What is the best way to organize user generated content in a social network?

Question

I'm searching for the best way to automatically organize all user generated content in a social network. I'm building a site in ruby based upon lovdbyless' framework. the site is a place for men to share specialised knowledge.

I've looked into wikis,forums, blogs by need a platform/organizational structure that will allow user generated content from these 3 sources to be automatically aggregated, indexed and make it searchable, so that other users can get access to it easily and efficiently.

Something like a knowledgebase, that is automatically updated wherever a user creates a forum post, personal blog post, wiki entry etc.so that the combined knowledge of the site is accessible to members with minimum effort

Answer 1

Titles and Tags.

Answer 2

If I may expand on Lance's answer, since I agree tags are the best structure, you could generalise that into a triple graph, perhaps with something like RDF. What is an RDF triple?

Answer 3

Thanks to stuff like semantic mediawiki, and SIOC turning up in both wordpress and Drupal, you basically have a pre-built architecture for doing this.

As long as you are happy working in RDF, it should just be a case of integrating the various UIs in a way that makes sense for the goals of your social network project.

There are even "federated" query engines that will query all sources as if they are one source.