Googlecloud
I’m not wild about tag clouds. I prefer a normal list with the ability to sort it A-Z, by popularity, by date or put it in to some hierarchial order (especially if you can do it in the OPML Editor).
And then I find out about a service called Googlecloud.
It’s fun, but pointless. Why would I search for something more than once?
If I forget where, I don’t know, I can read the Bible online, I might Google for “bible”. Then I find Bible Gateway, bookmark it (or blog it, del.icio.us it etc.) and that’s it. New stuff comes to me via my RSS reader. Google is for putting URL’s to thoughts (like “I want to find out whether Michael Jackson was found guilty or not” or “Where’s the RSS 2.0 specification?”).
The search is not the end, it’s the process towards the ends - the end being the website you’ve found.
Searches, to do anything, need to be complex. That’s why I use a lot of “site:” searches on Google. If I want to know something with a high degree of reliability, I just put “site:.ac.uk” or “site:.edu” on the end.
Complex searches don’t aggregate well - nothing complex aggregates well (“postmodern jurisprudence feminism site:.ac.uk”), simple aggregates very well (“sex”, “britney spears”). The whole reason why you can aggregate tags is because they are describing the complex in terms of the simple - but not the simplified.
What we really need is a way of aggregating the means. RSS/Atom provides the method to aggregate the ends (blog posts, del.icio.us links, photos etc), and OPML provides the method to aggregate more complex ends (directory structures, outlines, reading lists etc). What we need is a way to aggregate how people find stuff automatically. A “social search” so to speak, a way of customising Google to show things within your social network and within communities of interest (that ‘c’ word again…).
How does that work? Well, we need more ideas for that. Get your thinking caps on, and build something cool rather than just flashy.
