Others online : blog community
Read/Write Web posted on people networks, of which people tag themselves. You can then find profiles based on similar tags as you, Explode have this as their main feature, Yedda also have people tags but their main purpose is Q&A, Ziki is another service that has people tags but their main purpose is personal content management, then their is Technorati which is a blog engine, but they also have a directory feature to find others by how they tag their blog (kind of like tagging yourself, if your blog represents you).
Now we have Others Online, which I blogged about a while ago, basically it started as recommending and connecting with people based on your search terms and webpages you visit, but it also now recommends people that match your self tagged interests.
See the widget on their widget explanation page or on their blog, it’s impressive.
MyBlogBlog shows recent readers, Explode shows your friends, and OthersOnline shows people who are similar to you based on your tags…but I think it’s more than that.
Hover over a person and you get a link to:
- their tags (tags they use to describe themselves)
- their profile
- their identities eg. blog homepage
- chat, email, or add as a friend
One extra functionality you get on a user profile page is: find other profiles like this one.
Basically all these services are expert locators as you can discover people by tags, Ziki also allows you to search people’s content, so from searching a people network or searching people tags you can find an expert.
MyBlogLog is a community for bloggers, but they do lack people tags, the best thing it is for at the moment is to see who from the community is visiting your blog.
NOTE: you can read someone’s interests, but since these aren’t hyperlinked and aggregated for the community it is not a usuable expert locator, I think it will come soon.
MyBlogLog could easily incorporate the people tagging feature of Explode showing not only recent readers on the widget, but also explicit friends, and it could also show related people based on tags, ie. potential friends, like Others Online…MyBlogLog has the benefit of the community base.
It could also absorb the features of AutoRoll, essentially “people who visit your blog also visit these blogs”.
Come to think of it Ziki could so all this also, just give us a widget.
Related:
fringe contacts: people tagging
Microsoft Knowledge Network : expertise locator
The different ways of finding experts
Wink becomes a meta-expert locator
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Hey, Jordan from Others Online here. Thx for writing about us! The goal is to provide much more context to the connection. Lots of stuff left to do before we can properly launch, but when we do our users will be very happy with the traffic we’re sending to them.
I hope you’ll consider signing up (if you haven’t already) and putting the widget on your site.
Comment by Jordan Mitchell — March 17, 2007 @ 2:11 am