During last year’s Summit I had the good fortune to interview Kevin Kelly (see Technology is the Seventh Kingdom of Life). In the interview Kevin made the case that we have only scratched the surface on how to coordinate group activities on the web: there must be hundreds of effective methods to run an auction, crowdsource products etc. We have only scratched the surface so why stop at eBay and Threadless?
So too in the area of search and discovery. As the web moves real-time, it exposes the limitations of reference based search. Wowd is among the new crop of companies looking to find ways to implement search and discovery in a real-time context.
While Google measures relevance based on PageRank and Digg measures topical relevance based on explicit user action (promoting pieces of news), Wowd is trying to measure attention across the web in real time. Attention can be an implicit indicator of interest and another form of harnessing collective intelligence.
Mark will be doing a High Order Bit on “A Conversational Approach to Search“at the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit.