I had already been involved in a project getting computers to Kenyan schools for a number of years. When I was visiting Ghana for the first time, my friend Marlene and I went to see the Akosombo dam, which is holding back the Volta river to create the largest man made lake in Africa, and the second largest globally - as I was told. On our way back we were looking for a hotel to spend the night. When we came through the fishermen’s village of Anloga at the coast of Ghana towards Togo, we noticed a large and clean looking building in Western style among all the fishermen’s houses in native style. Our curiosity aroused, we came to the “Pin Drop Inn”, a neat little hotel. Quite unexpectedly, each of the rooms was up to Western standards, offering its own bathroom – with shower, toilet, and running water, air conditioning, and satellite TV. And most surprisingly, everything worked! I then started talking with Jerry, the owner of the hotel. His bright 11-year-old son offered to take me through a tour of the village. When I got back, Jerry’s daughter joined our discussion. The three of them were asking all sorts of questions about computers and the Internet. It soon became clear that their biggest dream was to get an Internet café to Anloga. When I left the Pin Drop Inn the next morning, I promised Jerry to help him set up an Internet café for the secondary school of Anloga.

Back in Switzerland and the US I asked around for used computers. One of my Swiss friends, the CIO of Elektro-Material AG, a large electronics parts wholesaler, offered to donate a dozen used but still usable computers, fully equipped. He even agreed, together with some colleagues, to install Windows XP and Office on the computers so we would only have to plug them in in Anloga. Microsoft had also generously agreed to provide us with free Windows and Office licenses for our school Internet café project. The only thing left to do now was to pack the computers up and ship them to Ghana. I found a shipper who specializes in moving stuff to Africa. He promised to ship the computers to Ghana to be there around July 8th such that they would be ready for us when we would get to Accra on July 24th. I was therefore not too pleased when he called me a few days after I had paid his bill to tell me that the computers had been lost on the way from Zurich to Antwerp, and that the ship therefore had left without our computers. He would put them on the next ship which was scheduled to arrive at the Ghanaian port of Tema July 24th. Timing started to get quite tight now. To get the computers out at the port in Tema I again contacted the Ghanaian Embassy in Berne. This time, the Embassy was very helpful, and – within 2 days – wrote and faxed me back a confirmation letter, also asking the customs authorities in Tema to forego import duties, as the computers were destined to go to a school.

However, getting the computers to Ghana was the easy part. Connecting them to the Internet, once they were in Anloga, proved to be a harder nut to crack. When I was visiting Anloga for the first time more than a year ago, the closest phone land line was still dozens of kilometers away, so the only viable option seemed to be to get Internet through satellite connection - using a so-called VSAT connection. I was told that setting up the station would cost about $10,000, while monthly access fees would amount to at least $800. As this seemed quite excessive to me, I started asking around. Through a friend at the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) I was referred to Jack Constanza, CSAIL’s infrastructure director. Jack told me about Don, a professor at the University of Maryland, who was involved with similar projects. Don knew Erik Osiakwan, an Internet journalist in Ghana, who in turn referred me to Kwaku Boadu, owner of Ghanaian Internet access provider arrownetworks. Kwaku told me that he might be able to get me Internet access at lower cost than through setting up a vsat connection myself in Anloga. He had an access point in the nearby border town of Afloa, and my location in Anloga might be close enough to get a terrestrial point to point connection. For that, however, I would need the GPS coordinates of Jerry’s Pin Drop Inn. When I called my friend Marlene in Ghana, her husband knew of a surveyor working for the Ghanaian state who might be able to give us the GPS coordinates, but it would be quite expensive because he would have to drive to Anloga, to get a GPS reading right at the Pin Drop Inn. It then occurred to me, that using Google Earth, and locating the Pin Drop Inn that way might be an easier way to get the GPS coordinates.

So, when, I and my children finally arrived in Ghana on July 25th, it was one of my first activites to ask Jerry to come to Accra, and locate the Pin Drop Inn on Google Earth, which I had loaded and cached on my laptop. Jerry was indeed able to spot the Pin Drop Inn on Google Earth, and when I called Kwaku to tell him the coordinates, I got back the good news that we would be capable of getting a terrestrial signal from Kwaku’s access point in Afloa to Anloga. But we still might have to set up a 30-meter high pole to capture the signal directly from the access point in Afloa.

In the meantime, I also tried to get the computers out at the port in Tema. I asked Jerry to look into this. When he contacted the port, he was told that, while the ship had indeed arrived on time, unloading it was backed up by a week, and the earliest time the ship could be unloaded and the computers be obtained would be one week later, on Monday August 6. My children and I therefore decided to do our sightseeing in Ghana during the first week of our stay, and set the computers up during the second week. I arranged with Jerry that he and I would meet again August 6 at the port to get the computers. When I called Jerry on Sunday August 5 to arrange for the computers to be unloaded, he told me that to obtain the computers within the next few days I would not only have to pay customs, but also a handling agent, and a substantial release fee for the local representative of the shipping company which had shipped the computers from Antwerp to Tema. I was also told that while I could indeed claim an exemption from customs for the computers, this would take a few weeks to be approved by the ministry. Also, if I would try to deal with the complexities of clearing goods at the port of Tema myself, this would further slow me down. As I learned I had not only to pay customs duties, but also the so-called documentation fee of the handling agent who would be walking me through the release process at the port, and the release fee of the local agent of the shipping company. I agreed with Jerry that he would come Monday August 6 morning to the house of my friends to pick me up, and we would then go to the port of Tema together.

Unfortunately, Monday morning no Jerry showed up, and when I finally called him around noon, he told me that he would only be able to come Monday afternoon. We then agreed to meet Tuesday morning. I was pleasantly surprised when on Tuesday morning Jerry was only one hour late for the meeting at our house. We then went to the port of Tema, where it turned out that Nick, the handling agent at the port, was a relative of Jerry – and a former customs officer. Nick generously agreed to manage the clearance process of the computers for a reduced fee of $100 (he originally wanted $150). Nick then promised that I would get the computers the same day, but first I would have to come with him to the various offices to pay my dues to the different parties asking for money in return for the promise to release the computers. Off we went in his glitzy new Nissan Infinity SUV, first to the local representative of the shipping line. There, the lady initially requested the equivalent of 247 dollars, but after same bartering accepted 207 dollars. After I had also handed the $180 for customs to Nick, I was sent home, but was promised that next day I would get the computers.

When I came to Nick’s office the next morning – it was now Wednesday, and our return tickets to Zurich were for Friday evening – nobody was there. After a half hour wait Nick showed up. First, he took me to the bank, where he had me wait outside and went inside to pay the customs duties. Afterwards, we drove to the port, where I was handed over to Edward. Edward was one of the young clearing agents who do the actual legwork for Nick. Edward now took me on a tour criss-crossing the port of Tema from one office to the other. After the first four stops I lost track of where we were, I just noticed that one of the stops was with the lady who had wanted to pay me the 247 dollars, and another one was at the customs office, to show our receipt that we had actually paid customs duty. In the evening, with sore legs and totally exhausted from a day walking around at the port with Edward, I was sent home again with the promise that finally, on Thursday, I would get the computers.

Thursday morning, after my mandatory wait for Jerry at Nick’s office, Jerry appeared in a Trotro, that is a Ghanaian taxicab. Jerry had rented this Trotro, a Mazda minivan, including driver and driver’s mate (the fare collector), to shuttle our computers to Anloga. Jerry also told me that the Trotro would cost me about 60 dollars. The three of us, Jerry, Trotro driver, and driver’s mate, went to the port, where Edward was waiting for us. After some more waiting, and after paying an entry fee of one dollar for each of us at the port, we were finally allowed to go to see the container with the computers.


After the customs officer had checked that the lading bill and the contents of the container matched, we were then allowed to load our 12 computers including accessories into the Trotro. I never thought that all the equipment would fit into the Trotro, but in the end Jerry and the Trotro driver succeeded in squeezing everything into our little bus, even the driver’s mate, who could only sit sideways on top of some monitors.

On our drive to Anloga, we had to stop a few times at police barriers, which were supposed to check the safety of the vehicles passing through. Paying a “small gift” at each roadblock ensured that the policemen waved our fully loaded mini bus through.

Two hours later, it was now Thursday at 5pm, we arrived at Jerry’s house, where a group of about half a dozen children was eagerly waiting for the computers. In no time had we unloaded the computers, and set them up.

I was amazed how the kids, who had only seen computers a few times in an Internet café, succeeded, by observing me, to assemble the computers. About half an hour later all the computers were set up, and the kids were already starting to experiment with Microsoft Office.

Usually I get along really well with the Ghanaians. Most of the time they are friendly people who are helpful and go out of their way to make guests feel at home. Occasionally, however, there seem to be clashes of cultures. I am still trying to make sense out of two tumultuous encounters with Ghanaian authorities where I only got what I needed after serious yelling, screaming, and threat of force. The first one occurred when I was applying for my visa for Ghana, the second one happened when we tried to check in for our flights back from Accra to Zurich.

When I applied in June for a visa for my two children and me with the Ghanaian embassy in Berne, Switzerland, I was expecting a smooth process. After all, I had done the same thing last year, and had gotten back my passport with the visa stamp three days after I had sent it in. This time, however, things were different. I got the first warning, when, ten days after having sent in the passports, I got back a form asking for missing information instead of the passports. I immediately called back and provided the missing information. I also told the consular officer that I would be grateful if he could process my visas in the next few days, because I would be leaving for the US the following Tuesday. When I still had not gotten back my passports on Saturday, I got really nervous. I checked with the Swiss post, and they told me that no registered letter was underway. I then decided to drive to Berne on Monday – my flight from Zurich to Boston was on Tuesday. I was at the Ghanaian embassy when it opened at 9 in the morning. No consular officer was there, but the friendly lady at the reception checked for me on the desk of the consular officer, and told me that our three passports were indeed on the pile of visas to be processed. At 11, the consular officer finally arrived, and I was promised to get my visas signed by the consul first thing in the afternoon. When I came back in the afternoon, there was only the friendly lady informing me that my passport could not be processed. I now freaked out, and yelled at everybody that I would camp out at the reception and only leave the building with my three passports – and indeed, after another 45 minutes, I got my three passports with the visa stamps for Ghana.

After this tumultuous beginning of my second trip to Ghana, things inside Ghana went mostly fine, except for the few glitches described elsewhere in this blog. The flight back from Accra to Zurich, however, was an altogether different story.

At the end of our stay in Ghana, when we tried to check in at the airport in Accra for our Lufthansa flight back to Zurich by way of Lagos, we were expecting smooth check in. But after I had handed over our tickets to the agent at the check in counter, she continued typing at the keyboard and staring at the monitor, looking more and more worried. In the end she asked us to drag our heavy suitcases off the carrier belt, and move to another counter. There, the same process was repeated, and then we were sent to a third counter. There, the agent told us that she could not check us in because we had two bookings, an e-booking and a paper ticket. I told her that we had traveled to Accra with Alitalia without any check in problems – and the only problem, if there even was one, was that each of us had two bookings, an electronic one and a paper ticket. She then tried to call the Lufthansa head office, which told her to go ahead and check us in. The agent, however, still refused to check us in. I then started yelling at her, in turn she generously agreed to check in our baggage for Zurich, and to give us stand-by boarding cards, but only to Frankfurt. Some more yelling on my side brought her to “informally” promise us three seats together, which she would hold for us at the gate, but for now we could only get in with stand-by boarding passes for Frankfurt. She also proclaimed to be unable to check us through to Zurich. As this seemed to be the best deal for us to be obtained for now, the three of us rushed through security and customs, as we had already spent well over an hour fighting with the different Lufthansa check in agents at Accra airport. When we were at the gate, the agent there took away our stand-by boarding passes, and told us to be patient and wait for our boarding passes. After waiting for another half hour, it was now close to scheduled departure time, we still had not gotten any boarding passes. I now exploded, and started screaming for our boarding passes. Only after me having thrown around a few chairs in the check-in area to show that I was serious, another agent came to the gate, and after unsuccessfully trying to print the boarding passes with the electronic check-in system, manually wrote the seat numbers on our boarding passes and allowed us to board the plane.
Needless to say that in Frankfurt we had no problems to get the follow-on boarding passes from Lufthansa for the final leg of our trip to Zurich.

Obviously, in the end in both instances we got what we wanted – and what was due to us. But I am really wondering if we would also have gotten it without all my screaming and yelling in the very last minute. I have to point out that in both instances, for getting back the passports at the embassy, and to get checked in for our return flight, I had waited until the very last minute until I escalated the process and started making troubles.

So my suspicion is that sometimes the swarm only does the right thing if one makes it more trouble for the swarm not to do the right thing.

The state-run Ghanaian electricity company is periodically turning off electricity because of power shortages. One night we had no electricity in the house of my friends in Accra. As a precaution they had recently bought two Chinese-made lamps with battery chargers, each giving light bright enough to light a room for reading. That night, unfortunately, one of the freshly charged lamps went out after 5 minutes. I opened the lamp, and fiddled with the electrical contacts between bulb and battery. The light went on again. My friend then decided to go to bed and took the working lamp with her. My children and I were left with the temperamental lamp, which went out again after 3 minutes. Opening up the lamp cover under the weak light of another flashlight and fiddling with the contacts got the lights back on for another 3 minutes. After having repeated this process 4 times, my kids and I decided to give up on reading and went to bed. Next morning both lamps worked fine again, as did the electrical power grid.
Lights made in China can be quite fickle – even more so in Ghana.

Yesterday morning our houseboy killed a poisonous snake in our garden. The property of my friend is not that big, it has a small, but well-tended garden. The garden is fenced in, and the fence is lined by overgrowing flower bushes. When the houseboy was cutting the bushes, he suddenly got really exited and called us to show us a pretty large snake, about 1.2 meters long, with dark green and yellow stripes. The snake was resting high up in the bushes, right within the flower bush which had overgrown the side door where all the visitors were passing through. It was a pretty eerie feeling that we might have come and gone for some days right underneath a poisonous snake. The fix of the houseboy to this problem was as radical as it was short and brutal. He called another man from the neighborhood for help. With a long stick the houseboy threw the snake out of the bush on the street, and then the other man shattered the snake’s head with a large stone – Risk management by eliminating the risks.

Later in the day the children and I decided to go to downtown Accra. My friend agreed to lend us her car. First thing was to fill up the tank at the filling station. After pumping gas, the guy at the station asked for 57 new cedies (about 57 dollars). The meter at the pump station only read 52 cedies. The guy explained that he had first pumped gas for 5 cedies, and then incidentally reset the meter by returning the nozzle into the holder. As this story sounded really fishy to me, I refused to pay. We got into a little argument, the manager of the station also came, and in the end I paid what the meter read, 52 cedies. The 5 cedies the guy at the pumping station was trying to extract from me would have been about one week of wages for him, at least.
There are different types of snakes in Ghana.

While the driver and I were standing outside the car and waiting to have our inflated tire repaired (see previous post), my children inside the car were eating candy. When they saw a few kids approaching, they threw them out some of the shrink-wrapped candy. First, the kids did not know what to do with the little square pieces wrapped into glittering aluminum foil, but once the first one had unwrapped the candy and put it into her little mouth, a delighted smile lighted up all over her face. More children started flocking to the car, and then even some half-grown-ups joined them. My children were busy throwing candy out the car window. But then things started getting out of control. The swarm of kids became more aggressive, banging at the car door, so I started getting worried for my friend’s car. I took the bag of candies and stepped away from the car. Now the entire swarm, about 20 children, aged from probably three to sixteen years, was surrounding me. I could not get out the candies fast enough for them. Hands were reaching out and touching me everywhere. And now even some adults were joining in. In the end a tall guy, probably half a head larger than I – and I am over six feet – wrestled the torn bag out of my hand. The rest of the candy fell on the ground. Now the swarm started fighting on the floor. Thirty seconds later all the candies were gone, and another few seconds later the swarm had dissolved. The only thing remaining was some dispersed candy paper lying on the floor.
Some times the swarm can get out of control – in particular if the protocol of sharing with the swarm has not been previously established.

At the end of our beach holidays we drove back from Axim to Accra. Our friends had sent their SUV with a driver to pick us up at the beach resort. Suddenly, we were near the old capital of Ghana Cape Coast, our driver pulled the car in a filling station, telling us that he had noticed a strange sound. I then walked around the car, and noticed that one of the tires was flat. At the filling station, however, they told us that they were only equipped to pump gas and could not exchange our spare tire. Suddenly, and without comment, our driver disappeared, taking the car keys with him. We could do nothing but wait in the hot sun and make sure that our belongings left in the unlocked car stayed where they were. We were very relieved when 15 minutes later our driver came back, bringing with him a powerfully built young man in a mechanic’s overall. The young man then searched for our car jack, which, as it turned out, was not working. The young man disappeared again, and 20 minutes later, came back with an old car jack, and ten minutes later our spare tire was put properly in place, and we could resume our trip.

I then asked our driver if it would be possible to have our flat tire fixed immediately. He assured me that this would be no problem, and another ten minutes later pulled over at what appeared to me to be a tiny shack in the midst of a large collection of small market stands along the road. Our particular stand had four broken tires heaped in front of it. It turned out the wiry little man in the shack was operating a bustling flat tire fixing business. Only using the most primitive tools, it took him no time to plug the hole in our tire and put the tire back on the rim. Then, with the one sophisticated piece of equipment he had, a fuel-operated compressor, he put the air back into our inflated tire. It’s amazing how the swarm can fix things.

Yesterday we went to the small town of Axim. Axim is an old town with a similarly old historic slave castle. My children and I walked around in the small town, looking at the slave castle and the street vendors and their stalls lining the sides of the street. While I was quite fascinated by the bustling street live, I was surprised to learn that my kids were less than taken with the colorful scenery. They found the streets and houses very dirty, and the smell coming from the open sewage canals disgusting. While the kids were right in that the red dust was indeed everywhere because the streets are mostly unpaved, and the canals indeed, well, stank, I found the scenery so full of life that I could have watched it for a long time. Not so my kids. After a ten-minute walk, and after quickly drinking a cold coke from one of the street vendors, they insisted to take a taxi and get back to the hotel as quickly as possible.


It seems that becoming immersed into a new swarm is a long learning experience.

I frequently noticed in Ghana that while my opposite was trying to do the best for me, his failure to explain me his reasoning converted the result into the opposite. Sometime this can go to some extremes where the motivations on both sides are not really clear. Our experiences in the beach restaurant at the romantic Axim beach resort set an excellent example.

It is no easy thing to get ice cream in Ghana. Electricity breaks down all the time, and frequently it is turned off for half a day which means that it is hard to keep ice cream in its icy state for extended periods of time. The more pleasant our surprise, when the menu of our beach hotel in Axim offered ice cream. When we ordered our ice cream, the three of us chose chocolate and strawberry from the waiter. We were slightly surprised when the restaurant manager himself proudly brought us mixed strawberry and vanilla ice. When we informed him that we had ordered strawberry and chocolate, he deeply apologized and promised to bring us what we had ordered. We saw him throw away the strawberry and vanilla ice and head back to the restaurant kitchen. But a few seconds later he was back, even more apologetic, telling us that the chocolate ice had melted in the hot Ghanaian climate, and that strawberry and vanilla ice was all that was still available. The chef had decided on his own that substituting chocolate ice with vanilla ice was what we wanted. Of course the chef had guessed right – we were starving to get some cold ice cream – but the chef had not bothered to inform the manager about our order and the changes the chef had made without asking us. In the end we gladly accepted a new vanilla and strawberry ice, but the wasted ice cream was a heavy price to pay in a country where ice cream is a highly valued rare treat.

In the same restaurant we experienced a second communication breakdown and misunderstanding of cultures. One day I told the waiter I wanted a chef’s salad as a starter for the three of us – my two kids and I would share one salad as we were not that hungry and would also have a second dish each for lunch. And indeed I got a large heaped plate of salad as the first course of our lunch. The not-so-pleasant surprise came afterwards, when the waiter doubled the price of the salad – explaining that I had asked for a “big” salad. He claimed he had only tried to follow my wishes, and could not understand that I refused to pay the double price.

Our adventures started well before boarding our flight for Accra. Seven days before we were supposed to get on the Lufthansa plane from Zurich to Accra – I was still in Boston at that time – I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the travel agent, telling me that the flight to Accra had been cancelled by Lufthansa. He could not explain why. I then started calling around, and in the end the travel agent was able to book a flight for the three of us one day later than planned from Alitalia, through Milan instead of Frankfurt.

The reason Lufthansa could not fly was that it had started a squabble with the Ghanaian government about landing rights. As it was flying from Frankfurt to Accra with a stop in Lagos on behalf of Air Ghana, the Ghanaian government wanted compensation for these flights, which Lufthansa refused to pay. After a week of squabbling, the two parties came to agreement, and our flight back to Zurich should now happen with Lufthansa as planned.

Our flight with Alitalia from Milan to Accra was quite an adventure. It already started in Milan, when we noticed an excitedly gesticulating lady of seemingly Ghanaian descent. It turned out she had four pieces of hand luggage she wanted to take with her into the plane, and refused to let the flight attendants check in the surplus bags. In the end the surplus bags were checked in under police protection, and an obviously very unhappy lady boarded the plane. Everything went well until our stop in Lagos. The plane stayed on the ground for an extended period of time, and in the end the captain informed us that we were short of three passengers – meaning that in Milan three passengers had their baggage checked in, but did not board the plane. It seems this went undetected in Milan, and was only noticed by the Nigerian authorities. In stern words the Alitalia captain now requested the passengers to identify their luggage manually. At this time the already aggravated Ghanaian lady shot up, and asked for more dignified treatment of passengers. The Italian captain came running back through the plane, reinforced by a few male flight attendants. A shouting match followed, and things started getting really ugly. Tempers only cooled down after some Nigerian police officers (they also might have been customs officers, I could not tell the difference) also joined the fray. In the end the Ghanaian lady and some other unruly passengers were forcefully convinced to take their seats again. In the subsequent two hours passengers had to leave the plane in small groups to manually identify their pieces of luggage which were spread out widely on the tarmac of the airport, once this task was completed, they were let back into the plane. With 3 hours delay the plane finally took off for the last 40 minute hop to Accra.

Overall this was a surprisingly eventful trip to Ghana, free entertainment provided thanks to an explosive mix of Lufthansa’s mishandled negotiation with Ghana airline authorities, Alitalia’s mishandling of the passenger count and rough treatment of passengers, and the explosive temper of same passengers.

This summer we (my son, 14, and my daughter, 15 years old, and I) are spending our holidays in Ghana. The “official” purpose of our trip is to install 12 computers and set up an Internet cafe for the secondary school of Anloga, a fishermen’s village at the coast of Ghana close to the border to Togo. Unofficially, we are also visiting friends in Accra and spending sunny days at the long Ghanaian beaches.

Among our objectives on this Coolhunt program was a desire to find new ways to publicize the release of a new book on the Internet. The publisher, AMACOM Books, who paid to have this online program produced, is hoping for sales at the end of the day to cover the marketing costs. The authors, who benefit modestly from sales and more from reputation enhancement, desire that the book gets an opportunity to reach its target audience.

At Patron Saint Productions, we try to find novel ways to bring books to the attention of readers without bothering those who aren't interested. It's a delicate operation, blending these interests into an online publicity campaign. I think you might find this behind-the-scenes look at some of the results to be interesting.

Access to the following reports normally is limited to campaign insiders. We are able to make these reports available here with the blessings of AMACOM Books:

Discussion Group Postings Report

(Microsoft Word document)

Shows the 50-plus discussion groups where we posted a message about the Coolhunt program and offered to send an excerpt from the book upon request.

Blog PR Report

(HTML document)

Shows a couple dozen blogs we approached -- besides those visited in the Coolhunt. We visited blogs listed in the Author Questionnaire completed by Scott Cooper, as well as blogs found through our own searches. At these blogs, we either posted comments or asked the blogmaster to post an announcement about the Coolhunt program. We offered the blogmasters free review copies of the book.

Review Copy Requests
We pitched media contacts, offering a review copy of "Coolhunting" and a press kit. Here is a list of the media who responded to our pitches and requested a review copy of the book. Due to privacy concerns, we are not releasing their contact information:

Kristin Clarke, CAE
ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership
CATEGORY: Magazine, Journal, or Newsletter
TOPICS: leadership, business

Geoffrey P. Lantos, PhD
Professor of Business Administration
Stonehill College
TOPICS: business, marketing
NOTES: Marketing Program Director at Stonehill College, and Book Reviews Editor for Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Product and Brand Management

Roy Bragg
San Antonio Express-News
TOPICS: San Antonio, general interest

Mary Beth Guard
Executive Editor
Bankers Online
TOPICS: banking, finance

Mark Gibbs
GibbsBlog
TOPICS: technology, computers
NOTES: Contributor to NetworkWorld

Marie Leone
Senior Editor
CFO.com
TOPICS: finance, business

Jason Thibeault
CTO/Co-Founder
GoWare, Inc.
TOPICS: technology, computers

Paul J. Wilczynski
Krislyn Corporation
TOPICS: business

Ari Herzog
TOPICS: travel, entertainment
NOTES: Freelance writer and reporter for such publications as The Boston Globe; launching new blog

Mordechai (Morty) Schiller
TOPICS: marketing, Judaism

Allan Alter
Executive Editor, CIO Insight
TOPICS: technology, computers

Chris Locke
TOPICS: business, Internet
NOTES: author of Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing

Alan Chumley
TOPICS: public relations, media

Guy Kawasaki
How to Change the World
TOPICS: entrepreneurship, business

Dion Hinchcliffe
Web 2.0 Blog
TOPICS: technology, Internet

Tom Davenport
Babson Knowledge
TOPICS: business, management

Coolhunt Log #20
Friday, May 11, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: This is the last day of our month-long coolhunt. Could you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

PETER: I'm calling from Switzerland.

MODERATOR: Today, on our last coolhunt I was hoping we could go over where we've been and talk about where we're going in the future with social networking. Can you tell me what you think about the list of all the sites we've visited that Gary Michael Smith posted last night?

PETER: I can't believe we've visited so many sites.

SCOTT: I was pretty impressed when I saw the list.

MODERATOR: Some of the things that jumped out at me is that we had a very protracted and good discussion about who are the news originators, places that have reporters doing research and bringing out facts. Then we looked at how searchers for information would find sites -- the whole yin and yang about new forms and old forms of finding information.

SCOTT: I was struck after looking at the list and reading some of my emails. In an email from the New York Times about a column from David Pogue, Asking the Crowd to Spread the News. He says that we haven't even scratched the surface about the audience supplying materials. Why isn't there a website that says, "Yes, this is going around and you'll be vomiting for two days"? There should be a map of such information. I just reminded me that we really were coolhunting over this past month.

WEB: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/asking-the-crowd-to-spread-the-news/

PETER: I would like to know what all the other crowds are thinking and reading. I think it's a double-edge sword, creating news stories and making them available. You know what to expect from certain branded, boilerplated sources. If old-time media does it right -- whatever that means -- there will always be a place for those types of news providers. Getting access is
another story. Will people stumble across it or will there be more organized dissemination that will tell me all the stories that I'm normally interested in.

MODERATOR: The New York Times really never has had an opportunity to know what readers thought about its stories until recently. Now this has changed with journalists' blogs. Let's go to the Apple Store. If you look at this cutting-edge site you'll see "moving stills" as well as video in the advertising and display of presentations. Going into the store and looking for a particular product such as a power cord you'll find eight matches. Under the description of the product is a customer rating. You don't even have to drill down into the product because the customer rating is so important. Based on the rating, the shopper will drill down into the sites of particular products. I'm used to seeing customer reviews on books such as those with Amazon.

WEB: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

SCOTT: We make that obvious in our book Coolhunting by writing that power is gained by Amazon by giving power away in the form of user reviews.

MODERATOR: Reviews probably are only going to grow and wisdom of the hive will grow as well because reviews probably will not ever be removed.

PETER: I noticed the rankings on our Coolhunting book based on ratings. One reviewer says that Amazon nearly always processes orders quickly, but if you have any problems you can almost never get a person on the phone the settle it.

WEB:
http://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-Thing/dp/0814473865/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2487262-1981740?ie=UTF8&s=books&q


MODERATOR: We looked quite a bit at citizen reviews and ratings. We looked at tagging, digging, rating, and reviewing as well as censorship. Look where it asks if reviews are useful to you, allowing readers to rate the value of the comment. Where does the helix stop?

SCOTT: I think it's linked to the other discussion we had about the news business. If you let the swarm through all these mechanisms, it's empowering the swarm to take early steps toward self organization. I rarely buy books from Amazon -- preferring to go into bookstores -- but I'll look at reviews and listen to snippets of music online. And the reviews will often give totally opposing viewpoints even though they're listening to the same thing. So the collective intelligence allows the swarm to feed off such information.

PETER: This mix can tell us where the next big trends are. The New York Times has added a new feature allowing readers to dig or post information. This will allow them to know more about what people think about the Times' articles.

SCOTT: I notice that U.S. newspapers in general are so far ahead on this. Peter reads the New York Times and a Swiss newspaper and I read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German daily newspaper, and the foreign papers are less user-friendly regarding blogs, comments, etc., not allowing web 2.0 services as with U.S. news services. A couple years ago there was an article about the bloglessness of German politics. Politicians still think that handing out pens at a supermarket is more effective, or setting up a table and giving out something for free, including a printed copy of their campaign platform.

MODERATOR: We've seen that in many cases, elitists are afraid of the wisdom of the crowd as with the censorship of Google in China and suppression of news in Afghanistan. Can you talk more about this battle between the receiving elite and the growing power of the crowd.

SCOTT: Here's one specific example of the enabling of the swarm. I listen to a lot German lieder and British art songs. Gramophone, a venerable record review magazine in England that's been around for about 100 years, had long been the arbiter of taste and quality for such vocal music. Reviews from "experts" makes one wonder if they ever actually listen to the music. But now, blogs and forums by younger people make for a much broader discussion of what makes for good music. These experts no longer have hegemony because of new technology.

WEB: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum.asp

PETER: "Elite" is the wrong word. Not all bloggers are equal. It's a meritocracy.

SCOTT: Let's talk about what "elite" means. First, it comes from the French for "select." More often than not the elite select themselves. Mike Arrington has not set himself off as one of the elite. He's just a guy who wants to provoke and share in a conversation, whereas others end a blog reminding readers how much of an expert they are on a topic.

MODERATOR: It was fascinating during our visit to Debian that the group had quite an elaborate structure, unlike something like YouTube. The web right now is struggling to come up with guidelines for bloggers' epics. You seem to be saying that the rules already are in force by people blocking you from email.

PETER: In the standards world, there is the International Standards Organization (ISO) group in Geneva. In the networking world, it competed against the much more self-organizing and less hierarchical Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and lost. If given free reign, the crowd is much more capable of setting up its own ethics and rules of operation than a formal group. It's a stable, robust, and self-correcting system. The crowd is very efficient in policing themselves.

SCOTT: Regarding the code of conduct among elitists in the blogosphere, such as Tim O'Reilly who issued a call for a bloggers code of conduct because of the case of Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users) where she was threatened by readers as reported by the BBC and the San Francisco Chronicle.

WEB: http://headrush.typepad.com/

SCOTT: See his "Lessons Learned So Far."

WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/code_of_conduct.html

MODERATOR: Also, see the Word of mouth Marketing Association.

WEB: http://womma.org/

MODERATOR: One person meritocracy is another person's cesspool. People who contribute often are driven offline by the rude behavior of others who post vitriol material. You're saying that the hive can narrow the range into some kind of consensus. How do we deal with the issue of poor manners, spammers, etc.

PETER: The few bad apples such as spammers spoil all our fun but sometimes the entire swarm is spoiled. I think people have learned from the mistakes of the past. Most is self-correcting and self-policing. Many just withdraw from a community when they don't like it, making it self-correcting. I'm quite an optimist.

SCOTT: So am I. I have to say that the swarm on MySpace is self-protecting, keeping off bad programming. I don't know the answer, but I feel that MySpace is populated by so many teenagers, making it a problem. I think it'll work out it's own problems, though.

MODERATOR: Allowing more content to be posted on your sites by the hive is labor-intensive.

SCOTT: You could create a site like Wikipedia and let users create and update it.

PETER: In our case we had to change our community model and start asking for registration in our second version of a website to limit users to a higher quality.

MODERATOR: I wonder if the verification letters required on some sites was a hive-generated concept.

PETER: I think it was a professor who developed the "captcha" algorithm. It's again a great example of the power of the swarm.

MODERATOR: Regarding prediction markets where large groups of people steer decision making on a large scale such as in the stock market, how about using prediction markets in medicine? An op-ed in today's WSJ basically argues that Congress needs to back prediction markets for the gambling industry.

SCOTT: A lot of the ways in which prediction markets could be used turns our stomachs. The military had to take down one model because Congress said it was immoral. But whether you like it or not, it still proves the point about the value of collective intelligence.

MODERATOR: The article talks about a lot cases. A consensus plan suggests that a safe harbor will encourage experimentation. The goal is to allow the federal government to have prediction markets. I'd like to move to my last point on altruism, people releasing copyrights and companies letting go of trademarks. Everything we've covered in the coolhunt seems to say that if you drop your protection and let things go, you'll be better off.

SCOTT: There's a growing recognition for the need to consider stakeholder rather than shareholder value. This is a first step toward altruism. It's a step in the right direction.

PETER: It's a great starting point. The point is that all those communities are driven to a certain extent by altruism. The programmers are motivated by recognition of their peers, and ultimately the well-paying jobs. Prediction markets only work if you have real skin in the game, if you have a stake at risk. In the SpineConnect case they hope to start a company with their
altruistic endeavors. You need to have a healthy respect for your own well-being as well as be concerned with the well-being of the entire society.

SCOTT: Aristotle said "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."

MODERATOR: We've been speaking for the past month with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, the very generous authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Gary Michael Smith, professor at the University of New Orleans, has transcribed our journey to over a hundred websites, and has posted them at http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Any final words
gentlemen?

PETER: This has been an extremely enriching experience.

SCOTT: I'd like also to add Rachelle to the list to thank.

MODERATOR: We're going to post some of the documents from this campaign to give those who are interested the opportunity to view them. I'd like to thank everyone for listening and invite them to comment.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Thank you.

Monday, April 16, 2007

New York Times online
http://www.nytimes.com

Technorati
http://www.technorati.com

Treehugger
http://www.treehugger.com

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Micropersuasion
http://www.micropersuasion.com

Twitter
http://twitter.com/steverubel/statuses/26737381

Who Is Sick?
http://whoissick.org/sickness/

HealthMap
http://healthmap.org/

Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

They Rule
http://www.theyrule.net

Free Beer
http://www.freebeer.org/blog/

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Creative Commons
http://www.creativecommons.org

Innocentive
http://www.innocentive.com

Rite Solutions
http://RiteSolutions.com

Friday, April 20, 2007

Galaxy Advisors
http://www.galaxyadvisors.com

IMDB
http://www.imdb.com

TeCFlow
http://www.ickn.org/ickndemo

Digg
http://www.digg.com

Monday, April 23, 2007

O'Reilly Radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html

Mashable
http://www.mashable.com/

MySpace is Better Than Porn
http://mashable.com/2007/04/20/myspace-porn/

Pete Cashmore post
http://mashable.com/2007/04/21/web-startups-and-the-lying-liars-that-lie-about-them/

Yub
http://www.yub.com/

Prosper
http://www.prosper.com/

Daugter needs to take summer college classes Max State Int.
http://prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=124674

Groups
http://www.prosper.com/groups/

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

New York Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23link.html

Wikipedia, Virginia Tech incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Massacre

BostonNOW
http://www.bostonnow.com/

Assignment Zero
http://zero.newassignment.net/

JoVE: Journal of Visual Experiments
http://www.jove.com

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

O'Reilly Radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/thoughts_on_the.html

Hive-Mind Backyard Beekeeping
http://www.hive-mind.com/bee/blog/2007/04/beekeeping-and-hive-mind.html

Debian.org
http://www.debian.org/

Debian Social Contract
http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Constitution
http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution

SpineConnect
http://spineconnect.syndicom.com/

Thursday, April 26, 2007

InTrade
http://www.intrade.com

U.S. Politics section of InTrade
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/

Hollywood Stock Exchange
http://hsx.com/

Iowa Electronic Markets
http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/

Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/

Blog post about the stock option crisis at Apple
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/04/24/2134257.shtml

Friday, April 27, 2007

We Feel Fine
http://wefeelfine.org/

Trip Advisor
http://www.tripadvisor.com/

Citizendium
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page

UNcyclopedia
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Monday, April 30, 2007

Read/WriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tripadvisor_the.php

New York Times Online, Got Roomfulls of Stuff? Now sites will help keep track of it
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30ecom.html?th&emc=th

Tuscaloosa News
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30ecom.html?th&emc=th

Zebo
http://www.zebo.com/

Groups tab
http://member.zebo.com/Main?event_key=DIAL&execCode=FGRP

Get Free Get Wild
http://groups.zebo.com/getfreegetwild

Michael profile
http://www.zebo.com/8272628

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Zebo
http://www.zebo.com/

GoLoco
http://www.goloco.org/

Minggl
http://www.minggl.com/

Kyte TV
http://www.kyte.tv/home/index.html

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Dailytech
http://www.dailytech.com/AACS+Key+Censorship+Leads+to+First+Internet+Riot/article7129.htm

MediaVidea
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/05/day-on-planet-of-digg.html

China google censorship
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?ex=1303444800&en=9721027e105631bf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

38pitches
http://38pitches.com/

Thursday, May 3, 2007

The Wall Street Journal online
http://online.wsj.com/public/us

The Financial Times of London
http://www.ft.com/home/us

All Things Digital
http://allthingsd.com/

NOLA.com
http://www.nola.com/

The Boston Globe
http://www.bostonglobe.com/

Boston-online.com
http://www.boston-online.com/Blogs/

OpinionJournal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/

TheWashingtonPost.com
http://www.thewashingtonpost.com/

Friday, May 4, 2007

The New York Times, Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?
http://www.nytimes.com/

Emerging Writers
http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/

Bookslut
http://www.bookslut.com/blog/

ElegantVariation
http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/

Curledup
http://www.curlup.com/

Shelfari
http://www.shelfari.com/

BookExpo America
http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/

PublishingTrends
http://www.publishingtrends.com/

Bookcrossing
http://bookcrossing.com/

Monday, May 7, 2007

Hybrid Vigor
http://hybridvigor.net/

Cooperation Commons
http://cooperationcommons.org/

Alliance for Discovery
http://breakthroughdiscoveries.org/

The Peer to Peer Foundation
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page

Howard Rheingold
http://rheingold.com/

MIT Media Lab and Architecture departments
http://mobile.mit.edu/

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Forrester Research
http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/04/forresters_new_.html

Boredom Drives Open Source Developers
http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/05/07/1235250.shtml

Forbes Special Report on Networks: Community
http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/18/immigration-charity-religion-lead-cz_tp_07networks_0419community_land.html

Xanga
http://www.xanga.com/

Post about shoplifters at Wal-Mart
http://www.xanga.com/TheTheologiansCafe/589173273/i-am-a-thief--i-stole-from-walmart.html

TechNews
http://technews.acm.org/current.cfm#310579

Samuel Bowles
http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles/

Science Magazine last December
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5805/1569

ArXiv
http://www.arxiv.org

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

TechCrunch
http://www.techcrunch.com/

ZoomInfo
http://www.zoominfo.com/

Spock
http://www.spock.com/

Wink
http://wink.com/

google belgium yahoo
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070503/tc_afp/belgiumusinternet

copyright
http://www.afp.com/english/links/?pid=copyright

ZDnet
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070503/wr_nm/belgium_google_dc

Democratizing Innovation
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

Thursday, May 10, 2007

SpineConnect Demo
https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/app

SOLAS XLIF Discussion link
https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/groupinfo.svc?groupId=72

Possible XLIF with decompression?
https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/case.svc?contentId=1187

Add a Case
https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/CaseType.page

Friday, May 11, 2007

David Pogue, Asking the Crowd to Spread the News
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/asking-the-crowd-to-spread-the-news/

Apple Store
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

Coolhunting Amazon ratings
http://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-Thing/dp/0814473865/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2487262-1981740?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178920742&sr=8-1

Gramophone Magazine blogs and forums
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum.asp

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users
http://headrush.typepad.com/

Tim O’Reilly, Lessons Learned So Far
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/code_of_conduct.html

Word of Mouth Marketing Association
http://womma.org/

Coolhunt Log #19
Thursday, May 10, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Raymond Miles, Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group, University of California - Berkeley
Scott Capdevielle, CEO and Founder of Syndicom and SpineConnect
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: I'm calling from my business office in New Orleans. Could you tell us where you're calling from?

PETER: I'm calling from my home office in Switzerland.

SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: We have two special guests with us today. Raymond Miles is Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group at the University of California at Berkeley. We also have Scott Capdevielle who is CEO and Founder of Syndicom and SpineConnect. Ray and Steve, can you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT C: I'm calling from Derango, CO.

RAY: I'm calling from my office at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, CA.

SCOTT C: We're going to start with a website that we've built to help surgeons connect with one another. I can give the user name and password so those following along can log in. This is our demo server. Direct your browser to www.demo.spineconnect.com/sc. Log in using "demouser" and "password."

WEB: https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/app

SCOTT C: I was a student at Berkeley and started reading books on organizational design, and I kept running into books by Ray Miles. After reading one particular book I became enamored with the concept so I looked him up and went to his office. Finding him sitting there at his desk we starting talking, and he ended up becoming a consultant to my company and a mentor to me. I started working on a concept later and came to Ray with some needs I saw about being an entrepreneur. Roadblocks I saw included the fact that innovators were at a tremendous disadvantage when they were working with a large company. So back in 2000, Ray was trying to understand why open source software organizations were out performing groups who kept their information more concealed.

RAY: We saw that when knowledge was freely exchanged everyone prospered more.

PETER: As a recent example, we found that the more companies collaborated over the course of a year the higher their productivity and high levels of success.

MODERATOR: so what you're saying is that When there's networking across and between corporations, the performance exceeded those of the more closed off ones?

SCOTT C: What Ray discovered back then is that there's a new organizational form. I wanted to know if I could apply that to medicine, and we chose spine surgery. Orthopedics is the fastest growing medical field in terms of innovation. We had to figure out what would be an appropriate way to use open source. Historically, "Hallway Consult" is the way info was transferred among professionals.

MODERATOR: Can you show us how people interact with this software?

SCOTT C: Click on the Groups link at the top of the page. We find that primary growth is through the fellowship program. this site has become popular when fellows have finished their 1-year training but want to stay connected. Click on the Browse button on the left panel and click on Browse Group. Then click on Cleveland Clinic. Then you can submit a request to join this group. You can also create your own group by clicking on the second button, "create a group," in the left panel.

SCOTT: Thus far, it appears that these are largely communities of practice. Peter and I have recently been discussing differences between COINs and communities of practice. I'm curious: what innovations have emerged from the collaboration among these groups and surgeons?

SCOTT C: What we recognized is that if we wanted to create a collaborative network, we had to get the members together first. Once you create a group you can invite members by sending an invitation. When you look at a member's profile you see their training, interests, and other groups they're members of. Back to the menu bar, select Groups, then click on the SOLAS XLIF Discussion link.

WEB: https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/groupinfo.svc?groupId=72

SCOTT C: We've created a "Technology Fellowship" page here because we understand that people learn more effectively by being trained by their peers. SOLIS is a society and XLIF is a product and a procedure.

MODERATOR: It stands for eXtreme Lateral Interbody Fusion, which sounds painful.

SCOTT C: When you first join, you need to go through the training, then you're free to post your case to get the feedback from the expert doctors who have driven the technology. Now, click on the case "Possible XLIF with decompression?"

WEB: https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/case.svc?contentId=1187

SCOTT C: What you see here is a surgeon describing his patient in much detail. You can view case the specifics of his case, as well as x-rays, right there by clicking in the proper section on the site. Participants will discuss the case and how they would approach the it if it were theirs.

RAY: This is appropriate collaborative behavior conducted on the web, which had to be learned since doctors were not use to collaborating using this technology.

MODERATOR: How has it been received by users?

SCOTT C: People have been excited about creating a network of supporting peers. Surgeons are doing more cases because they're getting more confidence by hearing more feedback from their peers.

PETER: How do you get participation?

SCOTT C: There's no reward in the open community. Fundamentally, when people reach a certain level in their career, they get success by sharing their knowledge.

RAY: Scott and his group recognized themselves as examples of excellent consultation. There was recognition, but it was coming from Scott and his group, which was very useful early on, but it carried over to surgical colleagues once they saw the usefulness of this site. Now, appreciation for the site -- and the consequent recognition -- has been growing and has become the norm across the group.

SCOTT C: The surgeons now are coming to us with queries about new applications, so we created a research tool. We wanted to know where we could improve, and the users opened up to their communities. It is important for data collection and reporting to be useful. Go to Add a Case on the left side, select the Private Group radio button, then Continue. This page allows you to add images and files.

WEB: https://demo.spineconnect.com/sc/CaseType.page

SCOTT C: In one situation, a doctor posted his case here and was contacted by someone who currently was reviewing a peer-reviewed research paper on the topic. He gave useful, unpublished, information that probably helped the patient greatly avoid a potentially dangerous and painful surgery. So far we have 10 patents in various stages of submittal for spinal implant treatments and devices. We created a process and methodology to enable teams to form to create patents rapidly. So now we have mechanical engineers with medical device experience involved, as well as patent attorneys, at a cost of less than $1,000 per patent. It's a manual process right now that had to be architected via software and currently is in a design phase. The allocation of equity is part of the software.

RAY: These Colab Comm (surgeons and other skills) have behaved pretty much as we thought they would and they do agree on the distribution of shares. The contributions of the team leads everyone to behave correctly in the allocation of equity. This is becoming model behavior, and we had predicted that this would be emergent -- that collaborative communities would develop the capability to behave in their relationships.

PETER: Who brings in the other experts such as lawyers and technicians?

SCOTT C: I've gone out and talked with dozens of patent attorneys and mechanical engineers to find those with an entrepreneurial mind and attitude. And I've been introduced to the surgical community by others as well. We envision creating a learning community and connecting everyone. Our community is a qualified open community.

PETER: You need 10 years of training just to understand the language.

MODERATOR: Right. Some of the names of the links are such that I can't even figure out what they are about.

PETER: Even looking at programmer's open source community sites, they seem pretty rude to outsiders.

SCOTT: At what point in the innovation process do you find that those involved begin to want to protect their property?

SCOTT C: A venture comes to me typically, and I agree to facilitate a round of interviews with all essential personnel required to take this to submit a patent. I ask the inventor to divide the pie and figure out how much work and what kind of work and complexity is going to be involved.

SCOTT: Do you have any instances of innovation where there's no desire for remuneration?

SCOTT C: I had a knee surgeon come to me about these plates that he uses as standard equipment. He wanted to create his own plate and didn't care if he made any money. He just wanted to stop paying $1,000 for something that should cost $50.

SCOTT: Have there been any discussion of a creative commons approach to some of these innovations?

SCOTT C: You could use the knee plate example and our own example of developing commodity products where patents have expired. We're a small company and doing what we can to keep on our core mission. We'll probably open more in the future to a creative commons format.

RAY: What Syndicom has done is take what we've anticipated would happen and make it happen. Within a domain where everyday behavior was different, it has changed to be more collaborative. These are true collaborative communities where innovation develops. You're tapping into the creativity of the community in a much more generous way than what's happened in the past.

PETER: This seems to be one of the most advanced social communities I've seen. While the software may be nothing more than a beefed up version of a Yahoo group, true innovation has grown from it. I'm wondering if all this trust building is because they know one another only online or is it because they've known each other from face-to-face acquaintances at conferences?

SCOTT C: We've actually seen surgeons who have shared cases online but haven't met until a conference. In our second year now we've seen surgeons go abroad and do surgeries with donated equipment. When they leave, the surgeries go back to the way they were done prior to the surgeons' visits. But we're now trying to change this by having surgeons train others abroad using our software.

MODERATOR: Have you done anything to address language issues for international doctors.

SCOTT C: No, to date everything has been in English, but we haven't had any problem since English seems to be a common language among surgeons.

MODERATOR: How about remote surgery?

SCOTT C: We have one customer who has asked about his, and we might approach that in the future. But our current process really just augments current procedures.

RAY: We had not found anything like Syndicom, so when we wrote our book we created a fictional company. So what Syndicom has done is to become this company -- in real life.

GARY: Are there any plans to create a print version anthology of particularly interesting cases that can be researched and read at a glance, such as the knee plate case or the one where the patient avoided the dangerous and painful surgery? This could prevent surgeons from having to sift through so many cases.

SCOTT C: Good question. We actually do put out an email newsletter to highlight cases. Also, a couple surgeons have approached me to publish a compendium of cases.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott, Peter, and our special guests Ray Miles and Scott Capdevielle. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Join us on Friday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Thank you.

Coolhunt Log #18
Wednesday, May 9, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: I'm calling from my home office in New Orleans. Could you tell us where you're calling from?

PETER: I'm calling in today from my home office in Switzerland.

SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to encourage everyone to see the review of Coolhunting in the Wall Street Journal. Any comments on the review from the authors?

SCOTT: Wow! I like that it's above the fold. I like that it also reviews Chasing Cool, and uses our book to talk about the misconceptions of the other book. They mention how we differ from the marketer authors of the other book by our different definition of "cool." And even though we never mention Jessica Simpson in our book, it's nice that the reviewer points out that our definition of cool would have nothing to do with someone like her.

MODERATOR: It also mentions Paris Hilton as another example of what the crowd wants to see the most of, although it may not really be what the crowd wants. Did anyone post any messages yesterday?

PETER: I posted a comment at Forrester Research, sent a message to the editor at Forbes, emailed Sam Bowles soliciting a comment, and I couldn't think of what to send to Xanga.

MODERATOR: We have some special guests tomorrow, don't we Scott?

SCOTT: We coolhunted to SpineConnent, and Scott Capdevielle contacted us and offered to give us a tour of his website. His mentor was Ray Miles of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and Ray should be a guest as well. Today, we're going to TechCrunch.

WEB: http://www.techcrunch.com/

SCOTT: We'll scroll down to the article War of the People Search. Michael Arrington is a blogger we've mentioned before. I'm very interested in talking about how the use of people searching on the web fits in with what we've been talking about. We're writing another book and are very interested in this topic.

PETER: Mike is probably the most popular bloggers in the web 2.0 environment. He is an influential trendsetter.

SCOTT: He's a coolhunter and a coolfarmer.

PETER: Exactly. You can read his posts and reactions to posts, and see that he's very positive. He mentions the CEOs of search companies such as ZoomInfo.

WEB: http://www.zoominfo.com/

SCOTT: Let's search Peter Gloor in ZoomInfo.

MODERATOR: We noticed that there's no way to comment on the Wall Street Journal's book review of Coolhunting. We need to talk later about online copyright law. Back to ZoomInfo, we notice that the site matches names with job titles and companies.

PETER: You'll notice that there's a number of Peter Gloors because it's a very common name. I'm the fifth one, but one even states that he's not the Peter Gloor at MIT.

MODERATOR: So, about half of these are you but the profiles have not been consolidated into one profile?

PETER: That's correct.

MODERATOR: ZoomInfo is not user-generated content. Profiles are created by ZoomInfo and contain numerous references that they hope are correctly associated with the correct person.

PETER: They must be using statistical information to find information. I think they are doing an extremely good job putting together a conhesive, comprehensive history.

MODERATOR: While you see Peter's PhD and Master's studies work, my name only shows the grade school I attended, which I still think is amazing.

SCOTT: In the second paragraph of Michael Arrington's blog is the article You're nobody until. . . . It's funny and sad about a woman who is an epidemiologist who added her husband's name and fell off the face of the virtual earth. ZoomInfo is a fabulous way to get basic information.

MODERATOR: One of the reasons ZoomInfo an important site is because the swarm puts it there by popularity among browsers.

SCOTT: If you click About, then go to About Michael Arrington, the first link PANEL, you go to another story by Askteruck. It says he cuts through marketing BS to modernize the people search, and Google is probably looking at these engines to see which one it wants to buy. There's a fascinating slide by a guy named Dustin, a link to Facebook data. It takes us to Flickr that shows the slide getting six hundred million searches per month!

PETER: It is all about social networks, us being social creatures, and us using the web to find out about it. Thirty percent of all searches are about people.

SCOTT: Now let's go to Spock. What's interesting about Spock is that it makes it possible to tag people, adding keywords, to enhance profile searchability.

WEB: http://www.spock.com/

PETER: Compare wikipedia and ZoomInfo: Wikipedia shows that people can correct mistakes, whereas in ZoomInfo the information stays forever. My hunch is that there is a correction way but only by writing to ZoomInfo to ask them to make a correction. In one case, a professor was labeled as a movie director when in fact he only made a 3-minute film years ago. It took him two years to get Wikipedia to change it because they thought he was trying to take away someone's credential.

MODERATOR: Great article about the bad article problem at Amazon regarding correcting bad data, which seems to hang around a long time. I've tried to get negative comments removed from Amazon but it's remarkably difficult. Last year, all the anonymous reviewers' names were revealed for about 2 days at amazon.ca. Journalists discovered this and downloaded enormous
examples of authors glowing about their own books.

PETER: This is a great example of the power of transparency. Such examples make people much better behaved.

MODERATOR: The Arrington panel discussed the issue of how these databases get corrected, and it was mentioned that it's policed by the community.

PETER: I'm using the same effect in my class, a virtual mirror to every student so they can see how they're viewed by others.

MODERATOR: I just did an experiment by searching Michael Arrington in Wikipedia and ZoomInfo. At TechCrunch you'll see 151 profiles whereas Wikipedia has only one profile. ZoomInfo offers snippets of info. I hope we'll have time to talk about that copyright issue.

PETER: It occurs to me that all the ZoomInfo information may not be authorized. I notice my information may have been taken
from bio information that I've given at conferences.

MODERATOR: I put my picture on ZoomInfo because it looked like a valuable site for reputation management. I think this shows that people are more interested in the Internet for a) themselves and b) others in that order. It looks like ZoomInfo allows you to groom your own information more than Wikipedia -- the former inviting you to post information whereas the latter asks you not to. You're not supposed to add your own information on Wikipedia.

PETER: Enforcing the rule that someone else must write about you as in Wikipedia shows that another human being must feel that you're important enough to be written about. My hunch is that they have editors to whom others can complain if they feel something is incorrect.

MODERATOR: We don't mean to condemn Wink and Spock by not looking at them. We just don't have the time.

PETER: I actually tried Wink but was pretty disappointed because it didn't find me. And being a researcher in social networking, I know I left traces in MySpace, etc. so I feel I should have been found.

WEB: http://wink.com/

MODERATOR: I'm going into a discussion on copyright now. Go to Google to do a search by typing in "google belgium yahoo." The first and fourth results take you to the same place.

WEB: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070503/tc_afp/belgiumusinternet

MODERATOR: Now, go to the copyright link at the bottom of the page.

WEB: http://www.afp.com/english/links/?pid=copyright

MODERATOR: Google recently came to a settlement on this, linking to websites in Belgium. Papers in Belgium say that pointing people to articles in Belgium newspapers is a violation of copyright law. U.S. law says using snippets are fine, though. However, you can't make money from using others' snippets. Also, titles are not copyrightable. So the Belgians are saying that snippets are too much to use legally. The other article I wanted to take you to is on ZDnet. Type in "journalist at center of youtube case" in the search bar and you get 20,000 matching results -- none of which are the article.

WEB: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070503/wr_nm/belgium_google_dc

SCOTT: I put "journalist center YouTube Case" and I found it as the 8th or 10th article.

MODERATOR: This is a helicopter videojournalist who had some of his content put on YouTube without his permission. He was the first to sue YouTube for copyright infringement. The decision in this case could dramatically shape precedent of such cases. You can see a discussion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is a very interesting case where Google is saying it
has the right to post what it wants.

PETER: I'm on Google's side here.

SCOTT: Me too.

PETER: It's such much more valuable if we can get access to information. But the journalist is afraid of losing market value but really is giving them more visibility, making them more accessible. It's altruism. I once discovered in a website that someone had cut up one of my books, scanned it in, and put it on their website. I ended up linking to this site.

SCOTT: We've talked about this other time -- how giving things away for free can have great value. Our colleague at MIT, Eric von Hippel, put his highly successful book Democratizing Innovation online for free download, and it hasn't hurt the sales. He also has an earlier book from 1998 on his website, also downloadable for free.

WEB: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

MODERATOR: SethGodon.com sold 20,000 hardback copies of a self-published book that he posted online. It'll be interesting to see if publishers will become more altruistic in the future.

SCOTT: Peter and I have been talking a lot about -- for want of a better word -- altruism in business. Altruism is not far from self-interest in this regard. We believe that if you give away, you'll reap benefits. One of the principles we incorporate in coolhunting is to gain power by giving power away.

MODERATOR: Letting go of content can actually increase value.

PETER: Ecofarms combines making lots of money while trying to make the world a better place.

GARY: If we could take a minute before we end this coolhunt I'd like to go back to Wink.com. Type in "Gary Michael Smith" then "New Orleans" for location. I notice that 19 of the 20 links are actually me. Why so many?

SCOTT: It seems to be culling information from Google and other search engines since it's not really giving personal information such as what schools you attended, where you worked, etc. But I notice that the Gary Michael Smith I've been working with on these coolhunts over the past month is the same Gary Michael Smith who wrote a book I bought for a friend.

GARY: That has to be The Peer-Reviewed Journal about setting up the editorial office of a peer-reviewed scientific specialty research journal.

SCOTT: No, actually it's The Complete Guide to Driving Etiquette.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with Scott Cooper and Peter Gloor, co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. We also were joined by Gary Michael Smith, our transcriptionist who also is author of several books. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or about any connection problems you've experienced. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Join us Thursday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper and our special guests Raymond Miles, former dean of the Haas Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Group at UC Berkeley and Scott Capdevielle, CEO and founder of Syndicom and SpineConnect.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Thank you.

Coolhunt Log #17
Tuesday, May 8, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Gary Smith, moderator

MODERATOR: I’d like to welcome everyone to today’s coolhunt for Tuesday, May 8. We are hosting daily conference calls with the authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing published by Amacom Books. You can view logs of previous Coolhunts at The Swarm Creativity blog at swarmcreativity.blogspot.com. On stage today is Scott Cooper and Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliates with the Sloan School of Management, and co-authors of Coolhunting—Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. I’m Gary Smith and I’ll be moderating today’s Coolhunt. Authors, can you identify yourselves so we’ll know your voice and tell us where you’re calling from today?

PETER: I'm Peter Gloor and I'm calling in today from my home office in Switzerland.

SCOTT: I'm Scott Cooper and I'm calling in today from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone. This is the final week of our 4-week program. I’m going to mute the audience now to keep down any potential background noise, but listeners can make comments by pressing 6 to unmute themselves. Peter is going to start the coolhunt today, so where are you going to take us first?

PETER: Today we're going to look at social networks, particularly how altruistic they can be. A good starting point is the Forrester Research blog. Charlene Li has come up with a way of grouping everyone on the web by activity: 52% are inactive, another 33% are spectators (such as going to YouTube to watch videos), and there are 19% who will go to FaceBook or other social networking sites.

WEB: http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/04/forresters_new_.html

SCOTT: I recently read an article on Slashdot that stated the reason that 52% is inactive is because they're not bored.

PETER: They have better things to do!

SCOTT: The article stated that a lot of the collaboration that happens on the web can all be traced back to the boredom levels of the people who are involved. I don't really believe that, but I thought it was funny. I can see the headline: "Boredom Drives Open Source Developers."

WEB: http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/05/07/1235250.shtml

PETER: If you scroll down a little bit on the Forrester article, you see the motivation for people to become creative thinkers. At the highest level, 13% of all web users publish their own web page or blog, or post videos on YouTube, for example.

SCOTT: That 13% is comprised of online adult consumers in the United States, so these figures are not worldwide. And, according to Li, to become a creator simply means you have to do one of these things one time within a 1-month period. It's still a very high number, but it's just a snapshot in time that someone did something once.

PETER: On the other hand, it's my experience that people who have done these activities once are usually repeat users. They might not go back to the same blog, and they might not like uploading videos, but they are active on the web because they have discovered how fun it is to be active. Let's go to the Forbes Special Report on "Networks: Community" and look at what types of people comprise that 13%.

WEB: http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/18/immigration-charity-religion-lead-cz_tp_07networks_0419community_land.html

PETER: For example, we have self-help groups, and the largest group network of all, the church, as well as other charitable networks. As Scott and I have said many times, networking is not new. It's as old as man. Thanks to the Internet, it has become more global and much easier to network with each other.

PETER: Here’s an example of old-fashioned face-to-face networking. When a new member of a church needed a dentist, she solicited recommendations from her fellow parishioners. She got 30 or 40 recommendations, and they were all highly personalized. This is a very practical, hands-on way of coolhunting.

SCOTT: That's just like something I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, where I was looking at online reviews of a local Chinese restaurant, versus the official newspaper review.

PETER: The point is, if you know your friend’s tastes, then his recommendation becomes much more valuable than a stranger's. If I read the blog of a total stranger, I have no idea what he likes. If I talk with my friend whose taste I know and trust, his recommendations carry a much higher weight.

PETER: Another interesting thing on the Forbes page is that you can vote on your favorite networking site. We have looked at a few of them so far throughout this month of coolhunting. Even more interesting, you can view the results. I found the Xanga site to be very interesting.

WEB: http://www.xanga.com/

PETER: If you're interested in what a large population of people thinks about a topic, you can post about it here and wait for a comment. For example, let's look at this recent post about shoplifters at Wal-Mart.

WEB: http://www.xanga.com/TheTheologiansCafe/589173273/i-am-a-thief--i-stole-from-walmart.html

PETER: In one day, this post has received more than 140 comments. There is a range of comments in support of the concept and also against it. Now, I would like to talk a little bit more about people collaborating in social networks, and the altruistic uses for networking. Let's look at an article on kidney donors.

WEB: http://technews.acm.org/current.cfm#310579

PETER: This is a great example of the power of large networks. As you might know, there are potentially many more people needing kidneys than are available for transplant. What this professor has figured out is a way of matching people who are willing to donate a kidney with potential recipients. He has figured out an algorithm for this. This is incredible because it means survival for thousands more people. It's an example of a very altruistic use of social networking -- using it for the greater good.

PETER: As our last stop on today's coolhunt, I'd like to take a look at research by Samuel Bowles, Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute.

WEB: http://www.santafe.edu/~bowles/

PETER: Let's look at his paper that was published in Science Magazine last December.

WEB: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5805/1569

PETER: This is a description of his experiments where he has shown that altruism is good for mankind, which is not necessarily an obvious conclusion. What Bowles has done is proven mathematically that altruism is good. In his research, the individuals who survived were the ones who were willing to sacrifice themselves in order to ensure survival of the other members of the tribe. He's proving, genetically, that groups that have an altruistic gene have a better chance of surviving than the ones that are trying to cheat each other.

PETER: He defines different levels of altruism, and for each he defines mathematical properties of what is needed to succeed. He models different types of behavior in groups of people, the groups where members of the team behave altruistically to each other; they do better in their activities.

SCOTT: We're still working these ideas out, but we discuss them in a recent article in the Sloan School of Management magazine -- the ideas of doing what's good, getting power by giving it away, concentrating on the swarm rather than focusing on making money. All of these are altruistic ways of doing business. The term "altruistic" has a certain connotation to people and when used in a business sense, it is incorrectly perceived.

PETER: Perhaps we need another word. "Swarm business" might be a good way of describing it. For example, Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, who instead of giving severance packages to employees it laid off gave them capital to fund startup biotech companies.

MODERATOR: This is a novel approach. But how would altruism play out in more competitive fields, such as scientific publishing where researchers careers -- and lives -- are contingent on getting that big NIH grant because of some cutting-edge research they just published in a peer-reviewed scientific research journal? If someone else gets hold of their research and publishes it in a journal that has a faster receipt to publication turnaround time than the one to which they submitted, they could end up having to go back into private practice to survive.

PETER: That’s an excellent point.

SCOTT: I don't have data to back up what I'm about to say, but it's an educated hunch. Two things are changing it. The idea behind Creative Commons, a willingness to share very widely in exchange simply for the recognition that it's your work. It doesn't get stolen. You don't worry about remuneration and proprietary concerns. Also, the new generation of scientific researchers is comprised of kids who've grown up in this world of social networking. There's a generational clash between the 60-year-old professor, wanting to keep his research secret, and the lab post-doctorals who have a completely different view of the world. They get online. For example, see ArXiv, at Cornell.

WEB: http://www.arxiv.org

SCOTT: This is a place where scientific publishers can upload papers. Popularity is judged based on downloads of the papers.

MODERATOR: In this case, the researchers will get much more visibility and recognition than they would ever receive from publication of their paper in the print –- or even the online versions –- of a peer-reviewed journal.

We are out of time. Our Coolhunts take place daily, Monday through Friday, from 2 pm to 3 pm Eastern time in the United States. I’d like to thank Scott Cooper and Peter Gloor, co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Join us on Wednesday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #16
Monday, May 7, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone. This is the final week of our 4-week program. Last week we found that Mike's book reviews beat out the New York Times book reviews. Scott, were you able to post to any sites.

SCOTT: I posted a message either via email or by commenting on a blog to every site we visited on Friday.

MODERATOR: I'm calling in from Toronto today from Annick Press. Where are you two calling from today?

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

PETER: I'm just returning from a conference in Greece. I'm back in my home office in Switzerland.

MODERATOR: Scott, where are you and Peter taking us today.

SCOTT: We're going to start at the Hybrid Vigor website, and their blog. This is a research organization that focuses on collaborative problem solving for research applications. You can see at the top of the page the five areas of focus: Earth Systems, Health Determinants, Interdisciplinary Practice, Human Perception, and Understanding Risk. The director, Denise Caruso, writes a "Re:framing" column in the New York Times Sunday Business section, and she's the author of a book titled Intervention. Here in her column, she mentions how The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University is arts driven, similar to how the MIT Media Lab is media driven.

WEB: http://hybridvigor.net/

PETER: In the article, Red Burns makes a point on not wanting to use competitive people as researchers. She says the twin forces that fuel innovation at I.T.P. are collaboration and diversity. For instance, based on an analysis of four different organizations, two key criteria -- likeability and competence -- emerged as the basis for creating four employee "archetypes": the lovable fool, the competent jerk, the lovable star, and the incompetent jerk. While research shows that everyone wants to work with the lovable star, and nobody wants to work with the incompetent jerk, when faced with the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools a little extra likeability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with. What matters is that you have competent skills and are able to work within a team.

MODERATOR: Peter's referring to the third article where Professor Burns talks of selflessness, which is brought up in the book. We think normally that this stimulates growth, but research shows us that this is not true.

SCOTT: It's very important what Burns says about about competitive people missing the periphery -- the broad swarm of collective intelligence out there.

PETER: There are people who can predict trends, whether or not they're considered "experts." Both experts and non-experts lead to much better results because they complement each other. Google has lots of prediction markers, and they're doing their own research now on prediction markers by using people who are very good at predicting.

SCOTT: Back at Hybrid Vigor, go to Cooperation Commons under Links on the home page. This is an interesting group similar to Hybrid Vigor, but they're actually coming together to study cooperation in collective action. Scroll down to see the signers Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri. Click on the About tab at the top of the page. Here's a brief explanation of the Cooperation, to determine how swarm creativity can be used to solve problems. Rheingold coined the phrase "virtual community." All this helps to produce materials geared to promulgate creativity. The blog on this site is particularly interesting.

WEB: http://cooperationcommons.org/

PETER: I'm reminded of another website called Alliance for Discovery. At the site, click on Overview to see Julian Gresser in his attempts to create COINS (Collaborative Innovation Networks) such as the Ten Cube Project. (Benjamin Franklin had developed a form of COINS.) Here's you'll see his discussion of COINS. He also talks about a new power source developed by COINS, illustrating the power of COINS. I had dinner with Julian, who's a lawyer, and I learned a little about his background.

WEB: http://breakthroughdiscoveries.org/

SCOTT: Back to Cooperation Commons, and click on Resources, then External Resources and The Peer to Peer Foundation. It looks like Wikipedia.

WEB: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page

PETER: This is because an open source piece of software called Media Wiki.

SCOTT: This is another one of the driving theoretical concepts on the web. It encompasses human to human collaborative projects, coordinated under peer governance. Down toward the middle of the page you'll see a list of topics that are being discussed and collaborated on. Click on Topics, then Open Music Practices. The list of articles listed gives you an idea of the broad scope for collaborative effort involved.

PETER: This is the power of swarms. The fact that a conductor composed music in collaboration with others is rare because this usually is done by one person. But one conductor composed entire operas by collaborating with jazz musicians who got to know each other during travel, and who also were similar in their own genetic mindsets. I bought a CD and actually got an email from the publisher thanking me and telling me that I'm the tenth buyer of this $15 CD.

SCOTT: This peer to peer example is a teaser to encourage those following along to look at other similar sites.

MODERATOR: It's interesting that you can find forms and other information by those who are willing to share.

SCOTT: Back at Cooperative Commons, go to Meta Collab. As it says here "Meta Collab is an open research, meta collaboration (a collaboration on collaboration) with the aim to explore the similarities and differences in the nature, methods, and motivations of collaboration across any and every field of human endeavour."

PETER: Now the risk of running totally open is that you open yourself to spammers. This is why it's mandated that you have to create an account.

SCOTT: And anyone can create an account by typing in hidden text to show that you're not a machine. Now, click on the link "work towards the development of a general theory of collaboration." This is the open, collaborative research page for developing a general theory of collaboration (GTC).

PETER: Do you know if he's quoting the German philosopher Niklas Luhmann? One of his main works is "Social Systems" (Soziale Systeme) from the mid-1980s, which I believe is one of his few works translated into English.

SCOTT: Go now to some work I'm doing at MIT's Media Lab. But first, go to Rheingold's website. Read About Howard by clicking on the link under the picture.

WEB: http://rheingold.com/

MODERATOR: He's the founder of one of the first virtual communities in 1985.

SCOTT: I'd encourage everyone to explore all the many links on this page by Rheingold. Now, go to mobile.mit.edu. This is a relatively new research lab at MIT by both the Media Lab and Architecture departments. It addresses the ways in which people use mobile technology (cell phones) to redesign connections between people to build greater virtual communities to improve lives using these technologies. Now click on Projects to see the list beginning with Smart Mobility. This is the bus system of the future for social networking portals to order busses and invite people into their neighborhoods. It involves all sorts of technological solutions. Click on Elens. Now, click on "Elense web site." I think this is one of the coolest things anyone is doing at MIT. Frederico and colleagues have gone to Spain to empower teenagers with cell phones to tag buildings in towns, building a virtual community to upload messages to reguide people to have a completely different experience than traditional tours provide. Now go to Field Trial to see how this is building a virtual community of these teenagers, a different way to social network.

WEB: http://mobile.mit.edu/

PETER: Another theme for consideration is the topic "Is social networking hype over its peak or not?"

SCOTT: I think this deserves a lot more time to discuss, tomorrow perhaps.

MODERATOR: This coming Thursday we have a special presentation.

SCOTT: SpineConnect founder Scott Capdevielle will give us a virtual tour of how their COINS was started.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott and Peter. We've been talking today with the co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Join us on Tuesday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #15
Friday, May 4, 2007

On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: Could you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone.

SCOTT: We're going to start at The New York Times today at nytimes.com. Click on the Most Popular tab at the top of the page, then let's look at the Most Blogged column. The third item is "Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?" by Motoko Rich. It explains why you're seeing fewer and fewer book reviews, mainly because of social networking replacing formal book reviews. It says that Dan Wickett is a former quality-control manager for a car-parts maker wrote 95 book reviews on his blog, Emerging Writers Network. Whether or not it will impact book reviews is one question, but it still is yet another outlet for other information via social networking.

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/

SCOTT: Emerging writers can be bestsellers based on these recommendations rather than on reviews by traditional book reviewers. See the Emerging Writers network at http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/.

WEB: http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/

MODERATOR: I'm going to suggest that this site is largely a labor of love, even though there is some paid advertising.

SCOTT: You can see a lot of nice quotes from authors. So despite that this is an amateur site, it is having an impact, as evidenced by the fact that he's the lead story in The New York Times.

MODERATOR: There are lots and lots of links, which increases the search engine position since engines find importance in the number of links to something. I'm trying to take a unique phrase from one of his reviews and see if it's located elsewhere when I perform a key word/phrase search. I'm copying a phrase into a Google search window with quotations and I find three
sites. I'm now using Google Blogs search engine to do this same. This is proving that, although his material may not be widespread, at least it is being syndicated. I'd be willing to say that our book reviewer here is not really particularly concerned about someone using his material on their site.

SCOTT: Back to the New York Times story, scroll down to the fourth paragraph. These links are to some of the sites that have become very influential. Go to Bookslut, which is an equivalent to an online magazine. See the blog at the top of the page.

WEB: http://www.bookslut.com/blog/

MODERATOR: You can tell that this site is developed by someone who appreciates the aesthetics of website development.

SCOTT: Now we're going to the site ElegantVariation. You can post on this blog, and it has become a darling of publishing companies. There's a Friday giveaway, using a random generator to select a winner.

WEB: http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/

MODERATOR: ARCs, or Advance Review Copies, primes the pump for early reviews. This has really grown with the public being fueled with free copies.

SCOTT: Go to Curledup.com. It shows that, while you may not appear in the Times, you may end up on Curledup.

WEB: http://www.curlup.com/

MODERATOR: Curledup is also supported by advertisers. Another way to gauge the impact of citizen reviews on overall reviews is to google a title to see its popularity. I'm going to type in "Age of Spiritual Machines," a book by Ray Kurzweil, also from MIT.

SCOTT: Put "Age of Spiritual Machines" in quotes, then add "Reviews."

MODERATOR: Amazon is the first review, because of the amount of traffic it experiences. You can scroll down to see Mike's Book Reviews, showing that his review evidently is more influential than the New York Times review, which could be because it's probably not restricted as much by copyright protection. But Mike probably also understands the use of tags to syndicate reviews, making his review more widely spread.

SCOTT: Let's go to Shelfari, which is a fascinating example of social networking. This is a way to social network with other readers all over the world to have discussions, post opinions, write reviews, etc.

WEB: http://www.shelfari.com/

MODERATOR: Let's go to Sample Shelf on the Start Exploring line at the top of the page.

SCOTT: Artemis_98 writes a great example, and you can read his entire posts here. This paradigm is interesting because you can reach out well beyond what you could do face to face.

MODERATOR: No longer do you have to be in the same city but you can also go online, make a phone call, or participate in a videocast to network to experience each other and the author in a more rich environment than ever before.

SCOTT: I learned about shelfari from someone who asked me if I was going to be at an upcoming event in New York. I looked online at the site for BookExpo America 2007 in New York City. Steve, you must know about this. Do you plan on going this year?

WEB: http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/

MODERATOR: I'll not only be there, as I have over the past 20 years, but I'll also be teaching there at the Publishers University.

SCOTT: On the site I noticed on the fifth link down in the center of the page, a story about Lance Fensterman titled "Blogging with BEA Director." Then I looked at the blog "Build Your Own BEA Event!" Here, I learned about Shelfari, which is a cool example of social networking, going from online to face to face. Lance encourages readers to recommend authors, then he creates an event at BEA based on recommendations. What's more cool than having authors on social networking being contacted because of social networking, to present at a function?

MODERATOR: There was quite a bit of grumbling from authors about them being signed up to blog early in the blogging phase, but now blogging on books has become quite popular. However, that doesn't necessarily affect book sales since the audience is different between those who read blogs from those who actually walk into bookstores.

SCOTT: It's often more interesting to me to read online about online issues, than to read about it elsewhere.

MODERATOR: On the other hand, publishers may be wise to figure out how to make available information from blogs to people who buy books and don't read blogs. The content could find a whole new market this way.

SCOTT: If you go back to the BEA site and see the My BEA section in the middle of the page, the "more" link takes you to another page titled "My BEA & Book Industry Characters." See PublishingTrends.com. There is an online social network of BEA attendees, so in advance of the event, people are given a chance to get to know each other. There was the MIT graduate
student who developed "end tags" that allows you to recognize when another member approaches. As they walked around at the conference, their tags alerted them to the fact they're near someone who has similar interests. The organizers at the conference added another function that allowed them to identify who the most important social networkers were, identifying trendsetters, to anticipate how the next conference would work.

WEB: http://www.publishingtrends.com/

MODERATOR: Next week will be our last week of the coolhunt, and we'll be exploring how many profiles a person can sustain since there are so many social networking sites. So I'd like to talk next week about how many profiles we have and how much time it takes. Go to Bookcrossing.com. It's like leaving books sitting on a park bench, hoping a finder will register it on the site. Today the number of books registered is approaching 4 million. You can gauge the international reach of the Internet from this site by the active participation. On the left hand navigation column go to Books, then Search Books and type in Wild Animus, which is supposed to be one of the worst books ever written. There are over 2,500 negative reviews on this site. It's fair to say that the swarm didn't care for it.

WEB: http://bookcrossing.com/

SCOTT: It's like movies that are so bad that you just have to see it because of the novelty.

MODERATOR: Now, click on the Forum tab, then Community and you'll see from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of posts.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with the co-author of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/.
Join us on Monday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #14
Thursday, May 3, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: Could you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone.

MODERATOR: I'd like to mention that next week on the Coolhunt we're going to have a guest speaker with Syndicom's SpineConnect.

SCOTT: I'd like to report that I posted to dailytech and mediavidea, praising them for their reporting on the big story on Digg reversing its position on posting some antipiracy code. YouTube also spread the code via a video where one guy wrote a song
that included the code, and it has played more than 45,000 times. It appears that the code is being enshrined.

MODERATOR: Today we're starting our search on The Wall Street Journal online. We're looking at this because we looked at The New York Times yesterday and discussed how the news items often lead our coolhunts.

WEB: http://online.wsj.com/public/us

SCOTT: News organizations are scrambling to discover ways to stay viable. Last week the Boston Globe was so desperate that they were allowing advertisers to slap stickers onto their newspapers. Local news agencies now are asking viewers to send in cell phone videos for news stories. Newspapers have to refocus what they see as their mission. National news organizations are focusing more and more on local news, and The Wall Street Journal seems to be lagging behind in nonpaying content.

MODERATOR: In today's news Rupert Murdoch has offered a $60 stock price on The Wall Street Journal stock. Scroll down the page in the What's News column to the article beginning "Dow Jones's board took." This is one of the free articles about the $5 billion offer from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. You'd think that Murdoch would want the journal to change to make people pay for some articles while selling ads to offer other articles for free.

SCOTT: The Wall Street Journal does well financially with it's business model because it is the newspaper of record on business journalism.

MODERATOR: The Financial Times of London (http://www.ft.com/home/us) also charges for its online content, as do some other organizations. From the home page in the At a Glance box to the right and midway down, in the Most Popular column on the right there's an advice article on buying a laptop where Walter Mossberg gives some tips, both in the online article and in a video. However, there's no way to respond to the article. Allowing readers to comment allows a more robust community. Now, we'll see how The Wall Street Journal handles blogging. At the bottom of a post there are no comments. But The Wall Street Journal also offers many articles where blogging on them is not available.

SCOTT: There are 93 comments for the second one, but the visual presentation does not connote a vibrant community. It doesn't look dynamic visually.

MODERATOR: Also, you can't comment on a comment, or review and rate comments. But they do allow you to comment anonymously. Some even look as though they've been edited or truncated. It's not very Web 2.0 friendly. Now type in "All Things Digital" back in Google. This is a very sharp, colorful site and features Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on the opening page. On this site you can add comments to the articles.

WEB: http://allthingsd.com/

SCOTT: This is fascinating. It makes you wonder if All Things Digital exists because journal reporters rebel against strictures of The Wall Street Journal, or maybe because The Wall Street Journal is sitting on the fence regarding print versus online content.

SCOTT: Scroll down to All Things Digital on the bottom panel and click on "Read more." This takes you to the About Us page. Down at the bottom left is a block beginning "Because the site is wholly owned. . . ."

MODERATOR: So it's very interesting that they mention that this is an autonomous start-up owned wholly by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

SCOTT: Do we know what would happen if we reposted something from here to another site.

MODERATOR: I think reposting might be bad, but linking to it would be educational.

SCOTT: I noticed some snootiness regarding their comment policy, insinuating that comment quality on blogs other than Dow Jones are of a lower quality. It seems a bit elitist.

MODERATOR: Now I'd like us to go to nola.com. We call it the website for the Times-Picayune, the paper of record for New Orleans.

WEB: http://www.nola.com/

SCOTT: It's like The Boston Globe at http://www.bostonglobe.com/, which can also be reached through http://www.boston.com/.

MODERATOR: Last year at the conference in New Jersey of the National Association of Online Journalists, online publications became a valuable means of news dissimination. After Hurricane Katrina, nola.com crashed many times because of heavy use. John Donnelly said at the conference that 80% of the readers for the print version don't use the online version, and that 80% of online readers don't use the print version. He summed it up that there are two kinds of people who want differing forms of news access.

SCOTT: That makes perfect sense. News organizations are making attempts to direct people to the online world. Note that evening network news broadcasts show that more can be read about news stories on their website. They're looking to get people from every direction.

SCOTT: I notice that here in Boston, channel 5 has been the award-winning serious network that directs you to online news stories. More and more, the reporters on TV are blogging on the websites.

MODERATOR: Notice on nola.com the blog by Walter Williams of Mr. Bill Saturday Night Live fame on the left near the bottom of the page. While he may not be popular enough to have a column in the print version of the Picayune, he has a blog here with the occasional comment. Back to the previous page leading to Mr. Bill, BLOGS & FORUMS, we'll view the full list of forums. You've seen the blogs, now see what the citizens are saying in the forums. You may have to enter profile information, which you wonder how accurate the data going in is, because personally I never enter the correct information on myself for age, gender, zip code, etc.

MODERATOR: Many of the social networking measurement devices, such as We Feel Fine, don't ask for information but rather cull it in an automated manner. Note that there are a number of comments nesting under comments on the Marigny/Bywater neighborhood, which is where my office is located. You'll see about 40 comments on our page here today. Post 11948 starts "Does anyone know who" from May 2, asking for removal of a dead cat under a house. You'll see here how many different pieces of advice this person gets from political philosopy to humor to Metro Disposal System website policy information. The point is that the feel and content of this forum, albeit localized, is citizen journalism, which is not even on the blog anymore. People are posting neighborhood surveillance information such as who's working on power lines, who looks suspicious, etc. It's a very interesting subculture.

SCOTT: Boston.com also has some good neighborhood blogs at boston-online.com, which is a directory showing numerous neighborhoods.

WEB: http://www.boston-online.com/Blogs/

MODERATOR: I'm going to take the link to forums to see if it's similar to the threaded ones on nola.com. There are discussion boards here, and you can get a sense of the traffic showing 2,805 topics and 50,740 posts from 1,038 registered users. Analysis of the numbers starts to reveal meaningful results.

SCOTT: We see in nola.com that this is real life going on.

MODERATOR: It's almost minute by minute. There are many questions regarding information that any city that's undergone disaster would see. It's a good referral networking system.

MODERATOR: Let's look at The Wall Street Journal opinion page called OpinionJournal, which is not accessible from The Wall Street Journal home page. This is a list of editorials, political diaries, etc. Just the Political Diary blog costs $3.95/month to find out what people are saying.

WEB: http://www.opinionjournal.com/

SCOTT: Note the sample editions of Political Diaries are over a year old.

MODERATOR: We have just enough time to go to TheWashingtonPost.com. You can access it without a subscription and there is some premium content available. Take the link to Capital Briefings, scrolling about midway down and in the center of the page under NEWS COLUMNS AND BLOGS. Paul Kane has a log dated today, only a couple hours old. You'll also see that there are two comments on the FCC fines piece. This shows broad-based comment participation.

WEB: http://www.thewashingtonpost.com/

SCOTT: One thing that the Washington Post does is a "politics blog" encouraging their bloggers into being talking heads on TV such as on MSNBC's Countdown to feed traffic both ways, on TV and online.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with the co-author of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com.

Join us on Friday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #13
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

On Stage:

Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of "Coolhunting"
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: Could you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site review, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone.

SCOTT: Something's happened in the last 24 hours in the blogosphere that will be a day people will remember in history. Go to Dailytech and go to the Top Stories section.

WEB: http://www.dailytech.com/AACS+Key+Censorship+Leads+to+First+Internet+Riot/article7129.htm

Click on "AACS Key Censorship Leads to First Internet Riot." I also praise the writer for coining the term "Internet Riot." Here's the scoop: There's a string of letters and numbers allowing people to hack into HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, breaking the encryption that keeps them from being copied. This script has been available on the web for a while, but about two weeks ago, a licensing administrator said Google must remove links to sites that post the code. Google complied.

Then Digg -- the social networking site that allows people to praise content online by "digging it" and leads people to content based on the number of "Diggs" an item gets -- got a "cease-and-desist" order instructing them to take down Digg's stories that had contained the forbidden code. When Internet users got wind of this censorship, they started spamming the code all over the net, then digging the stories by the tens of thousands, and people began posting everywhere the string of numbers that makes up the code.

Finally, so many posts had been "digged" so many times that Digg couldn't keep the story down. So Digg co-founder Kevin Rose reversed the company's position on compliance to the cease and disest order. Digg isn't the only place this happened. One Digg user calculated that there were close to 51,000 Diggs, or votes, for stories trying to keep the code available.

MODERATOR: I read on Fox News today that it was like playing whack-a-mole trying to keep the code off the Internet, or to keep people from linking to the code.

SCOTT: This is directly related to what we've been talking about during our coolhunting. Jay Adelson, president of Digg, states that Digg must abide by the law and decided to comply to avoid being shut down. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose later posted a notice of noncompliance, vowing to "go down fighting" and deal with the consequences. The subject line of Kevin Rose's announcement contains the actual code.

This is an amazing development on two levels. First is what is says about democracy, transparency, and swarm behavior. Digg is a site that generates income for those who founded it. Legislation is being considered to limit access to create taxation, etc. regarding what you're able to see and share on the Internet. Second is what it means for the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which has pursued a policy of suing college and high school kids for sharing files over the Internet. The RIAA decided that instead of figuring out how to change with the world, they'll just penalize the kids. One day, within minutes of a new musical release by a popular artist, the music will be available on tens of thousands of sites for free.

MODERATOR: So Digg isn't actually spreading the code but rather spreading links to posts that have the code. While some of this might be splitting hairs, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act appears to allow Google to post information as long as they take it down when notified by copyright holders -- again, the wack-a-mole process. It's one thing to have copyrighted content on your site; it's another to be punished for linking to a site that has infringed on intellectual property rights. This is the "common carrier" argument that Napster tried unsuccessfully to use against the RIAA.

SCOTT: Go to Blogsearch.google.com for another site. Input search "DVD" and "code." See the fourth link to the article "A day on the Planet of Digg: Living and dying by UGC." It's from MediaVidea -- a good blog. The story here conveys the historical nature of this decision, and the reversal of it. So, here there's speculation about what will happen next. Did Digg do the right thing? It's said that suing Digg will accomplish nothing. People want this type of news and content, and want Digg to stick to their guns.

WEB: http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/05/day-on-planet-of-digg.html

MODERATOR: Once you have an open market where you're allowing user-generated content to determine what's important, it's difficult to shut it down. People come to rely on the wisdom of the crowd for what is popular or important. When you can't tap that wisdom, you make more mistakes.

MODERATOR: At this point, the Coolhunt entered a discussion of legal skirmishes regarding the "common carrier" argument: The phone company doesn't police what you say on the phone. Google and other sites are censored in China. eBay prohibits the sale of certain merchandise. Even Digg has a clear policy against linking to posts that trade in pornography. This led to a discussion of whether efforts to suppress Internet access to certain information can possibly succeed.

SCOTT: Since the late 90s, the Internet has become a great vehicle for organizing protest. Loose collectives of young people, defining themselves as anarchists, used the Internet to organize, transparently with consensus, during the Seattle trade protests. Imagine if a protest similar to Tiananmen Square were organized over the Internet.

MODERATOR: If you can't even link, must less host, critical stories on the Internet, the environment seems almost totalitarian.

SCOTT: Searching Google for "china google censorship" leads to a great article in The New York Times about this:

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?ex=1303444800&en=9721027e105631bf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

SCOTT: I remember when this article came out, about a year ago. It's a great piece of reporting.

MODERATOR: Once again, The New York Times is a primary source for news. Join us tomorrow when we'll look at The Wall Street Journal online and other primary news sources.

SCOTT: The government of China was concerned also about chat rooms.

MODERATOR: Do you think we're now near the end of copyright?

SCOTT: I don't know, but there's no denying that it's under assault, coming from all sorts of directions. CreativeCommons helps people say, "just give me credit and you can use my content any way you like." Then there's the open source content movement. On the other hand, some companies are trying to lock down every patent and copyright they can.

MODERATOR: Like biotech companies copyrighting the DNA of plants.

SCOTT: In some respects, the Digg story might be a sign of the end of protectionism. I do know that the copyright holders themselves are scrambling.

SCOTT: Now, let's go to 38 Pitches to end our hunt on a lighter note.

WEB: http://38pitches.com/

This is a blog for Curt Schilling. He's an ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and potentially could go into the Hall of Fame. He's controversial in that he's so opinionated and speaks out about issues regarding baseball. When congress had steroid hearings, Curt was the only player to testify who was not himself suspected of juicing. Part of what prompted Curt to start this blog is a journalist who constantly needles Curt, which prompts him to write after every game to tell his own story, preventing him from being misquoted by "the red-haired curly one." This is a real blog written by the star, not by a publicist. It's just an interesting use of the web to counter media misrepresentation.

MODERATOR: In the online PR class I teach at Tulane, we talk about how democratic technologies are everywhere, enabling more free sharing of information without having to rely solely on the media. Companies are increasingly sharing their side of every story with the public through direct-to-consumer news releases and blogs.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with the co-author of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog:

WEB: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #12
Tuesday, May 1, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of "Coolhunting"
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of "Coolhunting"
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: Could you tell us where you're calling from?

PETER: I'm calling in from Switzerland today.

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from my home office in MA.

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone.

PETER: Zebo seems to be mostly for lonely boys and girls wanting someone to talk you, and I'm amazed so much information is right there for everyone to read.

WEB: http://www.zebo.com/

SCOTT: An alum sent me an email about this website, GoLoco, for ride sharing.

MODERATOR: I'm wondering how many people post profiles on how many different websites.

PETER: Another website allows you to use one dashboard to merge all of your social networking profiles into one to mix and mingle. In all my coolhunting I've noticed that this is all like a virtual yard sale.

MODERATOR: Yes, you can attach prices to items. But people also were being facetious. However, some are actually revealing their real feelings, such as with IFeelFine.com

PETER: Let's go to GoLoco.

WEB: http://www.goloco.org/

SCOTT: I think we're in the very beginning of social networking using new technologies. And eventually, it'll become specific instead of just an atomized digital connection. With GoLoco you can see where people are driving and who needs rides. What's really interesting is what was asked of me when I registered: what kind of vehicle I had, what kind of trips I made, what languages I speak, what music I like, and some other general information. One goal is for same-language speakers to be paired.

MODERATOR: GoogleMaps also seems to be used to establish routes.

SCOTT: The reason they ask for the type of vehicle is so others will know what to look for when you arrive to pick people up.

PETER: They probably have to update their calculator to keep in line with gas price changes.

SCOTT: My main point of mentioning GoLoco is that you can compare prices with public transit. This is a good example of a specific use of social networking on the web. It's sort of like "stitch 'n' bitch" where people meet as not only a sewing club but also to converse -- coming together to share as a social community, whether to complain or gossip.

MODERATOR: This is a good way to close the gap on customer service, where complaining may not be done elsewhere.

PETER: It's about making money, networking (finding a plumber), and also explains why you might want to do something.

SCOTT: On my list it shows someone named Holly Parker is looking for a ride. The cost is $4.50 per mile, tolls, how much is paid per passenger, and a transaction fee. Then there's a picture of Holly. It also shows a list of who she trusts, which also involves being assigned a buddy in case you end up on a milk carton as missing.

MODERATOR: There has to be a privacy issue involved here.

PETER: Minggl is our next site.

WEB: http://www.minggl.com/

MODERATOR: This reminds me of a site SubmitIt, which allows you to post something that would be submitted to a number of directories in a one-stop fashion.

PETER: If you need some explanation, just drag the cursor across the bullet points. You can request an invitation or you can use the "video tutorial" link at the bottom of the site to guide you through the site.

MODERATOR: It's interesting that they use YouTube videos as their tutorial. It's a very clever use, and it solves compatibility problems as well. YouTube converts to Flash, which is more universal and better quality than many viewers.

PETER: Kyte TV is our next site. This site could be described as twitter on steroids. You can put together entire stories for those who care as well as those who don't. It's more entertaining than pod casting. It's like being a local reporter.

WEB: http://www.kyte.tv/home/index.html

MODERATOR: What we're watching is an animated short with a sound track, a montage of images. And it looks like there's been quite a bit of viewing and comments.

PETER: When I stumbled on this a few days ago I noticed that there's many holiday vacation videos on the site. And there's probably many visitors because of a recent New York Times article about the site.

MODERATOR: The number of viewers of online videos is truly stunning.

PETER: This should make cell phone companies happy since we'll be able to send video messages, which are much more expensive than regular messages.

SCOTT: There's an emerging tool, a search engine called blinkx, that gives you the ability to search the contents of web videos. It was reported in The New York Times Business section.

PETER: Bertlesman, Sony, etc. make the most use of video search technologies to make money by suing YouTube. They're setting up their spiders to search for infringement.

SCOTT: From a technological point of view we're well on our way to coolhunt within videos, finding phrases, etc. The ability to coolhunt in new kinds of ways is coming.

MODERATOR: It wasn't long ago that we couldn't even use speech recognition.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with the co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted with previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Visitors to the Swarm Creativity blog and members of the Coolhunt: we welcome your suggestions for destinations or themes for our upcoming coolhunts.

We are looking for places where outcomes are based on social networks, for ways to encourage such formations, and for interesting uses that people have found for tapping the wisdom of crowds.

Please add any suggestions here or email them to our hosts, Scott Cooper and Peter Gloor. Don't delay! Our first season of Coolhunting ends in just another 10 days.

Thanks,
Steve O'Keefe
Coolhunt Moderator

Coolhunt Log #11
Monday, April 30, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: Welcome to the Coolhunt. I'm your moderator, Steve O'Keefe, calling in today from our offices at the Bywater Tech Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, over a nice, clean land line. Hosts, where are you calling in from today.

SCOTT: I'm Scott Cooper, and I'm calling in from my home office in Newton, Massachusetts -- right down the street, it turns out, from where TripAdvisor is headquartered. They were included in last Friday's coolhunt.

MODERATOR: Yes, just after our hunt, Scott forwarded a link to another review of TripAdvisor. The review is on a blog Scott reads regularly called Read/WriteWeb:

WEB: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tripadvisor_the.php

MODERATOR: The review was written by Sramana Mitra, an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. The review contains screenshots of TripAdvisor, and then comments and rates the site in six areas -- Context, Content, Community, Commerce, Personalization, and Vertical Search. She gives TripAdvisor an overall rating of A-.

Mitra adds some figures to our Coolhunt of TripAdvisor: 500,000 estimated travelers a day visit the site. She says the "Rant & Rave" function "can make or break the reputation of a hotel or a restaurant in a nanosecond." She doesn't comment on how TripAdvisor adjusts to rating and review spam. Would love to hear from them on that question.

PETER: I am using SkypeOut to access the chat today from my office in Switzerland.

MODERATOR: Peter tried calling twice on Skype, but the sound quality made it impossible to follow his conversation. Reluctantly, he called on a land line.

PETER: I'm testing the SkypeOut for when I am in Greece later this week. It looks like I might have to call in using a cell phone, with very expensive international rates.

MODERATOR: What followed on our phone conference was a lengthy discussion of blogging ethics and the manner in which we are conducting the Coolhunt. We discussed how much we should reveal about email communications we have received during the hunt. For example, we revealed that a New York Times reporter commented on our first Coolhunt, but did not want his comments posted on the blog. We honored that request, but we also posted the names of the New York Times journalists who we contacted about the hunt. We came to an understanding that if people wanted their comments to be public, they would blog them, and if they don't blog them, we should ask for permission before revealing them on the blog.

This discussion included references to several recent blogging breaches of netiquette that are being discussed on many blogs. We referenced O'Reilly Radar's attempt to formulate a blogger's code of ethics. We are trying to bring onto the blog more of the background discussion of how we manage the coolhunt, and we look for your suggestions on these and other coolhunt-guiding issues.

Now onto today's hunt. Peter, where are we going?

PETER: Today, I want to start a discussion of Commmunity Based Shopping. Part of what got me started on this topic today is an article that appeared at The New York Times Online today: "Got Roomfulls of Stuff? Now sites will help keep track of it," by Bob Tedeschi. NYT Online requires free registration to read archived articles. If you're registered, you can find the article at the link.

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30ecom.html?th&emc=th

MODERATOR: Those without NYT Online registration can read the article at the Tuscaloosa news, where it was syndicated and available for viewing.

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30ecom.html?th&emc=th

PETER: The article pointed me to this very interesting site called Zebo, which is a place for people to shop but has become a community of shoppers.

WEB: http://www.zebo.com/

PETER: Zebo is to shopping what Prosper is to lending. It calls itself "a better way to decide what products or clothes to buy." They try to tap the swarm to find out what clothes and other products are hip by who is using those products. If you have a list of everything someone owns, you can search through those lists to find "People Like Us" -- PLUs -- or "People Like Me" -- PLMs.

You have to register to access many of the functions. For example, the registration page teases that you can "see what celebrities own" if you join. People list all the things they own on their profile. So you can discover people by the things they own. You can see how some of this works without registering by going to the "Groups" tab on the top navigation bar.

WEB: http://member.zebo.com/Main?event_key=DIAL&execCode=FGRP

PETER: You can input a keyword into the search box and look for groups, or you can scroll through the box on the left side of the page and select or highlight groups that match your interests. You can have multiple search criteria. For example, let's select three groups and add them to our search using the "ADD" button between the two boxes. Let's pick:

Movies/Comedies

Music/Pop

Sports/Soccer

SCOTT: No, trampoline! Let's take Sports/Trampoline!

PETER: Okay, Sports/Trampoline.

Now press the "Find a Group" button and the results of our search appear on the same page in Section 2, below the search box.

MODERATOR: The search returns about 24 results in a grid that is four columuns wide and six rows long.

PETER: These are profiles that match the search criteria. Let's look at one of them, "Get Free Get Wild," which has 31 members and is listed in the categories "Comedy, Rock, Other."

SCOTT: Obviously, these aren't all trampoline people. They're matching on maybe one of the three criteria. It looks like it's designed to always find some group that you match.

PETER: The group Get Free Get Wild has a description that says "music is the best thing to talk about." The page shows recent comments and a list of the members.

WEB: http://groups.zebo.com/getfreegetwild

PETER: Some of the members have real names, some have "handles," and some have pictures. Let's click on one of the members -- Michael -- and take a look at his profile.

WEB: http://www.zebo.com/8272628

PETER: Michael lists the things he owns. He lists 93 things, starting with two houses his Mom owns and three his Dad owns.

SCOTT: Looks like Michael's family is pretty well to do.

PETER: He also lists a Reebok Wallet. So you see how the brand names slip in here. If you think Michael is cool, and he has a Reebok wallet, maybe you should get a Reebok wallet? If you look at the comments Michael is getting from other Zebo members, it is mostly girls telling him how cute he looks. Michael might be using this site, not for shopping, but to meet girls. But the girls and the boys find each other through the products they have in common.

MODERATOR: So how do you know that this information is accurate? It's all user-provided. Can't this be tainted by spam?

PETER: Well it is true that we do not really know who "Michael" is. He say's he is 17 years old and single, but he could be 45, or those might not even be his pictures. And the girls writing to him might not be girls. That is an issue with all user-generated content that is not subject to verification. What attracts people to the site is that it's fun and entertaining. It's all about traffic -- Web 1.0 -- trying to get as many eyeballs to the site as possible. But we like this site for the design. It doesn't put a wall between users the way Amazon does. You can't find out who has bought a certain book on Amazon -- but you can search for a book here and find out who owns it.

MODERATOR: I searched for "Atlas Shrugged," the Ayn Rand novel, and got one matching profile. "Fel C" also says she owns "insomnia" and "anorexia," but she has not listed them for sale. We are running out of time. Is there a blog here or a place where we can leave a message, and let them know they've been coolhunted?

PETER: If you click on "ZE'Buzz" in the top navigational bar, it takes you to a discussion area. We can search the discussion or start a thread of our own. But you must be registered to do that.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #10
Friday, April 27, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, Professor of Internet Public Relations at Tulane University
Rachelle Matherne, moderator

MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site review, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone.

Speakers, please introduce yourselves and tell us where you are dialing in from.

SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from the Engineering Systems Division at MIT.

STEVE: I'm here in my role as Tulane University professor, calling in from my home office in New Orleans, Louisiana.

SCOTT: Part of the preparation for doing this daily call has resulted in finding some interesting things on the web. The weirdest thing I've seen lately was a blog by Alyssa Milano on the L.A. Dodgers. Apparently, she blogs every day for Go Blue, and she seems to know what she's talking about. I'm a very big baseball fan.

MODERATOR: Leading the coolhunt today is Scott Cooper. Where are we going to start today, Scott?

SCOTT: Recently I was sent a link for WeFeelFine.

WEB: http://wefeelfine.org/

SCOTT: The reason I chose this for today is because I thought it'd be interesting to see the many unique ways people do things in niche areas. Go to the Mission link on this site. The artists who founded this sift through web blog postings world-wide for the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling" to accumulate demographic information to enable them to show in any given moment what the world's happiest, saddest, sexiest cities are. It's called "harvesting human feelings."

You can see exactly how many feelings have been collected by how many people based on age, gender, nationality, and actual feelings. Apparently, Las Vegas is the city where people are feeling sexy. Go back up to the top and click on "Movement." This is the artistic part. See the first picture of "madness." It looks like some of the social networking maps in our book, "Coolhunting." Each particle represents something unique to a person based on color, etc. Clicking on a particle reveals information about a person. This gives you a structured environment where you can view a variety of human feelings.

MODERATOR: Clicking on an individual "feeling" takes you to the original blog post where they harvested this phrase.

SCOTT: Right. Let's click on the Montage. This was created to present feelings from a particular population.

STEVE: I clicked on the image of a flower and I get "I feel guilty because I don't know what any of these images are."

SCOTT: Another says, "I feel horrible. . ." from a 99-year-old who refers to her MySpace page. Now, let's go to Mobs.

MODERATOR: Note the white X to get back to the previous page since pop-ups don't give a back button.

SCOTT: Let's go to the fifth one, which is Metrics. Metrics shows the most salient, which expresses the ways in which a given population differs from the global average.

STEVE: Very sophisticated color coding for emotional states on this site.

SCOTT: This is a good example of showing how social networking works. This is data mining, with individuals logging in to allow them to say how they're feeling. This could be used to better humanity.

STEVE: It's based on social networking, but it doesn't rely on voluntary participation -- they automatically scan how people say they are feeling. It's one of the most dynamic sites I've ever encountered.

SCOTT: That was just a snippet of interesting stuff related to what we've been discussing over the past few days.

STEVE: I'd like to take us on a trip to Trip Advisor.

WEB: http://www.tripadvisor.com/

STEVE: My daughter tipped me off to this one. I'm interested in looking at the reviewing process. Click on the Read & Write Reviews tab. Now I'm going to look for reviews for a hotel I know, the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans. There are 229 reviews for this hotel. They're doing a similar thing to We Feel Fine in that they are scanning the web for reviews of the Monteleone. You can see how the reviews congregate, viewing various reviews. I'm clicking back on the green banner for the home page.

STEVE: Now let's check hotel rates across the board for an entire city. Let's search for hotels in Austin, Texas. It shows me the first 10 hotels that have a vacancy the dates of my stay.

SCOTT: It also gives you a sense for expense, which according to the professional raters is better.

STEVE: Because of the popularity of the site among travelers, hotel proprietors will actually come on the site and write what they're doing to overcome problems posted by guests.

SCOTT: A smart hotel could make a small investment by hiring a bunch of kids to go to the site to post a bunch of good stuff about the hotel.

STEVE: Good point, and I wonder what TripAdvisor policy is about postings. I'm going to modify my search now to show only hotels with rooms available under $100 in Austin. A useful tool is to compare TripAdvisor rankings with prices.

SCOTT: Super 8 is ranked no. 7 out of 166.

STEVE: This is a high rating for a 1-star airport hotel. I'm clicking on the Read All button. I'm always suspicious of 5-star ratings, just as Amazon readers are of high book review ratings. Scott's right that someone could come in and spam TripAdvisor. But maybe just a few people who were very happy were responsible for the high rating.

STEVE: Articles also have been added to TripAdvisor, such as the best second-hand shops in Seattle. Go Lists also is given to recommend what to do in Austin. Any article on the web will be linked here. TripAdvisor allows you to search airline ticket portals and hotel reservation systems, all in one place, with articles linked to geographical destinations. The objectivity, combined with the number of reviewers, is what gives it its power. It's an extremely popular site, giving at least an aura of independence.

SCOTT: It illustrates the wisdom of crowds, and what a swarm of people can do. There are lots of examples on the web of people sharing information like this. Just a couple weeks ago my teenage daughter wanted me to order Chinese food to come to the house. But she insisted that I order from this new restaurant. I looked online and noticed enough people who seemed genuine had reviewed the site for this particular restaurant. I saw enough people talking about it with enough specificity that we ordered, and it was great.

STEVE: People seem more willing to review hotels and restaurants online -- maybe due to the anonymity -- than will use a comment card. Reputation Management has almost become a science in itself. If you see a high TripAdvisor rating, that's a really good indicator based on a large number of reviews and users. Many hotel managers may not know of problems without such an anonymous interface.

STEVE: The reduction of risk is what this is all about. I'd be curious to hear you and Peter talk about the role coolhunting plays in the reduction of risk.

SCOTT: Here, they allow people to vote with comments such that the swarm's collective intelligence and wisdom has a value greater than the decision made in a boardroom -- one that might cost the company $50 million.

STEVE: This greater accuracy is the flip side of lower risk. In virtually every aspect of human endeavor, this coolhunting process can significantly reduce the level of risk, and increase overall prosperity and development.

SCOTT: You made another interesting point about anonymity. Coursing through the blogosphere is the anonymity. Cathy Sierra had to shut down her site because of threats due to something she once wrote, having to cancel public appearances. Tim O'Rielly has developed a bloggers code of conduct that indicates that you shouldn't be anonymous.

STEVE: The "average" Wal-Mart posters who were writing blogs were actually paid employees. This scandal was a turning point in blogger ethics. There needs to be an automated weeding out of various forms of bias that cause a distorted picture. There must be software to help with this.

SCOTT: I'm sure there is. My colleague, Bengt-Arne Vedin, sent me some sites because of what he's been reading on our swarm blog. Citizendium is the first one.

WEB: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page

SCOTT: This is a site that actually was started by one of the founders of Wikipedia to solve one of the problems on Wikipedia. Citizendium requires contributors to use their real names and has a gentle expert oversight -- expert editors involved to ensure accurate information. Now let's go to UNcyclopedia.

WEB: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

SCOTT: It looks exactly like Wikipedia but is a spoof of them. This is like The Onion of Wikipedia. Today's feature article is Rock, Paper, Airstrike. I had never seen this site and it looks like hours of fun.

STEVE: This whole hunt today has been a lot of fun.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you, Scott. We've been talking today with one of the co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing.

Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt. The transcript of today's coolhunt will be posted tomorrow morning. You can view that transcript and previous ones at The Swarm Creativity Blog: http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com.

Join us on Monday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #9
Thursday, April 26, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Listening in from Sweden is one of the co-authors of the book Design-Inspired Innovation.

Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor.

PETER: Today, we're going to talk about prediction markets. A really great example is InTrade.

WEB: http://www.intrade.com

PETER: Prediction markets are a great way to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Instead of having an expert predicting the outcome of certain events, you have people placing bets on what's going to happen.

SCOTT: This ties in with things we've discussed in previous days. The concept of collective intelligence to predict outcomes is similar to what we talked about with "Mutual Fun" at Rite Solutions. Essentially, anything that hits the news that has an outcome related to it can be bet on here. For example, right now bets are being placed on whether Paul Wolfowitz will be asked to resign at the World Bank. Whether the news items are actually bet on depends on what the swarm wants to do.

PETER: Let's look at what the swarm wants to do by going to the U.S. Politics section of InTrade.

WEB: http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/

PETER: For each potential candidate, you can place a bet. Right now, if you invest 30 cents, you will get $1 if Giuliani is selected as the Republican candidate for President.

MODERATOR: Is there "skin in the game," as you say in the book? Does this use real money?

PETER: Yes, it uses real money. These are real bets. In one of our research projects, a group of students monitored web chatter to accurately predict Oscar winners. The closer an event gets, the more accurate the predictions get. The closer we get to the elections, these predictions get more accurate.

MODERATOR: Is there any analysis that compares the accuracy of prediction markets with other means of polling?

PETER: Usually, the prediction markets outperform traditional polling, by far. You have to look at how the prediction market is set up. It has to be a large crowd. It has to have a good mix of participants -- different types of people. Private companies are also using prediction markets, such as HP, Google, and Microsoft. There is undeniable evidence that even small prediction markets are more accurate in predicting software delivery dates than managers or experts.

SCOTT: I've read interesting stories over the past year about businesses using prediction markets, partially precipitated by an article that appeared last spring in the New York Times Business section. The article said that while some high-tech companies were making breakthroughs trading on idea futures, most companies had not done it. Prediction markets threaten the hierarchal control of managers and would make it obvious that most managers are stupid, to paraphrase many bloggers.

MODERATOR: If the costs of setting up the mechanism are not prohibitive, it seems prediction markets would be preferred.

PETER: There are prediction markets for success of movies at the box office.

SCOTT: We talk about the Hollywood Stock Exchange in Coolhunting and how it's useful to help determine the likelihood of a given release becoming a box office smash. There are 1.4 million people who trade on the Hollywood Stock Exchange as of a year ago when we wrote that section of Coolhunting.

WEB: http://hsx.com/

PETER: One interesting note is that people are not betting real money on this site. There are some rewards such as T-shirts and tickets for very successful predicters.

SCOTT: It's expanded over the years, not just to predict success of movies. There are also star bonds -- essentially, betting on the future success of a given entertainer.

MODERATOR: There is a leader board with top traders for the site. You'd think someone would recruit these people as movie reviewers?

SCOTT: It would be interesting to find out if anyone has parlayed their success on Hollywood Stock Exchange into becoming a paid movie critic.

PETER: Companies want successful predictors to participate in their prediction markets. It creates accuracy. Having people with a good track record of making predictions helps the hive. We've found that it is not just the number of people participating in the markets that counts, but also the quality of their prediction capabilities -- and of course their "betweenness" factor -- how well networked they are. We'd love to have a swarm full of Warren Buffets -- the investor with a track record for accurately predicting markets. Now, let's visit the grandfather of prediction markets sites, the Iowa Electronic Markets.

WEB: http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/

PETER: This is a longstanding market for predicting presidential elections, run from the University of Iowa College of Business.

MODERATOR: You can make predictions on diseases as well. Can people really predict the outbreak of a disease better than medical professionals?

PETER: There has been research done in this field. If you have a mix of experts, ordinary people, and well-educated people, you get the best predictions. The mix is more accurate than the experts alone. Experts have really strong opinions.

SCOTT: There is a specific reason we refer back to collective wisdom and collective intelligence. They can mean two very different things, with respect to the combination of experts and "ordinary" people. It's with the ordinary that you often get the wisdom part of the equation. They don't have the bias associated with being an expert. That, mixed with real expertise, can be a powerful predictor. People making "bets" are informed non-experts. One has to assume that if you're betting real money on InTrade on whether Barack Obama will get the nomination, you're doing it based on some of your own intelligence applied in a wise way.

In our book, we make mention of the fact that a few years ago, the Pentagon proposed a market for anonymous bettors to predict when a terrorist attack would take place. They thought it'd be a worthwhile endeavor rather than an academic experiment. It didn't happen because after the news of it went public, people were horrified by the concept of using a disaster as a "game."

I worked at a firm a few years ago on an early version of a prediction market regarding the energy crisis. Consultants would get together once a week and make bets about certain aspects of the electricity market in the U.S. This was 15 years ago, and we were using collective wisdom plus a general information dump from the corporate librarian.

MODERATOR: Much like turning an office football pool into a powerful new business tool.

PETER: Let's now look at how something that was really cool in the past is becoming less cool. The brand of Apple is mired in maintaining coolness. Right now, there is the controversy of the backdated stock options. Bloggers are suggesting that Steve Jobs knew about this all along. We can view the various comments on Slashdot to see some examples.

WEB: http://slashdot.org/

MODERATOR: By the way, Slashdot is a hugely popular blog for nerds and geeks. It's a great place for cool farming.

PETER: Yes, it's a great place for cool farming and even more so for coolhunting. Scroll through the comments on this particular blog post about the stock option crisis at Apple and see what respondents think about Jobs.

WEB: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/04/24/2134257.shtml

We could go to InTrade and see if people are already placing bets on Jobs stepping down.

MODERATOR: These comments give us the sense of what's happening with the hive.

PETER: Exactly. The wisdom of crowds is amazing for predicting these sorts of things.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #8
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper.

SCOTT: I'm really excited about where we're starting today. In Coolhunting, we talk a lot about bees and beehives. In fact, one of the original ideas for a title was "Innovation Beehive." This morning, when I went to O'Reilly Radar, there was a post entitled "Thoughts on the Hive Mind."

WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/thoughts_on_the.html

SCOTT: This is a post by Brady Forrest, commenting on Jordan Schwartz's concept of extended thoughts. Let's take a look at Schwartz's blog article entitled "Hive-Mind Backyard Beekeeping."

WEB: http://www.hive-mind.com/bee/blog/2007/04/beekeeping-and-hive-mind.html

SCOTT: Schwartz tells us that 10 or 12 years ago, after reading an article by Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, he took up beekeeping. Hive-Mind is both a blog about beekeeping as well as a site about bee behavior and its correlation to social behavior among humans. It's also a huge reference for beekeepers with resources such as books, a diary, links to buy supplies, etc.

This is really very cool to both Peter and to me. The behavior of bees is a very important part of what we talk about in Coolhunting. It illustrates key principles both in Coolhunting and in our most recent co-authored work, which is the article we have in the current issue of the magazine for MIT's Sloan School of Management. Peter actually introduced to me the whole idea of beekeeping as part of the discussions we were having.

PETER: I grew up talking about bees because my father has been a beekeeper for nearly 60 years. He still has a little house full of bees in his garden. I'm a big fan of those amazing creatures. He was always telling us what great role models the bees are. When we started working on this book, bees were the main inspiration for how we should organize the guiding principles of coolhunting.

It's really amazing how they are self-organizing, working for the greater good, and they communicate in swarms. They have a really democratic way of doing everything, even deciding who becomes their next leader in the sense that the queen who rules the hive is chosen by the bees. Perhaps "rule" is the wrong word, since she has no authority. The only thing she really does is pass on her genes.

SCOTT: A beehive is a really great example of a Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN). The queen doesn't rule or intervene in telling them what to do. The worker bees take care of her, though, primarily because she'll pass on her genes to sustain the colony. They have a lot of interest in taking care of her because the number the eggs she lays is directly related to how much food she is given.

A lot of this is what we see in COINs -- in humans who come together to organize and coordinate their daily tasks. We talk about this a lot in Coolhunting. There are many parallels with Hive-Mind and Coolhunting, such as the wisdom of crowds.

MODERATOR: This Hive-Mind post also includes a description of the waggle dance, which features prominently in Coolhunting, as the means by which bees share their knowledge with the hive.

SCOTT: For me, the most fascinating facet of bee behavior is a particular principle of coolhunting: you gain power by giving power away. This is directly related to what Peter said a moment ago -- the concept of altruism. The bees will even give their lives for the good of the hive. Perhaps that's the ultimate act of altruism.

PETER: There is a story in Switzerland that dates back to the 14th century and is told to every child. An Austrian emperor came in with a large army of knights on horses. The peasant farmers were fighting to get him out, but couldn't penetrate the blockade of mounted knights. One of the farmers threw himself on the knight's lances so the others could then run over his body and attack the knights from behind. The farmers won the battle. The story is probably made more colorful to make the principle easier to remember. The concept of altruism within COINs is quite important. You don't have to go as far as giving your own life, but stepping up for the good of the community is important -- once again, gaining power by giving power away.

MODERATOR: Do you have some examples of recent business models that have been based on the concept of giving power away?

PETER: One example is a retailer in Switzerland called Migros. It succeeded by giving away power to its customers. The founder of the company decided to not just give shares to employees but also to the customers. Migros has about 2 million owners because every customer can become a co-owner. It has worked so well that it's the biggest and most profitable retailer in Switzerland.

SCOTT: We describe this in our Sloan article. We have also talked about MySpace and Friendster -- really good examples of gaining power by giving it away. Our favorite human example is Benjamin Franklin, who gave everything away and gained tremendous power. He operated a COIN called a "junto."

MODERATOR: Johnny Appleseed is another example from that era of someone who gained power by giving away -- apple seeds, in his case. Michael Pollan writes about Appleseed in his impressive book, "The Botany of Desire." This generosity seems to not only result in successful ventures, but for some people, lasting fame, such as Linus Torvalds -- the inventor of the Linux operating system -- who we'll remember 100 years from now.

PETER: In 1991, Torvalds laid out the rules for using Linux and becoming one of his team members. The rules are transparent, undisputed, and still in use today. He's the queen bee because he follows his own rules. Like the owner of Migros, if he didn't follow his own rules, he'd be demoted; occasionally, queen bees get kicked out of their hive. Bill Gates knows when and when not to give things away. He won the battle against Netscape by giving away his web browser for free.

SCOTT: He definitely gained power in part by giving something away. Then there's the anti-competitive business practices that were part of it.

PETER: He mixes the two models very freely to Microsoft's advantage. I would like us to look next at Debian.org.

WEB: http://www.debian.org/

PETER: Debian is a Linux developers group, and a very active, very self-organizing swarm. They maintain one particular flavor of Linux. The group is democratic, bottom-up, self-organizing. On the left side of the home page, the first link in the "About" section is to the Debian Social Contract.

WEB: http://www.debian.org/social_contract

PETER: They lay out their core principles and guidelines for using their software:

1. Debian will remain 100 percent free
2. We will give back to the free software community
3. We will not hide problems

These are similar to the principles that drive COINs and hives. To show how to apply those principles to the activity of the group, Debian created a "constitution" spelling out exactly how the hive would be governed.

WEB: http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution

SCOTT: It's like the constitution Ben Franklin helped to draft. These are their rules of operation. Rules are crucial for any COIN. They all have to start from a code of ethics or behavior.

MODERATOR: So there are no rulers here, but lots of rules?

PETER: Not so many rules as decision-making bodies that resolve disputes. See the second item in the Debian Constitution -- "Decision-making bodies and individuals." It lays it all out.

SCOTT: Ben Franklin's junto had an organizing document as well.

MODERATOR: These remind me of the utopian communities that sprang up around the Boston area at the end of the 19th century. They had noble ideas, but they never spread very far.

PETER: They did not thrive because many of them did not adhere to principles of internal honestly and transparency. I've studied some research by Rosabeth Moss Kanter -- the Harvard professor who became a member of some utopian communities. Usually, there are queen bees who make rules but don't live by rules themselves.

SCOTT: Her book is called, "Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective." It came out in early 70s.

MODERATOR: You've used the term "COIN" often in this coolhunt. Can you explain what it means?

SCOTT: A COIN is a Collaborative Innovation Network -- people who come together for the purpose of generating and improving ideas. Look at the Wikipedia entry for "Collaborative Innovation Networks." You'll see a reference to Peter's previous book on Swarm Creativity. There's also a link to an example of a COIN where innovation was at the center of its work and the COIN is simply a way to share knowledge, which tends to be called a community of practice. The site is called SpineConnect.

WEB: http://spineconnect.syndicom.com/

SCOTT: At SpineConnect, surgeons who work on spines essentially have one central depository for information. They share their experiences. Over time, this evolved to become a place where spine surgeons would get together to collaborate and innovate in the field. New research and patents and things like that came about as a result of the collaboration engendered by this network. Some developments in spine surgery might not have happened without this site.
This collaboration has been enabled in large part by the technology that broke down distance and time barriers. Spine surgeons in different parts of the world are discovering connections they might not have otherwise known about.

MODERATOR: Bees in Minnesota dancing and being seen in New Delhi.

SCOTT: A global waggle dance.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #7
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor.

PETER: There was a New York Times article yesterday documenting Wikipedia's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. I find the article really inspiring.

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23link.html

The story begins:

IMAGINE a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers,
researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or
managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan
coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of
command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after
a job well done.

PETER: Further down in the article, there is a quote: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." Let's now move to Wikipedia, starting with the entry for the Virginia Tech incident.

WEB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Massacre

PETER: The Wikipedia article was originally entitled "Virginia Tech Shooting," then there was a discussion to rename it "Virginia Tech Massacre." If you click on the Discussion tab at the top of the page, you can see people discussing the name change. You can see the user Vranak defending his position of including the word "massacre" in the title. Wikipedia has total transparency in their operations.

MODERATOR: Isn't this what drives people crazy about Wikipedia? The idea that so many people have so much time to debate such a minor point as changing the name of the entry from "Virginia Tech Shooting" to "Virginia Tech Massacre"?

PETER: Well, I don't think it's a minor point. I think it's all about coolhunting, actually. The people involved in grooming this entry thought it was important. Right now it's cool to participate in Wikipedia. This might change. Yesterday, we had an interesting discussion about Wikipedia at MIT's Sloan School of Management. When the speaker, Kevin Crowston, was talking I was thinking, "How long will it be cool to be a Wikipedian?" Crowston discussed the growth rate of new users signing up for Wikipedia. In 2001, there were around 2,000 people. Today, it's growing at such an exponential rate that, theoretically, it will take less than 10 years for everyone in the world to be a Wikipedian.

MODERATOR: How long do you think it will take before everyone has an entry on Wikipedia?

PETER: We discussed that, too. Right now, there is a requirement for an entry to be something newsworthy. Combine Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia, and you get a worldwide universe of virtually everyone online.

SCOTT: As an aside, there is no entry at Wikipedia for "Peter Gloor." The entry for "Scott Cooper" is not me -- it's a Boston Red Sox baseball player. If you search for "Peter Gloor" at Wikipedia, you will see an entry for Collaborative Innovation Networks, which references Peter's book on Swarm Creativity. There's also a page called coolhunting, though it's not about our book.

PETER: As far as everyone in the world becoming active Wikipedians, I think that will not happen. At some point in time, nearly everything stops being "cool" because everyone is doing it. Usually, when I give talks about the concept of "cool" and coolhunting, I ask people what's cooler: the iPod from Apple or the other mp3 player from Microsoft. Most people say the iPod is cooler. When I asked this last time in Helsinki, one of the most trendsetting cities, someone said it's so much cooler to have an mp3 player from Singapore because everyone has the iPod: "The iPod is mainstream and boring."

MODERATOR: You're using "cool" now in the sense we tend to think the word means, which is not necessarily what Coolhunting is about.

PETER: I think they go together. In our book, we make some distinctions between "cool" just being something that sells really well and something that touches an emotional nerve. In particular, we think that "cool" things also have some aspects of the greater good.

SCOTT: That is actually the definition that applies to Wikipedia and speaks directly to Peter's point. It is unlikely that Wikipedia will still be "cool" at some point in the future. What I think we would predict is that something even better will become the next cool thing -- perhaps something with the best elements of Wikipedia that will become even more pronounced in a new online community, or maybe something we can't even yet imagine.

PETER: We can speculate what it might be, for example YouTube combined with Wikipedia, a combination of articles with videos.

SCOTT: There are already hybrid forms of the underlying ideas behind Wikipedia. For instance, here in Boston, a new newspaper called BostonNOW was launched just within the last few days.

WEB: http://www.bostonnow.com/

SCOTT: It's a free newspaper, distributed at public transit stops. It's competing with a free newspaper called Metro which is part of a worldwide chain. BostonNOW's objective is to become a "blog newspaper." It wants to eventually solely print blog-style articles so that the entire city of readers is also the writers of the newspaper. It has already begun to try to draw people into the creation of a newspaper by having a daily online editorial meeting. It's a videoconference and anyone can join and speak and help plan the next day's edition of the paper. Within a short time span, the readers will write the newspaper everyday.

PETER: I think the bigger question is, "How are those articles being produced?" There is very little original content. Instead, the articles are derived from other accessible news sources.

MODERATOR: What often makes "original news" is the perspective, or the commentary. You can say an article is original by the comments that string along behind it. Many of those comments are, in fact, "original news" reports.

PETER: I think that's a delicate discussion. I don't think it's a good idea to have fully individualized newspapers.

SCOTT: To some degree, what we can expect for the future is a combination of all of these things we've talked about: an opportunity for people to pick and choose the news they read, but also to participate in writing those news stories.

PETER: I think in this context, I beg to differ. A newspaper like Metro is the antithesis of personalized news, whereas something like BostonNOW is tremendously personalized.

SCOTT: The objective is to actually open the decision-making process regarding what's going to be in the newspaper to the readers themselves. It's not going to be perfect.

MODERATOR: There is a section in Coolhunting that covers the "madness of crowds." For example, there is potential for user participation to actually destabilize an entry in Wikipedia or in some ways paralyze a news delivery organization that is just simply incapable of keeping up with a surge. For example, on the day of Anna Nicole's death, her Wikipedia entry was frozen due to so many user updates. [A LiveJournal community for celebrity gossip was also rendered useless for a short time due to a surge in activity.]

PETER: There have been experiments on Wikipedia where people tried to see how stable it is. It has proven to be amazingly stable. A professor (whose name I can't recall) entered inaccurate information on approximately 20 Wikipedia entries. He wanted to see how long it would take Wikipedia to fix the errors. Within 30 minutes, all 20 of the entries were corrected -- even ones in the most obscure entries. Once they discovered his first error, they searched using his username to find the others and correct them all.

PETER: History is full of examples of crowds going off the track, and we discuss this in our book. For example, the tulip frenzy, or the Nazi movement in Germany after World War I. Entire countries have totally gone off the track. There was recently a really interesting experiment. Newspaper ads invited people to come to an exhibition hall. There were then some experiments as far as crowd behavior goes. Out of the 300, the researchers secretly told only 10 to reverse the direction they were walking. The others followed. We are cattle. If a large enough arc of the population deviates from the right direction, then the others will follow.

MODERATOR: Wikipedia has taken measures to protect the open editing of entries, such as entries dealing with religion and politics, that are enormously controversial, watched very closely, and debated very hotly. Does that kind of sabotage and marketing that also goes on in Wikipedia damage its use as an indicator of the wisdom of crowds.

PETER: I think what that shows is, unfortunately, the same thing as the open environment of the early days of the Internet. There are always bad guys out there. And there are opinions that people believe in strongly.

SCOTT: These are examples not of problems with the technology of collective intelligence or collaborative innovation, but problems with human beings and the discourse we have in our society. It is somewhat related to the technology because the online world atomizes people in a certain way, being dissociated with genuine human contact. All that being said, Wikipedia is remarkably self-correcting.

MODERATOR: What about Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives good money out of circulation." In the early days of UseNet and other mailing lists on the Internet, there were frequently one or two obnoxious posters who would drive everybody else off the list. How can Wikipedia or any other user-generated forum prevent Gresham's Law from taking effect?

PETER: That's a very tough question. Unfortunately, you need enforcement of the rules.

SCOTT: The good news is that we are observing that the more people involved, the less likely these sorts of things are to happen. Wikipedia is an example. The kinds of things you're talking about are the exception rather than the rule.

PETER: Let's return to our discussion of citizen journalism, by looking at Assignment Zero.

WEB: http://zero.newassignment.net/

PETER: This website is the vision of Jay Rosen. It's similar to Wikipedia; however, it attempts to keep the level of professionalism much higher by producing high quality, original articles. Assignment Zero requires original research, such as interviews. If you think you are a journalist of professional quality, you can sign up here and collaborate on a story. To get started, you can click on the link from the top menu, "How This Works" and scroll down to the section called "How Can You Get Started?"

I'd also like to point out the "About" page. This is an example of how an organization creates trust. Users want to see the faces of the people behind the projects. If you scroll down on the About page, the last entry is "You." When you click on that word, "You," you get to the list of user journalists. That's the crowd they have recruited so far. You can click on a user's profile, then select the "recent activities" tab, and see their contributions to the site. There's also a tab for a contributor's "reporting topics."

Another example of an attempt at high-level online journalism is a Boston-based journal JoVE: Journal of Visual Experiments.

WEB: http://www.jove.com

PETER: It's really high-end research, still mostly about the sciences, but it's in a totally new format. It's a new way of publishing research papers using video to supplement a text presentation.

SCOTT: Videos can be uploaded here instead of, or in addition to, writing a journal article.

MODERATOR: This site gives users the ability to leave comments and to upload supplementary files. It makes information with other researchers around the world faster and easier. It allows people with these similar, narrow interests to collaborate.

We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the Swarm Creativity Blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhuntany or connection problems you experienced.

Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #6
Monday, April 23, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper.

SCOTT: Let's start with a website that I go to everyday: O'Reilly Radar at Radar.Oreilly.com.

WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html

SCOTT: I thought it would be interesting to discuss the software program Freebase. The concept behind it is quite amazing, and what it means for bridging ideas for the future of the web. Because it's an alpha product, however, we can't actually look at it at this point.

PETER: On our 3/11/07 Swarm Creativity blog post, we discussed Freebase and Danny Hillis. Hillis created Thinking Machines, which involved a massively parallel computer called the Connection Machine.

SCOTT: He's the brain behind Freebase, a software program that is a product of MetaWeb.

PETER: Hillis wants to centralize information into one database. I don't think it will work. Things can have different meanings depending on how you look at them.

MODERATOR: The idea of centralization vs. decentralization is a topic covered in Coolhunting.

PETER: Decentralization is important to swarm creativity. The creative process happens because we bring in so many different viewpoints.

SCOTT: I agree with Peter. I thought it would be interesting to discuss how Freebase's process for pulling in information may actually have value for what Peter and I advocate. Amalgamizing and getting something of use from collective intelligence has great benefits. The question is, "How do you do it?" The technology itself behind Hillis' method is quite compelling, but it seems at the end what you get is a rather centralized view of what any given thing means.

PETER: I think it's great to look back at Hillis' first successful company, Thinking Machine. He had a massively parallel computer located in Massachusetts that was supposed to solve the problems of the world. It used centralized computing. All the attempts at solving really hard problems, such as searching for extra-terrestrial life, are done using peer-to-peer computing. It's done much better that way than with the centralized computer.

SCOTT: I'll see if we can get access to show Freebase on the Coolhunt. Until then, let's start today's hunt at Mashable.

WEB: http://www.mashable.com/

SCOTT: This is one of my favorite blogs. It's different than a lot of other social networking blogs. Everything about the really big sites is tracked and discussed here. One of the nice things this site does is it tracks social networking sites -- such as MySpace -- and what people are doing as they create them, broadly defined. Mashable often publicizes new sites and talks about them. The other thing I really like about Mashable is the Headlines in the box at the top of the page. There's hardly ever a 2-day period that can go by without something compelling happening. For instance, the article entitled "MySpace is Better Than Porn":

WEB: http://mashable.com/2007/04/20/myspace-porn/

SCOTT: This is a posting from last Friday. It's one of the most significant pieces of web-related news to come out in several years. It's based on an article from The Economist finding that social networking sites are about to overtake sex sites in volume of browser traffic in the U.S. any day now.

PETER: I think, Scott, you are overly optimistic. [laughs]

SCOTT: In our book, Coolhunting, we have a foreword by a very well known blogger by the name of Danah Boyd. She traces some of the initial history of MySpace and Facebook, and she makes the point that when they were first launched, they became a place for people to make "hookups." And I think that's obviously still very much the case. If people are going to MySpace or Facebook to find someone to have a sexual liaison with instead of going to something like "hotbabesinyourneighborhood.com," doesn't it represent the swarm taking over a huge part of the web from people in the San Fernando Valley companies, where the porn merchants congregate?

PETER: I just think this shows that the overall population of web users is still growing. In the past, the people desperate for sex were using hotbabesinyourneighborhood.com to satisfy that desire and now it's a much broader part of the population that is using the web. In the past, people would go to the trendy bars in the neighborhood and now they go to social networking sites to hook up.

I think it's a more natural use of our strongest desires: being social animals, being with other people. We have homophilic tendencies, which means we look for people who share similar interests and we form communities based on that. The web is being put to use by helping us become more connected, and it's becoming more mainstream.

MODERATOR: Do you know anything about Pete Cashmore, who wrote this article and put this site together?

SCOTT: He is one of the main people behind Mashable. I think he's one of the most famous bloggers on social networking issues. His writing is usually extremely thoughtful and knowledgeable. Let's go back to the home page of Mashable and take a look at the article on the failure of many web startups, which is also a Pete Cashmore post:

WEB: http://mashable.com/2007/04/21/web-startups-and-the-lying-liars-that-lie-about-them/

SCOTT: I thought we should talk a little bit about why this happens. I think it relates to a part in Coolhunting wherein we talk about some web startups and their tremendous demise. This will give us an opportunity to talk about some of the principles of coolhunting and also of swarm creativity that have an effect on whether you're going to succeed or not.

PETER: I think we should look at it from the perspective of the crowd. None of these imitation social networking start-ups is really about a leader; they're all followers. They're not setting up a new direction -- it's all about copying others.

MODERATOR: Imitation versus innovation.

PETER: Exactly. It does not bode very well for those startups. My advice for anyone who is doing coolhunting for really cool stuff, this might be a very good test. If it falls into these 10 categories that Cashmore writes about, chances are it won't succeed.

MODERATOR: The inventor of an item is often not the one to popularize it. Some of these "wannabes" are often the refined version that works. For instance, Friendster versus MySpace, which is covered in your book Coolhunting.

SCOTT: Yes, Danah Boyd covers that in her foreword. She discusses how one site, MySpace, gives users the power to do what they want and to solve problems and create the site in the image they want. And the other, Friendster, tries to control them more. It's a very important point. Often, any one of these sites could perhaps be tremendously successful -- even if all 10 of Cashmore's statements apply, if there are users who stumble upon it and see some value and take hold of it and move it somewhere other than where the original person had even conceived.

SCOTT: Now, let's continue the Coolhunt at Yub.

WEB: http://www.yub.com/

SCOTT: My 18-year-old daughter uses this site. She told me it was cool because it's like a virtual mall. She didn't mean in the sense of virtual shopping, but a social network like the one suburban teens create in malls. This is reflected right at the very top where it says, "Meet. Hang. Shop." The objective is to get you to buy stuff, but the way it's done is to try to replicate some of the power of connectivity among people with similar demographics. In this respect, the developers have sought to find a way around the isolation of individuals that happens when they make online purchases. Next, I'd like us to look at the concept of swarm finance. There is a website where you can borrow money from people you don't know. It's called Prosper.

WEB: http://www.prosper.com/

SCOTT: This is an amazing idea that seems to be working.

PETER: We don't know yet if it works because it's very new. It's community-based lending. You have to be totally transparent about your financial circumstances. In return, people will lend you money at a better rate than if you would just use a credit card.

SCOTT: It's not about the rates, though; it's about the collateral. There is no collateral offered in exchange for loans on Prosper. People who are getting money from Prosper are people who might not be able to get it from traditional outlets because of lack of collateral.

PETER: People can invest in business ideas, even if they only have $10 or $100. If the idea succeeds, you will get back the original $10 plus the interest.

SCOTT: Let's look at a sample listing, the one with the headline, "Daugter needs to take summer college classes Max State Int."

WEB: http://prosper.com/lend/listing.aspx?listingID=124674

They misspelled "daughter." Here, the loan seeker states the purpose of the loan, an explanation of why she needs the financial help, and a monthly budget to show how she will repay it.

MODERATOR: This is an amazing page we are looking at here. It contains a vast amount of information about this person, her finances, and her project.

SCOTT: On the home page, there are links to news stories about Prosper. There have been some investigative studies of it, too. The basic story is that there's no collateral for these loans, and there's a very, very low default rate.

PETER: But it's just been around for a year, so there really hasn't been time to default on it.

SCOTT: Well, thus far, the concept appears to be working. I just want to use this as an example. I'm not necessarily giving it an endorsement.

MODERATOR: This is quite a bit more elaborate than some simple social networking pages that just have contact info. This is a very detailed financial profile.

SCOTT: But it is still social networking. Click on the "Groups" tab from the home page.

WEB: http://www.prosper.com/groups/

SCOTT: This shows borrower and lender groups. You can create your own group or join an existing group. People with similar interests come together. For example, there is a group called "Apple User Group" with 378 members for people who want to finance the purchase of a new Mac computer. Each member can get a 5 percent discount. The group has negotiated a discount from Apple. This is social networking at a higher level than just making an over-the-web connection and having 30,000 friends on MySpace.

This is also an example of microlending, which we will cover more in depth during a future Coolhunt.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced.

MODERATOR: Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #5
Friday, April 20, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Renaud Richardet, software developer with the Condor software program
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: I'm Steve O'Keefe, and welcome to the Coolhunt for Friday, April 20, 2007. Joining us today we have a special guest, Renaud Richardet, developer of the Condor software project. He's also a colleague of Scott and Peter.

MODERATOR: The coolhunt consists of one site review, one blog post, one comment on another's post, and one personal connection via email or phone. Please introduce yourself and tell us where you're calling from.

RENAUD: I'm calling from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I met Scott working on this project.

SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in MA. I'm going to let Renaud speak for himself but I'll introduce something that's essential to the Coolhunting book. We use a software called TeCFlow for graphs to show social networking at http://www.ickn.org/ickndemo. It's downloaded for free and shows the temporal communications connections among people. We'll begin our Coolhunt today at Galaxy Advisors, which is an association of a bunch of coolhunters -- a swarm of creative people.

WEB: http://www.galaxyadvisors.com

MODERATOR: The software shows a great many maps that look similar to the zodiac or constellations. Those with us today can follow along online.

RENAUD: At galaxyadvisors, the first part of the process is entering data into the software in different formats such as HTML.

MODERATOR: So you're importing large quantities of info?

RENAUD: When you think of 3 million emails, it's scary. So when we analyzed the emails from Enron, we only looked for the messages where people are talking about fraud. This helps you to "find the needle in the haystack."

SCOTT: In our book we actually report on the outcome of the research that Renaud just described. People are familiar with the Enron accusation and their claims against it. Analysis of these emails show a direct connection between the perpetrators of the fraud in California with Ken Lay by searching on words such as "affair," "investigation," and "disclosure."

MODERATOR: Were your results ever involved in the trial?

SCOTT: No, or at least they were not mentioned in open court or entered into transcripts. But economists hired to get people out of trouble do use such software as Condor.

RENAUD: Research of such documents does reveal the usefulness of Condor. Also, Condor can be used to enter web pages instead of just email for search purposes. You can graph the information as nodes (web pages) and lines (hyperlinks). We focus primarily on links between web pages and email instead of focusing on text as with Google. Text is more used for web page searches. For example, with blogs we look for who started the buzz, the subject -- regardless of what subject it is.

SCOTT: This not only spots the trends but the trendsetters.

RENAUD: We have a server version to help users explore coolhunting. On the first page of the Condor viewer we have probable searches. Click on Show Me to see three graphs. The first graph you see is what we call the galaxy. We have pre-searched all the important information. The graph is balanced with a layout algorithm. You can see the largest nodes are the search engines, Wikipedia, along with other pages such as HillaryClinton.com, .org, etc. It's counting a subset of the net. Instead of Google's search for text, we focus more on the social network, for instance, who links to Hillary Clinton?

SCOTT: Why would some of these sites come up? Why would zazzle.com come up? Why Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com)?

RENAUD: Because of the connection with Amazon.com and HillaryClinton.com. Maybe zazzle.com prints t-shirts for hillaryclinton.com?

MODERATOR: Let's take a look at IMDB. Open a new window to go to IMDB.com.

WEB: http://www.imdb.com

SCOTT: Now type in Hillary Clinton.

RENAUD: If you search Hillary Clinton on IMDB you find actors by this name and references to movies. We're trying to bring users the most interesting information.

MODERATOR: It seems that very high traffic sites often show up, correct?

RENAUD: Yes, because many people link to IMDB. Google shows that the more links to a page, the more important the page. The more a page is linked between other pages, the higher the "betweeness." If Alex and Clara need to talk to Bob to get each other's phone numbers, Bob is very important because he is between them. When pages are needed to connect other pages, they are "in between" those other pages. And the more betweeness, the more pertinent the pages.

MODERATOR: Does the relative size of the nodes on the graph relate to betweeness? Or the distance?

RENAUD: The size of dots shows betweeness, how central the page is in the web, in the network. We are working on software that will remove certain sites from the list we track -- such as search engines -- that are distorting the linkage analysis.

SCOTT: Renaud, could you speak of how coolhunters could use this in a more sophisticated hunt such as when others communicated, how they communicated, and about what they communicated?

RENAUD: In Finland, we just finished a project where we did just that. We were able to create another view of an organization's clustering, representing someone's position in the circle, so top management could see who is networking, who is talking to one another.

SCOTT: And this has all sorts of implications for companies such as if people function as stars or galaxies.

SCOTT: In the book "Coolhunting," we discuss an experiment with a cell phone company that wanted to determine what features or technology of a phone were the most important to users, which bells or whistles were embraced by the community. It was a relatively small group of about 17 phones being giving out to people with some broad social class network. These college kids were given free phones with the understanding that the telecom company could track their use. It wasn't the content of their conversations that was tracked but rather which services they used and how long they used the services such as call waiting, soccer scores, etc. to discover the social networks involved. Therefore, the company could better market their phones to the right customer community.

MODERATOR: Is the software free?

SCOTT: Yes, you can download a trial version at the TeCFlow website.

WEB: http://www.ickn.org/ickndemo

RENAUD: We plan to improve the relevance of the data returned. You'll be able to search for which blogs talk about your topics of interest, and blogs that are in between other blogs.

SCOTT: Since we have a few more minutes, I'd like Renaud to talk about the website Digg.

WEB: http://www.digg.com

RENAUD: Let's go digging. This is the prototype of a new kind of site where people can spread the word about cool sites they find. You can see a list of popular sites on the left side. When a page has enough diggs it's promoted to the front page. We don't have CNN or Google telling us what's cool; it's actually the web and it's people telling you what's cool.

SCOTT: If you comment on a blog, you only reach the people who read that blog. But if you "digg" the blog -- that is, alert people on Digg to the blog by tagging it or "digging it," others might find it.

RENAUD: Digg being part of this Web 2.0 move is getting important with non-techie people.

MODERATOR: I thought the Galaxy site was cool, but how do you digg it?

RENAUD: Go to the top right to Submit a New Story link. The site is so popular that you have to register to create an account.

MODERATOR: It's a fairly simply process. I'm going to fill in the fields to see if I can digg. I've registered so now I could probably add a story -- which is how you "digg" a site -- by "adding a story."

RENAUD: I'm actually adding a story right now.

MODERATOR: I'm back at the home page where the number of diggs on the top story has doubled in the last 5 minutes, while email postings tripled.

RENAUD: I would like to show you how this page is going to be digged. Search for "online coolhunting." They have done an incredible job on bringing meaningful links to the front page and keeping the site clean and pertinent to relevant pages.

MODERATOR: These diggs represent selfless behavior to provide information. I'm going to sum up the coolhunt. Today we visited galaxyadvisors, IMDB, and Digg.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Renaud and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt or any connection problems you experienced.

MODERATOR: Join us Monday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #4
Thursday, April 19, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper.

SCOTT: I thought we would start today at the Creative Commons website. It's not a blog, but it is a starting point for what we talked about yesterday. We wound up at a website called freebeer.org and we talked about a group of people in Denmark who had developed a recipe for beer. It's not just a copycat of Budweiser. For instance with Mozilla's Firefox, where anyone has access to the source code and can essentially innovate on top of that.

WEB: http://www.creativecommons.org

MODERATOR: And develop a better recipe.

SCOTT: Or a different recipe. The idea is that everything is shared and credit is given where credit is due. But the motivation is to build the best mousetrap, not necessarily to make money. So the beer is really analogous to that and we looked at all sorts of beer. On the Free Beer website, there's a link to Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a very interesting concept. This is essentially the legal website for the notion of just what it says on the top: "Share, reuse, and remix -- legally." It's a way to let authors, artists, and creators of intellectual content actually produces legally viable documentation that allows an artist the sort of open source equivalent in writing, codified in contractual-type language that typical copyright and patent holders hold. This is speculative on my part, but I believe one of the objectives is to legitimize this kind of sharing within the framework of the proprietary world. In other words, to make it easier to relax the rights on certain works and to encourage the kind of works you're talking about. And to destroy that regime from within. This is what the Worker's Movement used to talk about in the 1860s.

The reality is that if you're going to do something in an open source way, you don't really need this kind of legal documentation. You just have to trust that the people who are going to use it are going to use it in the ways you stipulate.

MODERATOR: I do have some questions about Creative Commons. Is this a place where I bring content and choose from a menu of rights alternatives and more or less stamp my content with that?
SCOTT: What you can do is go to this website and apply for a Creative Commons license to a work. So people register their (mostly) online and some offline work here. Then you can come and ask to license the online work or whatever work it is. And essentially, you get a Creative Commons license, which is based on copyright, but the difference is the Creative Commons copyright allows you to do all types of things that typical copyrights don't allow you to do. It allows you to treat the work as if it were not copyrighted.

MODERATOR: Are there any big corporations who have decided to rescind their rights on information and to allow it to be copyright-free through Creative Commons?

SCOTT: It's mostly smaller enterprises, but there are examples of companies doing similar things. For instance, not too long ago IBM released a whole slew of its software, relinquished 500 patents in 2005, and proposed a patent commons for royalty-free, open source software development. What IBM did was give it away, seeding the initiative. They identified 500 U.S. patents (or its counterparts in some other countries) in the beginning of 2005, and basically said, "Do what you want with this. We want to establish this platform for people to do what they want with these patents we've developed." In the world of business journalism, and reasonable people who can speculate reasonably, IBM released stuff that would not hurt its profit making venture. While that's probably true, I don't think it minimizes the significance.

MODERATOR: It was fair to say it was a cautious first step, but definitely more than some companies have been known to do: When forced to reveal source code, some companies basically put junk out there that makes it very difficult to use the code.

SCOTT: Right, that's a good point. I think what IBM is doing is certainly in the spirit that's becoming part of the innovation world. Part of unleashing the power of collaboration by putting out there the problems that they're trying to solve and sharing with the swarm everything that they have thus far in their attempts to solve the problem and have whomever happens upon it try to help, where companies actually post problems and offer tens of thousands of dollars to those who can help fix the problem. For example, Innocentive.

WEB: http://www.innocentive.com

MODERATOR: "Innocentive," sort of like innovation and incentive mashed up. I'm there. It has a lovely little atomic logo.

SCOTT: This was started by a pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilley. It's now in lots and lots of industries. You can see right there on the front page how it works. A company posts a challenge. Such as this one, searching for a synthetic root in organic chemistry. If you can do it, $40K is waiting for you.

MODERATOR: People are offering financial incentives to solve problems.

SCOTT: Exactly. What this is illustrating is sort of the breakup. These are all part of a piece even though Creative Commons is not exactly the same. They're all showing breaking up the monolithic black box problem solving or innovation. There are a lot of famous examples of people from the most unexpected places winning the prize. I remember something like a schoolteacher in rural Australia won $50K for solving a problem that the scientists hadn't been able to crack. A guy teaching at a third-rate university in Kazakhstan solved a chemistry problem.

MODERATOR: The Wall Street Journal had an article about a million-dollar prize and a Russian youth solving an "unsolvable" math problem. He declined the prize! What I think came out of your book for me is that companies benefit and society benefits when people stop holding their knowledge so closely and instead toss it to the wind and see what happens. Is that a fair summary?

SCOTT: Yes, that really is what Peter and I think and we've taken this idea further. We've got an article in the current issue of Sloan Management Review called "The New Principles of the Swarm Business" where we've taken some of our ideas in Coolhunting and gone even further and tried to apply the principles of coolhunting and cool farming to how a business in the future might best succeed. The three principles are: 1) Gain power by giving it away, 2) Share with the swarm, and 3) Concentrate on the swarm, not on making money. The idea is that you should innovate and share, and you probably will end up making a lot of money. It's almost Zen-like.

MODERATOR: That's interesting. What you're providing is evidence.

SCOTT: The development of the World Wide Web is a good example. It happened in all the ways of coolhunting, one of which was the people who propelled it forward did so with the motivating factor of wanting to see the idea to its fruition. They're all worth a lot of money now.

MODERATOR: Is it possible to drill through this site to see how this meeting of problems and solutions happen?

SCOTT: Sure.

MODERATOR: There's a section for seekers who have problems and solvers who have solutions. Which side would you like to drop in on?

SCOTT: It tells you what Innocentive can do for you. If you want to see what the actual challenges are, you go to Innocentive Challenges on the menu.

MODERATOR: This is also a networking site as well.

SCOTT: I think it might be interesting to continue with this thread and go to a site called Rite Solutions.

WEB: http://RiteSolutions.com

SCOTT: This company has a kind of innocentive internally. We're seeing this more and more as well. It's an internal idea and prediction market that they call "Mutual Fun." They call it a marketplace to harvest collective genius. Basically, people who work there are given $10K in pretend money to invest in ideas that employees float on this market. One is for emerging technologies; it's called the SpazDaq. Technologies outside the company might acquire. "BOW JONES" is for products they might consider doing themselves. Savings Bonds are ideas for saving money or making the company more efficient internally. Anyone who works at Rite Solutions can come up with stock. The basis is their collective intelligence about whether or not they think the ideas are good. What Rite Solutions has done is throw out the ideas to everyone and see what people think about it, but they're not necessarily shopping for the solution but shopping for the collective intelligence of their employees to see if it makes sense to invest real money. What do people think about the ideas? They create an "expectus" instead of a prospectus. People review that. There's a ticker that scrolls across all the computer screens in the company in real time. They gauge the direction of the senior managers from gathering this collective intelligence.

MODERATOR: Why do you think that the addition of an exchange or more or less a gambling-style interface would encourage this sharing of knowledge in a way that not having that structure doesn't?
SCOTT: I think part of it is that it's fun to do it this way. If Peter were on the call, he'd use his standard phrase, "It always makes a difference if you have skin in the game." I think what Rite Solutions has done is create a way of having skin in the game that doesn't cost anyone anything but has real potential economic benefits. What we don't know about specifically is the degree to which if the prediction works correctly and they end up making a business decision that turns out to be tremendously profitable how the originator of the idea benefits, but I have no doubt that they do -- financially.

MODERATOR: Is there a certain threshold number of people who have to play in order to get the results that are statistically relevant as opposed to just a couple of employees?

SCOTT: I think Rite Solutions has a lot more employees. I think there's a high level of participation. I don't have a specific number, but definitely the more the merrier -- especially when the swarm comprises knowledgeable, smart people who are innovators and have specific knowledge.

MODERATOR: It looks like they have created a variety of games that they market to companies who want to pull out the marketing consciousness of their employees.

SCOTT: These are not just for their own employees. They create collaborative games that their customers use.

MODERATOR: This is very interesting. There's been quite a bit of research in gaming and how game theory plays in terms of business development. It's sounding like what Coolhunting is telling us is that when you play the game by giving away and spreading it around, those are the people who win the game.

SCOTT: That's a very good point. If people want to read more about mutual fun, they can go to businessinnovationfactory.com. There's a search function. Put in the name of the CEO of Rite Solutions, Jim Lavoie. One of the articles is called "Stories of Innovation" and it's about Lavoie creatively inspiring employees as a source of innovation.

MODERATOR: I have a side segue here, about something in the news today. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal commenting on an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Isn't that the same issue your article is published in?

SCOTT: Yes.

MODERATOR: Four marketing experts at MIT's Sloan School of Management found that companies often didn't understand how consumers were using their products. When they actually looked at how, they found out different information than what they originally thought -- basically, finding the right job for your product.

SCOTT: They're actually not MIT researchers, but it was published in the MIT magazine. They are Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma and instructor at Harvard Business School, Scott Anthony, President of Innosite (Clayton's consulting company), Gerald Berstel, a researcher in Chicago, and Denise Howell, another researcher in Chicago.

MODERATOR: This strikes me as dovetailing very nicely with what you've been talking about in that they quote Peter Drucker: "The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells them."

SCOTT: I think more businesses are figuring this out. Peter and I have written about some interesting ideas. I recently did some research for some MIT researchers. Design-inspired innovation in which he discusses a very interesting example of this, Lego. Lego was really hurting a few years ago, but reinvented themselves, and in some ways financially saved the company. Customers can go to the Lego website and design their own product. We give you the customer, the platform is the ubiquitous Lego block. "User-driven innovation" is what the scholars are calling it.

MODERATOR: In your book, you mention the 3M company and a study that was done there. Customer suggestions were 80% more profitable than those of the designers working at the company.

SCOTT: Yes, something along those lines. I'm trying to remember the exact number.

MODERATOR: It seems to suggest, "fire the designers and hire your customers and you will have a more profitable operation." I know it's not that simple but it's an interesting study, certainly. It questions what it means to be an expert. Whether expertise or being able to tap a hive is more valuable.

SCOTT: It's really a hot topic right now. It goes under a lot of other names. Eric von Hippel at MIT, author of Democratizing Innovation, pointed out that if you put "user-driven innovation" into Google, you get quite a number of hits.

MODERATOR: That terms sounds like an individual thing. But what you're talking about in the book is letting hundreds or thousands of users interact with each other.

SCOTT: Our focus is much more on how swarms of people interact to create innovation. We use all sorts of examples all the way back to our consummate "cool farmer," Benjamin Franklin. If there were a tagline for our book, it would be "More Ben Franklins!"

MODERATOR: In many senses of that word. He's on the $100 bill, isn't he? "It's all about the Benjamins." In your case, it's all about the Benjamins in the role of cool farmer.

SCOTT: A cool farmer is someone who takes our idea of coolhunting and plays a more proactive role. If a coolhunter is someone who zeroes in on ideas and finds someone responsible for the idea and watches them and figures out how to find what's going to become the next big thing, the cool farmer is someone who immerses himself in the swarm and plays the role of promoting swarm creativity. He personally engages in creating the idea of what's cool through collaborative innovation, but really tries to make something happen without playing a starring role. The key point is that, in order to function best in these networks and come out at the other end, you have to function like a galaxy.

MODERATOR: You're asking people to give up any financial and power motivation, and if they do this they will have more power and more stature.

SCOTT: For cool farming, we've identified four principles that we think explain what it means to be a cool farmer. One is power by giving it away -- most important -- you gain your power from sharing the power and we're talking about ethically used power, not raw power.

MODERATOR: A more successful designer is able to tap the hive of the customers, not necessarily the one who has the training of a designer.

SCOTT: A good example is the inventor of the Linux operating system. He gives credit to all fellow Linux programmers and doesn't take credit for himself. Or Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, where his ideas became the ideas of the entire group. He is an icon today for all manners of things by virtue of the way he did things. He gave his inventions away. He didn't patent them.

MODERATOR: We've talked about the young mathematician giving up his award, Ben Franklin giving away his patents, and IBM releasing 500 patents into public domain. These things resulted in significant improvements for not only companies and individuals but for society as well.

SCOTT: The Creative Commons site is a good example of this concept of sharing. It shows projects under development. It would take anyone listening in a while to read through this, but I do recommend taking a look at Meta data lab. It's a fascinating concept of how to create the conditions and how to get attributions for the work you do -- in a scientific context -- but share what you know. We talked about an initiative putting together a bunch of labs to share the data on the outbreak of SARS in a way that enabled much faster ideas of solutions than what could possibly have happened under the proprietary system. The global outbreak alert and response network, part of the World Health Organization, got a dozen labs from a dozen countries and linked them together during the period when they were trying to control an outbreak, and virtual networks allowed them to share whatever information they had. These labs, by working together, very quickly enabled a whole bunch of pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that helped in the outbreak in virtually no time at all.

MODERATOR: In web development, when you adhere tags to content, it makes the content more searchable and easier to find. Is this meta lab about developing tags?

SCOTT: This is really about sharing meta data in all sorts of situations. If you take the meta data as data that's used to describe other data, this is a way to share the mash-ups, the amalgams of data that give people the ability to know where to look for the information that they need in a much faster way. One of the things that slows down scientific research is that people are working on similar things, but they don't always share quite the right stuff even when they do share.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog -- whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt.

MODERATOR: Join us on Friday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Coolhunt Log #3
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

On Stage:
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor.

MODERATOR: Concluding yesterday's coolhunt, I posted a comment on Steve Rubel's blog, micropersuasion, and I sent email to feedback@whiissick.com and to Jack Dorsy and Biz Stone, the founders of Twitter, to let them know we coolhunted them. A reminder to listeners that a coolhunt consists of: one site review, one blog posting, one blog comment, and one personal connection via email or Skype or phone.

MODERATOR: Peter, where are you taking us today?

PETER: I want to talk about social networks on the web and how these sources can be analyzed today. I would like to start with a nice example of how a social network can be used: They Rule.

WEB: http://www.theyrule.net

PETER: Using TheyRule, you can see how companies are connected by their directors. In a study of the six degrees of separation, Stanley Milgram, a researcher from the Midwest, had people send letters to friends who then forwarded the letters to their friends to prove that it never took more than six steps to connect any one person in the United States with any other person in the United States.

PETER: TheyRule shows the connection between any two companies as far as directors go. Proctor and Gamble is the connector between Amazon and Viacom by four connections by their directors.

SCOTT: The creators of the website chose to use a verbal rule to make the connections. They seem to be showing who are the unelected rulers of the U.S.

PETER: If you would take the names shown you could probably get actual rulers of the U.S.

SCOTT: The Ruling Class. This site shows basically the same thing as Six Degrees of Separation in the way of company directors.

PETER: It's a fully automated way to determine a business' social network. It's an extremely powerful tool to find those who have influence. It also shows the concept of "betweeness." If a person has only two friends he's not very well connected unless the two friends are well connected, giving a high level of betweeness. As another example, let's go to Centrality. This site shows all sorts of relationships, i.e., someone who is highly central to a network.

WEB: http://www.centralityjournal.com

SCOTT: Many of the ideas on the opening page of this website are central to concepts in our book.

MODERATOR: It says "Visible Path" at the top of the page. Is that the name of the company?

PETER: Visible Path is software used by social network researcher bloggers. Visibile Path is the platform, but they are also partners in this site.

PETER: The leading names in social network analysis contribute to this site all the time. The third post is from Stan Wasserman, who wrote the classic textbook, "Advances in Social Network Analysis." He is one of the chief scientists of Centrality. In his post here, he's talking about Duncan Watts who was one of the handful of people who discovered the "small world network" reapplying the 6 degrees of separation to the Internet.

SCOTT: Watts has an online experiment designed to prove 6 degrees of separation. It's located at http://www.smallworld.columbia.edu. You can sign up at this website to begin your own chain to experiment on the 6 degrees concept.

PETER: Even at 4 billion people worldwide, there still are only 6 degrees of separation because of the Internet. We are living in a small world because of people who are vastly more connected than the rest of us. Whereas most of us have connections with several hundred people, some people are atypical with 5,000 to 6,000 connections with others.

SCOTT: If someone signs up on this website, you're given a tutorial to begin your own experiment. It walks you through to try to make a connection with one other person. It gives you the profiling information you need to make the connection, explaining how this "small-world" concept works. This is really central to our ideas of connection.

PETER: In his book, "The Tipping Point," Malcolm Gladwell talks about three types of people: Mavens, Sales People, and Connectors. "Connectors" have atypically large numbers of friends.

PETER: Steve's questions: What brings us together? You can use a physician in Bombay to connect you with a physician in Boston.

MODERATOR: What makes a connector? What do you know about that atypical person? What percentage of the population are these atypical people?

PETER: Those people usually are gregarious, outgoing, open to new things. "The Tipping Point" doesn't really address the characteristics of connectors in a rigorous, scientific way. Gladwell just describes them in terms of how they handle a large number of friends. The atypical person could bridge a "structural hole" between different groups of people. These are the "gatekeepers" who connect everyone. They represent a small percentage of the population--probably less than 1% are these atypical connectors.

MODERATOR: You show a connection between connectivity and business prosperity. Should employers be screening job applicants for this trait?

PETER: To a certain extent it's already happening with sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., which replay social networking concepts to see how well others are connected. Network position correlates very strongly with business success. But not all connections work in all businesses. But the "betweeness" matters quite a lot. In Boston we looked at research and communications, finding that the more researchers spoke with competitors, the more successful they were.

SCOTT: In our book we discuss how Eclipse open source software developers interacted. One could predict which teams would be the higher performers because of sharing, high number of connections, etc.

PETER: The measure of success was not for dollars but for how many new features they implemented (innovation) and how quickly they fixed errors (efficiency). Another project at MIT shows that branches of banks that are better connected (according to an analysis of email patterns between employees) are more profitable.

MODERATOR: So you're saying that it's better for companies to release their secrets rather than hide them. Do you think if Coca-Cola released their famous secret recipe for Coke, we'd all be enjoying an improved beverage as a result?

SCOTT: Absolutely. Better products would result based on information sharing.

PETER: I don't know about Coca-Cola, but we can look at someone who has done something exactly like what you are describing--the Free Beer site from Denmark.

WEB: http://www.freebeer.org/blog/

PETER: This site was started by a microbrewery. They made their recipe freely available on the web, and allowed other people to use their name, FREE BEER, and print bottle labels from the site, and innovate on the recipe. The original recipe, which most brewers closely guard, is now in the public domain.

SCOTT: At this site you'll see a long list of various free beers that have been built based on the initial recipe. Peter and I both became interested because of the open source idea, and because we like beer.

PETER: There are now FREE BEER breweries all over the world. You could even make a very nice living with such a project.

MODERATOR: This site is very visual, colorful--a real eye-opener.

SCOTT: And you can see the original recipe posted on the right side of the home page, along with brewing instructions. Just get the ingredients and follow the instructions. As long as you can become familiar with brewing technology and find a place, you can brew. This is equivalent to Mozilla putting Firefox code online. The concept is for users to share information.

MODERATOR: What about the well connected person--say, a hospital volunteer--who is not online. Do some connected people fall off the radar because their connectivity is hard to quantify?

PETER: The privacy issue is that some people may not want everyone to know exactly how connected they are. Also, if we restrict ourselves to analyzing only one means of communication such as email, we restrict our analysis of connectivity. One social networking study at the MIT Media Lab was based on free cell phones, and provided an amazing study into connectivity. Students agreed to carry the cell phones at all times, and we could track their movements 24 hours a day and see who they were connecting with. Of course, you can tell who is spending the night with whom--and that kind of information is very sensitive.

PETER: If you have great information, you can make all sorts of great predictions. Your network position is a great predictor of how successful you are. The online network of a person consists of different communication systems. There is already software out there where you have to opt in, promoting the discovery of degrees of separation. But this is content on people who have self-reported.

MODERATOR: Today, we visited TheyRule.net, CentralityJournal.com, SmallWorld.Columbia.edu, and Freebeer.org. I'd like to suggest that in a future show we explore other social networking sites such as MySpace. I'd also like to talk about sites like ZoomInfo, which appears to be a massive effort to cull the Internet looking for connections based on two variables: a person's name, and the company they work for.

PETER: Yes, yes. ZoomInfo is a great project to discuss.

PETER: This is an excellent example of a great network.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog--whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt.

MODERATOR: Join us tomorrow for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

After yesterday's coolhunt, I posted a comment to Steve Rubel's blog, micropersuasion, telling him that he was coolhunted and what we talked about.

I sent email to Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at Twitter to let them know we coolhunted their site.

I also sent email to "feedback@whoissick.com" to let Who Is Sick? know they were coolhunted and what we discussed.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Moderator

Coolhunt Log #2
Tuesday, April 17, 2007

On Stage:
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper.

SCOTT: I'm connecting from my home office in Massachusetts. I've just been working on a project involving using RFID tags on buildings to help guide tourists through European cities. The technology lets citizens decide what attractions people should see--not some agency.

MODERATOR: Scott, we look forward to a discussion of RFID tags at a future coolhunt. I'd like to update folks on the finishing work on yesterday's hunt.

MODERATOR: We posted the log, then we sent emails to six business and technology reporters at The New York Times to let them know we coolhunted the NYT Online and discussed their "most popular" box. We received a personal email back from one of the reporters at the NYT with comments on our hunt, but he doesn't want them made public. We also posted a comment to the TreeHugger blog, letting them know we used their thread as an example of citizen commentary on the news and its ability to help people with similar views connect with each other.

SCOTT: Newspapers are scrambling for readership and survival now. The truth is, they just don't know what to do with this new technology. Some day the home page of the New York Times might become user-specific (your priorities are reflected).

MODERATOR: Both Scott and Peter agree that having the front page of the New York Times Online reformat according to the popularity of stories is a bad idea. Scott mentioned that he doesn't want his daily paper to begin with news on Paris Hilton's latest exploits and Peter agreed. But having a newspaper that is elegantly customized for one's interests is a completely different matter.

PETER: I am involved with a $1 million Euro startup newspaper in Europe. The newspaper will be user-specified, both in print and online. I want to know what the crowds think. Personalized newspapers could lose the ability to see what's important to the masses. Combining the two--a personalized paper that also contained new stories popular with the masses--would be the best of both worlds.

MODERATOR: Why aren't there any feedback threads attached to New York Times Online articles? Why did we have to travel to another blog to see commentary on a Times story?

PETER: There are feedback loops at the New York Times. The journalists have blogs.

SCOTT: There are two means of feedback at the Times Online: Letters to the Editor via an email address and feedback on the journalist's blog.

PETER: Wikipedia and the Times are the most heavily linked-to sites, quoted most often. The Times still dominates news, but not the way it used to.

SCOTT: There was a time when you had to be in The New York Times to be taken seriously. I spend an hour every morning reading newspapers from all over the world -- thanks to the web. Before the Internet, I had to rely on the large papers for news -- The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post--and international news always lagged behind. Now I have up-to-the-minute international coverage in addition to the Times.

PETER: Yes, I read The New York Times Online first every day, then my Swiss daily paper, then Google News, which provides an amalgam of news stories that is inclusive of worldwide papers.

MODERATOR: The New York Times is still the fat pipe for news about our neighbors here and around the world due to their research capabilities. Let's move on to today's coolhunt.

SCOTT: I want to start today at micropersuasion--Steve Rubel's blog.

WEB: http://www.micropersuasion.com

SCOTT: Steve Rubel is an advertising executive. His blog covers subjects of how technology is revolutionizing marketing and public relations. Each day, he posts a brief but always wonderful set of links to articles. I find these link sets to be a good starting for finding articles on these topics. In fact, today already I have visited 30 articles online, starting from Steve Rubel's link set.

PETER: Steve's main post today [Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering] tells an interesting story about bloggers themselves. They might take over the world, true, but they often type faster than they think, or are careless with their posts. Rubel is apologizing for a Twitter entry that says he never reads PC Magazine--that he trashes it immediately. But the Twitter post didn't go on to include that he reads online version closely.


SCOTT: I know he does, because I've seen many links he's posted to articles in PC Magazine Online.

SCOTT: Twitter is a one-liner equivalent of blogs. Follow the link to Twitter from Rubel's blog.

WEB: http://twitter.com/steverubel/statuses/26737381

SCOTT: Twitter asks, "What are you doing right now" and you can answer using IM, or texting from a cellphone, or email, or at the website. It's a one-liner blog. People put up one line, and it links to a list of one liners. Click on the image or Rubel at Twitter and you'll get a list of his Twitter entries. There are about a dozen in just the last few days.

PETER: Maybe we should talk about Twitter on a future show. You wanted to take another story from Steve Rubel's blog, right Scott.

SCOTT: Yes. Let's go back to the Micropersuasion blog. In the post entitled "Links for 4/17/2007," take the second link to Who Is Sick?

WEB: http://whoissick.org/sickness/

SCOTT: Who Is Sick? is similar to something called HealthMap, which is run by the Children's Hospital Informatics Program in association with Harvard University and MIT. We'll come back to HealthMap. Let's look at Who Is Sick? (WIS?)

SCOTT: Who Is Sick? is a map of user-reported illnesses. The founder of WIS? was on vacation when his wife came down with bad stomach pains. Suspecting it might be appendicitis, they went to the local hospital where they waited for 4 hours to see a doctor. The doctor came in and said there was a bad case of the stomach flu going around. The husband thought, "Wouldn't it have been nice if I could have looked online and seen that people in this area were reporting stomach flu?" So he built WIS? to show what's going around. He was inspired by Craigslist and the HousingMaps websites. HousingMaps is a mash up of Google Maps and Craigslist items. It's one of a series of mash-ups of maps and other data.

SCOTT: It seems silly to log in, say where you are, and what ails you: "I'm not feeling very well tonight. I might have a fever." But Peter and I talk about Collaborative Innovative Networks (COINs) in our book, and this is how they start.

PETER: The categories of illness at WIS? seem very simplistic. HealthMap is more rigorous--tracking outbreaks of infectious diseases.

SCOTT: Let's go to the HealthMap site now.

WEB: http://healthmap.org/

[Both Peter and Steve (the Moderator) had trouble connecting to the site.]

SCOTT: "It doesn't work well with Firefox, so I'm looking at it in Safari."

PETER: "I can't get Safari to work either."

STEVE: "It wouldn't work in Firefox on a Mac, so I tried Internet Explorer on a Mac and that's not working either."

PETER: "Explorer for the Mac is not supported any longer."

[Neither Peter nor Steve could access the page -- except through a Google cache that did not have the interactive map. Scott narrated a trek through the HealthMap site. ]

SCOTT: From the map, you pick a state. I'm picking Montana. On the map I see an outbreak icon. I scroll over to see the term: neurovirus. I click on the disease and get a report from the Billings Gazette, via Google News, about a past outbreak in Montana. The reports can come from any kind of news source -- not just the Center for Disease Control data.

SCOTT: This is an example of using the web in innovative ways. The possibilities are tremendous. WIS? represents how individuals are tinkering in their biotech version of a garage. Interesting experiments in innovation. But there are still a lot of bugs to work out.

SCOTT: Let's go back to Who Is Sick? and click "We're on TV." That links to the blog. This project is really in it's formative stages. Look at the discussion group for runny noses--it's full of spam.

PETER: You can see how data like this can be mined by pharmaceutical companies for drug inventory management. And also for finding out how people are self-treating diseases. One of the biggest uses for the web is gathering health information. For any thinkable disease, you can connect with other sufferers in self-help groups that span the globe. Who Is Sick? is at a simple level with simple ills.

PETER: I'm looking at how much coughing and how many runny noses are in Cambridge, Mass. I entered my zip code in the search box. There are 12 cases reported over the last 8 weeks. That can't possibly be accurate. The data is only as good as the people who report. The site starts with a map of San Francisco, probably because they are getting the highest number of reporters from that area.

MODERATOR: How can you trust the information online if the results are skewed by pharmaceutical companies spamming the discussion thread or making false reports?

PETER: It is unfair to blame the pharmaceutical companies for the spam. It's mostly for Viagra and other sex drugs. I don't think the pharmaceutical companies would engage in that kind of spamming. They are looking for accurate information, too. WIS? needs a moderated discussion forum. Look at WebMD, or the new health venture started by AOL founder Steve Case; they are thoroughly moderated and they check credentials. The quality of information on such sites is much, much better. Using statistical analysis on the results for Cambridge runny noses at WIS?, the result would probably not be statistically significant.

SCOTT: One of the pitfalls of healthcare on the web--or anything on the web--is the risk that what you see is not legitimate. Anyone with a PC can look like a big company.

PETER: Problem with bad advice is found online everywhere. How do we know which site is reliable? The wisdom of crowds will result in a stamp of approval for certain sites. Open Directory Project is a good place to start looking for quality sites. They use people to rate websites. Crowds rating websites result in even better accuracy.

WEB: http://www.dmoz.org

SCOTT: Don't confound the presence of crowds with wisdom. In "Coolhunting," we have a chapter on when crowds go bad. People sometimes do terrible and stupid things. Unleashing the power of collective intelligence offers the opportunity to have a wonderful result. But it doesn't mean the result will be wonderful. Swarms are more likely to have really great results.

PETER: It's not just how many bees, but finding the right bees--the leader bees, role models, with good ethics. People will follow good leaders. Numbers of the swarm don't tell the story. Who is in the swarm? Find the Ben Franklins as we discuss in our book--the coolfarmers who foster these collaborative innovative networks, or COINs.

SCOTT: Here's an example from the book. We tracked 100 Israeli software start-ups for 5 years, beginning in 1999 and including the dot-com bubble burst. The companies that survived had leaders that networked most with their competitors. All the companies were part of the original swarm. If the swarm had been led by non-networkers, the survival outcome would have likely been different. By giving away power, they became leaders of the swarm, and networked well enough to survive tough times.

PETER: Behaving in an ethical way usually leads to better results.

PETER: I'm very interested in the subject of network structure. Properties of networks can be correlated with outcomes. It's not just knowing who survived; it's being able to *predict* who will survive. We're looking for networking patterns that predict positive outcomes. It has to do with something I call "betweenness": How between other people are you? How powerful are the people you are between? We call this work Social Network Analysis.

SCOTT: A great topic for another show.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter and Scott. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog--whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt.

MODERATOR: Join us on Wednesday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

In completing Monday's coolhunt #1, we sent email to half a dozen business and technology journalists at The New York Times to inform them they were coolhunted and what we discussed. Here are the six journalists we pitched:

Saul Hansell - Technology
Bob Tedeschi - Ecommerce
John Schwartz - Internet Business
Connie Hays - Retail Ecommerce
Kevin McKenna - Circuits Editor
John Markoff - we are not worthy

We received a personal reply from one of the journalists who took issue with some of the statements from our Log. We hope he'll decide to post publicly here, so we can engage a little on those issues.

We also posted a comment to the TreeHugger Business & Politics blog, thus completing our mission of 1 site review, 1 post, 1 comment, and 1 connection. Our comment on TreeHugger was not only approved, but is featured today on the front page of the Business & Politics blog.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Coolhunt Moderator

In the Business section of last Sunday’s New York Times (April 15, 2007, page 3), journalist G. Pascal Zachary has a “Ping” column titled “Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Parade” (read it here). In it, he develops the idea that our national origin not only has a lot to do with how a career in technology might develop, but also that there are some things about national origin that speak to the degree to which we may be innovative.

Zachary’s column follows on the heels of his Februay 11, 2007 “Ping” column titled “When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny” (read it here). His latest, though, gets personal.

Zachary argues that if you are from a given country, you are most likely to think about innovation in a certain way. He admits the stereotypes are “crass” but states that he is reycling them “in the service of a better understanding of how innovation works.”

So, how does it all play out? If you’re Chinese, you’ll likely be a copy-cat. If you’re French, you’re probably good at big innovations that require solid government backing (he uses the recent example of the world’s fastest train) but unlikely to be the sole proprietor of a software startup because the “French business system is constraining for individuals.” Germans “excel when they control all variables.”

Like all generalizations, Zachary’s is useful only to a point. To his credit, he gives examples of countries changing: Finland from an agricultural country to a global powerhouse in mobile phone technology; Ireland becoming “home to thriving clusters in electronics and pharmaceuticals.” But where Zachary really misses the mark is that he says nothing about the amazing power unleashed when people have unfettered access to knowledge.

We see swarms of creative people working across the globe, powered by their unfettered access to knowledge and connectivity through the Internet and Web, in industry after industry. The World Wide Web itself is the product of international cooperation among individuals motivated to push Tim Berners-Lee’s idea forward and make it a reality. Yes, each individual brought her or his national “traits” to the table, but connectivity and knowledge functioned as the great equalizer. It still does today in the collaborative innovation networks spanning the globe and coming together online. Connectivity and knowledge are great equalizers; they thwart cultural imperialism; they, for instance, allow the Japanese innovator to escape the restrictions of a culture that demands peer approval before promoting an idea (one of Zachary’s generalizations).

Zachary’s analysis simply omits a huge piece of the equation that explains why innovation is thriving across all the old boundaries, with swarms of people who would never have come together in the “off-line” world.

Coolhunt Log
Monday, April 16, 2007

On Stage:
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor.

PETER: I start my day with the New York Times online to sniff the latest trends.

WEB: http://www.nytimes.com

PETER: On the right side of the home page, scroll down until you see a box entitled "Most Popular." Today's most emailed article is "The Power of Green" by Thomas L. Friedman.

[Note: You must register at the New York Times Online to access some articles. Registration is free and fairly simple. Recent articles can often be viewed without registration--as was the case with the Friedman article on our coolhunt."

PETER: The article is about a cool trend: green technology.

Quote from Article: ". . . projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century."

PETER: We know this is a cool subject because so many people are interested in it. The New York Times has a large pool of readers. The box on the home page gives us a variety of information about what this swarm of readers considers important. "MOST E-MAILED" shows how people vote with their feet--the stories that were most important to them. "Most blogged about" tracks a more activist response to stories--people who cared enough to comment on the story. "Most searched" shows what people are looking for most at the New York Times.

SCOTT: And "sex" is at the top of the list. That's not surprising.

PETER: But "global warming" is at number five, so sex is not all they're interested in.

SCOTT: The power of tracking these trends cannot be overestimated. Online "chatter"--what the bloggers are saying, what people are searching for--is a very strong indicator of future trends. For example, the chatter online suggested that Barack Obama would be a major factor in the U.S. presidential campaign before the big name pundits caught on to it.

PETER: Exactly. We were approached by Fox Searchlight Pictures to do an analysis of what the chatter had to say about the Oscar-winning chances of two of their films, "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Little Miss Sunshine." They thought "The Devil Wears Prada" would have stronger buzz but, in fact, "Little Miss Sunshine" was getting more chatter online.

MODERATOR: Why doesn't the front page of The New York Times Online reformat automatically to give the most prominent space to the top stories?

PETER: Good question. Let's apply for a patent.

SCOTT: Media companies are still confused by the new technology and are running for cover. Their business is changing radically. News gathering is becoming the work of swarms: Wikinews, independent media, bloggers. Online journalists often have a stake in the stories they cover--they're not trying to be objective and they can be more passionate than the mainstream media.

SCOTT: In oldschool coolhunting, librarians used to report on the most asked questions or popular searches in The Reader's Guide to Periodicals. That's how we knew what people were interested in. Now, The New York Times emails a list of readers' top picks to me on a weekly basis. It's probably only a matter of time until the front page you see is the front page you want to see.

MODERATOR: I'm making a note to email someone at The New York Times and let them know we coolhunted them today and what we said about the popularity box.

PETER: I want to talk about popularity rankings like this and which works better: human-generated lists or machine-generated lists.

SCOTT: Technorati is the entryway to the blogosphere and reflects a huge volume of searches. Media outlets are now watching how the public reacts to the news, then modifying their coverage accordingly. It's an instant feedback loop that never existed before.

WEB: http://www.technorati.com

PETER: On the right side of the screen, you see top searches, and the list is similar to the New York Times list. In the center of the page, you may look at the most popular items in six categories: Videos, Music, Movies, Games, DVDs, and News. If you click on the News tab, you will see "The Power of Green" article is in the top 10 of most popular, with 68 links to the article. That's how Technorati determines the popularity of news stories--by the number of sites linking to the story. That's the same way Google News does it.

MODERATOR: Technorati top 10 was obviously updated within the last few hours, the New York Times top 10 was from yesterday. Speed is important in registering rank. Peter suggested that ranking algorithms most likely give weight to current stories over older ones. For example, coolhunters might be more interested in knowing what film topped the box office last week rather than what is the highest grossing film of all time or the highest grossing film in the last 45 minutes--either of which could be "most popular."

PETER: On the left side of the screen, you see something called "Top Tags." People tag content online with keywords, and Technorati searches for these tags to determine the subjects that come up most often. You can tag your own blog entries, or you can tag other content you come across, such as news stories.

PETER: The words under the heading "Top Tags" are called a "tag cloud." The relative size of the words indicates the popularity of the terms. Relative size also weights how current the posts are. Misspellings can result in tag errors, such as spelling "Barack Obama" without the "c."

SCOTT: Tagging is still in its primitive stages. Someone will soon come up with pattern recognition software that will make tagging look primitive.

PETER: We conducted a study to find out which was a more accurate method for determining the popularity of terms: human-generated or machine-generated. We compared the results at Slashdot, which relies on human tagging, and Digg, which uses machine analysis. The human-generated search worked better. Humans are still better filters than machines and the wisdom of crowds is still the best predictor of cool.

SCOTT: The machine can't tell if you're searching for Virginia Tech because of a shooting there or because you want the latest sports scores.

PETER: But the stories people link to get around that. One of the problems with machine search is synonyms and misspellings. Google uses synonym dictionaries to correct for misspellings and other problems.

SCOTT: People who don't search well could be missing things that people who don't post well put up. For example, if you're looking for the best peanut butter sandwich, you might miss a great post by someone who waxes poetic about Jif and Skippy but never uses the phrase "peanut butter" in his or her post.

PETER: It is a problem at times. The wisdom of crowds is superior to algorithms. People looking for financial advice have something in common besides the need for financial advice. You can build communities around commonalities in search.

MODERATOR: At this point, we used Google Blogsearch <http://blogsearch.google.com> to find blogs talking about Thomas Friedman's article, "The Power of Green." The top match was to a blog called "Treehugger," <http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/thomas_friedman.php> where the Friedman story topped the "Business + Politics" tab.

PETER: You see the typical blog process at work here, with long quotes from the article interspersed with remarks by the blogger [Lloyd Alter of Toronto]. Six comments follow.

SCOTT: Look what's happening here. Let's say you have an article about global warming. And someone comments that "we should do something about this." And someone sees that and responds, "I think we should do such and such." And someone else come on and says, "Here's how to do that." And then someone else comes on and says, "Hey, I'm already doing that, and here's how I did it." It's a way for people from all over the world to find each other and find solutions to common problems.

PETER: The wisdom of crowds.

SCOTT: Swarm creativity.

MODERATOR: We are out of time. Thank you very much. Listeners, please post your comments to the blog--whether they're about any connection problems you're experiencing or commentary on the subject of today's coolhunt.

MODERATOR: Join us Tuesday for the next installment of our live, online coolhunt with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper.

Thank you.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Rules for the Online Coolhunt Show:
(Updated April 13, 2007)

These are the rules the authors have accepted for their live coolhunt program, airing here every weekday at 2:00 p.m. ET USA beginning Monday, April 16 through Friday, May 11, 2007.

- Each coolhunt involves:

1 site review
1 blog post
1 comment
1 connection

The comment must be on a 3rd party blog or discussion group. We are helping link COINs, and should post about the hunt somewhere other than the site being reviewed or the authors' sites.

A connection is an attempt to link with a person behind the site being reviewed. This connection might be IM, e-mail, voicemail, Skype, etc. Coolhunting is about networking with people, not just sites or companies.

- Speakers are asked to e-mail target URLs for each day's cool hunt to the other speakers at least 10 minutes in advance of the show.

- Only 2.5 people on stage at once: Author + Author or Author + Guest. Moderator is 1/2.

- No overt selling of products or services during the hunt.

- You must finish the hunt. Even if the phone's not working and the Internet's not working, our coolhunters will make every effort to post a new coolhunt every weekday and to complete interrupted hunts as soon as possible.

- Priority is given to recruiting guests from the comment pool over outside guests who are not participating in the coolhunt. If you would like to be a guest on the program, please express your interest here on the blog.

NEWS RELEASE

(Boston, MA -- Monday, April 16, 2007) -- Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers will put their trend-sniffing skills to the test in the coming weeks as they invite the public to join them online for a live daily "coolhunt."

Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, both affiliated with MIT's Sloan School of Management, are co-authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Their publisher, AMACOM -- a division of the American Management Association -- is hoping an innovative marketing campaign will help tap the powerful social networks the authors describe in the book.

Gloor and Cooper are considered expert trendspotters. Coolhunting shares their research into the ways new ideas are discovered, tested, adopted, and spread. The authors have arrived at a set of principles that are forcing companies to reconsider how they invent products and reinvent themselves.

AMACOM has joined with online book publicity firm Patron Saint Productions to produce a live, daily "coolhunt" from April 16 - May 11. Each day at 2:00 p.m. ET in the USA, authors Gloor or Cooper will meet a moderator at the Swarm Creativity Blog . They'll launch a "coolhunt," surfing the web while describing the chase through through an audio connection to FreeConferenceCall.com. The results of each day's coolhunt are posted to the blog, where public input helps steer the coolhunters on their next expedition.

Would you like to join the coolhunt? You'll need a simultaneous phone + Internet connection. To access the audio feed, dial (712) 451-6100 and input Access Code: 596632#. These numbers are subject to change, so please check the blog for the latest access code. This is a free program but each caller is responsible for their own long distance phone charges.

If you experience any difficulties with the program, please post your feedback to the blog. We are trying something new, and we need your feedback to see how well it's working. Thank you!

Peter and I are excited to announce that our book Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing (published by Amacom) is now available. You can read more about it at the publisher's website.

Coolhunting is about finding great ideas that will become cool trends. We're not just talking about whatever is the fad of the moment or the hot product of the day, but about innovation that happens through swarm creativity. Coolhunting uncovers the Collaborative Innovations Networks that are the source of the best new ideas. We take this idea even further in our book to introduce the idea of coolfarming -- getting involved in the actual creation of trends by nurturing and cultivating new ideas. One of our main exemplars of a coolfarmer: Ben Franklin.

We've created a practical guide that teaches how to coolhunt and even offers access to free software that uses social network analysis to find the coolest ideas out there in the online world.

We hope you'll check out our book and let us know what you think. It's available from Amazon or at your local bookshop.

Waiting for my hair to be cut at the hairdresser today, I was reading an article in a German science magazine about happiness. The article was relying heavily on the world database of happiness, a research project at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The researchers found that the Danes and Swiss are the happiest people, while people in Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Tanzania are the least happy. Out of 95 nations assessed, the US, one of the wealthiest countries, only ranks 17th by happiness. Why?

While the per capita income in the US is even higher than that of Switzerland, the income is far less evenly distributed. With per capita income slightly below the US, Switzerland is still one of the wealthiest nations in per head income. The big difference to the US is that the income is more evenly distributed, and that Switzerland and Denmark take much better care of their underprivileged citizens. Switzerland even has some sort of negative income tax, where, if somebody has an income under the poverty level, not only do they not have to pay taxes, but they even can request additional compensation payments from the state.

The researchers found that as individuals we are happy if we can help other people, or express our gratitude to other people. Interestingly, after having reached a certain level of comfort, people do not get happier if they accumulate even more. Your average billionaire is not happier than a moderately well-off person! Generally people are happy if they have more than the people they compare themselves against. This explains why the Eastern Germans where happier before the Berlin wall came down. Compared to other Eastern Europeans in Poland, Bulgaria, etc., they were well off. After German unification, compared to their Western German cousins, although in absolute numbers Eastern Germans had more than before, in comparison they had much less.

The smaller the differences in happiness among different groups of the population, the happier the population is as whole. What this means is that a society that takes care of everybody as a whole is much happier. Taking care of the swarm is a good thing, also for the caretaker! She/he will be a much happier person that way!

Another reason for us Swiss to be happier than most is that we feel in charge. It seems that having control over our own destiny is one way of making us happier, and Switzerland has one of the most direct democracies, where citizens vote many times per year on the country, state, and town level on a plethora of subjects. Getting involved in the decision-making process is also a great way to get buy-in for unpopular decision.

Compared to the Swiss, the US democracy, where citizens can only elect people, but not influence actions directly, affords much lower levels of direct influence for an individual. Sure, I can write a letter to my senator, but there is no guarantee that she/he will vote in the Senate in my sense. In a direct democracy, I can take things in my own hands, vote the way I want, or even start a referendum to ask for a citizens’ vote on issues I want to get changed.

Conclusions for swarm businesses and collaborative innovation networks are obvious: take care of the swarm, delegate power to the swarm, let swarm members decide. This will lead to a happy and high performing swarm, and then you, as the instigator of the swarm will reach your goal and be happy, too.

Scott Cooper and my article "The New Principles of a Swarm Business" appeared today in the April 2007 Sloan Management Review. In this article we list principles of companies that have succeeded in creating and growing businesses by tapping into the power of swarms:
Principle 1: Gain Power by Giving it Away
Principle 2: Share with the Swarm
Principle 3: Concentrate on the Swarm, Not on Making Money

One of our favorite examples is largest Swiss retailer Migros. A few years ago Migros created a low-budget product line M-Budget, originally cannibalizing its own business, but eventually becoming a big success, even reaching cult (and cool) status among Swiss youth.

Todays NYT has an article about user driven innovation. Heavily quoting Erich von Hippel's work, the article describes physicians coming up with their own medical innovations, snowboarders refining their snow boards, and new tools for the hobby woodworker developed by the hobby woodworker.
It seems that Denmark, well known as the creator country of user driven Lego, wants to go the farthest, establishing user-driven innovation as a state policy. It is probably no coincidence that Nordic countries like Denmark live under the law of Jante: "Don't think you're anyone special or that you're better than us".
Taken to its extreme, Jante's law leads to a society preserving social stability and uniformity over fostering creativity and change. Within a COIN, however, it is an extremely fertile nurturing ground for innovation and creativity. This has been shown many times, most famously for the creation of the Web, and for groups of open source programmers such as the developers of the Apache Web server. These communities are not egalitarian, but a meritocracy, with a transparent and fluctuating leadership of the most capable. It is those most capable users who drive user driven innovation.

...while you shop. For avid clothing shoppers, todays New York Times describes the latest virtual/real mirror at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. A shopper stands in front of the mirror situated in the store, which doubles up as a large computer monitor. While the person looks in the mirror, other people make suggestions from an online dress inventory over the internet. The live shopper at Bloomingdale's can then view the suggested piece of clothing in the mirror, overlaid with her/his own image.
It seems it has become popular to ask for shopping advice by snapping a picture with a mobile phone camera and sending it to friends, before buying that expensive Gucci handbag. This virtual mirror takes the shopping experience one step further, blurring together the real and the virtual world. Shopping still is a social experience, even in the virtual world.

I stumbled into this NYT article about Danny Hillis – of Thinking Machines fame – latest startup, Metaweb Technologies. His goal is to create Freebase, a database that will describe things “how they are”. He wants, for example, to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger with different views as a bodybuilder, a movie actor, and a politician.

I am wondering if the approach of having a centralized system to describe "things how they are" will ever work. The point is that the same things can have very different meanings for different people. I just think back to the only time I visited East Berlin before the wall came down. I went to a bookstore and looked at schoolbooks talking about the second world war. The books were telling how the great and wonderful Soviet Union liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship. The US was barely mentioned. In the meantime I have been in now unified Berlin many times. But I can not find these books anymore in the regular bookstores.
The point is that depending on society, upbringing, ethical and moral system, etc. the same “facts” can be viewed 180 degree opposite. What is “way cool” to one group can be unacceptable to another group. How one can capture such divergent viewpoints in a single database I don’t know.

Of course, Wikipedia as a centralized repository describing “things how they are” comes immediately to mind. It seems, however, that Wikipedia reflects the viewpoint of well-educated, tech-savvy, Western, mostly liberal people – a small elite, who is unaware of the real problems of the world, as other groups coming from other parts of the World might say. Also, even in swarm-controlled Wikipedia there are “editing wars” on controversial topics such as “George W. Bush” or “abortion”, where editing access to these pages has to be controlled by editors.

Another famous earlier project that tried to capture the commonsense knowledge of the world in a centralized repository was CYC. It was started in 1984 by Doug Lenat, when artificial intelligence was seen as the holy grail of computer science. It describes knowledge in form of well-structured rules. But the problem is that knowledge changes so fast that the people capturing it for CYC were never able to keep up.

As a believer in swarm creativity and the “wisdom of crowds” I think that the decentralized and chaotic approach of the Web at large, with search engines on top to retrieve and access knowledge is a much more flexible way than having a centralized repository. Searching for controversial topics on the Web will bring up pages discussing it from all possible points of view from all walks of live and regions of the globe. I will be really curious to see how Danny Hillis will succeed in keeping up with change while capturing opposing viewpoints.

There is some turmoil right now among Wikipedia contributors about the fake identity of “essjay”. As the NYT reported a very active Wikipedian with the screen writer name of “essjay” had edited thousands of articles, pretending to be a tenured professor of religion at a private university, while in fact he was a 24 year old attending a number of colleges (as the NYT put it politely).

The revolt was not so much about essjay pretending to be somebody else – after all it is a well established, although as has just been shown wrong again, tenet of the Internet that nobody knows that you are a dog. Rather, what the Wikipedia community did not tolerate was to use the moral authority of essjay's assumed faculty position in disputes about content of the articles he was editing. While the community initially was supportive of essjay, once they found out that he was using his assumed role to corroborate his arguments, they became much less forgiving, and were asking essjay to resign. For example, defending an editing decision, essjay wrote “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.” This, unfortunately, was too much for the Wikipedian community to accept, and so essjay was hanged himself by his fake identify.



The lesson is simple: don’t pretend to be more than you are, at least not on the Web, because the Web’s transparency will bring out the truth, normally rather sooner than later.

Yesterday’s New York Times profiles Intrade.com, a prediction market and betting web site in Ireland. The article makes the point for the wisdom of crowds, where swarms of people putting their money where their mouth is are better in predicting outcomes of political elections than the official polls of TV stations and the like.
For example, in the 2004 presidential elections, Intrade correctly predicted the outcome in all 50 states. For the 2008 elections, bets are on…… Hillary Clinton and John McCain as the Democratic and Republican frontrunners (see Intrade snapshots of yesterday)





The article got me curious to see what the Web predicts. I ran a TeCFlow coolhunting query on the leading presidential contenders over the last 40 days. The results were somewhat different from Intrade:

The first point to notice is that there is no clear frontrunner, at least by Web buzz. Hillary is not doing too well, John Edwards is spoken about more, while Mitt Romney displays a weakness attack even after the day he officially announced his candidacy.
Looking at the snapshot picture of the movie showing the centrality of the candidates is a little bit more insightful:

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are all about similarly central, while John Edwards has a higher centrality value, he is not part of the central cluster. The "kingmaking" Web sites are still time.com, the New York Times, Ovaloffice2008, and blog search engine Technorati. All the candidates are eclipsed, however, by non-candidates Condoleezza Rice and Newt Gingrich.
Click here to see the QuickTime movie (8.6MB). (Explanation: the numbers behind the names of each candidate depict his/her centrality at any given point in time, the closer two candidates are located together on the screen, the stronger their connection.)

According to today's New York Times Indonesia stopped giving its samples of the H5N1 avian flu virus to the WHO, instead selling it to US vaccine company Baxter. Indonesia has had more lethal cases of avian flu than any other country, about 70 in total. In the past, samples have been given to the World Health Organization, which has passed them on to research labs and pharmaceutical companies. If Indonesia does not change its mind, only Baxter will get the chance to produce a vaccine against this strain of avain flu - swarm creativity gets no chance here!

In the past, hackers trying to discover potential security breaches and computer vulnerabilities did it for fame. Not anymore! A lively market has sprung up, where according to today’s New York Times, companies like iDefense Lab, a subsidiary of Verisign, pay $4000 to $8000 for each new discovery of a vulnerability. Russian hackers make enough money that way to pay for their tuition. In online forums and bulletin boards, COINs of hackers are discussing and exchanging ways of breaking into computer systems, and then selling their insights to the likes of iDefense Lab. They have converted from glory seekers to cash seekers. That’s not how COINs usually operate!

While shoppers might go to buy a jumbo pack of toilet paper and laundry detergent at Costco, the world’s largest wholesale retailer, they are more likely to also walk out with a pair of fashion jeans, an iPod, or a large plasma TV – in addition to the toilet paper and laundry detergent. While a Wal-Mart stocks 100,000 items, a Costco makes 58 billion of annual revenue with just 4,000 items. It has become a terrific coolhunter, enticing its shoppers who came for daily necessities to also walk away with the latest and coolest gadgets, usually spending a couple of hundred dollars at every shopping expedition.

According to its own words, Costco is “..trying to figure out what customers really want.” For that Costco only stocks the most well-liked, trendy, and fast-moving items. It also gets it known that each of its items which is usually offered at a very attractive price is only available in very limited supply. This way, Costco combines its coolhunting efforts for the trendiest products with creating its own culture of cool. By having new items every time a customer comes to its store, it even tries to create a “treasure-hunt atmosphere”. By discovering items at a deep discount right before they get off the shelves, customers experience an emotional thrill.
But besides offering an emotional shopping experience, Costco also treats its workers well: a typical cashier, after having worked for four years at Costco, according to an article at last Sunday’s New York Times makes about $40,000 plus benefits. Costco even has created a community of shoppers by countering conventional wisdom and charging its customers $50 per year to be allowed to shop at Costco. So far 24 million shoppers have signed on. Coolhunting and coolfarming combined!