Social Media Now: Crowdsourcing a Better Mousetrap?
March 13, 2007 by Jason Chervokas
There are two classic ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. The first imagines solving a specific problem, the second imagines building a better mousetrap.
The mousetrap model has largely fallen out of favor, particularly among media technologists. After all, the history of new media technology is a tale of worse mousetraps (VHS, redbook CD, lo-rez MP3) triumphing over better ones.
But search remains a business sector for mousetrap makers–better algorithms=better search, or so the thinking goes.
If there’s any problem-solving thought going on in the world of search it is a matter of search engine optimization–third party businesses solving the problems of indexed sites looking for boosts in traffic. But what about the problems of searchers who want to ask plain language queries and get better, more contextually appropriate returns from the entire universe of online content not just from the most linked and trafficked sites?
Social search holds out the promise of bringing a little bit of end-user problem-solving into the search business by putting users, not algorithms, at the center of search.
Today there are two piece of news in the world of social search. First comes the beta launch of WikiSeek: Community Edition. As Michael Arrington explains in Techcrunch, WikiSeek is something of a Wikipedia symbiote–searches only return Wikipedia entries and sites to which Wikipedia links. And at present only 10 links are returned per search (presumably this is a beta restriction). But results can be edited by anyone and that editing includes not only adding and deleting returned links but also altering the order in which links are returned. Can wiki-based search scale? Dunno. We’ll find out.
Meanwhile another company focusing on social search–Eurekster–announced yesterday that it had raised $5.5 million in second round financing (its first venture round) from Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan Eurekster offers to blog publishers contextual, user-driven search widgets called Swickis.
[...] The most obvious application of social architecture is within the framework of social network and online communities. However social networks themselves are an aggregation of tools and strategies that can be dissected and broken into individual components. Profiles, folksonomy, crowd sourcing, voting, analytics, platforms, openness and search are all elements that can exist on their own and outside of a conventional ‘walled’ or ‘siloed’ setting. [...]