DISQUS

What's interesting is that if you look at all the "successful" startups from the past few years, just as many, if not more, were from outside the Valley, and came to prominence without being annoited by the Valley. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us are just a few examples, there's plenty more.

Nice meeting you this morning! Hope to see you at more DC events soon.

I think that's a great idea. I believe John Battelle had something like this setup on his blog, called SearchMob (http://battellemedia.com/archives/002868.php), but he just recently shut it down (http://battellemedia.com/archives/004091.php). I don't think he was thinking about it in the same way you are though.

It strikes me that this kind of system heakens back to the good old days of blogging, before it became about subscribers, page views and CPMs, and was simply about likeminded people sharing ideas.

I agree with you assessment of Mahalo; I've yet to find it useful in any way that has encouraged me to return there. But I don't see how your distinction from Google holds. You said, "Everytime a user clicks on an ad, they are being taken to information that is promotionally paid for as opposed to being there because it is the most valuable." I can't see how that's different than Google. If your distinction is in the motivations of the creators, I see the distinction, but would argue that Google's more interested in making money at this point than they are in providing accurate search results.

I've seen the opposite; if something is untrue, but generates buzz for a company, they are usually more than willing to let the rumors (and links) fly.

The new tech-media outlets (TechCrunch/GigaOM/Valleywag) are obsessed with breaking news, to the point where they seem to be dismissing with due diligence. Perhaps it's just the nature of the medium, and we need to adjust our truth filters to have a 24 hour time delay.

Carson: thanks for the plug!

Jason H: I apologize that the ads were distracting; we try to set them so that they are distinguishable from the main content but also there for our users. It's tricky, because sometimes they do provide useful additional information, but sometimes do not, and we have to try to find a balance. I'd like to follow up with you to get your thoughts on how we could do it better.

Scoble: Regarding postive/negative comments about things, try Opinmind, they've got a cool sentiment search engine that is powered by blogs.

Regarding the other issues that you bring up, these are all important; the problem is that each one of these issues is essentially a seperate problem to be solved. Finding the best products is different than finding all the posts that mention specific keywords, both of which are different detecting sentiment. I think some of them are best handled manually, for example, the best posts from DEMO would probably be best compiled by someone from the conference who knows in advance who is there, has collected a list of their RSS feeds, and reads them in an aggregator and re-blogs or links to the best ones (or the wiki scenario you suggest).

Regarding the mixture of authority on specific subjects and cleaning noise out of the result set, we're working on a solution to this that I think will help solve the problem. I'd be happy to give you more details, if you're interested.

I'm in the process of going through Season 1 of Lost as well; I got into Season 2, but have to go back and catch up on 1. It's very, very addictive.

Heh, just as long as folks looking at my resume don't know about your resume, I'm set. ;)

Thanks Sid!

I think we are going to see many services focus more on the bottom line this year; cool and useful services are nice, but when it comes to a business they have to make money. It's not always related to the public facing side of things.

Brilliant! I've been looking for that water ballon commercial ever since I saw it during Lost.

Sid, Blogdigger has a fair number of posts from your archive, if you like, I can set up a data dump for you. Let me know if I can be of help.

Cool Sid, I hadn't read through this in a while, it was interesting to see it re-posted. It's always weird to read you're own thoughts a second time. ;)

Hope all is well.

No, thank you!

A Creationist would probably tell you that the oil was created for them to use as well. Creationism as a science is similar to the World on the Back of a Turtle story. If something doesn't make sense, just add another turtle.