We all kneel to Google search paradigm. The paradigm is based on the study of the relational structure between pages that is created by the complex network of links.
The idea came to Larry when he mapped (in his mind) hyperlinks to citations and web-pages to peer-reviewed papers. Basically, he adapted the ranking concept used within the scientific community (i.e. the number of citations a scientist has for his papers) to rank the internet pages (i.e. the number of links that directs to a given internet page). Thus was born the PageRank concept. At the time (1995) there was still no easy way to tell how many links an internet page had pointing at it. The merit of Larry (and Sergei) was to actually craft a working crawler that would collect and retrieve this information. Well... that and actually sorting and indexing all the gathered webpages according to the PageRank rule.
The Yahoo! guys however, at the time, had a more organic arrangement and sorting of web-pages. Kind of like a giant directory of web-pages, sorted by topics and keywords. They made no relevant use of the internet hyperlink structure.
Time prooved that the structural search paradigm took the best over organic search. The PageRank had won the battle. The Google guys coined the google verb "to google", and became the bleeding edge of what was going on in the Internet. Over a decade has passed since the outcome of this paradigm clash, and never was another paradigm to point its nose into the battlefield. Up until now...
As the web grew into a social place, peer-to-peer pandemia settled in, RSS feeds arrived, blogs emerged, wikis came, flickr flipped over the table, tagging and bookmarking truly flourished with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, YouTube democratized video broadcasting, I-Pod mania tuned people's ears, a rush of new uses of the web surged. Eventually people labeled all that Web 2.0. A social, rich user-experience, information trading place. Economics will never be the same again. Sharing actually becomes (or will become) the economy driver for internet markets!
But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.
I intend to put forward StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us as an alternate, concurrent and complementary search engine: the organic 2.0 paradigm.
As people become more responsive in the internet and provide more feedback, tagging is the new thing. It actually sorts and indexes pages. Imagine millions and millions of internauts tagging each page they get interested upon, sharing their bookmarks, creating tagged-communities (united around a specific tag-subset). As of today. Reality or fiction? Will it prove really useful for searching issues? I know not. Time will tell.
What does organic 2.0 paradigm has that organic 1.0 didn't? The critical mass of active users, for once. And two, The social experience. As a collateral symptome of this new paradigm, the Time magazine personality of the year is "You", the average internet user. At the time, Time meant that the content of the internet was now provided by the average internet user in blogs, wikis and homemade videos and that this was something new in the internet short history. But what I mean today is, that the ranking of the internet will also be provided by the average user. We could call it the Democratic Rank.
Around a year before del.icio.us emerged, a bright friend of mine conceived the link-sharing community and started on its own web-based app. But college kept him from truly investing himself in it, and well, time passed, and del.icio.us rolled out the web. But that's another story. What I really mean is that... I'm going to spend some more time in giving a shot at using SumbleUpon and del.icio.us before actually googling. Call it gut feeling ...
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The Long Tail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ok, this is the most interesting concept discovered this week. Re-coined by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson, the long tail tells a long story about what's happening in business models, markets, and uncovers new market niches.
Still, the long-tail distribution could be applied to the language vocabulary, showing an ordenated set of decreasingly popular words. There would be one such ordenated set per language/dialect. The neat thing would then be, to compare a text word distribution with this language ordenated set, or compare distributions between languages. I believe it would evidence some sort of signature within a writer's work or within a language's identity.0Add a comment
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As a good friend of mine introduced me recently to TiddlyWiki, stormy winds blown my spirits away: an alternate competitor to the webtop! An On-A-StickTop! Indeed, with the flourishing of cheap high storage capacity usb flash drives, one may virtually carry around its own personal documents, and the software that goes along!
A revolutionary way of making it work seamlessly with web-based services is to create a web-browser-based 100% client-sided app! One such as tiddly-wiki, a 100% javascript+html+css wiki that doesn't requires to be wired on the net to work. It only requires a decent computer with usb slots that can run firefox or other modern web-browser. At this rate, soon enough, the web-browser will become the OS system machine of every decent application, whether client-sided whether server-sided. In the end, I can picture a mixture of WebTops and OnAStickTops as any serious information user main assets.0Add a comment
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Have you ever heard of the Google Query engine? Of course you have; or at least you have already experienced it in some other way. However I was astonished by the following experience at Google spreadsheets:
While perusing the usual functions available in any decent spreadsheet, I stumbled upon a peculiar "GoogleFinance" function. And lo, next to it, glowed a "GoogleInquire" function. I decided to give them a shot. I opened a new cell formula and typed =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") ("GOOG" is the financial label for google stocks) and bum, it loaded pronto the latest google stock price available. Cool! Then I typed in a new cell "=GoogleInquire("UK","population")" and bum, it loaded even faster the known population of the UK. Stoked. That's how I was. Stoked. Who knows what geopoliticofinancial knowledge can we get in numbers from the google spreadsheets query engine? How large is google's database? It blows one's mind, I supppose. Here's the spreadsheet I published:
Google Query Engine. It's a proof of concept. I leave the work to the reader of defining the concept, as an exercise. It's updated every 5 min, for whomever may care.0Add a comment
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It is quite easy to embed special html code that allows you to plug-in videos (youtube, google), photos (picasaweb, flickr), audio (gmail, odeo) in blogs and wikis.
It is better even when you get a quick javascript hack of a URL combined with simple forms like BlogThis! or GoogleBookmarkThis! or GoogleReaderSubscribe! that make this embedment seamless.
Here are the ideas:
WikiMedia extensions:
a) YouTube extension (done)
b) Odeo extension (bug)
c) Google Video extension
d) Gmail mp3 player extension
Javascript urls to be added to the web browser's personal toolbar:
a) WikiThis! Automatically opens in your predefined wiki a new article untitled with the selected word from the document. Body text already contains the document's URL as an external reference.
b) CiteThis! Automatically opens a form for the Citation site idea I had the other day, in the same "genre" as GoogleBookmarkThis!. The form's main textbox contains the full bibtex citation from Google Scholar, and its tag's textbox allows for the user to tag its citation.0Add a comment
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