Alexia (Amazon.com) just started a new web service that will give access to Alexia’s databases to anyone who needs it. It is really great news. I am all excited to see that big companies are opening themselves and making their data publicly available to anyone who needs it.

I am talking about how I see the future of the Web since some months. I am talking about the vision I have of the future of the Internet with the Semantic Web, etc. I talked about how the Web could change if everybody makes his gathered/processed/indexed content publicly available.

Yesterday I released a totally new version of Talk Digger. I talked about how I would like to make the computed results available to anyone who needs it. It is a dream I have, it is a reality that Amazon makes. Talk Digger and Alexia results would not be the same, the users would not too, but in a case or another, it goes in a vision of things that could change the way we use the Internet, the way that the Internet growth.

The new version of Talk Digger is using a web service of Google: PageRank. It is really great way to try to see what is the credibility of the people that are talking about an URL; it is a great way to know who the people that participate to a conversation are. It is sure that it is not the best and only way to do that, but it is a good start. In fact I am designing a system, a new feature of Talk Digger, that I think it could be a good way to see, analyze and interpret these conversations. In a case or another, it is a great feature that will be part of Talk Digger for long (as long as Google gives access to their API through a web service).

There is the point: Talk Digger goes ever further in displaying its results using the service of another company.

Now, would it be possible to integrate the new Alexia web service to enhance Talk Digger’s results? It would be really great considering all the stuff we have access too using the web service. I could even compare the Google’s PageRank with Alexia’s Popularity system to compute a unique indicator that would use both services (none are full-proof, but both of them could be complementary).

The problem with Alexia’s service is that I am restricted to one request per IP per second. The thing is that if you start a search for an URL and receive 70 results, then Talk Digger requested the PageRank of these 70 URLs in less than a second. So, I cannot really implement Alexia’s new web service in Talk Digger with this restriction.

In a case or another, Amazon has done a great thing by creating this new web service. I hope that other companies follow them in that direction.

Technorati: Talkdigger | alexia | amazon | search | engines | webservice | pagerank | google |