Posts Tagged: web users

Journalism / Metablogging / Web 2.0 / Webculture — No Comments
8
Apr 08

Response to ‘Why Journalists Should *Not* Become Bloggers’

I saw this regarding journalist bloggers – my responses are interspersed into the author’s text.  Read more...

  • Blogs bury yesterday and make last week disappear. Like the clocks in The Exorcist, blogs demonstrate reverse chronology in an unsettling way. Today’s entry is on top. Until tomorrow, when yesterday slips away. Wednesday buries Monday and pretty soon the good stuff is down in the basement somewhere. Want context? Just check out our handy tag cloud! Click around and you’ll find it. . .somewhere. Maybe.
Mashups / Metablogging / Web 2.0 / Webculture — No Comments
4
Apr 07

Personalized Social Search…

In thinking about social search, I have to stop and look at how I search the internet.  I often look back in my own blogs prior posts looking for something I jotted down.  I regularly use my del.icio.us network, I consider how I use digg (which I consider a user group I can identify with), or Technorati (again, although people blog on a variety of subjects, on some level, bloggers are more alike than disalike), or even looking at del.icio.us itself as a subset of "highly-effective" web users, and how the aggregate data of those groups, becomes the database I use for searching.  I know if I'm composing a MeFi post, that's usually my hunting ground of choice for quality links.  If I was searching for breaking news and current events, I'd use Digg or Technorati.  Basically, these online communities that I trust – my online social circle – functions as my frame of reference for search.

So let's say one takes the model I power my blog with, pulling in data from delicious, digg, bloglines, flickr, etc., making "my database".  If many people did that, and you had a service that allowed you to take people you know (using your email addressbooks), cross-checking them with a variety of social services, and then allowing you to build a custom database of "your stuff" and "your friends stuff" or your people with the same interests or locality.  It's reasonable that you may get more meaningful results, although you would lose out on valuable contrarian sources and eclectic sites.

In envisioning a community-driven site, users could voluntarily add their blogs, photoblogs sites, music sites, forums, etc., and create a custom search engine (and index).  How relevant would those results be?  Would they be valuable to the end-user?   So, for example, I've used the Google Co-Op to create a custom search engine which aggregates my blog, my Flickr account, my "dugg" items on Digg, the PhillyFuture aggregator, and my del.icio.us account.  You can play with it here. 

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