Week 5 Gabcast Presentation
Gabcast presentation by the not-so-gabby Mr. Spock Hinkle, or “don’t beam me up Scotty”…
While researching Web2.0 tools, I stumbled upon (But not by using stumbleupon, another tagging tool similar to del.icio.us) this interesting new tool called “Spock”. Spock appears to have combined powerful search engine capabilities coupled with the ability to search other Web2.0 tools such as MySpace, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technocrati, Gabcast and many others in the “community” or “social” networking websites plus news sites. Similar to a specialized search engine would be if there is such a thing…
You can search for people by name or search term – which they call tags on Spock.
For example, if you are looking for information on a particular person, you can type in their name. You can also search by e-mail address. Alternatively, you can also type in the search term, such as "democrat", "republican", or "drunk driver,” which will then give you the top results on Spock for those terms.
Apparently the results are ordered by number of votes, source of search results, completeness of search results and many other secret factors.
The developers say that Spock has developed a special algorithm that combines information found on the web with community generated input.
Thus Spock pushes up term-based search results based not only on news articles, but also on the number of votes that the community has generated. Spock allows the community to have a say in, for example, whether the search term “drunk driver” is more relevant to Britney, Ted Kenedy, or Lindsay Lohan at any given point in time.
One very fascinating aspect of the Spock project is their contest for the best and the brightest developers to help them make a better product. It is an interesting and innovative way to foster community and collaboration and to get their product enhanced at the same time!
Hear my gabcast here now!
Gabcast! Prof_Hinkle's prodigious apercu on the air #1 - The Spock Challenge for Web2.0
The Spock $50k Challenge for developers
THE SPOCK CHALLENGE
One Challenging Problem. One Compelling Prize ($50,000).
The Challenge
To improve our technology and to create a better user experience, we decided to share the fun! We have selected one of our most interesting problems, namely Entity Resolution, to share with the community, allowing other leading computer scientists and engineers to compete in an open contest. The winners of this global competition will reap a handsome reward, and perhaps even employment at Spock.
You can work individually and in teams. The competition will last 4 months and the winning team will win a Grand Prize of $50,000! Most importantly you’ll be working on a very important and widely applicable problem. We will also be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.
Visit Gabcast Yourself!
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1 comment:
Hi,
This is Maia from Spock, and I just wanted to let you know that the Spock Challenge is actually closed.
Our Spock Marketing Challenge is still open though.
Best,
Maia
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