I remember being told about the Knowledge Economy in school and that the resources for this economy consist of Data, Knowledge and Information (which I’ll call ‘content’ from now on).

• Data consists of raw symbols that are devoid of meaning.
• Information is what you get when you start to give meaning to the data and the relationships between them.
• Knowledge is the collection of information intended to be useful for a specific purpose.

I realised that there is probably at least another level on top of this and decided to call it wisdom. This is where you have data, information and knowledge and you know what do with it in order to achieve your goal. Wisdom is the ability to interpret content in original ways and separate the useful stuff from the rest. It also allows for someone to question the paradigm in which the content was created and decide whether or not these serve the intended purpose. You can then change the paradigm or look to other paradigms for different perspectives.Sadly for me it turns out I’m not the first one to come up with this idea. A quick search revealed:

Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

and

Knowledge economy becomes global

Anyway, the high quality problem we’ve created for ourselves is information overload. Too much data, information and knowledge that we are having trouble sifting through.

I think this is where wisdom comes in. It filters what’s useful from what isn’t and presents us with the right course of action to take with the content we have at our disposal. In the business world this role has been filled by consultants whom you pay for advice on a course of action.

Thanks to the internet we have access to consultants and experts on every conceivable subject and we can get a lot of information for free. This is the domain of the blogger who dispenses advice and expertise on their niche subject. The other example of wisdom in action on the internet is the rise of social bookmarking and new aggregation sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon. This is the wisdom of crowds in action, bringing to surface the content it’s users think others will benefit from.

Now I know there are flaws with both of these examples. How do you know that the self-proclaimed expert really is what they say they are? And don’t social bookmarking sites tend to promote content that appeals to the lowest common denominator? Valid concerns of course, but nothing solutions can’t be found for. And at the very least people tend to vote with their feet. If one person or site doesn’t seem to have the necessary wisdom to help users then they’ll find someone or somewhere that does.

I think the Wisdom Economy consists of people adding value to content with their wisdom and being paid for it by clients wanting to save time and money. This will happen either directly through fees or indirectly through advertising.