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The PreFound.com social search engine plans to hold a Kentucky Derby Roundtable with several notable guests venturing to the Bluegrass State to discuss social communities and search.

Derby Day Gets Social Network Treatment
On Friday, May 5th, PreFound CEO and co-founder Steve Mansfield will host a Roundtable discussion called "Extending On-line Social Communities into Pure Search."

Mena and Ben Trott, co-founders of Six Apart, will join Mansfield for the discussion. Journalists Bambi Francisco (MarketWatch) and Jessica Vascellaro (Wall Street Journal) will attend in person, while Washington Post e-commerce and Internet writer Leslie Walker will take part by teleconference.

Search Engine Lowdown managing editor Garrett French, who recently joined Search Engine Journal's columnist ranks, will act as moderator in a sort-of-homecoming for the former WebProNews writer.

Mansfield further described the focus of the Kentucky Derby Roundtable on the PreFound website:

The world of online social networks is growing exponentially. Memberships for these sites has grown to well over 100 million users and is expanding at a rate of nearly 500,000 new members per day.

At their level of scale, online social communities have the ability to gather, organize, recognize, reference and tag related online content. This has the potential to far surpass the abilities of existing algorithmic processes for demographic relevance compared to traditional Search. Under this scenario, could structures like Google's Page Rank system could be relegated to a second tier processing of news and search content?

Social community organization of search results is being utilized in technology offered by Eurekster and others, and there are many new "tag semantic" technologies cropping up that will work to make manual tagging a true reference tool. Will it happen? Should it happen? How should it evolve?
The Roundtable begins at 7 pm in Lexington; the venue was not known at press time.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.