People Powered Plings!

I really like the new (beta) BBC topics service. Choose from the ever growing list of topics and the BBC will magically arrange content from several places and sources into one page:

This reminds me of the work we are doing with Plings at the moment, evident in the Stockport page we have up live. This page is not static, but calls several data and feed sources to generate the content at one go. So – currently we are calling Events held in Plings, Images in Flickr, News in the Pligg (via Google Reader and Yahoo Pipes), Volunteering Opportunities in Do-It, Podcasts in Radiowaves, Bookmarks in Del.icio.us and even census data from a text file!

We also worked on a way to dynamically switch between Manchester and Stockport – which we will put out soon. This calls in new feeds, but in the same parameters. David did us proud with that!

Whilst that sounds great, there are two underlying issues around this:

1. Reliance on external web services and sources
2. Keeping data and feeds up to date

The first point is typical of where we are at now. A few years ago, we may have tried to build our own Flickr, Deli.cio.us and Digg for example – but why bother?

The second point is more interesting though. This reminds me of the growth in People Powered Search Engines that are now around – including the terrific Mahalo (which I always miss-spll btw!). Mahalo works in the same aggregation-led way but the content that is put together is usually contributed by people:

Each page seems to have a manager, with contributions made by various people. This is like wikipedia, but not like it – as the content that is generated on a page can change according to the feeds and time of day, etc.

It strikes me that building a similar People Powered Search Engine could be an answer to the Places to Go, Things to Do issue (and perhaps other youth work related topics, but we have to stay focussed here). We have a clear idea as to the trusted sources and places where content might be – the next step is to get people to find, tag and flag it… no mean task, but certainly one that is achievable.