MaxTB.com

For some time now, anyone who calls themself a Social Media Guru (or supremo, or magician or ninja or zombie pirate) has quite rightly been derided for tweeting too hard.

But in response, this group has upped its game. Meet…

The “Social Media Cynic.”

Now that these people have become aware they aren’t supposed to call themselves “Social Media Gurus”, the battle lines have shifted. Cruel is the new cool.

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There may be no service on Earth full of as much spurious misinformation, confusion and doubt as Yahoo Answers. There’s a sense of 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters with the occasional answer breaking for freedom with a whisper of welcome sanity.

By contrast, I think Quora has more potential, and many agree. However, there are a good number of people out there who think it’ll never expand its appeal beyond the small group of techies who are currently singing its praises.

I think they’re missing the point and underestimating where Quora is in its lifespan.

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As if making sure @DannyWhatmough never becomes Mayor of Wildfire PR wasn’t enough, I’ve actually found real value from Foursquare here and there.

In the first example, I checked into a bar and was quickly called by an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time who just happened to be around the corner. In the second, I spotted that one of my cousins was in town and reached out to see if she wanted to catch up.

In addition to aiding and abetting “ad hoc” plans, it’s also a great way to access inside knowledge on a whim about any unfamiliar area in which you find yourself. What’s more, you tend to get info on even some of the most trivial places like the best seat in Costa.

So what’s holding more people back from having these experiences and deepening the value it offers beyond temporarily entertaining mayoral power struggles?

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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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