Jacob Kneeshaw

Author: Chris Dixon via Silicon Alley Insider
I think you could make a strong argument that the most important technologies developed over the last decade are a set of systems that are sometimes called “collective knowledge systems”.

The most successful collective knowledge system is the combination of Google plus the web. Of course Google was originally intended to be just a search engine, and the web just a collection of interlinked documents. But together they provide a very efficient system for surfacing the smartest thoughts on almost any topic from almost any person.

The second most successful collective knowledge system is Wikipedia. Back in 2001, most people thought Wikipedia was a wacky project that would at best end up being a quirky “toy” encyclopedia. Instead it has become a remarkably comprehensive and accurate resource that most internet users access every day.

Other well-known and mostly successful collective knowledge systems include “answer” sites like Yahoo Answers, review sites like Yelp, and link sharing sites like Delicious.  My own company Hunch is a collective knowledge system for recommendations, building on ideas originally developed by “collaborative filtering” pioneer Firefly and the recommendation systems built into Amazon and Netflix.

Dealing with information overload

It has been widely noted that the amount of information in the world and in digital form has been growing exponentially. One way to make sense of all this information is to try to structure it after it is created. This method has proven to be, at best, partially effective (for a state-of-the-art attempt at doing simple information classification, try Google Squared).

It turns out that imposing even minimal structure on information, especially as it is being created, goes a long way. This is what successful collective knowledge systems do. Google would be vastly less effective if the web didn’t have tags and links. Wikipedia is highly structured, with extensive organizational hierarchy and sets of rules and norms.  Yahoo Answers has a reputation and voting system that allows good answers to bubble up. Flickr and Delicious encourage user to explicitly tag items instead of trying to infer tags later via imagine recognition and text classification.

Importance of collective knowledge systems

There are very practical, pressing needs for better collective knowledge systems. For example, noted security researcher Bruce Schneier argues that the United States’ biggest anti-terrorism intelligence challenge is to build a collective knowledge system across disconnected agencies:

What we need is an intelligence community that shares ideas and hunches and facts on their versions of Facebook, Twitter and wikis. We need the bottom-up organization that has made the Internet the greatest collection of human knowledge and ideas ever assembled.

The same could be said of every organization, large and small, formal and and informal, that wants to get maximum value from the knowledge of its members.

Collective knowledge systems also have pure academic value. When Artificial Intelligence was first being seriously developed in the 1950’s, experts optimistically predicted they’d create machines that were as intelligent as humans in the near future.  In 1965, AI expert Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.”

While AI has had notable victories (e.g. chess), and produced an excellent set of tools that laid the groundwork for things like web search, it is nowhere close to achieving its goal of matching – let alone surpassing – human intelligence. If machines will ever be smart (and eventually try to destroy humanity?), collective knowledge systems are the best bet.

Design principles

Should the US government just try putting up a wiki or micro-messaging service and see what happens? How should such a system be structured? Should users be assigned reputations and tagged by expertise? What is the unit of a “contribution”? How much structure should those contributions be required to have? Should there be incentives to contribute? How can the system be structured to “learn” most efficiently? How do you balance requiring up front structure with ease of use?

These are the kind of questions you might think are being researched by academic computer scientists. Unfortunately, academic computer scientists still seem to model their field after the “hard sciences” instead of what they should modeling it after — social sciences like economics or sociology. As a result, computer scientists spend a lot of time dreaming up new programming languages, operating system architectures, and encryption schemes that, for the most part, sadly, nobody will every use.

Meanwhile the really important questions related to information and computer science are mostly being ignored (there are notable exceptions, such as MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence). Instead most of the work is being done informally and unsystematically by startups, research groups at large companies like Google, and a small group of multi-disciplinary academics like Clay Shirky and Duncan Watts.

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies. Just include the modernizr-1.1.js JavaScript file in your page and add a class of “no-js” to your <html> element. After it executes (automatically), you’ll be able to use the Modernizr JavaScript object and the various CSS classes it’ll attach to the html element.

If or when a domain name reaches PendingDelete status, on the 6th day the domain name get’s released from the registry “drops”. Each TLD (.com, .net, .org) has a specific “time range” of when a domain name will become available.

• .com & .net domain names start dropping at: 11:00 am – 12:15 pm PST
• .org domain names start dropping at: 6:30 am – 7:30 am PST
• .info domain names start dropping at 1:30 am – 2:30 am PST
• .biz domain names start dropping at 11:30 am – 12:30 pm PST
• .us domain names start dropping at 1:00 am – 2:00 am EST

Brad Feld Recently gave some good advice on what makes a good board meeting. Other than making sure the meeting is in person and forward looking he had 5 other criteria of a good board meeting:

1. All board material goes out 48 hours in advance, including a detailed financial package and operating review of the business.  This material includes any administrative stuff (draft 409a report, options grants, compensation stuff, audit stuff, prior board meeting minutes.)  Everyone reads this in advance – if the materials go out 48 hours in advance there’s no excuse to have not read it.
2. There is a dinner the night before that is at least the board and the CEO.  Sometimes it includes non-CEO founders; other times it includes various members of the leadership team.  This is a casual dinner (e.g. not expensive or full of pomp and circumstance) – a chance for everyone to catch up with each other.  If the board meeting is an afternoon meeting, sometimes you can pull off a lunch prior to the meeting that acts as a proxy for the dinner, or a dinner after, although I find the dinner after to be much less helpful.
3. The first 30 minutes of the meeting are administrative.  Everyone settles down, you go through any formal board business, discuss it, and get it done.  Often it takes five minutes (which gives you an extra 25 minutes for the strategy stuff); sometimes it takes the full 30 minutes.  I can’t think of a case where it has ever needed to take longer.
4. The CEO then puts up one slide summarizing prior period financial performance and asks if anyone has any questions about the board package.  This discussion takes however long it takes.
5. The CEO then puts up one slide with the issues he’d like to discuss.  These are bullet points that are crisp yet detailed enough to know what the issue is.  This is then the bulk of the meeting.”

More:The Best Board Meetings

ESPN’s Social media policy – AUG 2009

ESPN’S ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL NETWORKING

ESPN regards social networks such as message boards, conversation pages and other forms of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter as important new forms of content. As such, we expect to hold all talent who participate in social networking to the same standards we hold for interaction with our audiences across TV, radio and our digital platforms. This applies to all ESPN Talent, anchors, play by play, hosts, analysts, commentators, reporters and writers who participate in any form of personal social networking that contain sports related content.

ESPN Digital Media is currently building and testing modules designed to publish Twitter and Facebook entries simultaneously on ESPN.com, SportsCenter.com, Page 2, ESPN Profile pages and other similar pages across our web site and mobile platforms. The plan is to fully deploy these modules this fall.

Specific Guidelines

· Personal websites and blogs that contain sports content are not permitted

· Prior to engaging in any form of social networking dealing with sports, you must receive permission from the supervisor as appointed by your department head

· ESPN.COM may choose to post sports related social media content

· If ESPN.com opts not to post sports related social media content created by ESPN talent, you are not permitted to report, speculate, discuss or give any opinions on sports related topics or personalities on your personal platforms

· The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts, including sports news, information and content

* Assume at all times you are representing ESPN
* If you wouldn’t say it on the air or write it in your column, don’t tweet it
* Exercise discretion, thoughtfulness and respect for your colleagues, business associates and our fans

· Avoid discussing internal policies or detailing how a story or feature was reported, written, edited or produced and discussing stories or features in progress, those that haven’t been posted or produced, interviews you’ve conducted, or any future coverage plans.

· Steer clear of engaging in dialogue that defends your work against those who challenge it and do not engage in media criticism or disparage colleagues or competitors

· Be mindful that all posted content is subject to review in accordance with ESPN’s employee policies and editorial guidelines

· Confidential or proprietary company information or similar information of third parties who have shared such information with ESPN, should not be shared

Any violation of these guidelines could result in a range of consequences, including but not limited to suspension or dismissal.

http://espnmediazone.com/documents/20090804_Social_Media_Guidelines.htm
http://espnmediazone.com/documents/20090804_Blog_Policy.htm

Business-models-of-the-new-web.pdf – Great Paper (long)

Should some niche communities rethink their ad-free premium accounts?

We reasonably assume that the more affluent the readers are, the more they value their attention. By allowing to opt-out of advertising for a flat subscription fee, only readers who value their attention more than that fee would purchase an opt-out. This will have two effects (note that advertisers are of course aware of the opt-out policy). First, advertisers of luxury brands would leave since the effectiveness of their advertising would fall dramatically since their target audience is no longer exposed to their ads. That would surely decrease ad revenues. Second, those who would still see the ads would be on average less wealthy than they would be without the possibility to opt-out, and this would make advertising less effective10 (ReadWriteWeb, 2008) and hence cheaper and decrease advertising revenues, which are a significant proportion (up to 90%) of total revenues of most newspapers.

Monetizing General Social Networks:

Now that third-party applications proved to be mostly useless, social networks have only one option to create personal value. Create it themselves. Create niche communities, one at a time, inside the general network. Such communities should not be mere “groups” or “networks”, but rather brand new websites built with the best advice from our previous discussion of niche social networks. For example, Facebook could create a community “Facebook Music” at music.facebook.com that would feature (paid) music downloads, rankings, artists marketing sites and fan clubs, that would recommend you new artists and tracks using special algorithms that take into account what kind of music you like, what your friends like and what people with similar music tastes to you like. Basically, it could be Last.fm + iTunes + MySpace all-in-one. Other niches may be online games, sports, education, jobs, etc.

Jason Recommended this corn recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Savory-Grilled-Corn/Detail.aspx

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon dried minced onion
• 1/2 teaspoon dried parsley flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 4 medium ears sweet corn, silk and husks removed
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

DIRECTIONS

1. In a small bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Spread over corn; sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Wrap each ear of corn in a double thickness of heavy-duty foil. Grill, covered, over medium heat for 30-35 minutes or until corn is tender, turning occasionally.

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