According to the piece, a firm by the name of Tacit Software will soon be introducing a program called Illumio that queries colleagues and associates’ PCs via the Internet to try to find out which of those people might have an answer tucked away in their PC on a topic you are looking into. So, for instance, say you were doing market research on the wind power industry, Illumio could search your colleagues’ PCs to find out which ones have relevant information.

According to the firm, the expected privacy concerns have been taken care of by ensuring that the software remains on local PCs, and that the process lets the experts remain anonymous until they decide that they would like to assist the questioner with information.

In the Times‘ piece Esther Dyson is quoted as saying “This is searching your friends’ heads as reflected in what’s on their computers,”

As to whether this will prove to be a standard, consistent, quality tool for business researchers that need to find sources of expertise, I’ll file it under the “I’ll believe it when I see it” category. There have been lots and lots of knowledge management and collaboration initiatives over the years that try to create software to find and determine who knows what. But so far it seems that the only technology that has achieved some success here is the blog (and to some degree Wikis).

Why? Well, for one thing, blogs are human-driven–there are no computer codes or programs that perform linguistic parsing, etc to make assumptions about who knows what. Blogs are just human conversation, amplified by the technology. So far, just that secondary facilitation of allowing people to find and share expertise is what technology is doing best.

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