Fil Menczer recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the Social Integration of Semantic Annotation Networks for Web Applications. The project brings together complex networks and Web mining techniques to develop a new generation of search engines and collaborative Web applications such as GiveALink.org. The researchers will leverage existing annotations from users (such as the bookmarks they already maintain on their browsers) and elicit new ones through useful tools and games. The research will lead to a framework for building and maintaining socio-semantic networks of relationships between, and among, users, tags, and Web sites. In the end, these networks will improve social Web applications such as search, recommendation, spam detection, and exploratory navigation interfaces. More...