Who is an expert?

In today's world specialization rules. Professionals active in any industry vertical always specialize in very narrow areas of business, technology, medicine, management, financial services, etc. This is clearly seen in domain of IT where some people spend nearly a lifetime to become true experts in just one system or platform (e.g. .NET or SAP specialist), or in medicine where hundreds of specializations (e.g. hand or brain surgeon). When we call somebody a "telecom specialist" or "expert in money trading" we usually mean that they are specialists in some specific areas like radio communications or foreign exchange, respectively.

I have been active in IT and Telecom for 30 years but I would hardly call myslelf a "Telco expert". I am indeed an expert in service creation, service delivery platforms, telecom middleware, and a few other areas, but ask me about optoelectronic or voice codex - I know they what they are, but in these topics I an a layman rather than expert.

Therefore, if we want to measure our "level of expertise" we need to do this in a very narrow areas. This observation is the corner stone of Azouk Expert Rating algorithm that aims at providing an objective way of measuring the "expertise" of industry professionals in all relevant areas of their domain (industry vertical).

The Expert Rating is also applied to professional content, like papers, presentations, market updates, product descriptions, blog posts, etc. In this case, we can measure the "relevance" of a content iteme to specific topics, technologies, standards, services, etc. By doing semantic analysis and applaying Expert Rating we can quickly asses that a piece of news provides an interesting insight into the adoption of "WiMAX" in "emerging markets" (high rating) whereas information provided there about "Voice over IP" is rather poor or irrelevant (low rating).


Read more about Azouk expert rating

The expert’s dilemma — sorting the wheat from the chaff

Every industry experts and professional like you and I have constant problems with finding the best content and discarding the worthless stuff. Out in the Web, there are hundreds of thousands of documents, papers, presentations, interviews, market updates, news, websites in our areas of expertise. How to drill through all this and get quickly the most relevant and highly rated stuff?

Google is our ultimate tool. I love Google and I think it is the most ingenious service invented in the Web space. Every time we search for something specific in our area of expertise, Google returns instantly millions of results. But quite often they are completely irrelevant. Google simply do not understand our "expert jargon" and often "mixes up" things.

Every industry vertical and area of business and technology has developed a unique vocabulary full of all those cryptic three and four-letter acronyms and odd terms. It takes sometimes years for us to comprehend, memorise and pronounce them and this is what makes us experts in our domains.

Another problem is to get straight to the right stuff. Evert time I do research in some new area I wonder "what top experts in this area would recommend to me?". Google cannot be much at hand. It simply hasn got managed to get into our minds.

Today to to learn from top experts and reach the right information we have to buy market reports and journals, attend conferences or use external consultants, which is expensive, time consuming and sometimes inefficient. I always thought that there must be some other way.

That's why nearly two years ago the idea of Azouk was born. Me and my colleagues wanted simply to create a free online service that provides an alternative way to reach the best content and information and to "meet" top experts in the cyberspace.

I have started this blog to tell you more about this exciting project and explain how all of us can benefit by "wrapping" our networking and collaboration around knowledge, information and content, and how this way we can add a true "human factor" to the web search.

To start, simply go to Azouk and get the first experience. If you have a bit more time check my personal page on Azouk and learn more about my choices and recommendations.

Kris Kimbler