Idea Is Queen!

Idea Day 59: Popular People, Popular Posts

Posted by Timothy Chen
July 13, 2007

Yesterday I did a review on Spock, that’s a really cool people-based search engine. Though it seems only celebrities’ profiles will be shown on the first page of results, I don’t think that will be a huge downside. Since when most of the time people use a search engine looking for someone, they are looking for useful info (bio/histry/contact) of “somebody”.(except those egoists :D)

And then I came up with an idea. Why don’t the team of spock add a feature, which shows the “most viewed” articles published by the one you’re searching for? For example, when I search “Tim O’Reilly”, Spock not only returns his profile, but also his most renowned “What Is Web 2.0” post, and so on.

I believe it would be useful because as the saying goes: You are what you write, right?

If the Spock team don’t want to do this, then you can give it a try. Build a vertical search engine of “popular posts” by crawling the authors’ names at the beginning or end of articles, counting the inbound/outbound links of them as well as the click-throughs, and finally ranking/aggregating these top posts to the indexed profiles respectively.

Sorry for being too simplified.

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Information: July 13th, 2007; 2 Responses

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Categories: Web2.0 Ideas

Other Posts: Idea Day60: You Can Edit My Post, Now; Idea Day58: Twitter-Like-Video-Nagging?

Reader Comments

Comment Number:: 1
Written by:: Maia
Posted on:: July 14, 2007 at 2:39 am

Hi Timothy,

This is Maia from Spock.

That’s a cool idea. Already, if you think an article written by someone should be on their profile page, you can go ahead and add it. We’ll look into crawling articles for their authors.

Oh, and in response to your comment about celebrities, that is mostly a result of Spock being in private beta. Profiles of “ordinary” people are constantly getting richer, and we expect them to only get better after we open ourselves us to the public.

Thanks for writing about us!

Comment Number:: 2
Written by:: Timothy Chen
Posted on:: July 14, 2007 at 8:23 am

WOW Maia,

Thanks for your comment,
I’m surprised you find this z-list blog.

It’s nice to see you’re considering adding articles to profiles. It’s important since on the Internet, in addition to the objective info on your profiles, your writings represent the “subjective you”. If I want to know somebody more deeply, I must check out his/her posts first!

Regarding celebrities v.s. ordinaries, how about add an option “I don’t want to see celebrities’ profiles”. hehe,

So when I turn on this filter, I would find my friends/family/potential employees’ profiles more quickly.

Anyway, keep up the good job!

Idea Day 59: Popular People, Popular Posts

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