What's a Swicki?
You may have noticed a new tag cloud on the Content Matters blog. Entitled "Content Buzz Cloud", it's on the upper left of the blog.
The cloud is a "Swicki" and it comes courtesy of social software provider Eurekester. At first glance, it looks simply like a web 2.0 tag cloud interface a la delicious. But, the swicki is more than that. Behind the tag cloud is a vertical search engine. Similar to Rollyo, the Swicki lets you select specific web sites to include in your index. It also includes a full web crawl, but the matches from your vertical sites show up higher in your results.
So, what's the social software angle? Well, a Swicki is designed for community tuning. Users can tune the results by removing sites that don't match, by adding new sites or by marking certain sites to go to the top of the results.
For Content Matters, I've focused the Swicki on content-related topics and sites. Swicki is still in beta, and some key features, such as including select blogs, are yet to be released (today, it includes all blogs in its index). So, how are the results? Try a few searches and let me know.
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