Phil Bradley's Blog

Saturday, November 05, 2005

 

A Swicki is a play on words, roughly speaking. It's a cross between wiki and search - hence swiki. OK, I'll explain more. A swiki allows you to create your own search engine that covers a subject that is of particular interest to you. The owner and visitors get to collaborate on what the swiki finds, to modify and focus it. There are a number of advantages to these beasties - they let you really start to dig through the net to find good quality information, and other users also assist in this process. In theory you might be able to make money from them as well.

We're starting to see these things roll out - the link goes to a really helpful article from Wendy Boswell at About.com and she takes you through the process of creating one, which you could add to your website or to your weblog for example. She's using a utility from Eurekster that lets you create them. I'm betting that they're going to be the next interesting thing on the net, and I'm also involved in beta testing what is essentially another version, about which more in due course.

I think this is a natural development as we are all getting disenchanted with the results that the traditional engines are providing us with, so it's only logical that something is going to come along and fill that gap. It's another incarnation of where Web 2.0 is taking us, where people are taking control back from the large corporations and doing their own thing with the web.

Phil 11:59 PM