If “Securities Mosaic” is No More, What Does That Mean for Securities Coverage on Knowledge Mosaic?

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

[This is the second installment of a two-part post.  Click here to read part 1, posted Wednesday.]

So as I noted on Wednesday, Securities Mosaic is no more.  Does that mean— as some concerned users have wondered out loud – that in moving away from that name, Knowledge Mosaic is moving away from securities coverage?

The answer is an emphatic no.  On the contrary, we continue to enhance our offerings in that area.  We recently released some significant upgrades to our SEC Filings page.  In the next few weeks, we’ll launch KM Feeds, a new RSS alerting system for business events disclosed in public company filings.  And on our Keep Current page, in addition to highlighting news, opinion, legislation, court cases, and rulemaking in the arena of business and securities law, we’ve added a new page showing the latest IPO registrations.  (If you were tuned into that page late yesterday morning, you would have known about the initial public offering of Groupon stock before most of your colleagues. )

So we’ll keep offering an ever-expanding selection of securities content.  But to call us “Securities Mosaic” is to diminish who we are and what we do.  It’s equivalent to the notion that Amazon.com is still just an online bookstore.   Book-selling may still be at the core of Amazon’s identity, but it’s no longer their main gig.  Similarly, people may still think of us primarily as a filings provider, and that is something we do very well — but we do so much more.

That’s the second part of the “takeaway” from Wednesday’s post. The move from “Securities Mosaic” to “Knowledge Mosaic” is no shallow marketing ploy.  It reflects something fundamental about our platform and the direction we’re going.  We don’t just want to offer a mosaic of securities; we aim to offer a vast mosaic of knowledge.

So what do we mean by knowledge?  In theory, of course, the word refers to any kind of information at all. In practice, we use the term to mean the knowledge generated by the bureaucratic machine of the U.S. government, including its impact on business and commerce.  Although framing the term this way means narrowing its scope somewhat, it’s important to note that knowledge thus defined is still incredibly broad. It surely affects every individual in the U.S. , extending into almost every area of our lives and experiences.

One other, crucial thing about that word knowledge.  It’s no accident that it has a different connotation from words like data or information. Data is locked up in computer chips, spreadsheets, file cabinets, algorithms. Information travels through cables, conduits, pixels, superhighways.  Data is what must be translated; information is what you’re seeking.  Knowledge is what you have.  It’s in your brain.  It is immediate and transparent.  It just is.  Our name embraces this aspect of the word.  Our broad goal is to transform information into knowledge.