Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Tim O’Reilly quotes Craig Kaplan of predictwallstreet.com:

I feel there is a big difference between user generated content and collective intelligence.

For example, PredictWallStreet.com focuses one million unique monthly visitors on predicting whether a stock will close up or down. With the help of our algorithms the community can outperform the market — something most analysts can’t do. That’s not user-generated content, that’s a cognitive community exhibiting super intelligent behavior.

Wikipedia exhibits super intelligent behavior when it is more comprehensive and more up to date than encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has the brand, but Wikipedia has the Brains on Board. And with very minimal software, Wikipedia directs millions of minds to create a new and better kind of encyclopedia. That’s not just user-generated content. It’s a cognitive community exhibiting super intelligent behavior.

Together we form a super intelligence that is a lot smarter than any one of us alone. As you say, Web 2.0 truly is just the froth before the wave. I believe networks of super intelligent cognitive communities are our future.

TECH TALK: Cyworld: Overview

2006 has been the year of video and social networking. YouTube in video, and the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Mixi in social networking, have defined these two spaces. Both are secular trends in the sense that they are not going to go away. Video is a natural evolution from the limited world of text and images that we have seen in the first decade of the Internet. Social networking is an extension of how we all live for and around family and friends. In the world of social networking, one of the early pioneers was Cyworld, which started in South Korea. In this week’s Tech Talk, we will take a closer look at Cyworld, and see what ideas, if any, are relevant in the Indian context.

Wikipedia provides an over view of Cyworld:

Cyworld is a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications, a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, “Cyworld” can mean “cyber world”, but it’s also a play on the Korean word for relationship, so it could also mean “relationship world.” It takes the concept of personal, virtual rooms similar to MySpace, CokeMusic, and AeroWorld which is still in service in the USA to promote their products.

Members cultivate on- and off-line relationships by forming Ilchon buddy relationships with each other through a service called “minihompy”, which encompasses a photo gallery, message board, guestbook, and personal bulletin board. A user can link his/her minihompy to another user’s minihompy to form a buddy relationship. It is similar to U.S. based Facebook and MySpace websites. It has been reported that as much as 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20s[1] and 25 percent of the total population of South Korea[2] are registered users of Cyworld, and as of September 2005, daily unique visitors are about 20 million.

Cyworld launched its US site earlier this year. This is how it outlines the services on offer:

Your Life. Your World. Cyworld.
Cyworld is a whole new way to connect with the people in your world. Here you’ll find friends you know, new people to meet, clubs to join and special spaces for your photos, artwork, journals and more. In Cyworld, you can meet up, hang out, play, dream and share your world like never before.

Build your Minihome – Your personal space in Cyworld.
Write your profile. Keep up with your friends. Upload your photos, drawings and images – we give you unlimited storage so you can save and display as many as you want.

Design your Miniroom
A place to tell stories and bring your dreams to life. Travel to exotic lands, talk about last weekend’s party or cozy up with a cutie – the only limit is your imagination.

Create your Minime – your avatar in Cyworld.
Your Minime represents all aspects of you … the “you” inside of you, the “you” you want to be. Or just the “you” you feel like sharing today. Have fun styling your Minime. You can change its hair, clothing, facial expression, mood, position and background as often as you like.

Connect with friends
Go out and visit friends, exchange gifts, post messages, create neighborhoods, join a club or even start a club. Millions of people around the globe have already moved into Cyworld. We’ll think you’ll like it here, too.

Tomorrow: Key Features

Best Blog Posts

Google Blogoscoped has a collection of some of the best blog posts ever: “I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts the kind that made an impact on people, had skyrocketing traffic numbers, or triggered a meme or changes. Here are their answers.”

Keeping Brains Fit

WSJ writes:

The key to keeping intellectually sharp as we age may not be mental gymnastics, as commonly recommended, but real gymnastics.

According to a new study, the brain’s long, slow decline may not be inevitable. For the first time, scientists have found something that not only halts the brain shrinkage that starts in a person’s 40s, especially in regions responsible for memory and higher cognition, but actually reverses it: aerobic exercise. As little as three hours a week of brisk walking — no Stairmaster required — apparently increases blood flow to the brain and triggers biochemical changes that increase production of new brain neurons.

Mobile Marketing

Russell Buckley writes:

Like the PC-web, the mobile web is also a global opportunity. When you put up a mobile website, its accessible from all over the world and will be found and used by people everywhere. Counties as unlikely as S Africa, India, Israel and Bangladesh are huge users of the mobile web, as well as the more obvious UK and US audiences. All these countries can also be addressed with advertising, as easily as the home market itself.

This opportunity was seized by AdMob at the start of this year, with the launch of the worlds first mobile advertising network. Less than 9 months later, AdMob has served over 200 million ads and by the time you read this, will be well on the way to 300 million. When something grows this quickly and with numbers this high, its worth examining in more detail and thats what were going to do now.

Flickr and YouTube

Dave Winer writes: “Have you noticed that there’s a formula out there, for Flickr-like sites, that, instead of providing social networking around pictures, try to do it for podcasts or videos. Examples include Odeo, Podshow, Dabble. However, none of them are gaining traction like Flickr did, and I think I now understand why. A picture is something you can appreciate at web speed. Go to a page with a photo on it, and it loads slightly slower than a page without a picture. Hit the Back button, leave a comment, link to it, whatever you want to do, it’s all over quickly and that fits the pace of the web. However, podcasts and videos don’t work like that. It takes a long time to ‘consume’ one of those media objects. So why did YouTube catch on? Simple — free storage.”

Improving Websites

The New York Times writes:

According to Jakob Nielsen, a Web site consultant and author of the book Prioritizing Web Usability, it is essential that a Web page get a companys message across quickly, because visitors are a fickle bunch. Most people do not go beyond what is in front of their faces.

Studies by Mr. Nielsens company, the Nielsen Norman Group, an Internet design firm in Fremont, Calif., show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor.

Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page, Mr. Nielsen said. A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.

With findings like those, it is no wonder that Web pages must visually hit a visitor right between the eyes. If a site does not answer a users questions about a business, then you have scored one for the competition. For example, the first thing customers visiting any restaurants Web site want to know is when it is open. But often that information can be found only by digging through multiple pages. As a result, the site fails, Mr. Nielsen said.
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The Expert Mind

VC Confidential writes:

Chess has been called the “Drosophila of cognitive science” (in honor of the experimental fly) because it can be measured, broken into components, observed and modified. Much of the research in cognitive science has been around trying to understand the “Expert Mind” and whether its skills are innate or acquired. More importantly, how does the Expert Mind process information so quickly and effectively? Can others learn to do likewise?

Following up on my Passion for Greatness post, I wanted to layout the heart of a recent Scientific American article on this subject. Like the Fortune article, the conclusion was “training trumps talent”. Studies have shown no correlation between Chess grandmasters and IQ, visual-spatial ability or memory. There is no correlation between professional horse handicappers and mathematical abilities. Rather most experts seem to organize information into distinct “chunks” which are then efficiently processed. This ability to form fixed patterns is driven by (you guessed it) “effortful” study and practice.

Customer Service is the New Marketing

Brad Burnham writes after a meeting with Craig Newmark of Craigslist:

Customer service is the new marketing because you can realize the radical efficiencies of the web only by enlisting the users of the service as co-contributors. The best web services provide bandwidth, cpu, storage and a governance system and then their users create the service. This is certainly true of Craigslist but it is also true of more commercial implementations like YouTube, Flickr, and del.icio.us. So if your users are your co-contributors, your co-creators really, what does it mean to sell them?

If you need to convince your contributors of the value of your service you have probably already lost. All of the web services I mentioned are free, so selling them doesnt make literal sense anyway. What you can do is serve them, and serving them is the best marketing you can do. Why, because only by serving them, can you learn what it is that would make the service more useful to them.

South Korea’s High Mobile Speeds

BBC has a story on wireless broadband in South Korea:

You can take your pick from 10-megapixel camera phones, to bespoke phones with elementary mixing for budding teenage DJs.

If you have got more serious musical inclinations, a fancy candybar phone should see you right, with a whopping 8GB in its hard drive – enough for 2000 tracks.

Also competing for your attention on the handset is a virtual pooch, who responds according to affection you bestow, and if you happen across a similar phone owner you can cross-breed a puppy and then give it up for adoption to another user.

Then there are the handsets with built-in motion sensors, so you can play games, make music or enhance the core functions of the phone – like speed dialling by waving your arms in the air.