Spock - The New People Search Engine

In my opinion, one of the hightlights of the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 was the Spock presentation at the first session of Launch Pad. Launch Pad is the venue where  organizers choose approximately a dozen companies wishing to have their first public unveiling, of either the company or a significant new product, on the mainstage at Web 2.0 Expo. Among the presentations conducted in that Launch Pad session, Spock was selected by the audience as the most interesting.

Now, what is Spock? Spock is the new people search engine. Once logged in, you can search for a certain person and if this particular individual is already in the Spock database, you can tag him/her as you wish and even upload a photo which you think relates to her/him. The leveraged Web 2.0 concept is “wisdom of the crowds”. So, ideally, once there are enough voters and votes for a person on the same tag or photo, his/her most popular and true attributes will prevail over the others. And if the person you are looking for is not there, you can send an invitation and then start tagging.

When I first logged in, I found my name and all the tags were by the ”Spock Robot”. Spock team seems to have used the LinkedIn database for the ordinary folks like me. If you find your name in Spock and if the information source is LinkedIn, you can claim that is you by simply clicking on the “claim: This is me” link and entering your LinkedIn email and password. At that point, the system will merge your two profiles into one. This merging process sometimes takes forever. Good thing is you won’t need to keep your browser window open for it to be completed. Just start it and come back in couple of days, you might find yourself lucky.

While there are some hickups with it, I like the Spock concept. I would be happy to see these folks at Spock succeed. Spock is still in private beta. That means to be able to use it, you will need an invitation. I initially got an invitation through a close friend and since than I have been tinkering with it. Apparently, these guys at Spock might have noticed that I have been very active so they gave me more invitations to share. So, I have plenty of invitations to share for anyone who is interested. Just post a comment and I will be sending you one shortly. I would like to hear about your experience with Spock as well.

Written by Kaan Bora on July 9th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Web 2.0 Expo 2007

I spent the last week in San Francisco attending Web 2.0 Expo 2007. For beginners, the official web site defines Web 2.0 Expo as an annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. The web site also claims that Web 2.0 Expo features the most innovative and successful Internet industry figures and companies providing attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web 2.0 world to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

So, what is Web 2.0? The first Web 2.0 conference was held in 2004, so at least since four years, people are trying to define and refine the answer. Apparently, there are many answers to that question and they all seem to complement each other.

Tim O’Reilly briefly defines Web 2.0 as “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects”. This is quite a simple form of referring to user generated content, social software, syndication, participation, folksonomy and all other names and descriptors used to define Web 2.0. It covers a lot of ground, but does it cover all?    

The movie below was shown just before the keynotes of the first day.

And this one was shown on the second day, again, just before the keynotes.

 

Now, after watching these, I’d say Web 2.0 is all about “harnessing collective intelligence and enabling two way use of web”.

What is your pick?

Written by Kaan Bora on April 22nd, 2007 with no comments.
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Testing the link to the photos in My Photo Gallery

I have uploaded the legacy photos from my old www.soran.com home page to the new embedded gallery2 module (My Photo Gallery) on the blog page. So far, it seems to work fine.

Below is an example:

 

Photo taken with my sister on her wedding day…

Written by Kaan Bora on February 21st, 2006 with no comments.
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WordPress… Finally, something easy to use and customizable for quick updates…

You are right. It took me a lot of time to figure this out. Last update on soran.com was in March, 2002. Since then, I could not touch the site due many reasons; I migrated my data over three computers, I lost the photoshop images, my Front Page broke, etc. Besides, I could not decide how to structure the way my professional and personal web sites should look and link to eachother. But now, I know how to do it.

From now on, I will be blogging and experimenting with WordPress on blog.soran.com about my personal stuff. I will use soran.com for professional purposes, primarily about my views on project management as a profession and its impact on telecommunication and IT industries.

As a consequence, I should be able to provide you more updates on both ends soon…

 

Written by Kaan Bora on February 21st, 2006 with no comments.
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