Reading Scott Hanselman's blog this morning, he stated that MS have released ASP.net Wiki. The idea is basically a "one-stop-shop" for all things asp.net to save people the time of googling and going through the results.
First of all I thought that sounded like a good idea, but thinking about it I'm not so convinced and let me tell you why!
Looking through the wiki, what I basically see is a carefully selected collection of links to various posts on a particular subject, now of course the wiki is still in its infancy so the links are top notch, most selected by Scott, but give it a few months aren't people going to be adding links to their own posts on a particular subject??, and even removing others? (It's been bad enough lately with people cross posting massive posts on some of the most popular "big" RSS feeds!)
With a search engine the top results are the most popular/best match for the search criteria you have put in.
Don't get me wrong I think the idea has legs, I just don't think a free-for-all editing wiki is going to be as useful as it first seems, neither will a team of people selecting the links - they have their favourite sources and will likely miss some gems that the google machine won't. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical today!!
How about instead of a free-for-all wiki, MS write an asp.net specific search engine? How could it work? If you gave it certain sites to trawl then you're back to the same situation of "gems" being missed, and perhaps even favouritism towards MS blogs! How about some kind of tag system like technorati, then why not just use technorati?? Well, its not asp.net specific I guess, but will that stop someone tagging a post on WPF?
Could have some kind of script that notified the "MS asp.net search engine" (a modern day product name in the making...nah, to short!), that a post is ready to be trawled and let the engine index it based on contents! Build a site based on results from the engine??
What do you think?
Technorati Tags:
asp.net wiki