Guest post by Joe Heath

Below are 8 sites I thought worth sharing, they’re some of the most talked about sites at the moment. Interestingly, it looks like the sites making all the waves are those seeking to filter and sort the web, to make it more useful and relevant for me and you. In short, we built the web, we filled it with lots of stuff, people started to feel overwhelmed by too much stuff and now the people who built it are trying to organise it better.

Whereas Web 2.0 represents an enhancement of the web, embracing the web as a platform and harnessing its strengths; Web 3.0 represents an ambition to meet the growing needs of the user, to solve a potential problem. Because of this I believe Web 3.0 will be far more rapid and impactful than anything that’s gone before it, these are just the first of many sites to come.

www.addictomatic.com

Addictomatic allows you to “inhale the web” in one go, it’s basically an aggregator of essential web 2.0 feeds and widgets (e.g. Google blogs, twitter, digg, flickr etc.) that sucks up all the real-time chatter around your search term. It’s been positioned as a kind of super charged personal search for all those big egos out there, but I’ve found it’s actually a great way of gauging who’s saying what and where about our brands. It’s in beta so it’s not quite there yet.

www.powerset.com

Now we’ve all heard lots of chat about the semantic web and here’s a beta site that uses ‘natural language processing’ to search Wikipedia pages (ambition to do same for the whole web). You can watch a video explaining how it works but in short, Powerset reads and understands everything on a web (wiki) page and allows you to ask questions in plain English to find exactly what you’re looking for. Once you’re on the results page (which is basically the relevant wiki page) there’s nice little widget that provides signposts and ‘factz’ to help you better navigate the page. There’s a bit of chat about Microsoft buying them out, which they’ll need if they want to achieve their ambitions of covering the whole web.

www.mahalo.com

Mahalo (another beta) claims to be the world’s first human-powered search it “creates organised, comprehensive and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.” It’s actually a great site that does exactly what it says on the tin. It uses ‘humans’ to filter and organise your search results (it still has a limited search capability – because of the humans) so they are more useful, interesting and relevant. It’s got a whole load of social stuff packed in there too to help connect and share around your search.

www.alltop.com

Alltop helps you explore different topics by channelling related stories from all the top sites on the web, this comes straight out the bag from the famed ex-apple employee Guy Kawasaki and has a very Craigslist ‘plain-simple’ feel to it. They describe it as ‘the magazine rack of the internet’ which they hope will put a stop to Internet stagnation. Imagine if someone took hundreds of topics and currated the best blogs/sites and put them into an RSS feed and this is what you’ve got here. It’s a superb site, extremely easy to use with some nice touches throughout, a fantastic resource for anyone passionate about a topic but unsure who to listen to and where to do it.

www.beta.searchme.com

Next up is searchme.com, I’d describe this as Google search meets itunes album scroll display. For all you ‘visualists’ out there this is a must see. Each results paged is headed by scrollable picture section that let’s the user scroll through mini versions of the web pages featured in the results list; the insight here is that often all we need is a quick glance at the web page to deduce its potential relevance. I know displaying web pages is no new feat for a search engine but the user experience here is fantastic (it’s another beta so not always), what’s more there’s a great little subject bar (scrollable again) that appears for each search allowing you to filter the result page further, another great way of improving the relevancy of your search.

www.google.com/friendconnect

This isn’t necessarily a site we can all go and visit but definitely worth a mention. Doc Searls (one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto) recently issued a bit of an update which included “Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them “social” will seem as absurd as it actually is.” Google’s Friendconnect is the first big attempt to knock down those walled gardens. It’s a simple bit of kit that allows website owners to easily build in social gadgets and applications to encourage visitors to be more social on the site (join, participate, share and add). The Google gadgets available include: allowing people to join the site (create a mini social network) and then invite friends from their existing social networks, leave comments and upload pictures It’s also got an open source bit in there that allows independent developer applications to be easily added to the site. Again, here’s video that explains, it’s bit long though.

www.bbc.co.uk/soundindex

Here’s a bit of left-field activity from the BBC, feels more like something Google would do (surely Auntie doesn’t think themselves some kind of Google rival?). At the moment most of BBC’s digital output turns to gold and soundindex is no exception. It’s got the tactile user experience of iPlayer and the usefulness of something you’d find in Google labs. Soundindex is a massive social index of the top 1000 bands/artists/tracks that are being talked about online (dips occur every 6 hours). It crawls Bebo, Myspace, Lastm, Youtube, itunes and Google to measure mentions, comments, plays, downloads. profile and views an artist or track has. Cracking little site they seem to have released under the radar.

www.Brandtags.net

A relatively new site from Noah Brier (bright guy at Naked US) which has taken off at breakneck speed. In essence it’s a brand image index and works by simply asking people to type the first thing that comes to mind on seeing a brand. It aggregates the responses and can show you the words typed most often for each brand. Really nice way of showing the words (basically the bigger they are the more people typed them in). Looking at Johnnie Walker we can see that ‘Keep Walking’ eclipses most of the other words so well done BBH. It’s great idea and with 600,000 tags there’s definitely something in it, only problem is most of those tags probably came from people like us. To be fair to Noah he does say it’s nothing more than a collective experiment.

Tags: addictomatic, alltop, filter, latest, mahalo, organise, powerset, search, semantic web, web 3.0, websites