This is a great, fun, intuitive website that walks you through choosing a list of tags attached to Flickr photos and displays them to you in a neat globe like UI. [linky]

Kinda feels a bit like Photosynth-lite.  All online and well worth the visit.

The folks over at Dolores Blog have put together a dataset of Wisdom-of-Crowd named colors.  Essentially asking what the people out on the intertubes would name each color.

They have also create a tool into which you can enter a descriptive word and which then returns the colors that are correspondingly titled.  Kinda neat.

Try It!

...umm that's it, if  you were looking for more...well...

ooooooh look kittens:

This is an interesting article at the NYT about SlashDot's new site "idle" set to compete against DIGG.  There are some interesting quotes from CmdrTaco (Slashdot's founder) about how DIGG is broken.

Basically it comes down to the debate around the "Wisdom of the Crowd" vs. "The Tyranny of the Mob".  I am of the opinion that DIGG is a "Tyranny of the Mob" site where a small vocal minority can drive stories.  You can read through the comments in the article and see the support for that argument. 

I've written about this before with regards to DIGG vs StumbleUpon: Digg is broken - Virtual Schrödinger's Law.

CmdrTaco echo's my opinion.  An open platform that relies on the wisdom of crowds is prone to coercion by a vocal minority.  This reflects our political system that is a representative republic and not a popular democracy.

Is CmdrTaco an Elitist then?...

I want to revisit this topic.  It's been awhile since I talked about it.  For a quick review go and read this article: Job v3.0 - 21st Century Jobs

I want to focus on crowd patronage.  There are a variety of people out there now attempting succeeding? at this route of self-financing.  The journalist Michael Yon mentioned in the article above is but one.

Here is someone else trying to fund their effort via the web. Jill's next record

Bringing people with a need in touch with people that want to fulfill that need.  In this case it is Jill Sobule's wish to create a record.  She has been frustrated by an industry that seems to be in obliteration mode.

I am very skeptical as to whether she would have been able to accomplish this in any way prior to the internet,  Because if you are interested in her music you can go out and find a video of her and see what she's all about.

You can then go read a review of her shows. 10 February 2002: Tin Angel -- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

And then, if you are convinced that she makes good music and music you want to be made so that you can listen to more of it...you can click click and give her some of your money.  Easy.

Connecting the crowd to the producer.

...how would you do that in 1988?

I have some organic traffic. I have some links from friends and associated bloggers. I've joined online blogging communities like Bloggst, MyBlogLog and others. I participate in other blogs comments. But all that results in about 25% of my traffic. (or less).

Stumble upon provides the rest.

This is fascinating and relates back to my earlier post on Virtual Schrödinger's Law.

This traffic generating engine that is Stumble Upon represents a shift in the way traffic is garnered on the internet. You used to have to cultivate relationships, you used to have to suck up to power users. Now you don't.

Create a piece of content that is compelling enough, interesting enough, well written enough and get it submitted into Stumble Upon's database of URLs and let the horses run wild.

Democracy of Crowds

It's the democracy of crowds. I don't want to use "Wisdon of Crowds" because I have had both "wise" articles and foolish ones explode into a link spike from stumble upon.

The key then of course becomes to continue to generate quality content and feed the mouth of stumble upon.

This is a great little "how-to" article to get syou tarted over at howtosplitanatom.com.  Go check it out and I'll see you inside.

This is amazing. [The Gathering]

It has been coined as "NerdStock" [linky]

These kids come from all over Europe and even Japan to spend four days playing World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, and Quake until they pass out in a pool of their own face-grease from exhaustion.

This might be the single largest gathering of nerds this side of the MIT campus.

Born on Monday, drafted on Wednesday, version 1.0 rolled out on Friday.

LOLCODE.

In a remarkable example of the power of geek-hive-mind in action a new programming language burst onto the scene just last month.

The language was birthed on May 25th 2007 [linky], the site was launched on May 31st, lolcode.com and by mid June there was a v1.0 spec created, the vision of the purpose of the language was refined and there were 4 or 5 compiler projects under way for different development environments.

Incredible.

It has already found a couple of purposes. 

1. to be funny
2. potentially to be a entry level programming language for noobs.  Kinda a replacement for BASIC. 

Here is a little example I whipped up to whet your whistle.

HAI	
CAN HAS STDIO?

SO IM LIKE REVVRZTRIN WITH yurwrrd

	I HAS A mahwrrd!!"" 
	I HAS A yurwrrdnum!!WTF IZ LEN yurwrrd?
	BTW this is probably not the correct syntax
	
	IM IN UR LOOP WAITIN TIL yurwrrdnum IZ LESSER THAN 0	
	
		mahwrrd!!mahwrrd N  yurwrrdnum IN MAH yurwrrd
		BTW again not the right syntax
		
		NERF yurwrrdnum
	IM OUTTA YR LOOP
	
	I FOUND MAH mahwrrd
	
KTHXBYE


I HAS A yurwrrd
GIMMEH yurwrrd

VISIBLE REVVRZTRIN WITH yurwrrd
KTHXBYE

I'm not sure if I get the whole cat thing...but that's ok.

I'm sure by now you've seen the official Olympic logo for the 2012 London Games.  It's hideous.  Unbelievably horrid.  It looks like some high school kids created it.  I could go on.

Well an interesting thing happened on the way to the marketing meeting, the BBC called for reader submissions of replacement logos. [linky] And they got a bunch.

Some of them quite good (most of them not).

This is a modern day consequence of big government / business / bureaucracy ineptitude.  In previous eras the pukeliscious logo created by the committee would have had no competition.  The fair citizens of London would have been forced to apologize for it and that's it.

An “Army of Davids” Moment

Now regular people have the tools on their personal computer to create professional quality (some of them are) logos.  Submit them to an organization with some weight and provide an alternative to the "official" logo.

If the bureaucracy was smart they would take this "out" provided for them and use the new, much better logo.

In fact future games should take note and save the money of hiring a marketing firm, open up the design to the public and trust on the wisdom of crowds to create something better than a travesty in orange.

We have seen lately the complaints surrounding the gaming of "Digg". [linky] Wherein a small number of power users influence the vast majority of Digg ratings. First of all these people need a life, secondly this highlights the primary weakness of Digg. It rewards power users. It does this if in no other way by allowing people to see the links and how high they are rated and who voted on them.

Virtual Schrödinger's Law
Each single piece of visibility into the workings of the system makes it less efficient. Knowledge of the effects you have on the system affects the outcome of the system. This is the Virtual Schrödinger'sLaw: you cannot both see the content and see the rating on the content without being influenced by bias.

The wisdom of crowds gets influenced by the bias of crowds.
Unpopular topics to the biased crowd will not get as many dissenting votes. There is an echo-chamber effect that then occurs. A self-replicating bias entrenches itself. People outside of the crowd bias do not participate, the vision narrows and the echo-chamber shrinks.

Digg becomes biased.

If there were a system that allowed for a "digg" or a "bury" without any of the "ego" feedback that is given with digg.com, a more democratic outcome could be achieved.

There already is a system that satisfies that requirement.

It's called stumble upon.
Stumble upon provides the voting functionality without the "ego" feedback loop. In essence it hides the useless UI. The end user has no list to traverse, the wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. The Virtual Schrödinger's law is upheld.

After installing the stumble upon toolbar, practically nobody goes to the stumble upon site. You don't need to go there, there is no point. You don't need to read any lists. All you do is set up your interests / categories and the sites are brought to you.

You vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down and that's it.  Egos of power users are not stroked. The quality of the site and the potential for its rating to go up or down is not influenced by arbitrary bias. [linky] btw - my experience with traffic closely mirrors the last link's.

You don't see the link and the rating on the link at the same time. The rating on the link is hidden from the user.

The wisdom of crowds is not influenced by the bias of crowds. QED.

Update: Here is the wikipedia entry for Schrödinger's Cat: [linky]. Also there was a comment left questioning my use of Schrödinger instead of Heisenberg.  I think it may be a valid point, but I like the cat thought experiment.  [Heisenberg]

Update 2: Someone else has posted essentially the same article: http://www.howtoliveonline.com/2007/06/why-stumbleupon-is-better-than-digg-to.html

So by now I assume you've read the story about how big Everquest's economy was (is? eh...I don't know).  Well here is the story of the economist who first discovered the financial size of the Everquest as compared to the real world.

[linky]

Castronova sat back in his chair in his cramped home office, and the weird enormity of his findings dawned on him. Many economists define their careers by studying a country. He had discovered one.

Brilliance sometimes comes in the ability to connect the banal with the ordinary and create epiphany.

Update: here's the research paper [linky].

So in this post over at BoingBoing [linky], our intrepid poster, Cory Doctorow, posted an interesting link regarding the DMCA.  It is an interesting article, but what was interesting to me was a derivitive on the post, the problem and his call for help and the response of his readers.

...(McGill University's crazy media player won't play the video in my browser for some reason, and they don't have a direct download link -- someone rip/post this and send me the URL?)

Link, Link to video

Update: Here's the Windows stream -- still won't play for me, but maybe someone can transcode it to something less brain-damaged. -- Thanks, Whiteg!

Update 2: Thanks to Jason Turgeon for ripping this video to something easier to see. Here's the whole thing, and here's Bruce Lehman's bit.

The "crowd" jumps in and solves the issue.  This is the benefit you get by ceding unnecessary control to your audience.  Excellent example.