Yesterday, we had the opportunity to particpate in the 3rd installment of GigaOm's thought-provoking symposiums they dub “Bunker Sessions.” This one,“The Next Web,” started with an insight typical of Om Malik and his team: while everyone is zigging towards the “real-time” buzzword (almost for its own sake!), they're asking pointed questions about new sources of context, from geospatial to geopolitical.

The most insightful meme I took away from this conversation was from Marc Davis, former Yahoo! research scientist and current partner at Invention Arts: ”context exists beyond the data center.”

Or, to paraphrase Steve Blank’s ”inside the building, there are only opinions,” it might be more pointed to say that “data centers only house data”: a mere map of restaurants can't hold a candle to one that's remixed with your friends have eaten at, enjoyed, and may be heading to next.

Knowing that the context of the data being uploaded is from a real person, at a real place, at a real-time is what Davis got at with his “Web 4” set: Who, What, Where, and When.

In fact, this led Tom Coates to suggest a seeming paradox: “the only way to address information overload is with more information: To determine what’s most relevant, algorithms need even better knowledge of your geographical and social context.”

When the conversation turned to privacy, Joseph Smarr pointed at the difference between announcing ”I am here,” and bugging each of your friends individually to tell them. Sometimes, privacy comes from good filtering, not simply preventing the information from being shared at all (egress rather than ingress, so to speak).

The weak link in a centralized aggregation service is sharing or syndicating over its own APIs. If I report my position to Twitter, that location is stuffed into the hidden “resource fork” of a Tweet in their API. If I report that I'm attending this symposium to LinkedIn, that fact is stuck in a “roach motel,” because they have no API access to event data, as Dave McClure mentioned. Davis concurred that “large companies have not create identifiers to make this easier at scale,” along the lines of Yahoo! Placemaker WOEIDs.

Ångströ’s own Salim Ismail identified a particularly trenchant problem with social network interoperability: “Our identities are locked in walled gardens. It's impossible for me to comment about or contact someone without going through those gatekeepers. And even if I want to refer to someone I know on another social network, which of 18 different contexts do I want to refer to him as?”

Ultimately, the people in your community define what’s salient for you, because that’s the shared context that marks your membership in that community. Adam Hertz, a founder of TuneIn based their product on that insight: “We believe people are the best filter, the people you pay attention to. We pull out all the media in your (inbox), and order it by popularity within your graph and, more and more, based on how you respond to it (your engagement).”

These were only a few of the most interesting ideas that bubbled up at the event, and I can only thank the whole team again for pulling that conversation together. I can't give it any higher praise than this: it was well worth getting up early for, even on a Monday!