Ask HN: Best way to share information | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way to share information

1 pointdavidy1236 comments

Over the years a number of open concept link sharing sites have come and gone, like Flock and ShiftSpace, not to mention closed sites like Google's page wiki, Diigo, etc that died or haven't really taken off. These sites help organize content by tags and commentary. I know I'm not the only one who ends up with browsers full of tabs with helpful information I want to retain, yet bookmarks are vastly inadequate. I could take the attitude that if it's important I'll find it again, but that's not always true, and a collaborative site could help discover and shape really useful content. How to tag things is part of the problem, but it carries a solution in how to link tags.

Is there something inherent about these types of sites that dooms them? Or with new peer to peer technologies (WebRTC, offline browser functionality, peer to peer storage) is there likely to be something smarter than Facebook for use by a large number of people? What works and doesn't work about these types of sites?

I have the same concern about link sharing and more broadly information sharing for many years. I came across some social bookmark sites, such as del.icio.us, diigo, Pinboard, etc. Although some of them has millions users, tagging and stack are still not easy to use.

So I worked out my own solution based on the research and investigation on this domain for a long time. Right now, I'm reading the book from David Siegel: Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. It covers various aspects of how to make web a meaningful community with common standards.

However, lots of previous efforts are not that successful, due to the difficulties for the industry to accept one standard. For example, in the book publishing industry, publishers, distributors and retailers all have their own catalog structures. When librarians want to classified all the books into a standard catalog, they failed again.

This told me that never pursue a common and standard catalog for any industry, just like the fact that there is no common product SKU list for the UPC classification. As long as we can organize the information in a de facto format to meet user needs, it should be good to go.

So I've published the beta site BingoBo.com for people to comment and have free trial. If you are interested in it, you can get more information from the Kickstarter project here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z, my blog site: http://bingobo.info or contact me at danmark.clara _at_ yahoo.com.

your site isn't at all about open collaborative sharing though, especially with "patent pending," sheesh! how would any of the good ideas of the semantic web work if it were all patented?

Initially you were talking about "the best way to share information", right? BingoBo provides an efficient way to meet this kind of need. You also mentioned about the peer-to-peer solution which might be possibly helpful in resolving this type of problem. BingoBo has it built in.

Maybe it's too much for you to get the whole idea of BingoBo in the first place, so you feel like pretty frustrated. BingoBo is a platform to help users and businesses to share and save useful information which meets your initial request in your original post.

Now you are talking about "open collaborative sharing", this is a different topic. If you read the book from David Siegel, you can find the existing Semantic Web solutions are not successful. They are trying to pursue common standard and make collaborative sharing. But it's hard for the industries to follow due to the high cost and difficulties to adopt.

We have to face the reality. Semantic Web has a good intention, but only the solution with business value will have customers on the market.

Patent pending is to protect the technology and unique solution BingoBo worked out during the passed years. It does not stop anybody from sharing information. Especially, it helps various kinds of people to participate in the sharing effort instead of building by itself. It's not a closed platform.

This week I'm going to introduce the distributed computing architecture and how BingoBo applied it. On Fri. I'll unveil the software package for our tech folks to download and play with in order to quickly start a local sub-site to get the ball rolling.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I'll be happy to discuss with you.

I mentioned "open concept" which surely you can't interpret as applying to your product. And you cannot consider one book to be conclusive. The semantic web is generally failing as a set of heavyweight formal standards, but its concepts are being implemented in practical ways. However it cannot be dependent on any closed system, so with good descriptions data will not depend on any service. And you completely ignore projects like Wikimedia which provide the best source of content well in excess of any commercial undertaking on a volunteer basis.

All of the components such as p2p (WebRTC) have been developing for some time and are given in a platform. Thus my query, to situate the goal in the current technical soup rather than that of five years ago.

In any case, it's clear what you are building is not of direct interest to my query which is about a directly open solution (open source / open content / open hosting / open use).

Ok, I understand now that you are only interested in "open concept" which is not something I can help.

But I didn't only consider one book. Based on the research and investigation I have conducted so far, many existing Semantic Web implementation solutions failed because they are dependent on ideal assumptions, such as publishing open standard for every webmaster to follow in order to make search engines understand about the web pages they have published. Or they request volunteers to work on open projects, such as Goodreads,cn, LibraryThing.com, with the goal to have all the books cataloged. That's not going to work. Even if Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Linked Data have published RDF based catalogs, they are not able to help end users who needs to find information for their daily base.

"The only person who can categorize everything is everybody." - Clay Shirky

It's ok that you are not interested in my solution and I don't want to waste your time. But think about how a feasible solution BingoBo is, rather than stick to the wrong direction.

ShiftSpace.com domain name is on sale now.

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