This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Denham on Social Search

As usual, Denham Grey has produced a to-the-point piece on Social Search.

Social search is touted as the next big thing for improving information retrieval, relevance and awareness. Let's take a look.

He tells there is no good definition of Social Search, beyond the general idea that it is (web) search refined by a person's social circle.  That circle could be work-mates or play-mates or both.

When I've looked at the developing options, I've always thought that it doesn't seem like it will work.  Or I just couldn't quite see the point in using intermediaries in this way.  I can't picture the steps I would take to search in this way, as opposed to going to my favorite search engines.  Maybe the social search is what I have to do after an "unsocial" search fails to provide me with good enough answers.  But then I want to interact and provide more context around my question to help my friends help me.  I almost think of the role of a librarian and the reference interview used to tease out the question.

That said, I definitely use my social network to ask questions and to discover interesting things for me.  This isn't so much search as it is a targeted recommendation engine.  For example, I read a lot of blogs.  One value I get from them is that the collection of bloggers has the ability to read and think about more things than I can alone.  I can then filter and read what I wish, based on my knowledge of the blogger (and the time I choose to dedicate at the moment).

My name: The good and the bad

Interactive Mapping