This week, Microsoft Research held its 2008 Faculty Summit. This event brings together faculty working in the wide disciplines of computer (related) science. Part of the tradition of this event is to have smaller gatherings on the day immediately following – called day 3 events. This year, Marc Smith and I hosted a Social Media day 3 event (see this CrowdVine for a selection of attendees).
The gathering brought together around 50 people interested broadly in social media. There was a reasonably even mix of academics and Microsoft researchers and product people, and this mix lead to a healthy discussion about research in the space, sharing data, where product groups are looking for solutions, methodologies and so on.
We structured the day with two panels on state of the art research (link based research, hosted by Lada Adamic and content based research hosted by Tim Finin). In addition we had a panel of leaders from Microsoft product groups. Interspersed with these presentations and discussions we had a number of community run break out sessions.
Of all the discussions, ideas and brainstorming that went on, one thing really seemed to emerge as a clear near/mid-term goal: transition from a web of documents to a web of people. I think this has been on the minds of many in both the research and industrial sphere. Issues of trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues, the content being in a sense an artifact of these individuals. The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement).
Things are about to change!
In my honest opinion Web2.0 its a step backwards. Sure it has lots of good and interesting effects but most of all these social sites are full of... data on people, if not data not interesting by the broad or specific public at all.
I mean information got lost somewhere in the way and dont think that giving the power to the people would bring it back.
Again, imho, the web should be data, information and metadata. I dont want the internet to be the next TV. Socializing the net would push us to that scenario.
Just my two cents, readers, I dont want to flame on pro-web2.0 people :)
Posted by: Malibu Carl | August 02, 2008 at 06:51 AM
I think the web of people is the way forward. In our lab, we have been testing a similar service to improve search by using social recommendation or more like social sharing. A lot of time or mostly, results by search engines are useful only if I know what I am looking for, in other cases, it doesn't return anything useful. Thou lot can be said about it, am looking forward for new services coming out of this people's web.
Posted by: Mohan | August 03, 2008 at 09:07 AM
Matthew,
It seems like you're assuming that PageRank is still soley link-driven. Google use a combination of weighted factors, one of which is the inbound link score. New factors are added when they're ready, so if you think the emergence of data useful to search relevence would leave PageRank redundant then I think you're mistaken.
Posted by: Richard | August 05, 2008 at 03:03 AM
People are still working for page rank.
Posted by: backyard ni donglloyd | September 09, 2008 at 08:08 AM
Hi don't agree with your point.
http://www.panaceatek.com/
http://www.go4myspacelayouts.com/
Posted by: Solid | September 25, 2008 at 10:58 AM
Until we have something better, page rank will have to do. Also it isn't suprising that Microsoft is leading this charge as there msn search is dead in the water
Posted by: righteous | June 22, 2009 at 05:11 AM
It seems that PageRank will stay for the next decade. Here's a link about PageRank topic that presents how should be used to serve your SEO campaign. My belief is to learn on using it because the day PR is removed hasn't come yet.. :)
http://trafficcpanel.com/848/pagerank-insites-that-seo-marketers-must-know-and-apply/
Posted by: Cristian | December 04, 2009 at 11:07 AM