Reducing the need to search

The market’s acceptance of the Adobe/Yahoo agreement to serve up contextual ads within PDFs should be interesting to watch. On external facing documents this makes sense; embedding relevant ads within e.g. a User Guide is a good idea, particularly for complex consumer technology products. Plus the opportunity for publishers to monetize their content is hard to resist. Beyond this, however, is a more interesting application of the underlying concept…

For a manufacturer, what’s the corollary for contextual ads for internal facing documentation that is part of a production workflow and driven by collaboration systems? Ads in this instance would deliver contextual information in order to update, motivate, or educate the end user. From that perspective, it would make sense for corporations to implement this capability, I mean, who doesn’t want to update, motivate or educate their employees? The next question becomes, what would this look like?

One potential approach is to deliver an “ad” within all information presentation applications (documents, PowerPoint, Flash, training videos, etc.) that is defined by topic, and is continuously updated across all media sources, including Wikis, Blogs, Flash, Video, E-mail, PDF, etc. All information within the application would have an “ad” that’s a topic-based rich media portlet for all other relevant information sources on that topic.

What you end up with is an information entity that exists as a rich media topic or set of topics that is constantly evolving as it comes into contact with other information entities within it’s ecosystem, whether human or digital.

This also eliminates the need to search, all relevant information associated with whatever you’re looking at it is already there. More on this later.