Could crowdsourcing be a better way to make legislation?

February 29th, 2012 § Comments Off on Could crowdsourcing be a better way to make legislation? § permalink

yes! yes! yes!

Could crowdsourcing be a better way to make legislation?

Crowdsourcing has proven to be a pretty good way to accomplish things that require a lot of input from different people, including the creation of encyclopedias and the financing of personal projects such as movies and comic books. But could it be used to create legislation as well?

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via: gigaom.com

but really, to actually get there, we need more transparency. basically, that’s the hope behind the open data movement right? if all the data is open, and real-time controlled using automated agents, then everyone can help on decision making. if all data is distilled to transparent chunks of information, then the politics is cleansed back to relationships management, without deceit or manipulation.

the challenge is not so much collection of information anymore, but figuring out when to present which.

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A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers

February 27th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

the guardians......

the guardians...... (Photo credit: simada2009)

Roughly a year ago, we had an incident with neighbors in the co-working space in NY. They were two writers for an online magazine, fairly young, geeky, caffeinated.

Now, in this co-working space, the only thing separating the offices is a one-layer glass, so you can hear the other people if they talk a bit louder. During one of our skype meetings, when we had bad wifi reception, so our VP Sales tried talking louder to get the message trough, those two writers got annoyed and started tweeting confidential information about our clients. I learned about it when a friend from an ad agency sent me an email with screenshot from his FB wall.

It took some more shouting to resolve it and get the tweets removed, but the damage has been done already.

I’d like to believe that well-bred old-school professional journalist would never do that. Because my generation thinks that internet changed the world so significantly, they do not learn from previous generations and are reinventing the wheels. those two kids probably call themselves journalists, but in reality they are just reckless kids, who will need another decade or so to grow up and start behaving responsibly.

this article brilliantly talks about similar situation with tech bloggers:

A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers

A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 20.37 GMT on Sunday 26 February 2012 . A version appeared on p28 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Dan Lyons used his personal blog to attack Michael Arrington and MG Siegler.

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via: www.guardian.co.uk

… I wholeheartedly agree with his points, but unfortunately there is no way back. the geeks rule the internet, for better or worse. and media is not the only part of the old world order that is deteriorating, all other industries that are being ‘disrupted’ are bound to this same ignorance – disruption brings more efficiency to the market, at the cost of ignoring inherent value system.

actually, i believe that the ‘gain’ of disruption is just temporary and the cost of building out value system is simply deferred for later stage of the cycle.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-26

February 26th, 2012 § Comments Off on Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-26 § permalink

how big is twitter vs the web

February 23rd, 2012 § Comments Off on how big is twitter vs the web § permalink

website ideas

website ideas (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

today Twitter will get it’s 500Mth user, and that facebook is way past that for a year already.

it’s fascinating in a way, that almost 10% of the population of the world is tweeting, but then i noticed another information: WordPress now powers over 60 million blogs, 16% of all websites. (business.financialpost.com)

this is amazing % for one single cms, but what really surprised me, is that it seems there is really just 400M websites out there in the web. i kind of assumed there has to be more than that.

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ceo must read: bill gates’s memo from ’95

February 22nd, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

 

This image was selected as a picture of the we...

Image via Wikipedia

this is really amazing document. at first i meant to quote bits and pieces, but there’s just too many. so i will rather summarize high level takeaways without specific connections to each other:

  1. to paraphrase my great teacher: “learn enough strategy to be able to lead like this” – specially first time founders/ceos face great challenges trying to figure out what ‘leading’ and ‘strategy’ really mean, and separating the operational hat from the insightful one. in this letter, we can see just how much is possible to infere from a handfull of data – internet was 3 years old at that point, and Bill was able to predict accurately next 15. Strive to become a business thinker like him.
  2. reading this letter feels like we have not entirely left the era it describes. IP telephony still doesn’t work as good as landlines, streaming media is slowly becoming standardized, 3d is hoping to have a comeback, cross-web collaboration is still painful. i’d say we are in the final years of the first version of the internet.
  3. mobile and social currently seem to be in the same explosive growth stage as internet was back then. if they actually prove to be as transformative for the society as the web was, i’m not very optimistic. as Bill noted in this memo, internet was built heavily on open values. the mobile is being built based on values of telcos and apple, and social networking is taking us back to the primeval societies, where everyone knows everything about everyone else. next era might bring de-urbanization of our minds.
  4. i love this site – Letters of note – absolutely best way to learn is by observing great people doing / explaining what they’ve learned.
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when cultural differences hit you – smile!

February 21st, 2012 § Comments Off on when cultural differences hit you – smile! § permalink

Silicon Valley Rocks 2011

Silicon Valley Rocks 2011 (Photo credit: thekenyeung)

Lots of people move to US to start their business and are surprised by the obstacles they face in the beginning. I like this advice because it’s straightforward and actionable:

Israelis Tap In to Silicon Valley – WSJ.com

A group of visiting Israeli technology entrepreneurs recently got some blunt advice on how to do business in Silicon Valley. Be positive, smile a lot and don’t bad-mouth a competitor, venture capitalist Itamar Novick told them. When meeting with potential investors, think of it as a wedding proposal, not a transaction.

online.wsj.com

I recently noticed with myself, that I started using exclamation marks in almost every email I send out. the change happened after year 2 of living in US.

it might read as a cliché, when in reality, it merely lowers various expectations. you don’t really have to do much else in the valley than play the game. you need to be determined that this is the game you want to be playing and have humility to accept that you’re a foreigner that has to go humbly trough a process of re-integration into the society.

there is nothing you can do to make this process more controlled, because it’s human nature. smile is a signal that you’re friendly, as people around you start to trust you they’ll share more opportunities with you, and in your second year you will be a different person in a different place.

if you’ll be pushy, they’ll just look away. you can try it the hard way and loose lot’s of energy in vain. smile and have fun is the first rule of this game. you might not like it, but startup entrepreneurship these days is a lifestyle business.

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how scoble is wrong in calling open web dead.

February 20th, 2012 § Comments Off on how scoble is wrong in calling open web dead. § permalink

Google toilet

Image via Wikipedia

superb analysis, and best piece in the end:

Chris Saad | Paying Attention: Personal Blog of Chris Saad

To put it another way, the reason Google was possible was because the open web was crawl-able – for free – with no biz dev deal. The reason FB was possible was because the open web allowed any site to spring up and do what it wanted to do. Today, too much of our data is locked up in closed repositories that can and must be cracked open. Google’s moves to exclude other socnets (besides G+) from their search results until they had free and clear access to them might be inconvenient for users in the short term, but, as a strategic forcing function, is in the best interest of the open web long term.

blog.areyoupayingattention.com

… in essence, everybody is free to “just use” proprietary parts of the web, but don’t go out preaching the death of openness that makes proprietary possible. no need to do so, and it can have lasting damage.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-19

February 19th, 2012 § Comments Off on Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-02-19 § permalink

  • what to do when a 'instant demo' link sends you to a contact form? #
  • dear @BedBathNBeyond , how can you sell products that are "known to cause cancer and/or birth defects or another reproductive harm" ?!?!?! #
  • dear @BedBathBeyond , how can you sell products that are "known to cause cancer and/or birth defects or another reproductive harm" ?!?!?! #
  • My @Klout score is 48. I improved it by 21 points over the past 30 days! http://t.co/txMNnpmS – that's 100%! #

Total Perspective Vortex

February 18th, 2012 § Comments Off on Total Perspective Vortex § permalink

I just can’t get enough of this infographic.

It’s amazing, jaw-dropping, existential.

If you click trough, you’ll understand.

give me more search results

February 17th, 2012 § Comments Off on give me more search results § permalink

Seth is right, I’d love a denser search interface. what he proposes sounds relatively easy to build – any extension develop up for weekend project?

Seth’s Blog: We can handle information density

I’d like to suggest a power search feature for a search engine that wants to recapture expert users (DuckDuckGo should know that the people who are most likely to switch are the power users, because power users are always the first to switch…). Show us three columns of results, with an emphasis on the name of the source behind the link and perhaps some data on how often people who click that link hit the back button. It would be easy to imagine a page with twenty or thirty easy to read and easy to follow links. A search engine that trusts us to be smart, fast and make our own decisions.

sethgodin.typepad.com

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