Group items tagged

"Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer. Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."

The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.

Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.

Gisteren publiceerde ik deel 1 van de Top 25 Web 2.0 Search engines. Dat leidde tot veel reacties, dus vandaag maar meteen door met deel 2 van dit overzicht. Met daarin aandacht voor de sociale aspecten (user contribution, recommendations, social networks), visual search en audio/video search. Verder eveneens een korte update over enkele recente ontwikkelingen bij Google en Microsoft op het vlak van de toepassing van Web 2.0 technieken in hun (traditionele) search.

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself keeps track of these studies and openly discusses them here, which is a form of social transparency itself. However, even Wales himself have been quoted as saying that "while Wikipedia is useful for many things, he would like to make it known that he does not recommend it to college students for serious research." Indeed, the standard complaint I often hear about Wikipedia is that because of its editorial policy (anyone can edit anything), it is an unreliable source of information.

services such as del.i.cious, Twitter, and Facebook

Semantic tags are in, free text tags are out.

August 4, 2009

Zemanta API

automatically query Zemanta engine for contextual information about the text that user enters

Structure of API call The end point of the API call is: http://api.zemanta.com/services/rest/0.0/