Found on Nick Lewis' blog Net Politik ... a description of an imaginary product he is calling Fluid


Beyond Google

Yesterday, I spent the day swimming with my friends at a hidden paradise about an hour outside of Austin . It was there that an idea hit me: it's called Fluid. What is Fluid? Its a syndication service, a metadata encoder, an index, a site tracker, a link mob, a meme propagator. ect. Sound complex? It isn't, in fact its designed to be easy enough for grandma.

Fluid's users would have three tools at their disposal: A composer, a browser, and an index. First let me describe the composer.

The composer is basically a word processor with two modes which are used to encode separate layers of metadata into the document. Here is how it works: Lets say a user types up an essay on word, and cuts and pastes it to Fluid's composer. The first mode would have two steps:

1.the user would pick the document's general topic (i.e. Political Humor, Social Software, ect.), priority (high, medium, low), and purpose (i.e. proposal, editorial, clarification, criticism, general information ect.).
2. The user would then use a color coded sidebar, that would highlight the document's thesis, points, support, ect.

After completing these two steps, Fluid's engine would automatically encode the metatags for the above values into the document without requiring the user to know a trickle of HTML.

The second mode of the composer would allow users to cite sources, and trackback other people for feedback, questions, or whatever. So say I were trying to get a hold of Nova Spivack to ask him, "did I just reinvent the wheel?" I'd follow three easy steps.

1. I would select his name from a people list (or a whole group of people who were interested in social software.)
2. Then, I would either highlight a specific place in the document, or the entire document. This would allow me greater freedom to ask small questions if need be.
3. A dialog box would open which would allow me to enter the specific question, "Would this be possible or practical?".

This brings us to the second tool of fluid, the add on browser. The user would be able to create a homepage with various components. One of which could display the most recent articles which other users classified as Social Software and Knowledge management. The metatags that were encoded by the composer would allow articles to be expanded or collapsed like so (the colors represent how the metatags would be integrated into the system):

-Beyond Goggle by Net Politik (0/0 ratings, 0 citations)
Fluid's users would have three tools at
their disposal
-The composer is basically a word
processor with two modes that encode separate layers of metadata into the document.
+The Browser
+The Index
This would allow readers greater ease in exploring large amounts of information. Call it a super newsreader.

These articles could also be rated by readers either anonymously, or publically. A good rating and citation would show up as "Beyond Google by Net Politik (1/0 ratings, 1 citations)." If the rating is done publically, than the author would receive a message (Bob.com rated "beyond google" as good. Bob.com has rated 1 Net politik article. The author could than view Bob.com's profile to see who bob has cited or rated as good or bad. The user could also find out who likes or dislikes bob's content. This would create an algorithm similar to Amazon's "users who liked this album also liked...". Furthermore, there would be incentives for rating other articles, such as showing up higher on the search engines.

The browser would also contain a message center for recent questions. So if Nova Spivack was using this system, he'd see a message that looked like:

From Net Politik: Did I just reinvent the wheel?
Fluid's users would have three tools at their disposal: A composer, a browser, and an index.
Note from Nick: Would this be possible or practical?

He could either give a reply publically or privately, he could also choose to ignore the message or block the user.

Another component of the browser would allow readers to ask specific questions about various points. Using the Fluid browser, the reader could highlight a section of text, and hit a hot key. This would initiate a macro that would record the URL, the text that was cited, the user, and the time. A little dialog box would pop up, and the user could type in a brief message such as, "watch your grammar" or "what the hell are you talking about?" The message would be sent to server that would appear to the author as:

From Bob regarding your article "Beyond Google":
Statement in Question: A little dialog box would pop up, and the user could type in a brief message such as, "watch your grammar" or "what the hell are you talking about?"

Bob asks: Would there be a feature that would allow other readrs to see which points were commented on? Furthermore, could the authr decide who was allowed to comment?

Nick Replied: Yes, and Yes. Users who enable the displaying of various color coded tags in browsing mode would see questioned statements in purple.

The final component, the Index, would resemble Yahoo. You could do searches such as "George W. Bush" and enable options such as:
1. Editorials only
2. Most Questioned
3. Highest rated
4. From sites that are hated by users that like my site

The users could than browse the results in ways that are similar to the expanding and collapsing menus in the browser's homepage.

Or click through indexed topics such as News/Politics/Republican/Liberal Hate fests. These indexes would also allow users to find the appropriate topics to file their articles under in the composing mode. Algorithms could also be developed that would allow the users to recieve suggestions for topics. Furthermore, various parts of metatags could be intergraded into search engines such as google using automatically generated link collections in the user profiles. So if 15 people rate my site, thats 15 links in 15 profiles.