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Noteworthy: Cellphones tap the wisdom of crowds in Kenya

NewScientist — A Masai herdsman from Kisumu in Kenya, answers a call on his cellphone. After listening to the message, he repeats a short phrase in his Masai dialect. He then listens to another short message, and repeats the new phrase. After 30 minutes, he ends the call, having earned enough for a week’s worth of personal cellphone airtime.

[This article was originally published in Feb 09 by Anil Ananthaswamy, but having just come across it while researching the "Wisdom of Crowds" for an upcoming commentary, we found it an appropriate, and still relevant, post.  It demonstrates not just crowd-sourcing and crowd-wisdom, but economic bartering - in the form of services for airtime for food.  Enjoy, and let us know what you think!]

Read the complete article HERE at NewScientist.

Noteworthy: 2,500-year-old bird’s nest found

BBC — A 2,500-year-old bird’s nest has been discovered on a cliff in Greenland. Hundreds of generations of gyrfalcons have used the same nest site, but climate change might soon drive the birds out. The nesting site is still continually used by gyrfalcons, the world’s largest species of falcon, and is the oldest raptor nest ever recorded.

Three other nests, each over 1,000 years old, have also been found, one of which contains feathers from a bird that lived more than 600 years ago.

Read the complete article HERE at BBC.

Internet Micro-Payments for "Valued" Content? I don't buy it.

Barry Diller has made billions off of the Internet. So when he said that all Internet content of value would be “paid” content within five years I thought I would agree.  But I just can’t buy his idea of micro-payments for things of value.

First off, I have to state that I’m damn impressed by the amount of money that Mr. Diller generates each and every minute on the Internet (his firm, IAC, uses around 30 sites, such as Ticketmaster, Match.com, Citysearch, and LendingTree,  to generate over $1.5Billion a year).  With that type of street cred, it’s hard to argue with him.  And yet, I can’t help but disagree with his statements that “everything of any value” on the Internet would be fee-based within 5 years (you can read a good summary here on Jon Fine’s blog at BusinessWeek).

Kaki King rocks "Pink Noise" (TED video)

Kaki King is one of the finest guitarists alive.  Her performances, like this video from TED2008, embrace both a talent and a style that goes beyond music into the realm of art.

Sometimes you listen to an artist and you like what you hear.  Kaki is one of those artists.
Other times, you watch an artist and you like what you see.  Kaki is one of those artists too.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Robert Scoble and an RC Helicopter

Robert Scoble kicked off his new web endeavor (Building 43) this week, including a great interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook.  But as I watched, there were a few questions that kept leaping forward, such as “is that an RC helicopter in the background?”

First off, kudos to Robert Scoble for Building 43.  Great idea, nice design – I like what I’ve seen so far.

Green IT: What 2 do with tons of legacy gear?

Nokia wants to plant a tree for every cell phone you recycle. No, I’m not kidding. They’ll even map the tree on Google Earth so you can, well, watch it, I suppose.

I get the Green IT movement. It makes total sense. Build products that have limited amounts of toxic components, are designed to be upgraded (rather than disposed of) and use less energy.

Why I think T-Ball and Social Marketing are alike

Sometimes it’s about winning, and sometimes it’s just about learning how to play the game.

My 6 year old son started his foray into organized sports this year with T-Ball.  There are 13 kids on a team and everybody bats every inning (they play three). For most of the players, it’s the first time they’ve ever worn a team uniform (my son’s team is the Raptors). For others, it’s the first time that they’ve ever really swung a bat, or tried to catch a ball in a glove.  It’s a learning experience for all of them, and more than anything else it’s fun – even when all 13 of them converge on the ball at the same time.

10 Great/Funny/Odd Celebrity Tweets

I guess the first rule of social media is that you are going to occasionally post things that just don’t make sense to the rest of the world.  Here are 10 of my favorite [and unedited] celebrity posts pulled from a recent online search.

1. Shaq O’Neal  @THE_REAL_SHAQ – May 24th from TwitterBerry
“The san diego wildlife parks sucks, u pay all this money and u cnt evn see the dam animals, Lions , tigers, and bears no way Uaaaw gag …”

Why Twitter Won't Charge Users

TWITTER MUST MAKE MONEY.

If it doesn’t, it will likely cease to be.   But they can’t charge YOU…

A short while back I wrote about why Twitter had to fundamentally shift its model in order to generate positive cash (not to mention ROI). This should be considered a flat-out given.

3 Reasons Why Twitter Won’t Replace Newspapers (or Patrick Swayze)

“Viral info can spread just like a virus – this is good. But beware the mutation of information.”

I’ve had a couple of recent online chats (including a brief one with @stevenbartus) revolving around the question of Twitter and its role in the world of Journalism (with a cap J).  What started as a basic comment about how quickly Google’s Gmail problems were surfacing on Twitter ended up with a to-the-point query:  was Twitter the “future of news coverage?”  We agreed that it would perhaps be a “slice” (he went even further, suggesting it might be an “engine for hysteria”).

What did we mean by a “slice” or “engine for hysteria”?  That Twitter will have a role in the flow of news events (like a conduit for rain water), but it cannot become a true Journalistic “source” they way it exists today (something that is not necessarily true for sites like Facebook).

The future of Twitter… Isn’t Twitter.

I have looked into the abyss, and seen the future of Twitter.

Yes, there is a future, and it will be good. But the future of Twitter isn’t the Twitter that we know today. Think of it as the old Arpanet from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s (for an interesting flashback, check out the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet: RFC 1188 from 1989 http://tinyurl.com/oyz8ot). The similarities between then and now are eerie. Everybody knew that the ‘Net had potential, but nobody really knew what it was. There had to be a purpose. There had to be an application. And that application (pre HTML and the WWW) was Infomail, designed to send text messages between users. It was the “hot”, if not the only, real application at the time. But in the end, even that wasn’t really enough.

Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war

If you think about it, you could reverse-engineer Sean’s equation (in the video below) to get some really interesting and actionable data on how conflicts evolve and how we can help bring them to an end in certain circumstances.

Music from Brazil: Elis Regina

You don’t have to understand Portuguese to love this video from Elis Regina.

Johnny Lee: Wii Remote hacks for White Boards and Gaming Apps

A great demonstration of the use of basic technology leveraged into innovative new applications.