Tomorrow I will be attending Search and Social Media (at WSDM) - and am very much looking forward to it. While thinking about the workshop I realised that the title can lead to endless debates around the definition of 'search' and 'social media', so I think it makes a lot of sense to break things down by aspects of the social media space. In particular: search and real time content, search and community, search and influence, authority and popularity, search and geolocated content, search and social networks, etc.
When breaking things down in this manner, we can also reflect on the notion of 'search'. There are many interactions with social media that currently don't follow the traditional search dialogue. TopicFire and Techmeme, for example, are more focused on real time analytics than on search as a primary mode of interaction. Similarly, Bing, Google, Yelp and many others provide a 'what's nearby' interaction which uses context to parameterize content in the spatial dimension, much as TopicFire and Techmeme use time (what's nearby versus what's rightnow).
Comments