MaxTB.com

The best invention since the upside down questionmark.

This time last year, there was some fuss about The SarcMark, a new piece of punctuation designed to make the use of sarcasm explicit by putting a little marker at the end of each relevant sentence.*

Naturally, it was met with near universal derision and ridicule, mainly because it made explicit what anyone with a semblance of intelligence could deduct by themselves.

However, for a while I’ve been watching the way that #client disclosure hashtags are used on Twitter and for me, it kind of twigs some similar concerns.  Tweets like this by .net magazine Editor @DanOliver, and @Wadds‘ little show of hands here present one assortment of views on the matter.

I have something of a different take.

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I’m reliably informed that every day, Google serves about 3 billion searches globally. I didn’t count that myself but I’m taking it on good authority.

But what if instead, every query was saved as a unique page accompanied by hand-researched and written answers created by a community of curators?

What if questions were semantically tagged to show the most popular related queries, giving a quick idea of what’s important about a subject beyond the Wikipedia question of “what is it?”

Could something like that offer an alternative to traditional search engines?

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<< Originally a guest post for the Social Collective blog, stumbled upon it while Googling and decided it deserves to be here too >>

Now, you may be wondering why we’ve called you here for this family meeting. But all will become clear. I just want you to know that your marketing manager and I love you very much and we would never do anything to hurt you.

But what we’re about to say may come as something of a shock.

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A jolly little cartoon just popped up in my Twitter feed (thanks @lewsisshields) making an entertaining point about the Follow Friday phenomenon- namely that nobody ever follows the people suggested in such tweets. But actually I think this kind of misses how Follow Friday is more frequently used today.

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My brother and I have a kind of gentleman’s agreement to buy each other the gadgets we want but can’t justify as Christmas presents every year. What’s more, we cunningly subvert the despotic rules of our childhood by giving and opening these gifts long before Xmas day.

This was how I ended up with the shiny (actually virtuously matte) new Kindle 3G in my hands.

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