Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search, Part 1 and 2

Great write up of some emerging search ideas for the Web 2.0 environment.

From Read/WriteWeb:

"In our previous post we coined the term "Search 2.0", in order to compare third-generation search technologies (of, or pertaining to, the current era of social web) with traditional search engines - to see where the future of search lies.

Even if some of the startups we're profiling in this series may not survive the next Internet bust, the underlying ideas are evolutionary and have proven to be effective so far. We think the ideas showcased by these new social search apps are worth embracing, to ensure the future growth of the search industry. And, as we note at the end of this post, the big search companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) think so too...

Here then are some further profiles of search 2.0 apps, followed by our analysis of where the search industry is headed."

Part 1

Part 2

-Miguel

Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War

From The Wall Street Journal:

"J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out of touch with the war.

"You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on."

Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists."

-Miguel

Digg Labs / Stack & Swarm

As visualizations of information these are pretty nifty tools. I'll have to play around with them a bit to see how they work, but it's a nice way to quickly see rankings/relevancy in the Digg community.

From Digg Labs:

"Digg moves very quickly, and has a great many stories submitted every day, so good material can sometimes fly by before you even know it. These interactive visualizations look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities."

Stack

"Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

The visualization has three modes: all activity, popular, and newly submitted stories."

Swarm

"Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

The visualization has three modes: all activity, popular, and newly submitted stories."

-Miguel

Shadows - the site for capturing the best of the web

From the site:

"Shadows is the link-sharing website for people. By people. With Shadows, you have the power to discover the web's most fascinating content – the most interesting pages saved, discussed, and rated by you, your friends, and the Shadows community.

With Shadows you can collect links for instant retrieval from any computer. You can tap into the collective wisdom and interests of the entire Shadows community. Shadows is the one-stop source for your daily fix of news, diversions, and discussion.

Express your individuality through your links, comments, and profile. Join or start a group discussion. Let your voice be heard! Invite friends. Grow your community.
In Shadows, you can have fun surfing for the web's best links or you can create an account, jump in, add your best links, and become part of our thriving community."

-Miguel

Diigo / Social Annotation

From the site:

"The name "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff."

Diigo (dee'go) is about "Social Annotation". By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media.

The social annotation service introduced by Diigo allows users to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page they read. Imagine a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. Users can write on the transparency as they wish, as private notes or public comments. And they can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their "two cents" and interact with them."

-Miguel

Book 2.0 - Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"While most scholarly books are reviewed by a few carefully chosen experts before publication, McKenzie Wark's latest monograph is getting line-by-line critiques from hundreds of strangers in cyberspace, many of whom know absolutely nothing about his academic field.

Mr. Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, has put the draft of his latest book online in an experimental format inspired by academic blogs and the free-for-all spirit of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Each paragraph of Mr. Wark's book has its own Web page, and next to each of those paragraphs is a box where anyone can comment — though readers are not permitted to alter the original text."

-Miguel

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

From User Interface Engineering:

"Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it."

-Miguel

Senators Hear Grassroots Drumbeat on Net Neutrality

From Save the Internet Blog:

"Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) spoke before the Senate on Friday to “outline what is at stake” should Congress ignore public opinion and let phone and cable companies gut Net Neutrality.

“If you listen to some of the so-called experts about communications, they would suggest that [Net Neutrality] is so complicated, so arcane, so difficult for anybody to understand, you ought to let the lawyers and the lobbyists sort this out,” Wyden told his colleagues.

This is a mistake, Wyden said."

-Miguel

Flash Mobs and Memes

This is an old story from The San Francisco Chronicle, but it illustrates the opportunity and power of collaborative, spontaneous, internet/communication driven gatherings.

From the article:

Pillow fight erupts amid shrieks, giggles
Big crowd lured by Internet postings, word of mouth

"Flash mobs, a phenomenon in which adults converge to do something silly, rely largely on cell phones and the Internet, spreading word of events via e-mail, chat rooms, and text messaging.

"It's just a meme. A meme is when a thought goes out and becomes part of consciousness," said Amacker Bullwinkle, a Palo Alto artist with purple streaks in her hair who claimed affiliation with a mysterious group called the Pillow Fight Club."

-Miguel

Blogosphere: Best of the Blogs

This site was mentioned in the recent issue (Jul/Aug) of Online Magazine as a supplement to the book Blogosphere:Best of the Blogs by Peter Kuhns and Adrienne Crew. It's an excellent resource for keeping up on trends and events in the world of blogs, and unlike the book, can be modified and updated at will.

-Paul

On Blogs, YouTube and Flickr, Glimpses of Life in War Zone

From The Wall Street Journal:

"As fighting continues along the Israeli-Lebanese border, a small army of bloggers and photographers are filing digital dispatches.

Though grainy, raw, sometimes unsteady and often unverifiable, footage gives viewers insight into everyday life in the war-torn region. (Warning: Some links include graphic content.) On video-sharing site YouTube1 , young men are awed2 by a nearby Israeli bombing in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. An Israeli family copes3 with Hezbollah rockets raining down on Haifa. A videographer films behind the scenes of a BBC broadcast4. Users have also posted video such as filmed footage from the Israeli Defense Force5."

-Miguel

Crisis in the Middle East: Bloggers Report

From The Truth Laid Bear:

A listing of Middle East bloggers responding to current crises.

-Miguel

Google Teacher Newsletter Signup

"Google and teachers have a similar objective: to help people build knowledge by providing greater access to useful information. Google recognizes the central role teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. The Google Teachers' Newsletter is one of the ways we're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together.

Subscribe now to receive updates on new features, tips and other information relevant to teachers."

-Miguel

Librarians and Google: Tips of the Trade

From Google:

"Check out how librarians across the country are using Google to help students and patrons find information. Then read more stories on the "Tips of the Trade" page."

-Miguel

Update on India bans blogs: bloggers want answers

From Boing Boing:

"Following up on news earlier this week that the government of India blocked access to a wide array of websites (Link to BB post), Mridula says,

Nandan, an Indian blogger filed an application under Right to Information Act 2005 seeking the government to explain:

"My RTI Application was filed to find out why a blanket block has taken place for Blogspot.com, Typepad.com and Geocities.com. You can find a step by step guide to filing an RTI application (specifically for this ban) here."

The irony is the Government takes one month to reply and then can deny an answer quoting 'National Security' as a reason."

-Miguel

AT&T, Comcast Rout Google, Microsoft in `Net Neutrality' Battle

From Bloomberg.com:

"When it comes to getting their way in Washington, Internet-era darlings Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. still have a lot to learn from the likes of AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp.

The telephone and cable-television companies are routing Google, Microsoft and other online-content providers in the fight over whether the carriers can impose fees on Web site owners in exchange for priority access to their high-speed networks.

The carriers won a 269-152 vote in the House of Representatives, and an 11-11 vote in the Senate Commerce Committee, rejecting the Web companies' bid for a ban on new fees. Google and other companies are still urging the full Senate to adopt the neutrality measure when sponsors try to revive it as early as September."

-Miguel

Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs

From Boing Boing:

"India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*."

-Miguel

OCLC to Open WorldCat Searching to the World

From Information Today NewsBreaks:

"In a move designed to reach users outside library environments, OCLC (http://www.oclc.org) is planning to launch a new destination site and downloadable search box for searching the content of libraries participating in WorldCat. Scheduled for a beta release sometime in August 2006, the new WorldCat.org site will continue OCLC’s efforts begun with its Open WorldCat program (http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/default.htm)—to make library resources more visible to Web users and to increase awareness of libraries as a primary source of reliable information. The WorldCat.org search box will make visible all 70-plus million records in the WorldCat database—not just the smaller data subsets of 3.4 to 4.4 million currently made available by the Open WorldCat partner sites, such as Google, Yahoo!, and others. And, where Open WorldCat inserts “Find in a Library” results within regular search engine results—where they can get lost—WorldCat.org promises to provide greater visibility and accessibility of library materials."

-Miguel

Introducing MediaCommons

From if:book - A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book:

"As has been mentioned several times here, the Institute for the Future of the Book has spent much of 2006 exploring the future of electronic scholarly publishing and its many implications, including the development of alternate modes of peer-review and the possibilities for networked interaction amongst authors and texts. Over the course of the spring, we brainstormed, wrote a bunch of manifestos, and planned a meeting at which a group of primarily humanities-based scholars discussed the possibilities for a new model of academic publishing. Since that meeting, we've been working on a draft proposal for what we're now thinking of as a wide-ranging scholarly network -- an ecosystem, if you can bear that metaphor -- in which folks working in media studies can write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween."

-Miguel

Breaking paper's stranglehold on the academy

Interesting piece on one possible model of the future of academic publishing. Especially note the mention of blogs, wikis, and collaborative processess.

From arstechnica.com:

"While most journals now offer online access to subscribers (often through databases like Project Muse and JSTOR), these journals are still printed, bound, and distributed. Purely electronic journals have yet to match their printed compatriots in prestige and authority, but USC's Institute for the Future of the Book wants to change that. Its new MediaCommons program is a test bed for purely digital academic publishing projects."

-Miguel

5 Ways Google is Shaking the Security World

From CSOonline.com:

"Whether you're charged with preventing hacks, protecting assets, stopping fraud or defending trademarks, Google and other search engines present a new mix of risks for everybody in the security game."

-Miguel

The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging

by Ellyssa Kroski - from InfoTangle:

"There is a revolution happening on the Internet that is alive and building momentum with each passing tag. With the advent of social software and Web 2.0, we usher in a new era of Internet order. One in which the user has the power to effect their own online experience, and contribute to others’. Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman."

-Miguel

The Tagosphere

Search the tagosphere of user generated tags, with new search engine TagFetch.


Or try Gada.be, which also searches tags, and much more - from the site:

What is Gada.be? We're a free "metasearch" service! Instead of having to browse to hundreds of different search engines, we enable you to retrieve results from all of them through a single search.

-Miguel

Google says bill could spark anti-trust complaints

From washingtonpost.com:

"Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file anti-trust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators."

-Miguel

Top Five Science Blogs

From Nature:

"Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."


And here is a list of Nature's 50 Popular Science Blogs.

-Miguel

The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers

From Technocrat.net

"We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: attacks against Open Source developers by patent holders, big and small. One is a lawsuit against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping used in Hibernate, a popular component of enterprise Java applications everywhere. The other attack is on an individual Open Source developer for his model railroad software.

These two attacks are the tip of the iceberg, thousands more are possible as software patent holders turn to enforcement as an income producer and away from the patent cross-licensing détente exercised by large companies until the mid-1990s. Open Source will not be the only victim: small and medium-sized companies make up 80% of our economy and any of those companies that develops software, either proprietary or Open Source, will be vulnerable. The American IP Law Association estimates that defense against a single software patent lawsuit will cost between 2 and 5 million dollars. Under US law, even a company that only uses software can be sued."

-Miguel

KatrinaWiki, Katrina PeopleFinder: Distributed Technology Responses to Disaster

From WorldChanging.com

"The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has fast become a global experience on par with the aftermaths of past four years of terrorist attacks and the Boxing Day tsunami. Extraordinary efforts of coooperation, communication and community are underway, with many dozens of folks contributing to an almost ground-up invention of technological and networked assistance systems to help people get emergency help, share info, and find each other amidst the destruction on the Gulf Coast, and the massive exodus of refugees/evacuees from New Orleans."

-Miguel

The new watchdogs: Internet bloggers take debate to the edge

From The Cincinnati Post

"Immediately after Nickolas criticized Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher in a Times piece, Fletcher's administration added his blog site and others to a list of Internet sites unable to be accessed on state computers. The ban has raised questions of censorship and constitutional rights, (as well as a wave of national criticism called "a blog swarm"), and could spark a lawsuit."

-Miguel

Social Networking for Bookworms

From The Wall Street Journal:

"If bookcases are a way to casually display interests dear to the owner, the Internet throws open the doors on reading habits. Social-networking and book retailers' sites are already rife with lists of readers' favorite material, allowing people to compare notes on taste and compatibility.

But for Tim Spalding, a computer programmer and bibliophile, listing a few titles in an online profile isn't enough. He sought a way to catalog his entire book collection -- and to check out what was lining other people's shelves."

-Miguel

His Space

From Wired:

"Twilight of the media moguls? Not for this guy. With the $580 million purchase of MySpace, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch is betting he can transform a free social network into a colossal marketing machine."

-Miguel

PeopleAggregator

Open Social Networking. Create or join a network. Build your community. Connect your community.

-Miguel