Who I am and who you are - The Information Stack
Who I am and who you areBy Jos Schuurmans You're holding the first issue of The Information Stack. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for your attention — which, as you may know, is exactly the thing I think we should be more careful about giving away. If you're among the first to read this, there's a good chance you know me. I'll be sending this to people in my network first, before opening it up more broadly. So consider yourself an early witness to something I've been meaning to start for a long time. I would describe myself as an entrepreneur by way of journalism. Dutch-born, living in Finland since 1999. Trained as a journalist, I moved through early digital publishing, corporate communications at Nokia, and eventually co-founded Cluetail in 2009 together with Minna, my journalist wife — to help companies with international aspirations make sense of complex information environments. As journalists, Minna and I had always grappled with the same challenge: how do you get up to speed on a topic quickly, without losing the nuance? How do you identify, as fast as possible, the questions worth asking and the sources worth following? At the advent of Web 2.0, content feeds were still reverse-chronological, not yet driven by algorithmic profiling. In some communities, the signal-to-noise ratio wasn't half bad. The question was whether you could systematically surface what the thought leaders in a given field were paying attention to — and use that as a signal. That question led to a first prototype of collaborative filtering, built under the name Eleet (Finnish for 'Gestures'), when we entered the Uutisraivaaja news innovation competition hosted by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and made it to the finals. The internet never forgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yKuLTyrg4 The idea has since been reborn under the name Siftler. The goal is a transparent, deterministic, non-AI implementation that can power alternative feeds on social platforms, run on the decentralised web, and serve organisations that need tailored information monitoring. I'll have more to say about where that stands — and what recently changed — in my next issue. This newsletter follows that work, and the broader conversation it belongs to: digital sovereignty and cognitive resilience, alternatives to black-box algorithms, the siege on the Fourth Estate, media literacy, the EU's Digital Services Act, and practical approaches to information management for teams and individuals in knowledge-intensive settings. The topics range widely, but the thread running through them is always the same — what reaches people, and why. Now I'd like to hear from you. What is the one information problem you haven't found a good solution to — whether in your work or your personal life? And: is there a voice in this space you think I should know about — a researcher, a journalist, a thinker — who doesn't get enough attention? Feel free to reply here, or write directly to jos@josschuurmans.com. More soon. |
Who I am and who you are - The Information Stack
Who I am and who you areBy Jos Schuurmans You're holding the first issue of The Information Stack. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for your attention — which, as you may know, is exactly the thing I think we should be more careful about giving away. If you're among the first to read this, there's a good chance you know me. I'll be sending this to people in my network first, before opening it up more broadly. So consider yourself an early witness to something I've been meaning to start for a long time. I would describe myself as an entrepreneur by way of journalism. Dutch-born, living in Finland since 1999. Trained as a journalist, I moved through early digital publishing, corporate communications at Nokia, and eventually co-founded Cluetail in 2009 together with Minna, my journalist wife — to help companies with international aspirations make sense of complex information environments. As journalists, Minna and I had always grappled with the same challenge: how do you get up to speed on a topic quickly, without losing the nuance? How do you identify, as fast as possible, the questions worth asking and the sources worth following? At the advent of Web 2.0, content feeds were still reverse-chronological, not yet driven by algorithmic profiling. In some communities, the signal-to-noise ratio wasn't half bad. The question was whether you could systematically surface what the thought leaders in a given field were paying attention to — and use that as a signal. That question led to a first prototype of collaborative filtering, built under the name Eleet (Finnish for 'Gestures'), when we entered the Uutisraivaaja news innovation competition hosted by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and made it to the finals. The internet never forgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yKuLTyrg4 The idea has since been reborn under the name Siftler. The goal is a transparent, deterministic, non-AI implementation that can power alternative feeds on social platforms, run on the decentralised web, and serve organisations that need tailored information monitoring. I'll have more to say about where that stands — and what recently changed — in my next issue. This newsletter follows that work, and the broader conversation it belongs to: digital sovereignty and cognitive resilience, alternatives to black-box algorithms, the siege on the Fourth Estate, media literacy, the EU's Digital Services Act, and practical approaches to information management for teams and individuals in knowledge-intensive settings. The topics range widely, but the thread running through them is always the same — what reaches people, and why. Now I'd like to hear from you. What is the one information problem you haven't found a good solution to — whether in your work or your personal life? And: is there a voice in this space you think I should know about — a researcher, a journalist, a thinker — who doesn't get enough attention? Feel free to reply here, or write directly to jos@josschuurmans.com. More soon. |