Big Boys <3 The Wisdom of Crowds

Check out Yahoo and Google and how they're harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds

Yahoo has had their Buzz Game for a little while.

Now Google is starting to muck around with it as well

Should be good to see what comes out of their efforts

An Overview of the Attention Economy

Nice post over at Read/Write Web on the Attention Economy.

It's a good overview of the whole attention economy issue at the moment - something which is worth getting to know more about as it will be affecting us all more and more in the near future.

And, for those interested in the actual economics of the attention economy, don't miss Umair Haque's notes over at Bubblegeneration

Note as well that Umair wrote his article in late 2005. Just another example of why he is one of the few economic thinkers who gets what's going on.

More Data Visualisation - Part 3 - Stamen Design

Check out Stamen Design

Some of you might be familiar with their work at Digg Labs

Their data visualisation work is great.

The thing I love most about it is that it is both conceptual and practical

v nice.

3D mailbox - worst app ever or revolutionary?

Not sure if everyone caught the press around 3D Mailbox over the past week or so.

I guess the general sentiment can be summed up by the Tech Crunch Article - 3D Mailbox: Worst. App. Ever - lol,that's pretty harsh

Anyway, I think alot of people are missing the point on this one.

Sure the graphics kinda suck, the James Bond theming is a bit odd and it's debatable as to whether this app could scale to handle the thousands of emails that exist in many mailboxes - but that's not really what this is about.

In my opinion this could very well be a revolutionary first step in the way that we consume and organise information. I'm very serious about that. Chances are that 3D mailbox, in this form, will disappear and be replaced by either a more useful iteration or a better competitor, but that doesn't discount its value.

Let me explain a little more.


The Internet as we currently know it is a very artificial and rudimentary concept. It's essentially a set of 2D pages that are linked together. We don't go around in every day life relying on 2D sources to gather information, rather, everything in our real life is 3 dimensional. The fact that we are so adept at using email and other applications, as they have been developed, says a lot for our ability, as humans, to adapt as opposed to the appropriateness of the applications as a means to gather, assess and organise information.

Now enter 3D Mailbox. It presents information using the types of stereotypical visual cues that many of us can understand from our experiences in real life (whether you agree with them or not is another story). Because of that it allows the user to more rapidly and more efficiently deal with information, in this case types of emails, than traditional folders, tags, colours etc.

This type of stuff is gold and in my opinion will be the basis of the next generation of web based applications.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of this, especially considering the publicity the launch has received.

What do you think?

More Data Visualisation - Part 2

I missed the Digg data visualisation competition in my last post but they've put up the 10 finalists now so it's probably a better time to mention it.

Of particular interest is that a couple of entrants used Adobe's Apollo in their submissions.

K

More Data Visualisation

Saw this article - 16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools - on mashable the other day and have been meaning to post about it.

Here's another one from google as well.

I still believe that 2007 will be the year that data visualisation makes it big. Hopefully the increased number of interesting tools on popular sites is a sign that that prediction might be coming true.

K

Friday Afternoon Update

I'll agree - I've been very slack of late with the posting

Between a few separate projects I've been too busy to even think about posting - which isn't much of an excuse as it doesn't take long to put a few words up - but its the excuse I'm going to use :)

Since the last post we had our first Sydney OpenCoffee Meeting. About 20 people showed up. It was great to hear about other people's experiences and struggles in the process of trying to run a start up.

So far we have over 50 people signed up to our Meetup group and the number is growing daily. All this interest makes me glad that I decided to help get the Sydney Startup community together as there was obviously a need for it.

One Eye Deer is also coming along. Admittedly it got stalled for a couple of other projects we're about to launch - but we should be back on point very soon and ready to get something out to our friends to test.

I haven't been doing my usual amount of reading but it's been interesting to see the interest that has come up in SMS in the US. Most of the hype was started by Twitter (I still don't get what the fascination with it is) but now others are jumping on the bandwagon. All this excitement is kind of handy because one of the projects that kept us away from OED just happened to be an SMS application. Hopefully all this SMS buzz will allow us to create a much bigger presence with it in the US than we would have been able to only 6 or 12 months ago.

I've also been trying to keep on top of microformats, openID stuff and, of course, visualisation of data, but the fields are moving quite fast at the moment and I need a little more time to bury myself in the detail.

Off to work on things again.

Hopefully I can be better with the regular posting from now on

K

Sydney Open Coffee Club

I've been reading a bit about Saul Klein's brainchild - Open Coffee Club.

Essentially its about making an informal (no name badges...ever!), regular (i.e. same place, same time) meeting spot where people know that if they want to roll up to meet other entrepreneurs, developers, investors, tech journalists or whatever, they can.

Because I like the idea so much, I'm trying to organise (what I think is) the first Sydney Open Coffee Club (OCC)

Here's my post over at the Open Coffee Club site.

If you're interested in coming to the Sydney OCC please answer the 2 questions I've put there and tell your friends/family whatever so that we can get this thing started.

I really believe we have the necessary ingredients to put Sydney on the tech map, to produce an excellent investment environment for those willing to invest, to create amazing projects for develops to work on and maybe to stop our budding entrepreneurs from having to go overseas for recognition and reward.

Remember - spread the word!

One Eye Deer Update

Haven't been writing too much lately because I've been busy with so much other stuff.

Anyway, One Eye Deer is getting closer to completion. The coding should be done soon and we can move on from there.

I'm going to try and catch up on some reading to see what's been happening in the 2.0 world that's worth looking more closely at.

In the meantime, its back to working on OED...we've got to release this thing soon.

Do We Need This?

Do we need this?

When it comes to features on your new web app, sometimes this is a critical question. Now, of course this is more or less what 37signals have been saying for ages, i.e. keep it simple, but its good to revisit words of wisdom from time to time.

For instance – I was reading a recent article on Mashable about the launch of SnowVision – essentially a YouTube clone with a skiing focus. A few paragraphs down Pete Cashmore says that what it’s lacking is the social networking element.

Now, I can’t understand why this is a necessary prerequisite of a video site. Of all my friends who watch videos on youtube, I can’t think of any who actively use the social networking features. I always thought that what tends to happen is that you get sent a link to a video, you watch it, maybe you take a look around for other videos, then you leave. If I wanted social networking I would use one of the many, many, many other services out there that have that as their core function.

So, despite the fact that the snowvision guys have said they plan on introducing social networking at some stage, well done to them for not adding it at the start just because it seems to be the thing to do.

I have no doubt that, like on ours and many other web apps, if the users want it they will let the developers know and the developers can THEN invest resources towards making it happen IF that fits in with the role of the site.

One Million Penguins - One Failed Experiment

PaidContent has information about “A Million Penguins” – which is book publisher Penguin’s experiment to see “whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a believable fictional voice."
Thing only launched last Thursday but I’ll do Penguin a favour and save them six weeks of waiting by telling them “No, it can’t” – or at least not in the way they want it to.
Just as a reminder, or a cheat-sheet for those who haven’t read it, The Wisdom of Crowds sets out some very specific criteria for crowds to be smart. They are: -

1. Diversity of Opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of known facts

2. Independence (People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)

3. Decentralisation (People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)

4. Aggregation (Some mechanism exists for turning a private judgment into a collective decision)
Essentially, the way this works is that under these conditions, when you average out everybody’s contribution, everybody cancels out everybody else’s errors so that you’re left with a “pure” answer.

Now, while I disagree with a lot of what Jaron Lanier says in his essay “Digital Maoism” (his opinions can be summed up by the opening line on the site - “The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it”), there are some valid points within it…if you look hard enough. The points I refer to revolve around the type of information created by wise crowds which ought to be given credence. For instance, there is a difference between guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar and writing a creative fictional story. Actually, I should clarify this by saying that Jaron lumped writing books and writing wikipedia articles into the same basket, but I don’t think that is accurate so I’ve modified it a little. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be attempts at creating pages of fact. Fictional stories, like the one being “created” by Penguin, are quite the opposite.

That doesn’t mean that smart crowds ought not exist and play a part in the creation of fictional works. What it does mean, however, is that they can’t play the same role they might in creating a wikipedia article.

I predict that a small cabal of writers will lead the story and the inputs and that is how the work will progress. The other authors will contribute by acquiescing (I think that can be considered a valid form of contribution) either because they believe that the writing is better than they can contribute or because the style of the book moves away from something they want to contribute to.

Either that, or there will be a massive mess of a work that will be funny because of its discontinuity over and above anything else, which brings us to an interesting paradox - Penguin will only succeed with this book if their experiment to get the crowd to write it, fails.

Despite that paradox and the fact that this is clearly just a marketing stunt aimed at a market that is decreasingly interested in reading traditional books, props to Penguin for trying…

$2.9M for Vizu Answers - WTF?!?!

Nick Gonzalez over at Tech Crunch reports that Vizu Answers just got US$2.9M in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). Even if DFJ got 130% of the company and points on all future earnings of all directors they still got robbed.

This thing is doomed to fail because, quite simply, the information it provides the people who are paying for the service is completely useless. This type of polling is open to severe abuse and its impossible to know who is voting. How can this be considered market research?

Then the clincher…They are charging people on impressions, not on votes.

Hmmmm. Seems this is an advertising gimmick, not a true market research tool, and I suspect it won’t be long before most potential customers realize this.

I guess I should mention that this is kinda in the space that we’re developing something, which is why I might seem a little angry.

So, Hey!, DFJ, if you’re looking for a sound investment in the market research space, drop me an email at info at oneeyedeer dot com. I guarantee you something that is more innovative, more useful and more profitable than this nonsense.

Happy Australia Day!

A belated Happy Australia Day to everyone! (for those who don't know it was actually on the 26th of January)

With beautiful summer weather, Bondi Beach sea temperatures back up from the ridiculous 14C of last weekend to a reasonable 22C, OK surf conditions, 2 one-day international cricket games, the Australian Open Tennis Finals and a trip down the South Coast, I haven't really had the time or desire to keep up to date with my readings and posts.

But it's back to work today, so I'll see what interesting things I can find to make up for the silence.

How DuggSpace/The Rival Project Could Be The Bellwether For An Innovation Revolution

There was a recent, seemingly innocuous, post over at Digg where a reader suggested that if Digg could be created for $200 then maybe the Digg community could work together to create their own version of MySpace. The working name is 'DuggSpace' although for obvious legal reasons, it won't stay like that.

Mashable thinks it’s destined to fail. I think that's being short-sighted. There are obvious issues with the ambiguity of many aspects at the moment, but it must be said that it is VERY early stages and this stuff can still be sorted out. In any case, Duggspaces's success or failure is relatively inconsequential in comparison to the importance of the fact that it was started at all.

Let me explain…

Digg is a loosely collaborative site, whose function is not inherently social but, rather, to aggregate and filter “news”. Despite this, people are starting to organise themselves, within the comments section of the above mentioned post, into a group with the aim of creating a new and better version of MySpace.

Yep, that’s the same, 6th most visited site on the whole Internet (according to Alexa), MySpace you probably thought I was talking about.

Why is this so important?

Firstly, because what happened was never meant to happen on Digg. There wasn’t even a proper means for these people to organise themselves, so they innovated and used the comments to a post. This tells me that if you nurture collaboration, even in a loose sense, then there is the potential for emergent groups to arise and take that collaboration to new depths in the pursuit of common innovative interests.

Secondly, this group of largely unknown-to-each-other digg users want to work together to improve on one of the most popular websites on the Internet. This tells me that if companies don’t start engaging with their customers effectively in an attempt to promote and benefit from outside innovation then either those customers will bypass the company and create the stuff they want by themselves, or forward thinking competitors will engage with the customers and take them away from you. In each scenario the end-result for the incumbent is the same – 1 or more customers less.

Thirdly, because this happened on Digg. Sure, collaborative software development has been happening for years all over the net, but these people chose to use Digg rather than SourceForge or one of those other sites to kick things off. Digg (74th most visited) and Sourceforge (83rd most visited) are about as popular as each other in terms of visits, but sourceforge is a very specific software development collaboration site and Digg is, while having a strong technology focus at the moment, more generalist in appeal. This tells me that if you give people of different backgrounds and interests a place to hang out and some basic tools, innovation will emerge. Now, if you give them more than just a place to hang out and more than just basic tools, imagine what they might come up with…

This is not a joke. Emergent groups and outside innovation are coming up in a big way and faster than you probably think. The question is how many companies are ready for what’s about to happen?

EDIT: looks like DuggSpace may have changed its name to 'The Rival Project' for now.

Where's Umair???

Anyone know where Umair Haque from Bubble Generation is these days?

It's officially been one month since his last post and I find myself going back to his site, day after day, and being confronted with the same Pay(Pain)Pal story I've now read about 30 times.

Throw us a freakin' bone Umair... :)

Vertical Search - I still don't get it!

The idea of vertical search is not new. For those who have never heard of it here's the wikipedia definition.

For those who have heard of it, you'll know that the hype has been around for a while. Om Malik wrote an article about it in March of 2005 - almost 2 years ago. That's an absolute eternity in terms of the new web app world but a quick search will find a plethora of reputable sources still claiming it to be a Google-killer and the next "biggest thing ever in the history of mankind".

Now, don't get me wrong, I get the concept - after all, more targeted search results is something that everyone would probably be interested in. That's not my issue.

What I don't get is why it is being touted as revolutionary.

If vertical search becomes popular, this is what I believe will happen: -

1. So many entrants will flood the market that search will become hugely fragmented. As a result, people will have to use horizontal search engines, like google, to find possible vertical search engines to use.

2. This will result in new entrants creating search aggregators that allow you to search groups of vertical search engines - essentially creating a kind of personalised search page based on your interests etc.

3. As people start to personalise these aggregators they will add more and more vertical search engines. To understand why this would happen think of how many different things you have searched for recently and how many different vertical search engines you would have to include on your "personal page" to cover them all. The alternative would be to just pick and choose particular search engines for each different search, but honestly, who could be bothered except in the rarest of cases?

The end result is that, while sometimes producing less relevant results, horizontal search engines will remain the easiest way to find stuff. From my experience, human nature dictates that people will gravitate towards that rather than seeking the diminishing returns associated with the effort needed to get more and more specific search results out of the many decentralised vertical search engines.

There are also some arguments that vertical search is better for advertisers, but last time I checked, advertisers went to where the people are, not the other way round. The whole "advertiser-preferred" vertical search concept is predicated on the notion that people will change their current behaviour and overcome the inertia of familiarity for an arguably better solution. If i was in the search or advertising game, that's not something I would be betting the farm on.

Also, vertical search advocates seem to conveniently forget the fact that the current horizontal search engines will not simply lay down and die in the face of competition. As an example, technorati has been super-successful in the blog search category, so what did google do? Introduced Google Blog Search. The idea of a popular horizontal search engine that can be made more vertical-like when required seems like a far simpler solution for the average user than the fragmented vertical search model.

If/when a google killer does appear it will be based on a new type of search paradigm, something as revolutionary, and maybe as simple, as page rank but not on a collection of niche players.

Time will tell if I've gotten it completely wrong, but i suspect the chances are greater that 2 further years down the track people will still be talking about the potential of vertical search rather than using vertical search engines as their main source of information

Visualising Data - 2007's big thing?

There's a great post over at Guy Kawasaki's blog about data visualisation.

This is something I've been looking at for a while and I'm suprised that it's never reached the magical Tipping Point. It's definitely something we're going to be using at One Eye Deer and with all the data that's flying around these days, I feel it will soon be an important feature of many other innovative sites.

The good news about that is the more people there are that are mucking around with data visualisation, the more likely it is that the field will advance rapidly from one that is highly specialised into one that is understood by, and relevant to, my mum and most other people in the general, non-techcrunch reading, public.

I also expect that in-line with the increased use will come better tools to make the process of representing all types of data/text etc. visually much, much easier. (If anyone knows of any easy to use data visulation tools - please let me know)

I've got some pretty good links on this stuff - but I can't remember where I've put them (Note to self - need to get into the whole del.icio.us thing so my bookmarks aren't spread over 3 computers). Once I find them I'll put them up for anyone who may be interested.

I know it's only the 2nd week of 2007 and that labelling data visulalisation as one of 2007's big things is a massive call, but when people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki are starting to focus on a topic, you know that it's close to tipping.

Keep an eye on this one...

EDIT: Here's one site that has heaps of interesting visualisation links

One Eye Deer Update

Well - we're several months into development and it looks like it will be one or two more until we have a product ready to release.

We're fans of lots of the principles in 37 Signals' excellent book "Getting Real" so we're trying to keep it as simple as possible for now, which is helping move things along.

As we move closer to launch it's great to see stories like Nic Brisbourne’s "The next generation of social networks will have a purpose" (thanks to Sam at Vecosys for highlighting it) which hint at the fact that we might be on the right track.

More updates to come, as long as the good surf and Sydney's summer weather don't distract us too much...

It Starts Here...

This has been some time in the making, so I'll keep in the intro short and hopefully let the posts speak for themselves.

One Eye Deer is a project we're working on that will hopefully lead to big changes in the way that innovation happens within organisations of all sizes.

I guess you could say it fits within the whole Web 2.0 thing, whatever your definition of that may be, so that will obviously be a focus of this blog...but not the only one.

The official journey starts here. We hope you enjoy the ride...