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Sorry for the lack of posts lately – a com­bi­na­tion of a quick jaunt to Corn­wall (to con­duct a thor­ough sur­vey of beaches in the pour­ing rain), pitch­ing for some rather lovely new clients (you know who you are – wel­come aboard) and an ongo­ing moun­tain of work.

In com­mon with many oth­ers, my first morn­ing back was spent delet­ing emails. It’s not like it was all spam – our spam pro­tec­tion is pretty good. It was just stuff for the most part – although stuff with a cou­ple of ‘must read’ mails hid­den in the mid­dle some­where. Deal­ing effec­tively with email (and stuff in gen­eral) is quickly becom­ing a must-have skill (and sadly not one I seem to pos­sess).

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Way back at the begin­ning of the year in my un-predictions, I sug­gested that:

Social search (eg Wink and Stum­ble­Upon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many peo­ple who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.

Well, while nei­ther Wink nor Stum­ble­Upon have made huge inroads, the lat­est announce­ment from Wikia (the peo­ple broadly kinda, sorta behind Wikipedia) could be very interesting.

Essen­tially, Wikia is look­ing to cre­ate an open source user-driven social search offer­ing (there’s some kind of vicious acronym in there some­where). They have recently acquired dis­trib­uted web crawler Grub which uses users’ PC idle time to crawl the web. And, of course, Wikia knows a thing or two about har­ness­ing user-driven con­tent. Which could all lead to some­thing pretty inter­est­ing.

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