Now that “Google-ing” has become a familiar and accepted mode of discovering information about someone on the sly, it should come as no surprise that all kinds of interesting tidbits can be found on the Internet about almost anyone. Even so, I confess that I was a little taken aback when I found this profile of myself on ZoomInfo.com. The profile is an automatically compiled resume of sorts that has extracted information about me from various websites and, using artificial intellilgence, interprets and arranges the disparate bits into a coherent description of me and my background. I showed it to a colleague who, by the way, also has his own profile, and his first reaction was “this was automatically generated? Without your knowledge?” Jon’s reaction is a testament to the fact that, as cool as the ZoomInfo technology may be (and it is pretty cool — although not infallible) one’s first response is to feel that one’s privacy has been invaded. Then, once you calm down a bit and realize that there’s nothing in your profile that you haven’t already made public on one site or another, that creepy feeling subsides.

Then, calming down still further, I began to realize how useful it would be — and, in a way, how obvious — to be able to restrict an Internet search to “people” only — not in a white pages sense, but in a way that would reveal their titles, educational background, etc. For employee recruiting, or prospecting for potential new clients, this could be a powerful tool. Of course, you can’t do any of that with the basic version, and it wasn’t clear to me how costly even available the premium version would be. Still, ZoomInfo.com is a first step in the direction of a more organized and directed search experience.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 9:39 am and is filed under Finds, Search and SEM.