Web Democracy? User In The Center?

Few random thoughts that surfeced during the project.

Alright so we opened this blog to present our thoughts about rating users around the web, for a project we've handed in a BI course.

So the course is over, we passed the exam with flying colors, now waiting for the results about the papaer we handed in.

Anyway we learned so much during this work, it's amazing!

We think we recommended a model that might change the way the web looks like.
When researching about web 2.0 you here a lot the user is in the center, we claim this is not the truth!

Yes the user is in the center, but in the center of big websites (YouTube, Digg, Facebook, etc...), not in the center of the web.
When the day comes that the user is in the true center of the web, that will be a true web democracy.

Today the sites claim you are in the center, but if this is the case why does Facebook.com, and MySpace.com have problems with power.com?

Are you really naive enough to thinkt that the you (the user), is in the center?
If so, plesase try nd convince us why you think so.

Have a good day.

This is the first post on our blog using Zemanta, it really is a cool feature, check it out.

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Future Thoughts

Ok we are getting somewhere with our work, I'm not sure where, but we are getting there….

This article gave us a glimpse into the future, it's one big social network, that has an infinite number of smaller social networks under it.
From the looks of it Google is trying to become this network.

I'm not sure what I wrote so I'll put it in simpler words – Facebook, hi5, LinkeIn, etc, will all be a part of a bigger social network, basically all the web will a big social network. Site such as socialGo are a good example of how common the technology is becoming, you can open your own social network within minutes.

This is actually nothing new just another step in greater web connectivity. All the actions we can do today, will be easier, each person / profile will be a junction (and a stand alone social network), your mail, YouTube, messenger, cell phone, and all other accounts and forms of communications will be under one user, of course you can have as many users as you like (I hope this will be the case, but web freedom is a different issue….). Obviously the folks at voxox understand this better then we do.

So what?

Well this makes our work even more relevant as rating a user only by the amount of incoming links won't be enough, nor will network and content mining.
As we see it the solution is a combination of all the ranking systems.
Content (semantic search engines), links (old school search engines), collective intelligence (digg), network analysis, and many more which we don't know of.

We came across a few ranking tools that try to combine a few platforms (socialmeter), but all they did is show us how limited they are.

The more transparent (readable) the web will become for different creepy crawlies the better image we can get of the users.

We don’t think that all the web should be open to all crawlies, this is a dangers act, but if different parts of the web will be open to different crawlers the combination of all them will give a better picture of a user. No more one dimensional users, but a multi dimensional user-social network.

What say you?

A Step Closer to Power.com to the Users

Power.com is the meebo of social networks, it allows you to log into all of your social network accounts from one place. You can post and chat to all of you networks at once.
For now it only works with the major players (facebook, myspace, hi5, orkut and msn - didn't know they have a social network), but according to the site they are planning to add a few more niche webs such as linkedin.

This is a step in the direction we are talking about, making it easier to rank a complete user, not just his account in myspace or hi5.

We think this is a great tool and big step forward, what do you think of this idea?

You can see there Alexa stats to see how quick this is becoming a powerhouse.

Will it fly or sink? What do you think?

Welcome to User Rank

Hello and welcome,

I guess the idea of empowering users is not a new concept around these areas, so what is different between this blog and any other?

Well basically we aren't fighting for web freedom or any of the other noble ideas all we are trying to do is one simple thing, rank - us - the users of the web.

What? Why? Are you crazy? This is a violation of users privacy and totally not web 2.0 behavior! You suck, boo, go away!!!

Well the idea is simple, today, there are a few ranking tools around, but all of the big ones (Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, etc...) treat blogs and user based content sites, the same as any other site. Our claim is that, this is discrimination, a user can't be ranked on the same scale as a website that has a staff of dozens or hundreds.

Users are not one dimensional they have friends in Facebook and Mysapce, they have movies on YouTube, they have a Digg account, StumbleUpon and many more things that are not taken into account by search engines and there crawlers.

What we are suggesting is a ranking tool (feel free to suggest ideas how we should call it), that will unite all of a user different accounts and give him a user rank, his web mojo.

Why should a user agree to do so?
Well he might earn, exposure, recognition and who knows what.

We are two students and we started this blog as part of an assignment we are doing for our degree in Information Science, we hope that this blog will push forward our idea, if not we'll still have fun (and we might even get a degree).

Please share your thoughts with us about our idea, web discrimination, web freedom, user power and ranking or any other web related issue that pops in your mind. Don't worry about sounding like a fool, next to us you will probably sound like a genius.


Please give a hand and help us develop this idea, by sharing it with your friends and people that might be interested in it.

Thank you,
Rotem and Eitan.