John Hunters last blog post..Checklists Save Lives

The problem there is just that it’s a balancing act between growth (user generated content enables exponential growth) and usefulness (having a staff pick the content leads to more of that)…

I think a big part of Digg’s success has come from the fact that anyone can add content and anyone can digg. On the other hand, sites like Sproutwire often die quickly because they require so much more commitment.

We’ll need to find a convenient middle ground, I guess.

I’m not sure even the mighty Google are on top of the problem, I not sure how often my searching
is thwarted my all the various kinds of rubbish links/misdirection, but it could be up to a third of the time.

2 things that could make a better expression.

1. Some form uf semantic markup that goes beyond tags in describing/rating content.
Perhaps covering concepts ‘level of expertise’, degrees of relatedness to other concepts,
say rather than just tag an article ‘Marketing’, have also sub-tags ‘online marketing – relevance 40%’,
‘direct marketing – relvance 25%’. Maybe have a vocabulary of 100 or so specific semantic words, like ‘Introductory Level’,
‘New Insights’, ‘Explains Key Concepts’. And also the possibility of negatively rating/describing content.

2. Ensure the users doing all the tagging/rating are in a trusted, self-policing system, that ensures
anyone not rating/describing content on objective grounds of usefulness, gets weeded out.
So some way of referring dud/spam/SEO results to a moderator function, that warns/deletes offending
users and all there rating/tagged results.

Thus over time the users build up a body of their own search results that are useful.

It’s strange you don’t hear of more people doing tis already, maybe they are and I just haven’t heard.

Ben Mulveys last blog post..killing me softly

@Ben: Good point. Even the white hat SEO that is considered OK isn’t really that useful for the user of the information.

I wonder… What do you think would need to be changed for that ideal world without SEO to exist? And could a site like the one suggested in this post somehow help that kind of a world to become closer to reality?

While all that SEO is very useful to the person publishing, it’s far less useful to the user and in fact is the main detrimental factor hindering useful information retrieval.

In an ideal world (that will never exist) – where people didn’t do every trick the book to manipulate search results – Google in conjunction with a form of ranking would provide what we need.

Ben Mulveys last blog post..killing me softly

I just wanted to stop by and thank you for all the information you shared about putting a blog/ social network together. I found your site about a year ago and picked your brain from time to time. My new site is up at 5k5k.org The site is a personal challenge on fitness and personal finance. Thanks again for your help.

Chett

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