More resources, and the 'four domains of search'
Jem Stone has emailed me a good link to a site listing lots of web2.0 apps. Well worth checking out to see if your idea is similar, or could build on an existing app.
I also mentioned at the North-West Lab today my structure for the 'four domains' of search - the four domains of information that you can tap into to provide more contextual or relevant services for users' search tasks. These were:
History
Users' existing activity, either within your product, or across different products
Users' 'taste' histories - what they've liked, what they've done, etc
Community
The people the user identifies with, and is likely to share tastes with
People that identify themselves as 'communitys' with shared goals
Users that might not know each other, but who share patterns of behaviour or taste
Context
The user's immediate environment - where they are, what they are looking at, their mindset (distracted, focused, happy, sad, etc), whether they are alone or in a group, what other services/products they are using, etc
Experts
Super-users - people with expert knowledge in a particular area
Early adopters - people whose tastes or behaviours are ahead of the curve (warning! the patterns of these users might not be matched by the mainstream)
Professionals - people who have professional experience in an area, and who can be relied on to provide an authorative answer
In each domain, your application could have a passive or active approach - it could rely on infering information from these domains 'in the background', without users being aware, or it could actively ask users to provide this information.
In the areas of contextual search and personalised services, I believe that we've only just started to scratch the surfaces of these domains of information, particularly context (and experts, for some strange reason). Most existing personalised or contextual services have focused on history and community (amazon, google, audiocsrobbler, delicious, etc). There are huge tracts of undiscovered land in the overlaps between these domains, and hundreds if not thousands of applications that can tap into these domains and provide specific value to users who are searching for content or information. Go forth and find these apps!
