This week I've been playing around with the new, closed, Talk Digger Alpha. It's not like I had thought, it's not Talk Digger with more tools on top, it's a complete rebuilt web application with social networking, a network connecting users by interests and represented visually.
It's also become a powerful monitoring tool I would advise as professional use.
The Network:
In short, on one side there are the new TalkDigger2 tools (To simplify between 'Talk Digger' and 'Talk Digger Alpha', I'll call them Talkdigger1 and Talkdigger2 from now on.) where search queries results (called conversations), are tagged and tracked (called tracks). On the other side there are the FOAF profiles listing users interests.
It's here that the connection is done and shown visually looks like this:
Results for 'pingthesemanticweb.com'
You can import/export FOAF Profiles, here's an example of Frédérick Giasson's profile. (It's such a long page that I had to take the screenshot using Paparazzi, a Mac application that can grab big web pages, but the location map at the bottom did not come out.)
And as any respectable social network, you can comment 'tracks', search user names, tags, interests, by location...
Tracking:
Talkdigger2 sorts results by newest (unlike Talkdigger1 which sorts by source) where 'Tracks' come with a visualization of 'Related conversations', a tool that shows in which order items are related:
The main search called 'search conversations' let's you enter URLs AND keywords. The Keyword search is like having a previous step to to TalkDigger1 search, it will list links (URLs) containg the keyword to track.
When you browse conversations two other tools/blocks show up, the ones I had mentionned here, a compact version of the related conversations and a block showing 'conversations from the same source'.
And of course, Tracks and comments can be followed by RSS, great for tracking your website or product.
Frédéric classifies TalkDigger as a 'sub-class of exporters' of a semantic document. (The New Semantic Web Services Environment)
All in all, it is like an enhaced version of Talkdigger1 with it's nice UI using Ajax and all. At first, the fact that it let's you track and tag search results made me think of a web BroadTracker, but technically to create these visual tools and add network, it's a different approache, it shows us the power of the Semantic Web. PingTheSemanticWeb came as a side tool by necessity.
Plus, the best maybe to come. We may see Talk Digger mashups:
“All its content is accessible trough ontologies like SIOC, FOAF, DC, GOE, etc. It give the possibility to developers to create software agent that can easily understand Talk Digger’s data and create other services above it.”How about implementing Talk Digger to social bookmarks? It could do some detection. :)
See a screenshot of a complete Talk Digger Alpha result page (again made using Paparazzi.) and read:
- Using SIOC ontology to connect Talk Digger with other online communities
- Using SIOC ontology to connect Talk Digger with other online communities 2
Category: Social Software Review 
tags: Talk Digger TalkDigger Social Network Track Tool FOAF Visual Web
Labels: search, social network
