Wednesday, July 26, 2006

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

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

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Book 2.0 - Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

Senators Hear Grassroots Drumbeat on Net Neutrality

Friday, July 21, 2006

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

Google Teacher Newsletter Signup

Librarians and Google: Tips of the Trade

Update on India bans blogs: bloggers want answers

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

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Indian gov blocks Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities blogs

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

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

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

5 Ways Google is Shaking the Security World

Monday, July 17, 2006

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

Thursday, July 06, 2006

The Tagosphere

Google says bill could spark anti-trust complaints

Top Five Science Blogs

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

Monday, July 03, 2006

KatrinaWiki, Katrina PeopleFinder: Distributed Technology Responses to Disaster

The new watchdogs: Internet bloggers take debate to the edge

Social Networking for Bookworms

His Space

PeopleAggregator