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Posts filed under 'collective intelligence'
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May 1st, 2008, 12:05pm
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Welcome to BlogRize. Currently in beta testing, the site is a new experiment in crowd sourcing - one that aims to make social news a more personal experience. According to founder Jesse Spaulding, the difference between BlogRize and other similar sites is that the site contains: “today’s news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.”
Readwriteweb, one of the social communities currently beta testing on Blogrize, adds,
The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog’s articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting.
The idea is that, unlike websites like Digg which aggregate the opinion of the entire web, you can get a much more accurate picture of sites that interest me from a community of users who share my interests and who are, in essence, more like me. According the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer, “people like me” - those who have similar interests and share a similar political outlook - have supplanted corporate CEO’s, government officials and doctors as the most trusted source of information. Read More »
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April 29th, 2008, 10:25am
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Well, Grand Theft Auto IV was released last night at midnight, which means that there were people lined up to buy it. From where I sit, dressing up like Niko Bellic is less geeky than Dumbledore and certainly better than dear Jar-Jar. Some of your co-workers may be a little sleepy if they spent the wee hours commiting mayhem in Liberty City.
The game has great reviews so far as well as the typical hoopla about inappropriateness of the material. Thing is, adults make up a huge percentage of the gaming population and some games are just not made for children — just as the Godfather (parts I and II), Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, and the Usual Suspects are all considered great films, but not ones that you would watch with your tween.
What’s the wikinomics angle? User-generated content delivered through “walkthroughs” are a huge value ad to the game and the best ones are prepared by volunteers. Below is an excerpt from a study that Alan Majer and I conducted about a great walkthough creator “named” AggroSk8ter.
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April 23rd, 2008, 10:44am
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There’s a fantastic article in this month’s Scientific America about the merits of open access and collaboration in science. We’ve certainly been of the minds that openness, whether in relation to data, patents or ideas, is at the heart of an array of potential advances in the sciences. Projects like the MSF-led Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative or the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid offer great examples of the positive outcomes enabled by openness and sharing that would have been largely impossible in a closed, proprietary model.
But despite such successes, there remains a great deal of scepticism about the merits of an open model in science. The usual response is that as potential profits, attribution and, for academics, tenure and promotion, are closely tied to their research efforts, opening up risks livelihoods, etc. Sounds all too familiar. Read More »
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April 10th, 2008, 03:43pm
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I was reading an article by Bill Simmons that was talking about how Barry Bonds has fallen off the face of the earth and no one seems to care when made an interesting comment. He mentioned how Barry Bonds has not just disappear from media spotlight, his career is also missing from YouTube. In part this has to do with the fact the MLB doesn’t get social media, but the major factor is that user generated content needs relies on users wanting to generate content.
Athlete’s are often idolized and immortalized by their fans. I know that growing up I definitely had images of my hero’s, ideal ways in which I remembered them. Social media sites like YouTube make it possible to relive the highlights and memories. The twist is that now users can rate and rank (by number of views) sports history, choosing the moments that will define how we collectively remember a career.
The sports guy mentioned Mike Tyson and Barry Bonds, both great examples of athletes who have had highs and lows during their careers. I decided to take a look at these two athletes and some of my personal hero’s to see how they are being remembered in the user generated content world that is YouTube.
The results are not in anyway scientific. I am just running a search in YouTube, sorting by the number of views, and then assessing what the top 20 results say about their career. The question I am asked myself is ‘if 20 years from now someone stumbled upon YouTube would the get the same impression of the athletes that I did growing up watching them.”
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April 2nd, 2008, 09:29am
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What happens when you decide to remove traffic signs, signal lights, and parking meters and merely ask drivers to be responsible? Sounds like a recipe for chaos… yet in the Dutch town of Drachten that’s exactly what they’ve done. Instead of chaos, they’ve found that personal responsibility and common sense go a long way toward reducing accidents and improving traffic flow. Said one citizen, “You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker.”
The experiment is based on a the philosophy of what is called a “shared space”, here’s how wikipedia describes the concept:
Safety, congestion, economic vitality and community severance can be effectively tackled in streets and other public spaces if they are designed and managed to allow traffic to be fully integrated with other human activity, not separated from it. A major characteristic of a street designed to this philosophy is the absence of traditional road markings, signs, traffic signals and the distinction between “road” and “pavement”. User behaviour becomes influenced and controlled by natural human interactions rather than by artificial regulation.
Paradoxically, relying on heavily scripted traffic regulations to improve our own safety leads to a decreased sense of personal responsibility. We rely on the rules of the road instead of our own good judgment. But by removing those rules, we actually start to feel less safe, forcing good judgment and personal responsibility to flow back into the system. It’s a great model for how pushing out central authority and decisonmaking to end users can result in more optimal behavior. If it works under these circumstances, imagine how well it’d work with additional community support like we have on the web - for example, a ratings system for other drivers.
What are the implications for more distributed approaches to guiding or regulating employee behavior within firms?
Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain for bringing this example to our attention.
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March 28th, 2008, 11:31am
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An interesting Businessweek article describes how researchers are tapping into mobile phone usage patterns to analyze the behavior of individuals. The article describes plenty of beneficial ways in which mobile usage data could be used such as identifying traffic congestion, tracking and preventing contagious illnesses and even helping event planners manage high budget conventions. Also known as ‘reality mining’, this practice provides an innovative way of collecting and analyzing data to more effectively predict and manage future outcomes.
Similarly, many entities are looking to use the collective intelligence of internet users and are finding innovative ways to harness this power. A good example is Google’s Image labeller game which pairs users against each other in a competition to label images thereby helping to improve the quality of google image results. Read More »
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March 26th, 2008, 05:21pm
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Here is a cool idea that is just getting started. The Time Space Map is kind of a combination of Wikipedia and Google Map mashups. It allows people to graph historical events in a temporal fashion. The picture below shows the growth of the Inca Empire. A good description can be found here.
I’m curious to see how this map of Napoleon’s advance and retreat to Russia (considered by many to be the greatest graphic ever) would look in this application. Read More »
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March 26th, 2008, 03:38pm
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The iPhone, Xbox, BlackBerries, and other proprietary, closed Internet-enabled devices are dooming the PC and taking the Internet with it; or so says Jonathan Zittrain. I’m currently reading an advance copy of Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It,” in which he discusses the trend away from the generative PC to “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.”
The battle for the democratization of the internet – net neutrality – is fairly loud (although not nearly loud enough if you think about what is at stake). Similarly, there’s a lot of talk about open APIs and open platforms for customizable applications. However, the discussion around the transformation of the PC itself from an open platform to locked-down appliance is much more subdued. But, as Zittrain notes, “the endpoint matters.” Read More »
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March 12th, 2008, 12:37pm
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They aren’t all rocket surgeons, people.
There is a lot of brilliant content provided by everyday people on the web. I enjoy debates on the talk pages of Wikipedia as much as the actual articles.
The comments on epicurious add tons of value. People provide suggestions on how to improve the recipes or how to make the process easier (such as suggesting substitutes for bizarre ingredients…cumin shows up a lot, or reducing steps…such as using tin foil instead of banana leaves). Check out this wasabi potato dish that nicely complements miso-glazed sea bass. For those boycotting sea bass, black cod works as well.
When people can rate anonymously, you sometimes get opinions that are somewhat unsatisfying. Below is a thoughtful review of Lobster “Potpies.” Sometimes you get people that say things like “caviar is too expensive, so I substituted chick peas and wasn’t impressed.”
Here is another example, a fella wasn’t happy with his stay at the Wynn in Las Vegas, but doesn’t want to tell us why. It still, of course, counts towards the average rating as much as a thoughtful, well thought-out post. Read More »
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March 7th, 2008, 03:49pm
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“We don’t have a monopoly on baseball knowledge,” says Sig Mejdal, the Cardinals’ senior quantitative analyst who helped create the contest. “Just looking at the fan sites and posting boards, you see an amazing amount of energy. Why not harness it?”
Why not indeed! So what this senior quantitative analyst has done (as reported in the WSJ) is create a “One for the Birds” contest, where fans are invited to file 300-word recommendations for players at small, non Division 1 schools. The fan who sends in the most compelling recommendation, whether the player ends up being drafted or not, gets a tip to St.Louis and a couple of sets of ball tickets.
I have to thank Joseph P. at River Ave Blues for pointing this story out, and catching me up on a couple of other wikinomics-related stories tied to baseball that I had missed or forgotten. Read More »
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February 25th, 2008, 03:42pm
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If you started reading this post based on the title, you’ve already half proven the point I’m about to argue. Sensationalism combined with social media is killing the news. Sensational headlines have always captured eyeballs, even when the dominant media was newspapers. However, with online developments such as hyperlinks, RSS feeds, news aggregators, and online voting mechanisms like Digg, headlines are often all readers use when determining newsworthiness.
I’ve been doing some research lately on how political communication in evolving with Web 2.0. Going through my notes, I came across the following snippet from an interview with one of the co-founders of a leading political blog and social networking site:
“There is this whole debate about the destruction Digg is doing to how information is disseminated. You have all these people who are going through [the site] and reading sensationalized headlines that have to be fictionalized, by nature, to get promoted. These are accompanied by a very small summary that is usually not very well written, and again, slanted because most people, and I’m guilty as charged, are attracted to those types of stories. The people creating the headlines are just trying to drive traffic back to their sites.
[…] The problem is that the people reading the news [on Digg] feel that by scanning these headlines they’ve been informed. You could scan the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and get a sense of the news, whereas now if you scan Digg-type sites, you’re getting a very slanted sense of the news. You form an opinion about an issue without really reading about what happened. I think that’s what’s scary about these things. Of course, the counter argument is that in order to be portable you have to be precise and you have to be digestible. It’s the whole snack media notion that everybody’s taking, but there’s got to be a little substance behind this or it’s going to work against us.”
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January 27th, 2008, 03:31pm
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The launch of Tata Motor’s $2500 Nano has made a big splash across the world. Although, not an immediate threat to established car makers, expertise in the design of cheap cars could allow Tata to eventually compete for the dollars of the increasingly prosperous middle class in developing countries. Obviously a huge growth opportunity for any car maker who can tap it.
However, a $2500 dollar car makes a smaller impact on your life if you are one of the vast majority of Indians who makes $700 or less per year. Even Tata’s best engineers could not make a car to serve this market. However, this doesn’t mean that India’s vast poorer classes do not have access to motorized transportation. Under these difficult conditions, a “car” called the Jugaad was created with the efforts of self-organizing rural mechanics.
The car is basic to say the least. It has four wheels, an engine and a chassis that is often made out of wood. A model with a 10 horsepower engine and all new components costs around $1000. However, since each part of the Jugaad can be replaced individually, or substituted with used parts, the price tag can go down to as little as $600.
The Jugaads operate mostly in rural areas as they are technically illegal - they do not meet any government standards, pay taxes or have license plates. However, with India’s famously overloaded transportation infrastructure, the need for these cars is likely to continue.
Although Tata’s Nano will go a long way in making the lives of millions of people more convenient, the real opportunity lies in the rural areas where a huge share of the world’s poor live. It seems that with the proven ingenuity of people in those areas a modest investment by either governments or corporations would yield a very high return in terms of development. Coincidentally, this topic was addressed by Bill Gates at the Davos conference.
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January 15th, 2008, 02:07pm
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As reported yesterday, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM (the leading earner of US patents for the past fifteen years) are partnering with Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony to release a portfolio of dozens of innovative and environmentally responsible patents to the public domain. This portfolio of IP is entitled the “Eco-Patent Commons” and is available on a website hosted by the WBCSD.
According to the WBCSD, the patents are searchable by anyone through a search engine on their website and global participation from businesses in diverse industry sectors are welcome. It will be fed with initial and subsequent patent pledges by companies that become members of the Commons. Through the Commons, the patents will be made available for free use by all, subject to defensive termination.
The objectives of the Eco-Patent Commons:
- To provide an avenue by which innovations and solutions may be easily shared to accelerate and facilitate implementations to protect the environment and perhaps lead to further innovation.
- To promote and encourage cooperation and collaboration between businesses that pledge patents and potential users to foster further joint innovations and the advancement and development of solutions that benefit the environment.
Examples of environmental benefits patented inventions may provide:
- Energy conservation or efficiency
- Pollution prevention (source reduction, waste reduction)
- Use of environmentally preferable materials or substances
- Materials reduction
- Increased recycling ability
It is fantastic to see big business making such great strides to help the environment. Not only will these patents help the public domain to share economical and environmentally sustainable practices directly, but the concepts and specific information in these patents could inspire others for formulate new ideas and methodologies for other products and services.
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January 7th, 2008, 12:51pm
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Interesting article on the NYT site today that points us to a new, YouTube for ideas. Backed by former Harvard Pres and Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, “Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system.”
I’m a big fan of this idea – while Wikipedia offers a non-visual repository of thoughts and facts – you can’t (for the most part) attribute them to anyone, and thus it serves as a rather limited reference guide. This, however, has the potential to play a large role in the facilitation of intellectual debates, and, if it gathers enough support among academics and thinkers, the spread of knowledge outside of academic journals and libraries. Now all that said, I have to point out that this isn’t exactly novel. Last spring, as a grad student in the UK, I often used the video interviews at BigPicture to get new ideas and thoughts from top thinkers from across the globe. And therein lies BigPicture’s current advantage over the BigThink – while the latter has a roster of experts almost exclusively from the US, the former has a more robust worldwide composition.
Nonetheless, if packaged correctly BigThink could play a role in broader open source education efforts, where informal students could use this and another OS curriculum to formulate theses and thoughts for peer-review and, eventually, some sort of accreditation. Think the Open University - a core component of what could be a neat menu of Education 2.0 projets.
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November 5th, 2007, 12:03pm
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What do an online games community, a shopper aggregation site and a social network for runners have in common? They are the top ranked internet startups on a site called KillerStartups.com. The site is like a Digg for new online businesses. Entrepreneurs submit their projects to be rated by the community which includes other entrepreneurs, investors and bloggers. Reviewers can also leave comments and advice. The site has 11 categories including eCommerce, marketing, social networking and the most popular which is Web 2.0. Traffic on KillerStartups.com has steadily grown since the site was launched in early 2007. To date over 7000 ideas have been reviewed with the top startup, MostPlays.com, receiving nearly 9000 ‘Killers’ or positive ratings. The site itself is ad supported and has premium options for additional information meaning that the owners don’t seem to have any personal stakes in the startups themselves. It will be interesting to see if the community manages to pick the next YouTube.
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October 4th, 2007, 09:34am
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Taking a page out of MIT’s OpenCourseWare book, UC Berkeley has not only opened up its academic materials to the world, but they’ve done it via video’s posted to YouTube. They’ve posted over 300 hours of academic lectures on YouTube allowing anyone and everyone to learn as if they were in the classroom.
From the press release, “UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare efforts and Berkeley’s previous podcast models were indeed good starts but providing the actual video of lectures is a significant step forward. And while it still doesn’t allow for the engagement that makes academia what it is, it’s a heck of an improvement over readings lists, course notes and audio recordings.
Moreover, imagine what this could do for developing country efforts to improve post-secondary education. One of the impacts of the international community’s push for universal primary, and at least semi-funded secondary education, has been a large increase in the number of students wishing to attend post-secondary institutions. But given that in many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, meagre budgets are directed at primary, and then secondary, education, the post-secondary segment has seen its budgets slashed. For example, in the mid-80’s nearly a fifth of the World Bank’s education spending went to higher education whereas a decade later it had dropped to just 7%.
Projects such as this may just enable a re-invigoration of developing country colleges and universities, whether formally by institutions and governments or informally by students, by allowing for the exploitation of content developed elsewhere. Evidently it doesn’t solve the issue of ICT infrastructure but given the paucity of resources available in many DC institutions it might just act as a major complement for students wishing to learn and able to afford an internet cafe.
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October 1st, 2007, 09:40pm
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Last week I talked about Apple’s plan to release a firmware update that would make modified iPhones, in the words or Steve Jobs ‘permanently inoperable’. Below is a timeline of how this story has played out.
September 28, 2007 - Apple releases new firmware update for the iPhone in an effort to take back control of the phones which they no longer own.
September 28, 2007 – In what perhaps was not Apple’s wisest decision, Apple Genius Bar employees are informing customers who now own a $500 dollar brick (a result of Apples update) they are out of luck. Check out the Video
September 30, 2007 – Hackers unlock iPod functionality on the iPhone, and are still working on enabling call features (unlocking the SIM).
October 1, 2007 – The iPhone is fully unlocked again. Paid solutions from Turbo SIM and iPhonesimfree.com now have solutions to restore the iPhone to a fully functional state. (free solution reported to be very close)
Apple’s new firmware didn’t even last a weekend and hackers from around the world are working to create a free solution. I wonder is Apple will get the hint that their customers would like to add applications to their phones. Seeing as they have now hacked the phone not once, but twice! Nokia on the other hand seems to get it, and in their latest ad campaign for the N95 smartphone the company appears to be poking fun at Apple.
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September 4th, 2007, 12:19pm
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According to researchers over at the UCSC Wiki Lab they have developed a way to determine the trustworthiness of the content on Wikipedia. The basic premise is that Wikipedia contributions that A) remain intact or are built upon and B) are done by authors with good reputations create an entry that is more trustworthy. This is all displayed graphically in an easy to understand way for the average user. Suspect edits are highlighted in orange, the more suspicious the darker the colour, and therefore text that is not highlighted (or less highlighted) is deemed to be most accurate.
In order to determine the reputation of an author the take into account “how long their contributions last in the Wikipedia. Specifically, authors whose contributions are preserved, or built-upon, gain reputation; authors whose contributions are undone lose reputation.” There is a much more in-depth explanation, complete with mathematical symbols, available for download in presentation and article format.
Researchers hope this shift to what they are calling ‘content driven’ reputation can help users sift through the large amounts of ‘junk’ in the world of user generated content. You can see a beta version of the tool in action on a few hundred Wikipedia articles at the UCSC Wiki Lab.
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August 27th, 2007, 10:36pm
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Good article today in the Wall St. Journal about how the wisdom of the crowds is becoming more acceptable within the medical community as well as other professions.
From the article:
When radiation oncologist Michael Tomblyn recently saw a 21-year-old patient whose eye was protruding from its socket, he turned to his fellow physicians for help. Dozens of doctors offered suggestions, including fungal infection, HIV-associated lymphoma or a cocaine-associated sinus problem, eventually steering him toward the correct answer: rhabdomyosarcoma, a fast-growing cancer most often observed in young children.
The diagnosis didn’t take place in a doctor’s lounge. It happened on Sermo.com, a social-networking site for licensed physicians, which Dr. Tomblyn and 25,000 doctors like him visit regularly to consult with colleagues specializing in areas from dermatology to psychiatry.
Some good statistics as well:
Social networking is just one of many consumer technologies, including blogs, wikis and virtual worlds, to cross over into the corporate world. It is happening as social networking is moving more into the mainstream. Leading consumer social-networking sites attracted more than 110 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in July, up more than 40% from the previous July, according to comScore Inc.
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August 7th, 2007, 11:28am
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Interesting blog posting today from wired.com about whether Facebook and it’s ilk are moving the Internet in the right way? Or is it setting up more walled gardens.
From the article:
Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It’s time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor’s little gardens and put it back where it belongs — free and open on the open web.
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know. But to get value out, you have to put something in — photos, contacts, appointments, lists of your interests and your blog musings.
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple’s iPod.
This serves companies’ business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have their own, proprietary instant-messaging systems. They’re all good, but they’d be better if they worked together. The iPhone would be better if it could also be used on Verizon’s and Sprint’s networks, and Facebook would be better if you could link to friends’ pages on MySpace and Bebo. Social networking should be based on open standards, just like e-mail.
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