OK, so I've decided the area of social software is just too ripe with low-hanging fruit that aren't being picked up, so I'm trying to find ways to do my part on that front.
The first thing is I've decided to periodically issue programming
challenges that are open to anyone out there who wants to cut their
teeth on Web service programming. The services I will describe have the
following characteristics: (1) they don't exist yet, as far as I know,
(2) they would be useful to many people, myself included; (3) it should
be possible to build them using only a Web server, free components and
open APIs, brains, and fingers. Most of those projects should be completable in less than a day of hacking.
There's no cash prize, but I can offer attention and visibility. I will
link to and wax lyrical about your solution on my weblog if you give
one of my
challenges a decent shot. Without further ado, here is
Challenge number one: apply reputation filtering to del.icio.us collections
The del.icio.us linklogging system
enables people to attach tags to the links that they record, and it
provides lists of links that have been tagged by any user with a
particular label. This list of mp3 blogs
is an example. This provides a mechanism for collaboratively creating
directories: over time, users who make consistent use of a given tag
end up building a collection of links that have something in common.
But what if a collection gets lengthy and I don't have time to look at
everything in it? Well, not all Web pages are created equal; some of
them are more worth looking at than others. There are several ways to
determine how "worthy" a page is. Counting inbound links
is one of them. del.icio.us provides some information about this, showing
the number of del.icio.us users who have put a given link in their
personal collections. However it does not order results according to
those figures.
Part 1 of the challenge is thus: build a little service
that will list the links on a del.icio.us/tag page sorted according to
the number of people who have bookmarked them. Note that
del.icio.us/tag pages are limited to something like 100 recent results.
For bonus points, go back all the way and use all the links to build
the page. Add a "threshold" parameter and cut off the links that fall
below the threshold. (A good default value might be 100). [Update: if you want to see what it looks like, Alf has posted a snapshot of the results for the tag mp3blog as they are today, January 18.]
The service I have just described will show results that reflect the
interests of del.icio.us users. Now, what about what bloggers think? Part 2 of the
challenge is: use the metric of inbound links from weblogs to order the results. One way to do this would be to use Technorati API Cosmos Queries,
which will give you the number of inbound links from weblogs. (And a
bunch of other information you don't need for this particular application; I haven't looked
around for a more lightweight query.)
