twopointouch

My post on Saturday about prediction markets being a useful way to access collective intelligence brought a response from Gary of Tall Street. Tall Street is a new search engine which operates a form of stock market on search results. You search for and add sites to the system and invest pretend money in the sites you like or own. If other users click sites you’ve invested in, your stock increases in price.

They haven’t been Techcrunched or boingboing’ed as yet so the number of sites in the system is low, which limits the utility of the service. However, a search for ‘Search Engines’ has been pre-populated. It would be useful if there were a way to seed the system with results from another service. I also think real money would be an interesting addition. As it is, only the ongoing addition and betting on sites by sufficient users will reveal whether the model actually works. But I have to say.. it looks good on paper. Would I invest real money in Tall Street? No. But then I’m not an investor on the lookout for innovative new ideas.

Yes, it’s just another student project, and it looks a bit rough. But haven’t we seen something fitting that description before…?

Gary was also good enough to answer a few questions for me:

Lanjut →

Techcrunch has posted a great interview with angel investor Paul Graham, which covers some different ground to the one he did with me. Especially interesting, I thought, is Graham’s point that new software startups can effect social and political change:

Frankly, even though I’m supposed to be an investor, the ideas that excite me most are not necessarily the ones that make the most money, but the ones that blow away evil old monopolies. For example, I love collaborative news sites not so much because they make a lot of money– though they might– but because they’ve shown what a bad job the “old media” were doing.

Most people don’t understand what a social force startups can be. There are a lot of changes that can only happen through companies. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies. You know your business model is broken when you’re suing your customers. The new business model must be out there somewhere, and my guess is that the way to beat the bad guys is not through political action (or at least, not only that), but by inventing
whatever replaces them.

(Parochial headline alert: PG Tips is a brand of English tea.)

Lunch today with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research for BT. It was quite a long, or rather intense, discussion, so I’ll only tackle the basics here. I’ve been trying to nail this semantic web issue for some time, but every time I start reading an academic paper, my attention seems to wander off. So this was a good opportunity for me. I wasn’t going to deviate. As soon as he sat down, I was in with my carefully prepared, top journalist’s question: “so what’s this semantic web thingy, then?”

It turns out that that is one of the more difficult questions. (Damn!) It depends on what you mean. You might mean turning the billions of existing web sites semantic or only about possible future sites or services. The second of these options is the most likely outcome at the present. Semantic web is partly about annotating web pages to make them amenable to machines. John prefers the expression ’semantic technologies’ to avoid this confusion.

Lanjut →

A-list bloggers are spurning the traditional media interview, says Steve Rubel. Instead of the normal procedure (reporter asks the questions, you answer them and then the reporter goes and writes it all up), the move is towards written responses. Apparently, Mark Cuban will only do email. Dave Winer answers interview questions on his blog. Rubel thinks this is fine and ought to be driven forward into new interview formats.

It’s fairly predictable of me, but I don’t think it’s fine at all. Here are four reasons why it’s bad:

(a) This is likely to lead to weaker published interviews. A one-hour interview can potentially contain over 20,000 words. Which interviewee is going to take the trouble to write that down? What a conscientous journalist does is take those 20,000 words and produces 3000 words that are cogent, interesting and helpful to the reader.

Lanjut →