Check out www.sparktherise.com, or www.ideaken.com, or even www.ioby.org. What do these sites have in common? Utilizing the crowd to help people get resources to bring their ideas to fruition. What if we could take this one step further?
Consider this:
For a truly semantic web we feel reasonably sure it need to have a strong directly human component as one of the main foundational struts.
One idea we came up with, though it would require a huge amount of computing, is the ability to track and catalog people. For example, there is Facebook, LinkedIn, other social networks, and there are other systems that track an individual's activities, say on Celsias.com or SparkTheRise.com even. WHAT IF we could collect that user data, aggregate it and catalog that individual's activity landscape? It would be relative to certain keys, such as subject matter, languages, ability to directly be involved or indirectly with a project, their record for follow-through on commitments and tasks, monetary donations, time donations; in other words, objective observations. Through an associative system, other persons needing collaborative talent can look up skills they seek and pull from this catalog of people and have a best-fit score, or something similar that measures appropriateness for the skill sought.
Take this one step further, and like we are seeing rudiments with Fb and Li, utilize algorithmic associations for tangential "you might also consider" associations for persons that may not immediately appear the best fit for the skill set (or resource) sought but would work well in a supporting role. The permutations are many. Build that into a truly semantic markup on the web and the results would be truly amazing!
At its basic level, people utilize the web to get information to get things done. For example looking up a definition, or as we are seeing more and more - connecting with individuals that are in-the-know. We have incredible computing power available to us, more than ever before. Companies are crunching millions and millions of lines of code to create predictive models to help us humans make better, more informed decisions. I think this would be hugely beneficial for the social and semantic web. Power to the people!
If this interests you, and you would like to discuss these ideas further, please contact me at joel@fuseiq.com, or comment below.
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