iAsk is back!

iAsk is back!
iAsk is an idea of collecting, categorizing and sharing information. It is based on the idea of tagging and community bookmarking, as been proven by Web2.0 site http://del.icio.us .While sharing the same way of categorizing information with "tagging", iAsk has some features that del.icio.us and similar websites isn't providing currently.

1. Realtime interactive. iAsk is implemented as an IRC bot. Using IRC as the transport / underlying protocol helps iAsk to be more interactive to user. With help of the iAskBot, IRC users can do their query and tagging during the interaction with other people. All information and results can be shared immediately.
2. Decentralized structure. That means you can easily control who to share the information with and manipulate the data easily.

iAsk has fallowed a modulized design. Currently the IRC bot (for IRC interactive searching), repository management and update module has been implemented. New modules like automatic update, broadcast searching are on the way.

iAskBot sample use:

~tag http://www.google.com search:linux

This tags the URL of Google with "search" and "linux"

~tag search:linux

This shows all URLs that has been tagged with both "search" and "linux"

~lstag l.*

Searching existing tags with regular expression

~alias Google http://www.google.com

Adds an alias "Google" for URL "http://www.google.com". The alias can be used wherever an URL is required.

~info Google "World's largest and best Internet searching engine."

Associates a piece of note with specified URL.

~info Google

Retrieve previously set note of specified URL.

Come to irc channel irc://irc.freenode.org/#ubuntu-cn and have a talk to iAskBot there :-) [Not always available since it's running on my machine. If someone has an better Internet connection and a Java 5 runtime, and would like to host it for the rest of us, I'd love to hear from you :-)]