What I Learned About Social Search On Yi-Tan

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What I Learned About Social Search On Yi-Tan
There has been a lot of movement recently in the field called 'social search', which is: "people helping people find stuff." This article summarizes a discussion (a telephone conference call, no less!) on the topic and offers a number of links and insights. "The first perspective we heard was that folks are sharing via email because it works best. They know and trust the source. The existing social searches are simply too big for trust - the information flow to huge and overwhelming... We trust someone who we know to summarize but to scale it won't work because you loose trust... There is also the issue of wow do we get there when there are people who want to catch our attention for profit not for edification?" These are my observations as well, and these are the sorts of considerations that will drive development in social search. More...