Wondrous Dark Matter
Brad Feld wrote a great post over the weekend entitled “The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere“. It’s definitely worth checking out. While Brad’s primary focus was on blog comments, the fact of the matter is that there is all sorts of “dark matter” out there on the web (I really like that term- I hope it sticks!).
Some dark matter, like blog comments, are largely black holes of information that isn’t structured or enabled in a manner to easily permit analysis. Some dark matter though is ‘dark’ in that only a fraction of its value has been derived. At TrustPlus we are exploring existing web data to extract reputation signals. We like to say that we’re shining a light into the dark corners of the Internet to illuminate the people we encounter online.
The next few years of Internet evolution are going to be largely about horizontal services that tie together so so many pieces of the web, and in so doing, lots and lots of wondrous dark matter is going to get leveraged to the hilt.
I for one can’t wait for the blog comments infrastructure to stop sucking!
Shawn, could you contact me? I have a technology partnership suggestion.
Best,
Rob Finn