Via Shawn Callahan this morning, a link to a scenario about the future of work by Dave Pollard. (These two apparently had a swell conversation in Melbourne this week.) In his post, Knowledge Management in 2020, Dave describes the work lives of two professional consultants at a global consultancy, “Omni,” and an entrepreneur who is an Omni client.

Omni’s business is focused on “personal productivity improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and communication skills development services.” Managing the rich flow of information available via blogs and RSS feeds is core to Omni’s work; for itself and its clients, it digests, interprets, summarizes, and offers recommendations on the immeasurably large flow of raw information now available. Omni has “abandoned” their traditional website in favor of a its collection of blogs and interactive directory of people.

This is obviously a vision of the future of work for a small slice of the population, but it also triggers thinking about the importance of rediscovering (as Dave says) the value of information intermediaries, and this need will apply in many business and work scenarios. RSS was supposed to help us filter and customize, but Pollard supposes a legion of these intermediaries like the Omni professionals described in the scenario.

What a great conversation that must have been! Wish I’d been there. Now I wonder if future applications will allow us to enable eavesdropping via podcast…