I was (and still am) fond of what the OpenCola guys created back in the P2P buzz days, but this recent spin-off, “Dude, check this out!” [DCTO?], started by a few of the OC founders and development managers, has me scratching my head — albeit OC did as well. So perhaps I’ll simply reserve dismissal and keep an eye on the progress.

For the most part DCTO seems to be a hybrid of Metafilter, Technorati, Feedster and the Delicious social bookmarks manager.

Here’s a quote from the site:

“Dude, Check This Out! is an entirely new application for finding, storing, and retrieving all the great stuff that you find on the Web. The Dude is the easiest way to share that stuff with your friends and other contacts, and it’s also a great way to meet people who think like you.”

In addition, it appears they are doing some clever stuff with all this meta-data:

“The Dude is powered by two extremely sophisticated search technologies: associative relevance and semantic search. The associative relevance search allows the Dude suggestion engine to suggest new items to you that are likely to be of interest to you, based on your likemindedness to other users.

Semantic search allows searches of the Dudesphere, so that you can find items on your own blog, or on the blogs of others. Our semantic search engine, called “ColaSearch (Collaborative Object Look-up Architecture Search) is the world’s first generic social search engine, and it will allow us to eventually rewire information content on the Web based on implicit social relationships.” (via the FAQ)

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