For our class in New Media Practices we had to look at Listible’s list of web 2.0 services. Although the idea is quite nice (ask a question, let people dump links with an answer which are voted on to get a ranking), it just doesn’t work. I’ve been looking at Listible for over a year but it hasn’t pointed me to any interesting links yet.

Much better lists of web 2.0 are on Mashable and Techcrunch; both blogs about new internet startups. Unfortunately they don’t have an inline description of the services. Maybe I should make a script which gets the names, and queries for a description in ‘google define:’ or Wikipedia, and ranks the sites according to inlinks or Alexa traffic ranks.

There has got to be a better way of ranking though. Only inlinks, user traffic or web 2.0 user ranking (Listible style) don’t seem to work. Will Wikia, the wikipedia search engine, work? Maybe because they have got a larger user base and there is (used to be?) more trust in the Wikipedia project. Web 2.0 seems to always come down to the size of your user base.

We were sent an invitation to talk on the Forum on Quaero in Maastricht because the

Open-Search model offers a feasible and imaginative alternative to the very issue of profit and property – and the resulting politics – apparent in commercially operated search engines now. Conditions that deserve to be mistrusted and investigated (like your practice is doing) once an internet tool, like Google, gets increasingly perceived as ‘neutral’ or part of the given infrastructure of a system. Instead, citizens need to be made aware that here, choices are to be made, and can be made.

Besides the well phrased mission of Open-Search, the conference looks very interesting.
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