Quiz

Include a quiz on the homepage.  Make it team vs team, reward winners weekly/monthly.

Would help build a bit more team spirit and be good elevator chit chat.

more later.

Experiments with tagging (folksonomy) have had varying levels of success, and remain relatively unchanged from inception.  Experiments with social rating have proven pretty sucessful with the likes of digg, and reddit.

The problem with tagging currently seems to lie in the lack of accuracy achieved by automatic tagging solutions, and various issues around user tagging (moderation, effort…etc).

A possible solution to these issues with  beneficial side effects would be to add weightings to tags via a simple vote up or down mechanism.  The base layer of tags could be applied by either content creator (unvotable) or automatic tagger, then futher refinement of the tags by other users adding, or voting up or down on existing tags could occur.  A tag voted to a score of zero would be removed until independently added by another user, making the community moderation of rogue users a far simpler task.

The potential benefits of the weighting could include navigational aides like most activity, most controversy, similar, recent and of course search and discovery…etc on a per tag, or tag grouping level.  Personal tags, for bookmarking/re-discovery could be included (with the other tags) by a simple syntax differentiation ie. /Research Ideas/.

—-In Progress—

There are a lot of new creations on the interwebs some good, some not so good.  The ones that people decide to use often often require leaving the page you are on, or some fancy pants new widget thing that causes your browser to crash.  All of these creations have a specific purpose, and a specific behaviour, and with a simple text entry (command) box, I believe that a very powerful, and relatively simple access point can be made for all that is out there.  The behaviour of the commands can be determined by the nature of the web application that one calls upon.

Picture, a simple browser plugin that consists of a single text entry box and a button (i have ideas for other buttons… will cover in future posts) that simply says go.  I think the best way to demonstrate the potential this has will be to provide some possible examples…

/@twitter “@friendname check out Allan’s exceptional ideas *incl:URL”

This example would ideally post a tweet including the url of the current page – there is the possibility of including an *incl:tinyurl depending on legalities (I am not very well versed in law).  This command would not open a new tab, chances are twitter would be open in another tab anyway. It essentially saves a user from clicking on that tab, clicking in the text entry box, typing the message, clicking the post button, then clicking back to the page they were reading – and this is assuming that they have the tab open.

This kind of action could be repeated depending on the users’ preference… /@facebook @status “this site sucks *incl:URL”

/@google “”allans ideas”"

This example would search google for the phrase “Allan’s ideas” the behavior of the “‘s im not too sure about as I am not well versed in programming either.  This action would open a new tab (it would have to).  It could be repeated across any search… /@technorati, /@yahoo /@amazon…etc.  The interesting thing about this one is that any search engine specific commands (site:blah.com, intitle:blah) if contained within the initial set of “” could be carried out easily

/@freeSMS 123456789 “hey, I really think you might like this site *incl:URL”

If someone wrote an application for the command bar which could send free sms messages then it could take advantage of the command bar.  The reasoning behind naming it freeSMS instead of simply SMS, is because generic terms like @search, @bookmark…etc would be unfair, although if revenue was a part of this model then i would imagine quite a bidding war for these terms – luckily it ain’t.  I am all about fairness, and I believe that there are enough recognizable and different names out there with unique names which self select their audience that it shouldn’t be an issue, reddit, digg and the rest for example.

/@blog @post “*incl:<title>This is a very interesting site *incl:URL It has wide reaching…blah” *incl:Tags -edit

This example involves a user setting which is for people who want to use a login to customise certain commands – actually this may solve the common terms (/@search) issue, – Where the user sets the platform that they choose to blog on, then posts either the start of a post or the entire post.  The *inlc:<title> could utilize regex to grab the title, I will get to *incl:tags in a later post (I have big ideas for this too, so hassle me and I will chuck them up) and the – edit can direct the user to the beginnings of a blog edit page or could be interchanged with things like -preview.  Delving way down the line – if someone typed /@blog the text box could expand to display the blog edit functions (could these be standardized? they are pretty much all bang image in here, bang URL in here anyway aren’t they?).

some more /@bookmark *incl:Tags + research project 1, /@review, or /@amazon @review…etc, any more would be cool to hear.

Do you kinda get where I am going with this, and the potential it has? or am I completely bonkers, with no grasp of the real situation.  I will argue that commands (like wiki, search) are already pretty widely used, and this system can offer the geekier user a very powerful tool, but still be usable by a large number of people, and I will argue in general.

Thanks for reading

Allan

Chur

Al