HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Here is the long awaited guest post from Rob Rustad of Collarity. As many of you know we have been chatting and he is a totally cool guy and he is taking over the circ.us for this post. If you don’t remember what this is all about, take a look.

Post 1 about Collarity

Post 2 about Collarity

TAKE IT AWAY ROB:

We applaud the entry of Wikipedia into the “people-powered” search arena this past week and have recently commented on it in our blog. This event provides more evidence to support the idea that links-based search technology can be advanced if we can find a way to harness the democratized collective feedback of everyone who uses it. As user identities, software applications, and attention increasingly move away from the traditional desktop-pc/tv platforms toward the new browser reality, there must be a way to apply more human online cycles to improve web content findability.

Our personal development philosophy is that the process of personalization and search recommendations should work in the background, implicitly, for the benefit of users. Searchers shouldn’t be required to rate, tag, bookmark or explicitly define their interests. We believe actions speak truer than words (people have a difficult time defining what makes them happy or interested) and “interests”, for most users, are a set of moving targets that change daily, if not by the hour/minute.

But who knows what will work best? The question is how best to apply people-power to search. Should you ask users for explicit guidance on how to serve them best or simply learn from their behavior? We continue to have great success with our platform but see other promising ideas as well. Only time will tell.

Tags: Collarity, Search, People Powered Search, New Browser Reality, Rob Rustad, Wikipedia, Personalization, Human Online Cycles