Zenome - Help Build a Mathematics Community of Knowledge

[dredfern]

I am the Mathematics Editor with a new Internet start-up called Zenome (www.zenome.com).
The idea behind Zenome is to build collaborative, highly functional, Web Communities, representing the combined knowledge and experience of its members. To start, Zenome will be gathering annotated links to relevant Web pages as well as spawning discussion groups for topics of interest. Many more knowledge sharing/leveraging features will follow.

I want to invite you all to get involved in building a Math Community that everyone can benefit from.

I've seeded the Mathematics Community with some initial data. Have a look at:

http://www.zenome.com/searcher/subCa...es/Mathematics

A couple of ways that Zenome is different than existing directories/communities:

* The intent is to pay both Community editors and page indexers a percentage of the advertising revenue generated by the site. The commissions would be relatively small to start, but it is our way of trying to say "thank you" to the Community.

* Zenome gathers much more meta-data about each page indexed than traditional directories - and over time we intend to use this meta-data to vastly enrich the user experience of Zenome over time.

* Zenome is meant to grow "organically" - with the directory structure set, in the most part, by indexers and editors. Everyday contributors will have a much greater impact on all aspects of their respective Zenome communities.

* Zenome's self-organizing tools should ensure that users receive the most relevant search results. The self-organizing algorithms should also ensure that Zenome's results improve as the directory grows.

* The knowledge encapsulated in the pages listed in Zenome categories will be leveraged to create new knowledge - it won't just be static.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the Mathematics Community at Zenome. Like I said above, I've just started working on this site and I'm hoping together we can build it into something great!

Darren (dredfern)
Editor, Mathematics
Zenome.com

[MathGuru]

I'm pretty sure that google ads are forbidden to be displayed along other ads. You should probably check with google to see if the other ads on your page are acceptable. If they catch you they will take away your adsense account.

Also, how can one "use" this site? What is it good for? Right now it just looks like a list of links to other sites. It almost looks like an adfarm, am I wrong?

[dredfern]

I'm pretty sure that google ads are forbidden to be displayed along other ads. You should probably check with google to see if the other ads on your page are acceptable. If they catch you they will take away your adsense account.?

Thanks for the heads-up MathGuru. We'll check into it.

Also, how can one "use" this site? What is it good for? Right now it just looks like a list of links to other sites. It almost looks like an adfarm, am I wrong

The idea for "using" Zenome is to be able to search for information of interest to you (through using the search facility or browsing the directory/discussions) - to mine the collective knowledge of a Community of members with a common interest (math, in this case). Granted, we're in Beta and there isn't a lot of content to search through right now - but that's why I've put out the all call for people who are interested in building this Mathematics Community.

Zenome is not an adfarm. While we are accepting advertising on the site, we will not allow it to interfere with the directory listing nor the search results (in the Google model). While we do not prohibit commercial sites from submitting their sites for indexing, they must be relevant to the Community and they will (soon) be marked as Commercial. Once we have more content, you will be able to slice through the material several different ways (even more so than currently offered).

We will either thrive or die on our ability to attract *real*, meaningful content and, therefore, on being able to attract Community members who want to be part of something collective. Hopefully these same founding member will also get great benefit out of the knowledge of their peers.

It's early days yet - but we think we have a viable plan that makes us different than other directories (DMOZ, Zeal, etc.) and more useful and sustainable in the future.

I hope that allays some of your concerns. If not, please let me know and I'll be happy to provide further information.

Darren