The Human Hive Mind

No, this isn't a blog about the borg. Recently, I ran across an article or two on how products such as delver and twine use social networking APIs and semantic web standards to make search results more intelligent. The idea here is that you pick friends based on what you have in common with them. In which case, it stands to reason that what they think as relevant is a reasonable determinant for what you think is relevant.

This is an offshoot on what is more commonly known as collective intelligence. I first ran across this on the web with the google search engine which capitalizes on the science of predictive markets to provide those miraculously relevant search results at the top of the screen. Books such as the Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics predict and expound on the power and inevitability of collective intelligence and the web, where physical proximity has no affect on cost, as a most excellent way of catalyzing collective intelligence.

April 28 Update: I ran across an article recently called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus that presented a different and interesting take on collective intelligence. The author based this on a speech that he gave at a recent conference on Web 2.0 technology and cultural impact. His upshot it this. One place to go looking for collective intelligence is to siphon off a little bit of the enormous amount of time that people spend watching television.

The Return of the Semantic Web

About a month ago, I blogged on how the semantic web was having a hard time getting any traction. I mentioned then that the Reuters News Agency was starting to endorse it. Now it appears that Yahoo is also starting to embrace the semantic web through the announcement that they will begin to parse certain microformats with their search engine. Perhaps it is premature to count the semantic web as DOA. I hope so.

Some of you may have noticed that, technically speaking, microformats are not really a part of the semantic web specifications. To me, the semantic web is all about marking up content in a machine understandable way such that the semantic context of searchable content is also specified and searchable.

As the project leader for an open source content publishing system, this is great news for me. I would love to add RDF Site Summary and microformat support to improve the SEO features of this project. There is no reason to add these features unless the popular search engines start using them. I wish that Google would make a definitive announcement of what microformats and/or RSS modules that their search engine would support. Right now, it appears that they are supporting hCard, hAtom, XFN and FOAF.

What is your opinion on this? If you are a content publisher, then what SEO enhancement features and formats would you like to see in your software? The most viable contenders seem to me at this time to be hCard, hCalendar, FOAF, and DC.