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"Paul Montgomery has been dropping a lot of hints recently about his yet-to-launch site TinFinger.  It seems to be a blog news service along the lines of Memeorandum and Blogniscient.  And with all the controversy about both Memeorandum and Blogniscient in recent days, Paul has had a lot to say.  His latest post on automated editors versus human editors, which he phrases as \"humans vs robots\", is so darned intriguing I thought I'd haul a big chunk of it over here and see if we can figure it out:  \n\nIf you want the whole Web, or whatever type of Web document you choose to focus on (like news stories), then robots are going to win over armies of humans. Yahoo's human-edited directory could not keep up with the explosion of Web sites, but Google's robots could.\nHowever, with the advent of Web 2.0 comes a different model: OPML. I think it represents a different way of looking at directory structures which places humans at the centre of the process. Instead of trying to classify and categorise all the billions of Web sites and millions of blogs on the Internet, we don't even try to be completist. Instead, we are more interested in \"reading lists\" compiled on a small scale - the perfect scale for humans to contribute a high quality level in the journalistic role of Editor. Memeorandum and Blogniscient are examples of this on a micro scale, with their reading lists numbering only a handful of lists each and one guy running the show as Editor. The next step is to build that concept out into a loose, user-friendly directory structure for everyone to use - and so that everyone with \"domain knowledge\" of a popular subject can become an Editor too.\nDon't get me wrong, being an Editor in the 2.0 era is not like being an editor of one or more of the categories in Yahoo or ODP. The role changes from a top-down structure of editors being appointed from on high by managing editors, to one where anybody can be an Editor but only the ones who do their job best (by defining the most accurate, comprehensive, most-updated reading list) have any success. Yahoo and the ODP were examples of 1.0 directories, and hopefully Tinfinger and others will fulfill the role of being a 2.0 directory. I realise people will be reading this and still wondering wtf I am talking about, but hopefully it will become clear in time.\n\nAs you may already know, my feeling is that humans are generally better at editing than algorithms, but by the same token you could say that the main algorithms in use today (Google PageRank, Memeorandum, Google News) are largely based on human decisions, where a link generally counts as a vote.  At the other end of the spectrum, you have sites like Digg and Reddit, which are entirely edited by humans in a distributed way.  \nBut I'm not sure if it's really a case of humans versus algorithms: I think the future could lie with services like Wink, where Google's search results are rated, tagged and built upon by human minds.  In this way, humans could make up for the obvious failings of algorithms - namely the scourge of spam and splogs.\nWhat do you think: who should edit Web 2.0?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2005/10/31/humans-vs-algorithms-who-should-edit-web-20/>