http://plays2run.com/table/index.php

An interesting approach to griding out strategy for business.

This is from Jason's e-mail list. I find his approach cutting edge. Just going for it is a breath of fresh air. Mahalo could be the sleeper site of 2009, if he pulls off the vision... See notes below on a great approach by a CEO. I need to have coffee with Jason in the coming weeks to discuss a little TV | Internet start up, Jason and Danny Sullivan would be an interesting combination to work with... Jason you up for it, I'm between Santa Monica, and Burbank now...
__________________

In one of the first emails to this list I asked folks for feedback on
how to make Mahalo better. The winner would get a free DASH GPS unit
(no, not getting paid by them, just love their product so they gave me
a few to give away).

Got over 100 emails almost instantly and I read these while playing
poker (I'm getting crushed right now for the record. Was up 6,200 for
the year and now up only 1,000--lost $5,200 over three games in a
row--brutal). While playing poker I read these on my Blackberry as
they came in (wait, is that why I lost?!?). The result was a non-stop
stream of consciousness about how people view the product. The top
three asks were:

a) A cleaner homepage
b) A customizable homepage
c) A mobile (specifically iPhone) version of Mahalo.

A sample of the suggestions follows below, and for my money the best
suggestion is to clean up the homepage. The first person to send in
that suggestion was Marques Stewart, who works in IT (
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marquesstewart ).

Thanks Marques. You're also invited to the TechCrunch50 event as my
guest ($2,995 ticket otherwise!) if you can make it to San Francisco
on Sept 8-10th.


Mahalo Suggestion Box: Selected Comments
------------------------------

Adam P. from Australia suggested a mobile version of Mahalo for the
iPhone. Brandon S. and Keith C. had this idea as well.

Matt C. suggested a digg spy service where you could watch searches on
Mahalo. There are some major privacy issues with that (think someone
searching for their own name + keyword), but we do already have a
dashboard to watch other user activity on Mahalo. It includes links
suggested, guide note edits, and message board posts. You can find it
here: http://tinyurl.com/mahaloua

Cody suggested letting good contributors make pages about themselves.
Actually, anyone can create a page about themselves on Mahalo right
now--notable or not. To create a page just visit:
http://mahalo.com/Special:Createpage

Henry B. suggests a bi-weekly or monthly podcast "about Mahalo's
challenges, struggles, ideas and also solicit ideas from the community
to better Mahalo." That's a good idea, I think we'll get on that.

Adam M. suggested starting a twitter feed "and post once a day with
the Mahalo page of the day." Good idea Adam!

Marques S. suggested cleaning up the homepage she explains: "People
like to have a good majority of their news/search in the upper area of
the browser and Mahalo should try to capitalize on that. I believe
that having to scroll down to see alot of the features that Mahalo has
to offer isn't a good UI choice." I agree, great suggestions, and we
are working on a new homepage.

Brad McCarty suggests we integrate tighters with FriendFeed: "Let's
say that you create a Mahalo page - once you're done editing, you can
choose to have that page auto-linked into your FriendFeed stream. The
same idea could hold true for major page updates, etc." We're in touch
with FriendFeed on this one already. It's clearly a great idea.

Max D. suggests a random key on Mahalo, saying a "Stubleupon
type of button to get a random Mahalo page" would be killer. We have
one, perhaps we should market it? http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Random

David S. has a great idea along the lines of our "show us your Mahalo"
project: "give away something very cool... to the person who gets full
camera time during either; the All Star Game, or one of the
Conventions coming up. Camera time being: A sign, painted body,
banner, etc... that has Mahalo loud and clear, and has something about
the event that can draw the cameras attention long enough to give you
free advertising that could be ultimately priceless." That's an
interesting idea.

Paul L. says "I think it would be nice to see the rankings of # clicks
per link for each Mahalo page." I agree, this is something we have on
our list. It's groovy to see which page is clicked the most by users.

Steve H. smacks us down about the homepage as well: "My recommendation
is to unclutter the main home page. Make it streamlined and something
you don't have to page down to start your topic search. The
'featured' list is way to long and distracting." I agree. It's my
fault and we're fixing it. Kieran H. and Matt B. also say clean up the
homepage!

Daniel R. has suggestions about the homepage as well: "the main
suggestion I would have would be to be able to personalize the mahalo
front page once you are logged into your profile. Nothing fancy, but
there are some sections I like to see, but others I don't care at
all." Agreed. Personalization of the homepage might only appeal to the
top 2% of the audience, but we want that 2%! Charles M. M., Russell
E., Bobby E. and Steve K. also suggested we make a personalized
homepage.

Kevin W. had a lot of suggestions, among his best was "* To help drive
traffic, how about a referral program where you earn a couple of
points for everyone you get to visit the site. You can then redeem
your points for cash, music downloads, Mahalo merchandise, or
whatever." I love this idea. In fact, we've been thinking about doing
this since day one, but we've focused like a laser on the core
product. Maybe next year on this one.

Nathan P. suggests coming up with an incentive program for folks who
make the site better. We've been thinking about this from the start.
However, it's very complicated and we're going to focus on it after we
have the core functionality of the site completed (i.e. new homepage,
perfect Guide Pages).

Josh Rappoport asks "how about Mahalo Follow for Safari?" I love this
suggestion and we did a massive search for Safari developers. Turns
out there is no plugin structure for Safari, so we would have to hack
it and that would be cost prohibitive. I'm bummed too.

Alan J. suggests "using the API from Dash to incorporate Mahalo.com
into the DASH unit itself." Brilliant! We've put it on the list.

Benjamin T. suggests focusing on mobile and supporting OpenID. I can't
believe we don't support OpenID already... we should. I gotta figure
out how that one slipped through the cracks!

Russell N. suggest "A simple rating system for each article. 1-5
stars or something like that. Simple, quick and easy." Not a bad idea
at all.

Jonathan R. says "make the Top 7 and Guide Notes bigger and stand out
from the rest of the page." Good point.

Patrick C. suggest we add polls to Mahalo. I like this idea a lot.

May 12, 2008 - By Jon Swartz -- SAN FRANCISCO -- As the Internet's Next Big Thing, social networks are drawing inevitable comparisons to TV networks.

The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch

May. 6, 2008 at 6:35pm Eastern by Muhammad Saleem

The landscape of corporate public relations is changing fast. First the press release died and we told you how to write a press release for the social media audience. Now the elevator pitch is dead and here's how to adapt.

Corporate pitches are usually unnecessarily long, filled with useless buzzwords, and an unfortunate lack of transparency (in favor of overstatement). An elevator pitch is supposed to solve that problem by forcing the person making the pitch to do it in 30 seconds or 150 words (the time it would take you going from the lobby to your floor in an elevator). The time restriction ensures that all formalities and verboseness are dispensed with and only the most important and relevant information is shared between an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist.

The Essential Elevator Pitch

With no more than 30 seconds to convince someone to give you a couple million dollars, what do you focus your pitch on?

1. What is the core idea and what problem does it solve?
2. Has it been done before (is there competition?) and is there a viable market for your core idea?
3. Why are you best suited to solve the problem and what is your business model?

These are some of the most important basic elements that you have to cover in 150 words or less. But what if you only had 140 characters to make an impression, what would you do?

Enter The Twitpitch

Stowe Boyd, an information technology consultant, recently decided that elevator pitch is way too long and that the only way he will accept pitches is through his idea of Twitpitching.

A twitpitch takes the following from:

1. A twitter message of the form "@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch".

That's it.

What's more, anyone who doesn't conform to that method will be automatically marked as spam after three strikes.

To be fair, you have three Twitter messages (therefore 420 characters) to make your point. The first one allows you to succinctly describe your service, the second lets you link directly to the product or service you're pitching and the third allows you to set a time and place to meet. What intrigued me about the idea is that it isn't a whole new way to pitch, it's another way to make the same pitch without adding any noise to the conversation. For example, here's what a successful Twitpitch looks like [via @thoughtfarmer]:

@jeffdachis #twitpitch For your new venture: ThoughtFarmer is social software for enterprise intranets. ReadWriteWeb: http://snurl.com/26hmn

The reason why the press release is dying is because these releases are usually boring, susceptible to hyperbole, and have a singular focus on the company. Similarly, no one is interested in your pitch of a product because no one finds value in your one-sided, obviously biased look at the product. The Twitpitch forces you to talk only facts (because you have only 140 characters for the first message) and then link to one (and only one) URL related to your product. If you want to make the biggest impact, this link won't be a link to your press release or even a link to your product, it will be a link to the best or most prominent coverage that your product has gotten (much like the link above for ThoughtFarmer). As you can see, this process is incredibly similar to the decisions you make when you submit an article to or vote on an article on a social news site. Essentially, all you have to go on is a title and description from the article and some things that you can infer about each submission from certain trigger points.

The Twitpitch streamlines the same process for Twitter. The title and summary are condensed into one tweet and the link in another. And assuming the link takes you to coverage of the product on another site, you bypass the corporate speak and get the facts from a human voice (and you are already getting social proof). Compare that to getting an email from someone you don't know (and probably can't get additional information on - sorry no about pages for PR companies), with no text in the email body, and a 2-3 page (if you're lucky) document attached that you are supposed to read and respond to. A Twitpitch is open and transparent, delivers on social proof, creates value without adding noise, and is somewhat personalized. The final great thing about the Twitpitch is that even when it is personalized, it isn't limited to the person it is directed at. You can simply send a message on Twitter, tag it with #twitpitch and anyone can track all the pitches being made at anytime by simply going to: http://www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch. That way, even if you forget to direct a pitch at someone, chances are it will find its way to the right people.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. The Let's Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Online Shoppers Trust Each Other

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers' opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..

ThisNext Takes $5 Million Series B

Social shopping service ThisNext has taken $5 million Series B in a round that included previous investors Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners.

ThisNext launched in 2006 with a product that offers shopping combined with comments, tagging, social recommendations, comment ratings and a wishlist. Users can also create a website widget to show products they like to others via any website.

The company has close links to Jason Calacanis, with Calacanis sitting on the board, and CEO Gordon Gould was previously with Blogsmith (the platform behind Weblogs Inc) and Silicon Alley Reporter.

See Michael's 2006 review of ThisNext here.

Call it World of Worldcraft. Amazon's Questville, set for a late 2008 release, is a spinoff of the company's Askville, a user-driven crowdsourcing question-and-answer service on topics ranging from everything from cars to electronics to relationships to science.

With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called "levels") - two metrics familiar to anyone who's ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you'll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information.

Though it may seem strange that Amazon is adding role-playing game elements to its services, it's really the most prominent example of an idea that's been bubbling for years, put forward by people like venture capitalist/Internet guru Joi Ito: Harness all that time, ability and creativity that users are investing in online fantasy worlds and leverage it for real-world, practical uses. Indeed, if Questville is successful, it could prompt other Internet companies to add MMO-style features to their own systems.

Hat tip to Alice Taylor of the essential game blog Wonderland, who notes: "We humans are such reward-oriented critters, aren't we!" Yes, and big Internet companies are beginning to learn what game developers have known for decades.

Image credit: www.questville.com.

Apple is in the early stages of developing a new hybrid display, according to recent rumblings.

This new display is supposedly capable of two different methods of inputs; electronic and physical. The displays will be unlike traditional offerings where the screen only shows what the keyboard and mouse tell it, but will also be interactive, like Apple's iPhone. Users will be able to 'touch' the screen to input and control information on the display.

No additional information other than 'the displays will have built-in iSight cameras' was given. We will keep you posted on any further developments.

The Wealth of Networks:
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press

© Copyright 2006, Yochai Benkler. http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-04.htm

Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production

This online version has been created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license - see www.benkler.org - and has been reformatted and designated as recommended reading - with an accompanying Moodle course - for the NGO Committee on Education of CONGO - the Conference Of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - in conjunction with the Committee's commitment to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and related international Decades, agreements, conventions and treaties.

Epigraph

"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."

"Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production

The increasing salience of nonmarket production in general, and peer production in particular, raises three puzzles from an economics perspective.

Webs.com Bets on Social Gaming Across Facebook

Written by Jane Pinckard, Friday, December 7, 2007

The User-Generated Content Myth

by Scott Karp

A whole mythology is emerging around the idea of "users" - consumers, fans, regular average folk - creating content that media companies and brands can leverage. It's a compelling idea - but it's a myth.

The reality is that "average people" don't create a lot of content - at least not the commercially viable kind. Most people are too busy. Those that do "create content" - and who do it well - are those who are predisposed to being content creators. The have some relevant skills, training, raw talent, motivation, something.

"User-generated content" sites like YouTube are much less a platform for armies of average people to create mountains of content and much more a platform for real talent to be discovered.

The latest story in the UGC mythology is a "fan" of the Apple iTouch - a college student in England - who created a commercial for the iTouch, posted in on YouTube, got discovered by Apple marketing execs, and got shipped off to Apple's ad agency to collaborate on a "professional" version of the ad.

Here's the original version by Nick Haley, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Leeds, England.

Pretty slick, huh? Is it just me, or does something about this smack of LonelyGirl15 - just a bit too "authentic" to be believable? Nick got "discovered" by Apple execs after the video had only be viewed a couple thousand time - hardly a viral hit by YouTube standards.

Even if it is legitimate, Nick is clearly a talented guy. This is not the work of your average fan - and I have a hard time believing that Nick created the commercial and posted it to YouTube out of pure "passion" for Apple products. Might it not have cross his mind that he could get discovered?

New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott happily plays along with Apple and their ad agency in establishing the new user-generated content mythology:

Consumers creating commercials "is part of this brave new world we live in," said Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey.

"It's an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences," Mr. Clow said. "People's relationship with a brand is becoming a dialog, not a monolog."

To be clear, I love the idea of YouTube and other user-generated content sites as platforms for talent to be discovered - especially talent that might never have been discovered before the web made it possible for anyone to publish their work.

I can also understand why media companies and advertisers want to propagate the myth of average user generating all this cool content.

But I think describing the phenomenon in honest terms is just as compelling - if not more so - than the myth.

Abstract: Social roles in online discussion forums can be described by patterned characteristics of communication between network members which we conceive of as 'structural signatures.' This paper uses visualization methods to reveal these structural signatures and regression analysis to confirm the relationship between these signatures and their associated roles in Usenet newsgroups. Our analysis focuses on distinguishing the signatures of one role from others, the role of "answer people." Answer people are individuals whose dominant behavior is to respond to questions posed by other users.

ThisNext Raises Round Of Venture Debt

Santa Monica-based ThisNext, an online shopping discovery and community web site, has raised a round of venture debt, the firm told socalTECH Friday. The firm's CEO, Gordon Gould, said that ThisNext raised a round from Western Technology Inc., which will go towards giving the firm runway extension prior to the company's Series B funding in the fall. Gould said that the funding should give the firm a strong position and help boosts the firm's valuation in advance of its venture capital efforts. The funding will go towards operations at the company.

Read this PDF. Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World? USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project Finds Major Shifts in Social Communication and Personal Connections on the Internet Is the online world as important to Internet users as the real world? Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities, according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.