For my the­sis, I am work­ing on inter­faces for the socio-semantic web. How can we exchange struc­tured infor­ma­tion snip­pets (“micro­con­tent”) and meta­data in small com­mu­ni­ca­tion cliques via RSS — and what inter­faces do we need for that?

One really hot per­spec­tive here is the search for infor­ma­tion from a net­work of trusted sources, and this is exactly what the peo­ple at Stan­ley James’ com­pany lijit do. They pro­vide you with a per­son­al­ized search engine, which returns google results only from

• - your own pub­lished infor­ma­tion (via your blog, pub­lic book­mark­ing tools, flickr, photo shar­ing, etc.)
• - plus infor­ma­tion pub­lished or marked as “good” from peo­ple you trust

So in a nut­shell, you can search your own net­work (“What have peo­ple I know book­marked or pub­lished about the new iPhone?”) or other people’s net­works (“Stan is the expert on social net­works — let’s see what he and his friends have book­marked or pub­lished about it.”)

This is def­i­nitely quite stim­u­lat­ing. It still has to turn out in which sit­u­a­tions a per­sonal net­work search is far supe­rior to the global web search or a per­sonal, local search on my own resources and if peo­ple will adopt it. But I have the strong intu­ition that they are fill­ing a huge gap here: con­nect­ing peo­ple and con­tents on web scale inde­pen­dent of indi­vid­ual book­mark­ing or pub­lish­ing tools. This is kind of a meta-service for what comes after Web 2.0.

You can try search­ing my net­work here:

Lijit Search