Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” book rocks…
On a flight today, I tore through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail book. Loved it.
It was a fascinating experience. In a sense, I think we (and by this I mean a very big Royal We that likely includes anyone reading this) have been practicing much of what the book preaches for a very long […]
Searching for what doesn’t exist…
As an industry, we’ve made a ton of progress in search over the last several years. Yet there is a subtle but profound limitation to “web search” as currently realized: search engines can only return results that… well… you know… exist.
At a glance this doesn’t seem to be much of […]
Capture v. Derive
Universal Law: It is easier, cheaper and more accurate to capture metadata upstream, than to reverse engineer it downstream.
Back at Virage, we worked on the problem of indexing rich media - deriving metadata from video. We would apply all kinds of fancy (and fuzzy) technology like speech recognition, automatic scene change detection, face recognition, etc. to commercial broadcast […]
Lowering Barriers to Participation
In a previous post, I mentioned our efforts around lowering barriers to entry for participation, i.e. empowering consumers with tools that transform them into creators. Tagging is perhaps the simplest and most direct example of how lowering a barrier to entry can drive and spur participation.
Tagging works, in part, because it’s so simple. Rather than […]
Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers
As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale.
The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:
The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example […]
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