Kluster.com is an interesting collaborative crowdsourcing decision making platform. They seem to position themselves as a sort of collaborative ideation/innovation platform. It seems that their main marketing strategy is to launch interesting services on it’s platform and the most recent one is called Name This, the main idea being that for $99 companies/entrepreneurs can post products and services to have the community come up with names for. As a demo they are running an initiative to rename Wolf Blitzer, a newsman who is famously on CNN more than any other person.
I particularly like these suggestions:
Garrison Sontag
Stonewall Blitzer
Slartibartfast
Other things they are attempting to rename in this demo are:
Chevy Nova
Zune!
Verizon’s G’zOne
As with all social tools like this I like to look at the rewards and recognition part of the culture, why would people participate in this in meaningful ways. In the case of Name This the primary reward seems to be cash money. Essentially they distribute $80 of the $99 fee to the top 3 names and the invluencecers:
We take $80 out of each naming fee and distribute it to the members who create/influence the top three…
1st Place: $40 to Namer, $10 Shared Amongst Influencers
2nd Place: $16 to Namer, $4 Shared Amongst Influencers
3rd Place: $8 to Namer, $2 Shared Amongst Influencers
Personally i think cash is a pretty weak motivator, especially when so few are going to benefit, and they need to do a better job of showcasing the top participants and have some non-cash community points for participation.
Found this video on Jonnie Moore’s always thought provoking blog. It’s a collaboration of 200 students in an anthropology class that looks at the defining characteristics of students today.
It certainly seemed bleak in many ways, and illustrated how the modern school system of lecture halls and chalkboards were antiquated, but what surprised me is how much the web was mentioned but mainly in the context of facebook. Isn’t there a wealth of information out there on the web, what of wikipedia, or the mountains of blogs out there written by smart, thoughtful people, if they were anthropology students weren’t they reading Grant McCracken? I’m just saying, how many of them were blogging, podcasting, putting videos on youtube? Well actually they are all blogging at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119″>mediatedcultures.net, and of course they put this video up on youtube which has been viewed almost 1.5 million times, and they used a wiki like service to edit the document to put the script together for the project, so thankfully it did go beyond facebook
A friend of mine at the San Francisco Law school just let me know about a symposium the law school is holding on Net Neutrality. This full day only costs $50 (unless you want credit in which case it’s $100) and will probably give you a more in depth understanding of this polarizing issue. I for one am planning to build upon the knowledge on this nuanced topic that I have already gleaned from askaninja.com, and of course Ted Stephens.
The University of San Francisco School of Law Intellectual Property Law Bulletin is sponsoring The Toll Roads: The Legal and Political Debate Over Network Neutrality, a symposium to increase awareness about network neutrality, bringing together lawyers, academics, economists, and technologists for a balanced debate on the issue. Panelists include Tim Wu, Richard Clarke, Lawrence Spiwak, and many others.
