Beta

I've determined that I'm a sucker for a good Web 2.0 beta. I wish I'd been keeping track, because man, I belong to SO many beta sites. I'm doing something with Newsvine, something with Yelp. I tag through del.icio.us *and* Wink (I think del.icio.us is all done being a beta). I'm trying out Yahoo 360. I just signed up for Gather. I'm no doubt missing a few others, but you get the picture. So, why?

I really dig the idea of the "Architecture of Participation" that became the theme of Web 2.0 ventures. I like the idea that all of us are better at getting things right than little silo companies. I like that all these places are out there trying to become a platform. (While I'm on that topic, check out this site: Programmable Web. It's really a neat site covering all kinds of technological mash-ups.) And, I like thinking that some of these will come together, will gain some momentum, and will become the way we all get to know about things.

Gather is a lot like Myspace.com, a lot like Newsvine, like Digg, like Slashdot (you get the picture). It's a place where you fill out this ungodly long profile, and then you set to work trying to get more and more friends to show up (Don't worry, I won't spam you this time). You are supposed to either blog unique content or find things that you're interested in, tag them, refer to them, etc, and get people to aggregate it up the food chain until everyone sees it's there. What are all these sites getting at?

In a weird way, sites that use humans to move content up to a level that gets more people's attention are like the humans rebelling against the robots in Terminator. Someone has decided that Google does an okay job with its uber-smart math-based finds of sites, but hey- nothing beats a human pointing out a story to another human. I admit that it's what grabs me about it. Instead of searching Google for interesting content, I search del.icio.us or Technorati or Reddit. And so, just like Yelp, I'm joining up with Gather, because I want to add some humanity to my content, so I can push what I like up the eyeball chain, so that more people might accidentally sneak back here to chrisbrogan.com and give the site some boyancy.

You're very welcome to look me up on Gather. My username is: chrisbrogan. Whoa. Unique, eh?