory right now is a report on private equity by Vijay Singh Pooni; it has had more than 1000 views in about 3 months. For a business or academic author, this could be a great boon; if you're looking for good business writing it could be a big help, too.

Site founder Avneet Jolly tells me that the site launched in November 07, and it's already getting about 15,000 visitors per month, and about 100,000 page views per month. There are about 1000 registered users, but you only have to register if you want to upload a document.

The principle underlying the potential success of Insightory is the value of thoughtful aggregation in the face of massive information excess. Just as a test, I entered "innovation" into Google just now, and it returned 105 million results. So then I tried again with "permanent innovation" and the total came down to a much more manageable 1 million. More manageable, but still way too many.

If it works, the added value of Insightory would be that brings better quality results than web searching. Thus, Jolly notes that only about 50% of the documents that are uploaded to Insightory are actually posted; the rest are filtered out.

There's a lot of potential for social networking and other layers of differentiation to be added to the site; if things go well for Insightory they'll probably be developed in the coming months.

Check it out and please let me know if you find anything useful.