I was talking my my friend Adam the other day about Wink, and he mentioned the “Wink Answers” feature. This is a typically ingenious Web 2.0 functionality mashup of search + wiki + tagging. Apparently, Wink is a tag-enhanced search engine — but once you search, you’re offered “Wink Answers” in addition to tag- and Google-powered search results. Wink Answers are simply wiki entries keyed to search strings. Given that a string like “mov video converter” is much more specific than any of the single words contained therein, this could be more useful than, say, the Wikipedia entry for video formats. Neat idea. Apparently, someone else has already taken this to its logical endpoint and mashed wiki + URL to create “Shadows” — clearly insane, but not surprising.

In any case, there isn’t yet a _Wink Answer_ for “mov video converter”. Given the results of my search yesterday, I now have the answer. The question is, why would I stuff it into Wink? I can blog it right here, Google (and a thousand other spiders) will crawl it, and the next time you search for “mov video converter” on Wink (or Google, or anywhere else), my post will show up, if it’s a good one. The only reason I’d shove my Answer into Wink is if I don’t have some other way to hang it out where spiders can see it — and if I’m on the net searching for info about “mov video converter”, then I almost certainly do.

The same problem/solution applies to reviews, which I’d guess are the broadest and deepest user-generated content out there. So why do so many people take so much time to write detailed reviews and post them in single, walled off databases like Amazon, Yelp, sfsurvey.com, etc.? It all comes down to the value exchange. You provide the content, the site provides the UI, and specialized economy of scale. The amount of personal content/data/facts that you’re willing to embed/give to a site is related to the utility that the site provides to you, personally, with regard to that information. But, more importantly, it’s directly proportional to the extent that particular site can act as a proxy for your desired audience.

As broad search UI’s become more powerful, the need for specialized UI’s to act as proxies to specialized audiences is reduced. If I can search for “reviews San Francisco chowhound azie” — and I can — and get an aggregate thread of web-wide posts and information, including stuff that doesnt happen to be posted on Chowhound’s board, why would I want to wade through this? I don’t.

I think I finally understand why “blogging” _might_ be such a big deal.

Check back shortly for “wink answer mov video converter“.