I'm in the Powerlabs Community!

Powerlabs is the playground for Powerset, a natural language search engine company. Like so many other companies, right now, they are trying to mash up huge vats of full text with some kind of linguistic knowledgebase to produce a search engine that does more than keyword searching. They opened up to beta testers recently and I applied.

They have a very interesting and extremely well done site. Members get 'karma' points for making comments, having their suggestions implemented and so on. You have to vote on the results of any search you do before you can do another search. You vote on other people's comments, etc. The point is it encourages people to participate. OK, it encourages a certain kind of person to participate. People who are so competitive that they'll go all out for something as insubstantial as extra karma points. :~)

Right now I'm ranked #8303 of 8342 community members and I have a 4 karma. I'll report more as I explore.