In reply to: Federated Wiki and Directories by Kicks Condor

Federated Wiki

I like the idea, but like the author says, it’s best for working on one narrow subject for each instance which would mean I, being a generalist, would end up with 20 or 30 Fed wiki’s. Gah!

I think we start talking about federating our directories

This could help spread the net wider plus leverage two indexes for more depth.  Sounds like a portal page, and the public might find that more useful.

central search engine

There are a couple of good off the shelf, open source search engines that can crawl across multiple domains.  My suggestion would be to try those first, see what the bugs, limitations are before spending the time coding something new.  This might be the easiest thing to execute.

Another option might be a metasearch script.  It the old days there were several types: 1. Parallel search: this was the easiest, a search would simply return the top X number of results from engine1 then engine2 then engine3 etc.  No attempt to blend the results or change the ranking so it was a easier scrape to code.  2. returned results and simply showed you a list of engines that had that same site in the first X results.  Again these were scrapes.  I don’t think these early meta search engines had any algo, you just looked at the result and if 2 or 3 engines all had that site on the first page it was probably decent.  3. The most sophisticated meta search engines use API’s and there really isn’t much we can do with that.

My point is #1 Parallel search might be doable.  There may be some open source metasearch scripts around that could be adapted.

Portal: I think I will throw around portal ideas in another post rather than clutter up this one too much.

categorization systems

This could be as simple as a spread sheet like table cross reference: this category on KicksSearch corresponds most closely with this category on Indieseek.  And a reverse one.  Each cat. name being a link to that category. Might encourage deeper browsing.  Also simple HTML.

Or it could be a flow chart but in any event keep it simple and clicky. (Portal)

collecting submissions

I’m getting a brain flood of proto-ideas:

1. Something like Indieweb.xyz?
2. Twitter submit:  Put out a Tweet (these could be themed) asking for submissions all they have to do is retweet with a URL they want to submit.  Cherry pick the best.  (Heck we could do this right now since both blogs and Twitter support webmentions.)

These could be important, because there seems to be some sort of resistance to submitting URL’s right now.

syndicate entries

This may not be exactly what you are thinking of but:

1. RSS feed: the directory already makes this of the 5 newest sites added.
2. Toplist Generation: I know I can generate just about any type of top list available (ie. Top 10 Categories, Top 5 links by Clicks, Top Rated, Newest Comments, etc.)  There is also a way to export these top lists via JavaScript.  I have no idea how this all works but it’s there.

Directory of Directories?

This may be only useful in the future.  I know we have slightly different definitions of directories, but we could easily make a directory of directories if there are enough quality sites worth indexing.  I just mention this because my license for WSNLinks lets me use as many copies as I want, with full support, so long as they are on the domain Indieseek.xyz or a subdomain of it.  Just FYI.

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