Prefound: Another Social Bookmarking and Sharing Site
By Gary Price, Editor, ResourceShelf.com
A couple of months ago I had the chance to talk for over an hour with Steve Mansfield, the founder of PreFound, a social search/bookmarking database. It was a very enjoyable conversation with a very nice person. It's always invigorating and exciting to speak with people who are completely dedicated and devoted to their work and in this case their own company. Granted, we have issues with some of the social search concepts (will the masses do it, is one of them) but just because we have issues doesn't mean it's not worthy of attention. We're just one person.
This weekend, PreFound got some major press with an article published by the Associated Press. Here's the full text.
Btw, for those of you who are web search historians, Mansfield was the founder and lead developer of ILor back in 2001. ILor began by adding extra features to Google results and then switched to offer its features with Ask/Teoma content.
From the article
At Prefound, launched earlier this year, users contribute to the knowledge pool by submitting clusters of sites they believe would appeal to like-minded people. As an incentive, the largest contributors even get a share of Prefound's advertising money.
A visitor looking for information on, say, New Jersey beaches can get the user-recommended sites, grouped by users. One user's cluster gives you restaurants, Internet cafes, and other information on the coastal town of Ventnor City, N.J.
Results are better the more people contribute sites.
We think it might be a good idea that PreFound focuses on specific "niche" markets. Let's say education. Students and teachers can easily (one of PreFound's strengths) create dynamic webliographies that can be shared with classmates.
Another service that might be helpful is the caching of pages as they are saved. The web is so ephemeral and having a record of a page as it once appeared online can be helpful.
We will not get into a long discussion of tagging again but will say (as we've said before) that tagging in small groups can be useful. In large groups and collections, that's another issue for another time. When you see tags like "blog," or "blogs" as top choices you wonder how helpful the tags are to saving people time and effort in finding what they are looking for. What's really needed is some kind of "fielded tagging" but the catch-22 is that it means more work. Not everyone, not even all librarians, are catalogers.
Spam of course is another major issue. This search from Yahoo Web 2.0 for Travel AND Cartoon Network* leads to results like "The Da Vinci Code - Cast," "Download, listen and watch music, mp3's," and "lime wire download." Not sure how helpful these would be to someone looking for info on either topic really. * If you're wondering why I chose travel and Cartoon Network it was suggested to me by Web 2.0.
Smaller, niche services might have an advantage here. Again, the biggest question is, will the typical user (not the tech or search geek) take the time to save and contribute, annotate and share links? I'm not so sure. Of course, building these collections might be yet another new role for the info pro. Actually, it's not a new role at all. It's what we've always been doing. In the case of PreFound and similar tools, we are just using new tools to do it.
UPDATE: As you know, for the past several weeks we've been posting "real time" or "near real time information" sources (usually about three a week) to ResourceShelf. If you would like to access the actual site we work from and the page to which we add new resources as we find them, go to: http://www.prefound.com/view?cp_id=275874
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
