Friday, March 02, 2007

Cool new site

Knover.com connects "notable" people to other people and topics. It's an interesting way to find out about a topic without going through Google just to see what you get. Here's a blurb from the "about us" page:

The Internet is a reflection of society, constructed by and primarily about people. Using notable people as an anchoring point, Knover mines online articles to extract an algorithmically generated social network of history's most influential, celebrated, and notorious people. Using the Internet as our universe, Knover allows users to understand the undercurrents of society by focusing on these notables and their relationships to other people and topics.

So let's say you want to find out about Anna Nicole Smith. Just kidding. Let's say you have that experience where the same topic keeps popping up all around you, and you feel like an idiot because you never heard of it before but everyone else seems to know what it is. (They're probably faking it, no worries.) Or let's say you're a Republican but your girlfriend forced you to watch An Inconvenient Truth, and now you want to see if other, 'normal' people actually believe this weird shit.

You go to Knover.com and type in the topic. I'm picking WiFi, because people ask me that a lot - what is WiFi? (Why do they ask me? I have no idea.) Sure, you can look at wikipedia or google for the definition, but to really see how WiFi is influencing the telecommunications infrastructure of the world (and I KNOW you want to know that), type it into Knover. It's very cool.

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