When I was in high school we decided to walk to Ottawa. By we I mean 6 of us who were all in the school’s camping club, which was called Outward Bound and modeled after the Colorado-based program with the same name. We camped year-round, regardless of the season or the weather. One year a […]
Tag: Digital Media
The Dunbar Number and Tribes, Big and Small
Wikipedia defines Dunbar’s number (commonly cited as 150) as a “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.” Dunbar is director of the Institute of Cognitive […]
More on Hunch.com
I’m seeing more and more written about the emergence of personalization on the web, a trend that has had me pounding the table for over a year. Recently Chris Dixon, a co-founder of Hunch, (which I covered in an earlier post), addressed a comment by an anonymous user of formspring asking (a little contemptuously) why […]
Crowdsourcing: Pros and Cons
The term “crowdsourcing” always reminds me of the book title, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (which has been on my reading list for years). A Wired writer coined the term in 2006 by combining “crowd” and “outsourcing.” Wikipedia (probably the best example of crowdsourcing) defines crowdsourcing as “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally […]
The Catbird Seat
“Pretty soon you’ll be sitting in the catbird seat,” my boss said with a sly grin. I mumbled a reply, hoping to hide my confusion, and looked up the expression when I got back to my office. Yes, it meant something good was going to happen and I began to speculate feverishly about what he […]
Hunch.com: Not Ready for Prime Time
I’ve been following Hunch.com for a while since their site offers “personalized recommendations,” a concept I’ve been exploring with Trybe. Hunch’s “topics” are user-generated and they use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to make recommendations based on members’ answers to a series of questions like “Can you do 10 pull-ups?” and “Do you live in a city, […]
Creative vs. Marketing
I was struck by a recent article in the NY Times about The Economist (which I used to read in my Wall Street days.) The editor was quoted as saying, “Once you start trying to segment and work out what people might want to see, I think that would be a journey to some type […]
Superstar Entrepreneurs
I went to a seminar not long ago entitled, How to be an Entrepreneur Superhero. A panel of entrepreneurs answered questions in front of a room full of reverential novice entrepreneurs, dispensing the usual homilies on how to be successful: perseverance, focus, obsessive, attention to detail, etc. One had sold his web company for $85 […]
Don’t be a victim
Don’t be a victim. I first heard that admonition from a senior executive when I was at AOL. He was commenting on complaints he was hearing after a big reorg. AOL, like all big technology companies, was prone to massive reorganizations. Some were genuine attempts to manage a company in the throes of hypergrowth in an […]
The Missing 3rd Place
Being part of a community is basic to our nature. At AOL we used to call online communities the “third place” after home and work. Those of us who don’t go to church lack that third place and I know I for one crave it. (Starbucks calls itself a third place but I don’t buy […]
Skate to where the puck will be…
Recently I was having lunch with two tech entrepreneurs and we ended up in a debate about the right target market for startup web sites. I said I was aiming for affluent, well-educated users, not early adopters. I’ve watched plenty of “cool,” “hip” sites go out of business because they couldn’t attract a big enough […]
Digital Media
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.” –John Gardner A friend, M, and I were talking about the iPad the other night. I said I thought it was going to […]