posted 15 years ago
Stevi,
Good to hear you liked the first chapter.
In the past few years there has been a fundamental shift in the way new applications are being built. Newer applications, aka user-centric applications, fundamentally change how the user interacts with the web application. User-centric applications make the user the center of the web experience and dynamically reshuffle the content based on what is known about the user and what the user explicitly asks for. If you follow the user-centric paradigm and invite your users to interact with the application, contribute new content you will be able to harness collective intelligence in your application. As users interact more they generate new data and the more personalized the application the stickier it gets.
So even if your application doesn't have much data, you can still harness the potential of collective intelligence by following the user-centric paradigm.
As with all user-generated content privacy and copyright issues are always of concern. The book focuses on the technical side of implementing collective intelligence in your application. I did mention in Chapter 6 that some people have effectively used web crawlers to find sites that are illegally using copyrighted content.
thanks
Satnam