A Nod's as Good as a Wink

As I mentioned, I have started playing with Google Analytics for this blog. It's early days yet, but already some fascinating results have dropped out - I'll be reporting on them once the trends become slightly more significant than those based on two days' data....

But one thing just popped up that I thought I'd pass on. Some of my traffic has come from Wink, which describes itself as a social search engine. More specifically:

Wink analyzes tags and submissions from Digg, Furl, Slashdot, Yahoo MyWeb, and other services, plus user-imported tags from del.icio.us, and favorites marked at Wink, and figure[s] out which pages are most relevant.

So basically Wink aims to filter standard Web search results through the grid of social software like Digg, del.icio.us etc. It's a clever idea, although the results at the moment are a little, shall we say, jejune. But I'm grateful for the tip that Google Analytics - and one of my readers - has given me. Duly noted.

Digg This, It's Groovy

Digg.com is a quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomenon: a by-the-people, for-the-people version of Slashdot (itself a keyWeb 1.0 site). So Digg's evolution is of some interest as an example of part of the Net's future inventing itself.

A case in point is the latest iteration, which adds a souped-up comment system (interestingly, this comes from the official Digg blog, which is on Blogger, rather than self-hosted). Effectively, this lets you digg the comments.

An example is this story: New Digg Comment System Released!, which is the posting by Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) about the new features. Appropriately enough, this has a massive set of comments (nearly 700 at the time of writing).

The new system's not perfect - for example, there doesn't seem to be any quick way to roll up comments which are initially hidden (because they have been moderated away), but that can easily be fixed. What's most interesting is perhaps the Digg sociology - watching which comments get stomped on vigorously, versus those that get the thumbs up.

Wackypedia

In case you haven't seen this on digg.com yet: a Wikipedia page devoted to "unusual articles" in Wikipedia. What's impressive is not just the sheer wackiness of some of these, but how many have been brought together here.

This is of more than passing interest. As the Edit history shows, the page's length - and richness - is down to the number of people who have contributed. In a way, this page single-handedly demonstrates the real strengths of the collaborative approach when applied to appropriate domains.