Tag: clay shirky

@NYC

NYTM 8/3/10: Shirky Rebutted, Social Shopping, and Semantic Web

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My ears are still ringing from a rant by Sam Lessin, Drop.io founder, as he went about trying to disprove intrinsic altruism and trust, and reclaim the commanding heights with neo-classical economics. More on this later, but it is a curious position for a tech entrepreneur whose site is based on people uploading and sharing content for a cost of bupkis.

A few of the high points for me at last night’s New York Tech Meetup: TurnTo, which lets online shoppers find out what friends have purchased; Twilio (which I’ve written about before) had a nice telephony demo for this data-centric audience, and Indaba is a great site for helping musicians monetize their craft.

Oh, and there was a startup, I think called Microsoft, showing off their Bink, or maybe it’s Bing(?) search engine. And Willow Garage, a robotics startup, gave us a glimpse into a future where we stay at home and let our mechanical avatars roam the corridors and aisles of faraway office suites.Continue reading

Social Studies

Suggestion Software: Perfect match for idle CPU cycles.

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I recently tried a silicon oracle called GetGlue.  I’m genuinely impressed at how racks of CPUs can quickly navigate through an enormous knowledge graph and grab a suggestion node that matches some characteristic of my preferences. Great searching capabilities, but I’m less than excited about the results.

Like other recommendation software (say, Hunch), you register preferences by initially rating a sample list of movies, books, TV shows, and music. I told GetGlue that I liked The Breakfast Club, Goodbye Columbus, The Great Gatsby, and Nina Simone.  GetGlue quickly responded with a list of predicable tips: lots of Philip Roth novels, Catcher in the Rye, American Beauty, and Sara Vaughn.

I suppose if I had lived in vault, then some of these suggestions would be novel. One quibble for the GetGlue crew: how about adding a “like, but already know about” classification.

On the plus side, GetGlue deserves credit for bringing swing band leader Jimmie Lunceford, who I hadn’t heard known about, to my attention.  Thanks.Continue reading

Social Studies

Foragers and Foodspotters

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So why was I sharing a picture of a roast chicken  (food source) at a Spanish restaurant in NYC (foraging spot) with Foodspotting.com (my tribe)?  I’m not getting paid for this activity, though the cost of taking the pic and uploading is vanishingly small. Am I being purely altruistic or is something else at work?

Inspired recently by Clay Shirky’s talk on his newest book,  Cognitive Surplus, I took a brief tour through some of the foundational ideas behind generosity and altruism.

Our kindness to strangers may be mostly in our genes, but as Shirky and other point have pointed out, being in a network has its own benefits.
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@NYC

Summer in the City: Shirky, Kind Strangers, and Neat Startups

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Last night was my fourth NYC Tech Meetup, and I think the first time I’ve been in Manhattan in recent memory during a major heat wave. Thankfully, the electro-mechanical HVAC at Skirball worked flawlessly, far better than this new venue’s Internet access.

One of the highpoints for me was listening to Clay Shirky talk about his new book, Cognitive Surplus. Shirky is a gifted narrator and explainer, and the TED videos I’ve seen of him only hint at the powerful thought waves he radiates during a live presentation.

He is an optimist, a true believer on the Internet’s ability to beneficially channel otherwise wasted human CPU cycles devoted to legacy TV watching into crowdsourced content creation: Wikipedia, Amazon book reviews, Aardvark experts on tap, tweets, and as you’ll see after the jump, food photography.Continue reading