A bunch of vaguely related thoughts, that seem like a reasonable fit for this mailing list:<br><br><rant>So I was reading my wife's "Women First" magazine and saw that Mahalo was in their "top 100 useful websites". I suppose I have to continue to give Jason credit where credit is due: he has apparently very successfully tweaked the open directory model into a search application. But at the same time, I am disgruntled and somewhat disgusted at this - in my humble opinion, it is 5% inspiration, and 95% marketing... </rant><br>
<br>Therein lies a dynamic that continues to baffle and intrigue me: The internet, more so than any other medium or mechanism, gives people the opportunity to very quickly disseminate new content and ideas... it is *possible* for a web page or application to literally become famous overnight. Because any page is potentially accessible to anyone on earth, and because it is possible to scale very very quickly, the internet levels the playing field more than anything the world has ever seen. And we see evidence of this frequently - look at Google, Facebook, Fark... all the countless applications that were started in garages, dorms, etc.<br>
<br>Yet, the old world dynamic continues to dominate. If you're connected to money and people with status, you have a *huge* advantage. And that advantage is 99% marketing - anyone can write code or publish some awesome content, but if you've got money and connections, you can spread your ideas faster and more thoroughly. But this is entirely a manufactured limitation - it is not inherent in the architecture of the net itself. It's not like you have to build a million widgets and get them onto store's shelves, or even print and distribute thousands of newspapers... yet the playing field still favors the entrenched players.<br>
<br>I believe that in the not too distant future, we will see more disruptive technologies that will attempt to level the field more, but that the guys with the money and connections will always fight to stay on top. I'm looking forward to seeing (and maybe even helping create) some of those disruptive technologies. Distributed search is one possibility.<br>
<br>Other things of interest: Microsoft getting into social bookmarking: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400248">http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400248</a> (and many more). People are still trying to figure out how to really make tags ("social bookmarks") really work - it's not going to stop at <a href="http://Del.icio.us">Del.icio.us</a>. I still believe this is a space where an open, distributed framework makes tremendous sense, and also a space that has strong ties to community driven search.<br>
<br>Lastly, and similarly: the data being built in Wikipedia (and similar projects) is huge and is under-utilized. Some tools exist to mine it, but I think we're only scratching the surface. My favorite possibility is category intersections. A category in Wikipedia is essentially a tag - someone has said that this chunk of information should be associated with this concept. I'd like to share a story I wrote on the developer's mailing list:<br>
<br>I was looking for multi-player roleplaying games for my kids (age 6 and 8) to play over our LAN. I wanted something rated E for everyone. So I googled. I looked at Amazon. I read reviews. Then I stumbled on to a Wikipedia article and had an inspired thought: I can look for video games by category on Wikipedia. So dusted off my prototype categories Lucene index and did some searches, like "+Multiplayer_online_games +Windows_games". It was awesome. In the end, the dataset in Wikipedia wasn't quite large enough or complete enough to get me the answers I wanted, but it *WAS* better quality than the searches I had done in Google. It was a terrific test case that showed 1) categories or tags can be a very powerful way to find content 2) intersections (and more sophisticated means, like semantic analysis) are powerful and viable ways of utilizing human entered data and 3) and inclusive content policy on Wikipedia is an absolute must from a data-mining perspective.<br>
<br>So let's get on with the truly revolutionary and disruptive technologies!<br><br>Best Regards,<br>Aerik<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><a href="http://www.wikidweb.com">http://www.wikidweb.com</a> - the Wiki Directory of the Web<br>
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