Eurekster Swicki Blog

There is an interesting thread discussing swicki's and web 2.0 at Techsoup which posed the question, "What is the problem we are trying to solve with a swicki?"

This is our answer to that question:

Any website or blog has an audience that has some sort of shared interest. As the person running the site or blog your goal is to provide you community with things they find interesting and useful or show something that will earn you money. Swicki's are an interesting combination of these two things. Most importantly a Swicki is a search engine that reflects the unique perspective of your community i.e. over time the results will be more relevant to your community than a general search engine. The buzzcloud also acts as an online water cooler showing what others in the community are interested in.

In addition to providing a useful service this tool will allow the ten’s of thousands of community sites out there to get a share of the multibillion dollar pay per click search market (more details on this coming soon).

The larger problem swicki's are solving is that large search engines are too general and just like every other form of media that starts with the big boys trying to be everything to everyone (NBC, ABC) eventually it splits into lots of niche targeted products (Nickelodeon, History Channel etc). We don’t think any one organization is clever enough to organize all the information on the web in a way that suits every user or community of users so we have developed a tool that allows anyone to moderate a search engine and decide what is and isn’t relevant to their community.

We have tried to make it easy as possible as most of the improvements happen passively based on how your community interacts with the swicki. Feel free to have a go and let us know how we can improve.