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 […]
Tag: recommendations
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 […]
Waiting for Superman
I saw “Waiting for Superman” this week and highly recommend it. Its subject is one of my hot buttons—the decline of public education in this country. The film reveals many statistics that illustrate the sad state of American schools relative to other developed nations. Just one example: out of 28 developed countries, the US is […]
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 […]
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, […]
Web of One
“We believe in a web of one,” Carol Bartz stated at TechCrunch Disrupt. Yahoo produces thousands of custom versions of their home page to reflect users’ interests and preferences. I was struck by her comment because we all waste too much time trying to find what we’re looking for—online or offline. At AOL, our mantra […]