Eric Gundersen, co-founder of and strategist for Development Seed, recently spoke with us about the work that the company is doing to create better Internet-based information aggregation tools. He also shed some insight on some of the processes of thought that a person or organization should consider before moving forward with a campaign or movement. The company, which refers to themselves as “communications plumbers,” specialize in unclogging communication channels. According to their website, Their team is “banded together around our common mission to build creative communications solutions for organizations doing world-changing work.”

Or, they clean up messy information and figure out how to best put it to use.

I had the pleasure of meeting Gundersen a few years ago through his parents. They told me that their son was really smart and working in Washington, DC on various forms of Internet development. Weeks after hearing about him, I told them about a campaign I had seen and gotten excited about a year or so before where some SUV company had allowed consumers to make their own commercials for the product via the website and the concept obviously unraveled into something of a disaster. They lit up and found video of Gundersen being interviewed on a news magazine show about his involvement and analysis of happening. We’ve met a handful of times since and it is always a pleasure to talk with him.

At present, Development Seed is working on Managing News, a tool used for news tracking. An aggregator, it is built to suck all of the chatter and news from all over the Internet and it will will also geotag it in order to help better visualize trends. According to Gundersen:

“The short is you get a snapshot view of what’s happening online and make it easy for us to manage up the news so you can take action on it. This has really exciting promise for organizations because once you know who is talking about you and what they are saying you can get out to these other sites and influence the conversation.”

Further, Gundersen says that Managing News will track and analyze in real time, allowing for up to date information without creating a sense of information overload.

Clearly, he holds chatter tracking to an extremely high regard. As the base of people contributing to Twitter–a site he has long been a user of–has grown, the ability to track has increased. He sees these methods as very powerful listening devices by way of being a different, decentralized and inevitably more manageable way to express ourselves. “When there was a new allowance for the mobile hookup with respect to blogging,” he said, “this was really influential with different organizations and corporations. For example, American Airlines didn’t do so hot with Twitter chatter during the backups of flights. Jet Blue, on the other hand, follows the traffic and listens to what is being said. That makes a lot of sense.”

“It also makes a lot of sense for political campaigns to do it too,” he added. And Managing News will be initially really focused on supporting political campaigns for the first couple months of the launch.

Of advice for those who are using the web to create and perpetuate campaigns, Gundersen shared the procedure Development Seed talks through while assessing potential projects. From an organizational perspective, they look at concept and design. “Concept kicks off with a meeting where we ask five questions: What do you do? What will it do in two years? How does the communication system function? How would we do it without a website? What is a successful outcome of this project?” If they are able to answer these questions, he explains, they are able to move forward:

“People need to be focused on the end communication goals and they need to put a value on that end communication goal and they really have to look at the web stuff as a tool box. What tools make most sense on the problem, who they are, how they are figured, and take that into consideration for overall achievement. It is critical for success points and for business.”

From a personal standpoint, he says that his communication goals involve making DC look cooler. “We’re based here and we’re having a hard time hiring folks because we’re competing against firms in Vancouver, New York and San Francisco and they have a little more sex appeal than DC. I am strategically blogging, taking pictures, linking my iPhone to my email, sending it to Flicker which is hooked to my Twitter account. I am twittering some stuff in DC.”

Finally, Gundersen celebrates aggregation and its roll in getting people to more effectively use the Internet productively. “Aggregation plays nicely into considering how to get people using all elements of the Internet succeffully for what they are doing.” It’s not just blogging anymore, but figuring out how to synthesize information, and how to get your message read. Whether geomapping news and blog chatter, developing ideas for a better aggregation system, or giving DC a sexier reputation than it presently holds, Gundersen surely enjoys making online interaction a generally more user-friendly and manageable experience.

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