Just Gnosh It! Gnosh it Good!

I just got back from the CNI Spring Task Force meeting. There were a lot of interesting projects presented that I will discussing over time, but I have to start somewhere, and it is with Gnosh.

Gnosh is a social metatagging and aggregation tool that supports searches across a variety of search and social services developed by Michael Richwalsky, Web Administrator, at Allegheny College. He was joined by Bryan Alexander of NITLE at the presentation.

Gnosh pulls information from Google, MSN, the Wikipedia and Yahoo as well as Blogpulse, Del.icio.us, digg, Feedster, Flickr, Icerocket, and Google Blog search and more. Users registering with the service can keep track of all the searches that they've done, and you can see if anyone else has done the search as well. Users can request to be added to their friends list and see what searches they have done as well.

When I was listening to this presentation I began to envision a different utilization of the technology.

One of the challenges I see that libraries are facing as we shift to LiveWeb environment is that our web sites are all Web 1.0 (DeadWeb?) technology. Libraries need to begin rethinking how we make our content findable when a "static" web site does not effectively get the information out to those utilizing NetGen discovery tools.

What if the Gnosh concept can be re-tuned to include provide access to ejournals, catalogs, and other "traditional" library resources? Having access to these resources within the context of the social search and tagging interface would seem to place our resources closer to where these users are living. It could turn into the Netgen MyLibrary system.

I haven't thought it out much more than that since I have too much else from the meeting to digest... Sphere: Related Content