Howard Rheingold of Electric Minds calls it "reputation information" - meta-data, information that tells you how to prioritize and filter other information.
The Web has been an archive of reputation information since the first time John Q. Geek turned his bookmarks into a "Cool Sites" page, but with the sheer Mbyte-tonnage of new sites growing minute to minute, the need for reliable meta-data becomes more desperate. Rushing into this breach are services like The Mining Company and Reader's Digest's LookSmart, hoping to score ad revenue by offering a Web filtered by the most discerning agents of all: people.
David Shenk, author of the upcoming book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, points out that the need for information throttling is older than the Net. "That's why we buy magazines," says Shenk. "We look to professionals to help us filter out most of the world."
Though Yahoo! was the first to capitalize on the Net's hunger for meta-data, Shenk takes a dim view of Yahoo as a value-added filtering mechanism. "They now want to be known as an editorial service," Shenk says. "The problem is that editorial vision requires editing. There's a reason that Harper's and The New Yorker seem so damned smart - they say 'no' to 99.9 percent of the information available to them. When a 10-year-old can start out at Yahooligans and be at the Budweiser site in a couple of clicks, that's not what I call an admirable editorial vision."
The Mining Company is the most ambitious of the current efforts to breed hybrids of editorial content, site-cataloging power, and community-building resources. Launching in April, the Mining Company will furnish a consistent look-and-feel umbrella - and interactive applications like bulletin boards and iChat - to thousands of sites on subjects from divorce support, to lesbian issues, to knitting, to videogames, to indie films, to Windows 95. Each section will have its own URL - like "probaseball.miningco.com" - and will be hosted by a "guide" who has proven his or her own dedication to the subject by building an independent Web site, and "graduated" from the Mining Company's three-week "school."
"Two or three years from now, search engines are going to be impossible to use," declares Mining Company CEO Scott Kurnit. "It appeared to us that the only solution was human power."
The aim of the Mining Company is nothing less than "disaggregating the Web and putting it back together like Humpty Dumpty" in more usable form, Kurnit says. That will require a lot of human power. Kurnit told Wired News he expects to hire 70 full-time employees by the end of the year, and more than 3,500 guides, who will work at least 10 hours a week for 40 percent of the ad revenue generated on their sites.
Guides are expected to not only catalog existing sites, but to write weekly columns on their subject, send out email newsletters twice a month, update frequently, and invite guests to the site for chats.
Like LookSmart and TotalNews - a "para-site" that found itself in hot water this week - the Mining Company slaps a nav-bar frame not only onto its own subsidiaries, but onto any sites surfed from those pages. Kurnit is hoping that sites like CNET and NBC.com don't mind pages from deep within their own directories appearing within a Mining Company frame.
With pages dedicated to serving already-established fan cultures like devotees of the soap opera Days of Our Lives, Kurnit also hopes that, say, Paramount - which has been cracking down on unofficial Star Trek sites - won't mind an ad-free Mining Company frame appearing above their own branded content.
For guide Susan Bolyen, her Days of Our Lives site is a way to pick up extra cash doing a labor of love that she'd be doing anyway. Bolyen hosted a high-traffic fan site before she was recruited by an employee of the Mining Company, and plans to carry her weekly opinion polls ("Who does John really belong with - Marlena or Kristen?") to the new site.
Bolyen says that the Mining Company has been good at building community among the guides, with weekly chat sessions that Kurnit himself occasionally attends. Calling herself an "overachiever," Bolyen already devotes more than 10 hours a week to the site. "I had to go to 40 different sites to get the 170 photos I have in my Photo Extravaganza," she says. "Now there's no need for someone else to rummage through all those sites."
The Mining Company isn't the only site aiming to exploit people power as the Web's killer app. HumanSearch dispenses answers to Net-related questions furnished by brains rather than search engines, as does idealab's Answers.com. Insiders say that the Mining Company is in preliminary negotiations with both sites, to network their human resources.
"All of us are becoming agents for everyone else," says Howard Rheingold. "That's a much more interesting future than programming algorithms to do it."
