Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released […]
This is fantastic. IBM has announced that it will voluntarily publish its patent filings on the Internet. The upside is that it is taking the lead in creating a clearer, less confused, higher quality patent landscape. The (potential) downside is that it exposes its technology directions and strategy to its competitors as they develop rather […]
Back in November 2003 I blogged about a social networking project within Microsoft Research called MyWallop. At the time, fuelled by what I call the first phase of social networking, I speculated that something like this could become an opt-in part of Windows, unleashing an extraordinary ability for people to create useful connections across all […]
Jay Rosen has just announced that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, which provides a more structured model for open source journalism, bringing together amateur and professional media creators. The money will be applied to hiring a full-time editor for the site. Jay gives some background to why Reuters is choosing to support this project: […]
I was interviewed for a podcast today by the enormously energetic Sanjana Hattotuwa, for his ICT for Peacebuilding blog. Sanjana’s overview of our broad-ranging discussion is here, and the podcast is here. While we covered a lot of territory, including reputation systems, getting traditional media to adopt social media technologies, global innovation networks, and more, […]
I am currently advertising for someone to work at the core of my team, based out of Sydney. I’m advertising online, through word-of-mouth, and it makes also sense to put this on my blog too. Please do pass this on if you know anyone you think may be interested. Blog readers are encouraged to apply! […]
Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint program about MySpace and social media, together with Sebastian Chan, the web services manager for Powerhouse Museum – the interview is available for streaming and download (listen from 39:10). I talked about how social media is unleashing our latent humanity, by providing us with new ways […]
I’ve just got back from the Influence event, held in the lovely Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney. A very interesting experience, and as far as I’m aware a unique event globally. Phil Sim has been running Mediconnect, doing events and an online PR exchange for some years now. These bring together Australian technology […]
Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Influence conference run by Phil Sim’s Mediaconnect. The event brings together media and other influencers (I believe I’m labelled a “new media influencer” there) and corporates, discussing current trends in key technology sectors. I’m on the Web 2.0 panel tomorrow, so I thought I’d briefly capture here my introductory […]
Tom Mohr, formerly president of Knight-Ridder Digital before its sale in June, has just published Winning Online – A Manifesto, proposing that the US newspaper industry should merge into a single industry-wide network, at least for its digital assets. He suggests that there is $4 billion of additional revenue to be gained by 2010, primarily […]
