We’ve all heard it said “Knowledge is power.” That may only partially be true. Back around the time of Christ there were two schools of thought: Knowledge and Wisdom. To the Greek, it was all about Knowledge - amass much information as you can in order to be wise; but there was a second school of thought that came out of the Jewish culture: Wisdom. To the Jew, wisdom was the right use of knowledge and to possess knowledge and not do anything with it was a waste of time and energy.

We’re starting to see this battle happen again here in our modern culture. There is a growing number of data sources available to us on the internet - as businesses and as consumers. Data by itself is useless, like knowledge alone was to the Greek, but the ability to aggregate the data and pair it with a person who can use it is exactly what the Jewish person was after.

…with the galloping growth of blogs (some 80,000 new blogs are created every day, according to blog search engine Technorati) and the proliferation of social-network sites, a growing group of companies is trying to figure out how to turn the cacophony of personalized information into usable form - and viable businesses. They call it the Shared, Trust or Referral Economy, and it is the current obsession of every Web company from Amazon to Yahoo!

The personal information being left behind on Social Networking Tools and blogs is critical information some groups and useless to others. Every consultant should be taking a queue from Amazon and Yahoo! right now and begin to look at the data resources they have available to them and see where they can pair up the data with someone who could benefit from it - that is profitable in any economy.

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