Don’t Aggregate - Integrate!
We’re all probably part of several communities (portals, what-have-you) and follow information and news from multiple sources. Some we regularly contribute to, some we follow irregularly. Some we use for work, some for play, some for hobbies.
Me, I use, read, browse, and/or follow at least the following (off the top of my head) - Slashdot, Digg, Ebay, Amazon, Tauschticket, Golem.de, BoingBoing, OpenBC, Spiegel.de, heise.de, Stern.de, Joel On Software, Wikipedia.
Some of them I check for shopping, some for contacts, some for news, others for entertainment. But it’s all about my interests and my focus (OK, maybe not that focussed). What I haven’t yet found is a way to integrate and relate these different information sources in a way that is meaningful and helpful to me.
If I find an interesting book on Ebay, I want to quickly check wether that’s also available in Amazon Marketplace (maybe it’s cheaper there? prices on Ebay are crazy), or wether it’s also available on Tauschticket. If there’s an interesting news item on Spiegel.de, is there more background information or maybe a discussion forum about this somewhere else? Are there new articles or discussion posts by people in my OpenBC contact list? Google is all well and good, but Google is a search engine, and I don’t want to search. I want to find. Or, rather, I want to discover.
How can we pull all this together, in a way which still is maintainable and managable by simple users like me? How can we allow people to quickly create, maintain and change their own references and Webs between items? Something along the lines of “If something looks like an ISBN number, and it actually turns out to reference a book on Amazon, and maybe one on Tauschticket, let me know subtly without getting on my nerves. If something is somehow marked up as book title, or I tell you it’s a book title, do the same thing.”
I’ve been playing playing around with a couple of RSS readers recently and I’m pretty sure that RSS is not the right tool for this job. I don’t want to subscribe to multiple channels and have a deluge of unrelated information pouring in (was that a tautology, or was it just redundant?). I want to follow free associations. I don’t want to aggregate tons of data sources into one large confusing cockpit view which makes me click through “channels”, “channel groups” and so on. If I look at something, I want to be able to quickly find related pieces of information, even if the original author did not think of this reference and therefore did not explicitly embed it into his writing. While I don’t think RSS is ready for human consumption (at least not in the form of the readers I’ve been playing around with), it is probably a good base technology for an integration platform. Because that’s what this is — the Integration Challenge. The Discovery Machine for the Internet. Peripheral Vision for the Net.
A lot of this is covered by research under the banner of the Semantic Web. Also, several topics have been addressed by the Hypertext community. Because that’s what I’m describing. A Hypertext, where potentially everything can be dynamically linked to lots of other related items. Only, I want the links to be discovered. I want to be able to tell the system which relations I’m interested in and which relation targets I prefer (see my list at the beginning of this post).
Oh, ideally I would also only want to have to maintain one identity. If I’m interested in nerdy computer books (and I am), I’ll be interested in them wether it’s with my Slashdot login, my EBay login or my Amazon account. At the same time, though, I don’t want to have to give up too much of my privacy. Alexa had the right idea initially - “What’s related?” Unfortunately, they ended up turning it into a privacy nightmare. So that’s not what I want.
Some sites are getting there, some are really screwing it up. See my previous Amazon Recommendations rant. Just looking at something on a bookshelf is not expressing interest. At least not on the Web, where you can follow a link and end up somewhere you didn’t even know you were going. So that’s not what I want. But something like it. Only better. Done right. And across sites — which will probably never happen (or only happen once Google has bought up ALL internet businesses and they’re no longer competing).
Is that too much to ask? Oh — I forgot: I want it by next Tuesday.
Technorati Tags: Internet, Web, Communities, Search Engines, RSS
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