Episode Notes

Mark Krynsky (@krynsky) of the X PRIZE Foundation & Lifestreamblog.com joins us to talk about competition, cooperation, and the folly of trying to measure online “influence.”

News and Notes:

• M.I.T. Media Lab Names a New Director – New York Times
• New Director of MIT Media Lab Talks of Encouraging Openness – Chronicle of Higher Education
• Peter Thiel Believes the Future Belongs to College Dropouts – The Atlantic
• A Customer Service Nightmare: Resolving Trademark and Personal Reputation in a Limited Name Space – Danah Boyd at Zephoria.org
• Bogus Infringement Takedowns And The Danger Of Relying On Third Party Services With No Backbone – Techdirt
• Zephoria Inc.: About to find out how social media really works – Suw Charman-Anderson
• Finding And Buying A Domain Name – Fred Wilson at AVC.com
• Invaders from Mars – Charlie Stross
• Books by Stross at Amazon
• Manifesto: I Am Not a Brand – Maureen Johnson
• Mark’s page at Empire Avenue (“Buy and sell your friends and own anyone on the social web!”)
• Klout is a Good Start But We Need More Ingredients for an Influencer Recipe – Mark Krynsky at Lifestream Blog

Some links and notes related to the X Prize Foundation and other aspects of Mark Krynsky’s work:

• Mark manages the X PRIZE Foundation websites & services.
• A collection of web services used at X PRIZE
• He has been writing about Lifestreaming for over 4 years, and he is currently focusing on social content readers and personal activity data (Lifelogging & Quantified Self)
• The Autonomous Auto X PRIZE
• Gold Rush 2.0: A Case Study of the GoldCorp Challenge – A.C. Preston
• The X Prize Visioneering Workshop

As you listen, you can replay the fascinating conversation from our live chat room here at CoveritLive.

Episode Notes

Thomas Knoll joins Heather, Kevin, and Deb to talk about love, community architecture, Zappos, tech, and humanity.

What I’ve been saying a long time. The premise of TummelVision is that everythign is made of people. We make everything we have. Only Alex, a brilliant technologist (thank him for twitter to some degree and the upcoming bank simple which I will switch to in one second) spells it out as well as why we need to regulate tech. What motivated his post?

As part of their reporting on recent events in the Middle East last week, NPR ran a story called Internet Freedom and the US State Department. The story is an interview with Alec Ross, co-founder of nonprofit technology provider One Economy and now Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While dodging hard questions about US companies selling restrictive or invasive technologies to repressive regimes, Mr. Ross made a statement that jumped out at me from my car stereo:

“[T]echnology itself is value-neutral. It depends on how a government chooses to use these technologies.”

I believe this is an unproductive, misguided, and all too common way of thinking about technology.

The rest of this essential post.

How interactions on the web are changing
The next stage of the web won’t have destinations, it will be a distributed network of content and people that will get reassembled depending on context and relationships. The increase in people interactions on the web will mean that building and managing communities will be important for responding to customer suggestions, queries, and complaints. Communities will need to be embedded in consumer experiences and not built at a new destination.

Quote from –Paul Adams, UX Researcher at Google – the tummler conclusion is mine.