Stumpedia

A totally different way to search than Google, Stumpedia is

a personalized social & real-time collaborative discovery tool that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web.  Stumpedia does not depend on automated bots, proprietary algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.

www.stumpedia

Stumpedia allows you to submit, rank, and personalize your own search results. The relevance of search results are unique to you and are determined by your social graph in the following order: you, your social network friends, friends-of-friends, your followers, and the overall community. A spammer who submits and ranks irrelevant results can be easily identified, blocked, and unfollowed to prevent your search results from being polluted. Users can personalize and customize search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. This data is used to determine the relevancy of search results for the people in your social graph and vice versa.

Upon search results being displayed, users are given the option to

  • like
  • save
  • share
  • dislike
  • bury

specific results. If users click on the appropriate buttons, this then changes the ranking of search results.

Wikipedia defines Stumpedia as

a social project and community effort that relies on human participation and folksonomies to index, organize, and review the world wide web. The aim is to help build Natural Language Processing and the Semantic Web.

Certainly an interesting project and would be useful to show to students just how public opinion can change the way information is presented.

Dopplr

Perfect for planning holidays, Dopplr also allows users to share their travels with other users or just selected friends.

Home
Home

The idea behind Dopplr is that of folksonomy; the folks of the world create the information. So the people who have travelled to Melbourne  add in information about where to eat, where to get a great coffee, where to stay, you get the idea. Valuable for pre-trip planning, Dopplr is only as strong as the members make it.  

Dopplr tour
Dopplr tour

Once you have registered for Dopplr and entered details of an upcoming trip, Dopplr contacts you with tips on hotels, restaurants and other places of interest.