Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge - whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people - collectively - perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!

We just tested out the latest version of our tool, and I wanted to share the results.  The short version: the test was a success!

Last week, 30 beta testers (read: friends) used MixedInk to help write a letter to the editor explaining why Barack Obama shouldn’t choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.   (We did not select this subject on our own - we gave our participants a few topics to choose from, and this is the one where there seemed to be greatest consensus.)

Here’s what they created together:

Sorry for the big pause in MixedInk’s musings. It was a busy Spring!

Over the past few weeks and months, there have been some notable developments in the crowd-powered arena, and I just want to take a moment to highlight a few interesting examples.

We’re always excited to see forward-looking companies embracing the collective wisdom, so cheers to Starbucks
and Dell, both of which opened the door to major customer feedback. Both companies have embraced a platform called Salesforce Ideas, which TechCrunch aptly described as “Digg-for-ideas.” It allows people to share their ideas, discuss them, and then vote on the ones they like. Participants also get updates from the company responding to the top-rated suggestions. Pretty cool! To many skeptics’ surprise, the Starbucks page has been very popular, with ideas coming in by
the thousands and garnering hundreds of thousands of votes. Starbucks has embraced this feedback as an opportunity to offer their customers the ultimate form of respect – asking their opinion – and to get some new and innovative ideas for free. Dell’s “IdeaStorm,” which was the first site to solicit consumer feedback in this way, rightly earned PR Week’s Innovation
of the Year Award in 2007.

Radiohead has also opened the door to crowd-sourcing. The band surprised fans earlier this year by letting them decide whether or how much to pay for their last CD. In April, they upped the ante by offering “stems” (or different tracks: bass, guitar, drums, vocals…) of their single “Nude,” and then letting fans remix the song. Fans could post the remixed versions to Nude Re/Mix, where the public then could vote their preferences. As SocialMediaInsider points out, “This practice views the original content creation as the mere starting point for what happens to it once it is embraced. Some artists dabble in this area, but most don’t.” This is exactly how MixedInk views the collaborative writing process. Each person’s written contributions are like stems – ready to be edited, remixed, and ranked – that together build the best possible response, reflective of the wisdom of the different people involved in the process.

Most recently, MoveOn challenged its members to make a 30-second TV ad that tells the nation why Barack Obama should be the next president. A whopping 5.5 million votes were cast on 1,100 entries. The top 15 videos were sent to a panel of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and progressives, including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Lawrence Lessig, Jesse Jackson, and Moby. The winner was recently announced, and will be aired on TV during the campaign.

We’d love to hear about other applications that show the power of the crowd. Please feel free to highlight any innovative examples in the comments!

There was a great NY Tech Meetup last week that got me thinking about collective organizing. For the first time the NY Tech Meetup had a theme, “Power to the People: The Future of Organizing.” It’s exciting to see great new ideas promoting people power – and forums that uncover and celebrate their budding existence online.

It was especially appropriate that Meetup identified this as a theme, being huge innovators in the world of local, do-it-yourself organizing. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, Meetup is a website with an elegantly simple premise: let people post an idea for a community meeting about anything – whether it’s saving the earth, starting a business, or knitting – and allow interested people in the area to attend. In hosting this event, the NY Tech Meetup (run by Scott Heiferman, the co-founder and CEO of Meetup) aimed to bring kindred spirits in the online world of organizing together.

The seeming legendary Clay Shirky was there to chat about Here Comes Everybody, “a book about organizing without organizations.” He made an interesting presentation, mostly about how much easier group action has become – and how often it’s happening these days. The simple fact that people with something in common can now find one another is a huge step. Philosopher William James once said “thinking is for doing.” Clay says “publishing is for acting,” meaning that publishing is increasingly used to gather and coordinate people.

Check out this excerpt from Clay’s book about Meetup here. He makes the point that Meetup groups can’t be organized top-down – being self-organized is key: “Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.” The book is brand new and promises to be an inspiring read. Update: Check him out on the Colbert Report…

A bunch of interesting online innovators presented at last week’s Meetup, but I was most excited about ThePoint. The Point is a brilliant new website run by Andrew Mason in Chicago that’s based on a few basic principles: (1) People want to stand up for themselves and their beliefs (2) standing up for yourself is usually a waste of time, because you’re just one person and it’s hard to be heard, and (3) people don’t want to waste their time. So he figures that people are generally being pretty rational when they skip out on standing up for themselves.

Here’s how his site solves the problem. Say you love KFC, but you want them to treat their chickens a little better. You don’t want to boycott the place by yourself, which would certainly deprive you of that deep fried goodness without much chance of sending a strong message to KFC. So you head to ThePoint, sign in to the “Tough Love for KFC” campaign:

“KFC, your chicken is so tasty. Your biscuits are so buttery. Your colonel is so regal. You’re hard not to like. But maybe you could be just a little nicer to your animals?”

And you pledge to stop eating there if KFC doesn’t adopt the suggestions of their animal welfare board only if 1,000,000 join the movement.

Now you know you won’t be forgoing those tasty morsels for naught. You can assume your actions are sure to mean something when pooled with a million like-minded souls. So ThePoint allows you to be sure the conditions exist for your actions to be meaningful.

But this tool is not confined to social movements – you can use it to make anything happen that requires cooperation. For example, you can use it to organize your neighbors to build a new community garden, only if 1,000 of them pledge $10 each to pay for it. Pretty cool. PledgeBank, a UK-based site, provides a service that’s similar to ThePoint.

This whole people-powered online revolution thing seems to have caught on in the news this week as well. There’s an interesting article in the Guardian, “People power transforms the web in next online revolution.” Like Clay’s book, the article looks at how we are going to organize ourselves “without the trappings of traditional organizations.” It talks about flash mobs - when a group of people gathers somewhere to do something random together, like smile in October Square in Belarus. Flash mobs have affected elections in Spain, Philippines, and South Korea. In China, flash mobs are staging campaigns despite 54,000 cyber police, and it seems it will soon be impossible for even the most totalitarian governments to stop people from organizing. Update 4/16/08: Check out this story about a student twittering his way out of jail in Egypt! The article also discusses Wikipedia and other movements to make information openly accessible, including the Encyclopedia of Life (about all the Earth’s species) and the Public Library of Science, an open-access journal.

At MixedInk, we certainly plan to play our part in helping folks self-organize and harness their collective power. We just came up with an exciting idea that could make our democracy a little more people powered, which we submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. It’s called Government by the people. You can help us win by voting for us! Anyone can register as a NetSquared user, making them eligible to vote - the contest is being decided, appropriately, by the people.

Update 4/16/08: Check out Seth Godin’s interesting article on the power of organizing.

Breaking from its conventional emphasis on editorial oversight, CNN is launching a completely user-generated news site at iReport.com this week.

In August 2006, CNN made a big move to bring citizen journalism into the mainstream when it launched iReport on CNN.com. iReport submissions are chosen by editors and checked for accuracy before CNN shows them online or on television. As a result, CNN has showcased only 10% of the nearly 100,000 news-related photos and videos that it has received since 2006. User-generated videos and news have provided some of CNN’s most compelling footage, which were especially noteworthy during California’s wildfires and the shootings at Virginia Tech.

The new CNN site will be fully open, allowing users to post anything (though the site will be monitored for inappropriate content). “The community will decide what the news is,” says Susan Grant, Executive VP of CNN News Services. Modeled after YouTube, iReport.com will allow citizen journalists to upload videos, photos, and audio files, while visitors can search, rate, and share clips.

The trend toward mainstream user-generated news doesn’t end with CNN. ESPN recently launched “ESPNU Campus Connection,” which “combines student reporting with gripping college hoops action,” according to its website. ESPNU is putting students to work as sportscasters responsible for generating coverage, sideline reporting, commentary, and analysis. This gives students a chance for a unique professional experience and offers ESPN exposure and more extensive programming on college campuses.

This is a win-win for publishers and consumers. “For a publisher, you’re engaging consumers, and mixing up your offerings. For consumers, you’re getting a voice and having an impact,” points out Piper Jaffray Web analyst Aaron Kessler.

Here at MixedInk, we’re excited to see these big players recognizing the potential of citizen journalism and supporting it with creative – and sometimes risky – new initiatives!

Also see ReadWriteWeb’s report on CNN here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cnn_to_launch_completely_user.php

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Thirty family members and friends of the MixedInk team recently came together to test our software. It was very exciting to finally see MixedInk in action at this scale after much hard work and internal testing. Watching an interesting discussion take shape and participating in the eventual synergy that emerged over the five-day period was an extremely rewarding experience.

Together the participants addressed the following question: Is the US government ever justified in using torture? Why or why not?

(We chose this topic because we know people feel strongly about it. Having a topic that encourages vigorous discussion makes testing our software and concept easier).

Participants wrote, edited, and recombined responses to the topic throughout the test. With a total of 44 responses and 296 ratings in the end, the group had a vibrant brainstorming session and a fascinating exchange. Through a process of mixing and rating each other’s responses using MixedInk technology, the test participants collaboratively sculpted a collective opinion on the selected topic.

For those who are curious, we’ve pasted the text of the collective response below.

This is a major moment for MixedInk – this test provided definitive proof of our concept. We learned a ton from the test and are now tweaking old features and adding new ones based on the test and on the feedback we received. At this point, we plan to continue testing it with different and bigger groups – let us know if you’d like to help shape MixedInk by getting involved in future tests at testing@mixedink.com. We’d love to get your input!

No to Torture

In the wake of 9/11, we have begun to speak a new language. “Patriotism” means blind devotion to any government policy; to “support the troops” means to never question an interminable war; and “torture” means making the world safe for democracy. (heh, heh, heh). We are living in a world of contradictions and are facilitating it with a language of opposites. It is easier to accept an unwarranted war, corruption, and torture when they are cloaked in words like democracy, strength, and safety. But eventually we will run out of platitudes and be left with nothing but the bare truth of our actions.

Torture has fallen prey to the cover of new speak. By saying we’re protecting our way of life from terrorism, we have become terrorists ourselves and what once was abhorrent to Americans has become acceptable. The question in real speak, though, is what security do we truly gain from the use of torture? Of the multitude of tools in our security arsenal, torture is one that has been shown to fail — people will say anything to get themselves out of the situation. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism, where people are often motivated by martyrdom, and just a bit more courage as a tortured prisoner can earn a handsome payoff in the afterlife. In embracing torture as a society, we therefore lose not only our honor, but also our precious resources as we waste time and money following false leads.

Even if torture were shown to be an effective information-gathering tool, however, it still would not be a sound security policy. When we commit torture against prisoners, we place our own soldiers at great risk as we forego our authority to demand protection for them. Today other countries can easily follow our lead in playing semantic tricks to determine where the Geneva Conventions apply. If that were the case, and our soldiers were being tortured at the hands of another countrys interrogators, be sure that this discussion would need not occur; our collective outrage would be unanimous.

More importantly, we cannot discuss torture without examining what it means to be part of a society that allows it. Many claim that we need to rethink our domestic policies, and even internationally-accepted norms, given the new threats we face. We disagree. In fact, it is only at times when we are scared for our safety that we must recall the importance of our civil liberties. It is during these times that it is easiest to forgo our most important ideals for the illusion of safety and expedient answers to complex challenges.

The American justice system relies upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And we have a very high bar for guilt; a jury must be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. The implicit understanding is that we, as a society, would prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongly punish someone who is innocent. We depend upon our right to due process of law to ensure that our government does not overstep its bounds. When we allow torture of someone suspected of a crime (or suspected to be privy to critical information), we corrode this deep foundation of our country by exacting punishment based on mere suspicion. Not only does it undoubtedly lead to the torture of many people with no, or little, connection to terrorist networks, but it also leads to a dangerous temptation to blur the distinctions. And just like that, we begin down a slippery slope of disintegrating civil liberties.

Nearly everyone agrees torture is generally wrong, but there is still a great temptation to allow torture as a last resort in extreme cases. Torture, however, is not an acceptable government policy even in these scenarios. We have seen time and time again that seemingly normal people can do awful things. We saw it during Milgrim’s famous psychology experiments, we witnessed it during the Holocaust, and we stood speechless more recently when we learned of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. If we condone even a single case of torture, how will we then stop it from expanding? Who is to be the judge? Any policy that allowed torture would be subject to abuse. Enforcement is extremely difficult to imagine, given that these prisoners would be punished without the benefit of being tried in court, and an interrogator could always argue there was good reason to believe the prisoner had valuable information.

There is a short list of countries that permit torture, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Uzbekistan. It is not a club that the

United States should wish to join. As we seek to remain a world leader, we must remember what it means to be American and the moral authority it could command. We should not throw it all away in exchange for nothing more than a second-rate intelligence tool. It’s time to speak clearly and realize that torture debases not only the victim but also the core of all we, in real talk, hold precious in America.

As is clear from this example, the group of our friends and family that created this lean to the political left. Note that MixedInk is emphatically nonpartisan. Our tool will be available to any group wishing to express itself together regardless of its opinion.

Sparse posting as of late – sorry about that. We’re up to our ears trying to ready the site for release. The good news is we’re on track to do so this winter, as planned.

Last week, I was at the Networked Journalism Summit, a conference organized by Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn, “bringing together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism” at CUNY.

In a word, it was…awesome (sorry, I’m an entrepreneur, not a journalist!). It was both encouraging that so many really smart people are experimenting with ways to democratize the media, and a relief that no one has yet been able to find all the answers – meaning that MixedInk can help to provide part of the solution.

The big unanswered questions that seemed to keep coming up were:

1) how the media will be able to make money without sacrificing journalistic quality and integrity (and whether advertising revenue will ever be sufficient);
2) how professional and amateur journalists can coordinate and divide responsibility effectively to produce high-quality, accurate content; and
3) how the public can be motivated to contribute in a way that adds value.

From MixedInk’s perspective, the event was unquestionably a success. In the afternoon, I manned one of several ‘tool’ tables, sandwiched between DayLife and Topix, two other innovative startups in this space. A number of leading media outlets dropped by our table and expressed very strong interest in viewing a demo when it’s ready next month. Several said they would even test our platform with their readers. Though it depends what comes of these initial conversations in the next couple of months, I’d say Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn accomplished their goal of focusing the event on action rather than talk.

Amid the excitement, there was a potentially depressing moment during one of the morning sessions. Jay Rosen, the brilliant NYU journalism professor and founder of newassignment.net, was asked whether there’s any way to avoid using a community leader to tightly moderate and channel contributors’ energy in a productive direction. To my dismay, and likely that of others in the room, he responded, “The dream of a self-perpetuating content production system is an illusion.” He might well have been describing MixedInk, though we would say our content production system is “community led” rather than “self-perpetuating.”

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to speak with Jay later in the day, but if I had (and managed to keep my wits about me), I would have said something like this: “With all due respect, we look forward to proving you wrong, Jay. Relying on heavy moderation is not scalable, it’s less democratic and it may even be less meritocratic. Given the right structure and application, the community can be trusted to produce quality content. We won’t hold it against you, though, if we’re ever lucky enough that you want to work with us ;-)” (Yes, I would have smiled and winked at the end.)

You can find a lot more detail about the day in the following accounts:

• Jeff Jarvis’s post mortem
• Scott Anderson’s (of the Chicago Tribune) version
• NPR’s take (audio)

Thanks again to Jeff and David for putting this fantastic event together – and for highlighting MixedInk as an innovative tool in the new media arsenal.

If Miles Davis were here today, we bet he’d be proud of the part he played in inspiring the current internet movement. From unconferences to open source software, musical tendencies have been interwoven in what has come to be called “web2.0.”

Jazz musicians are masters at improvisation to the point of seeming telepathic. Pre-written music and carefully crafted songs are catalysts for experimentation, not ends in themselves. Musicians also seek to blur the line between the audience and presenter and build a community around their concerts, with the belief that increased participation will enrich the experience as well as the music. And we cannot forget the open source movement pioneered by the Grateful Dead – the band encouraged taping of concerts, with the only rule being that tapers could not sell tapes for profit.

On the internet today, we similarly seek new avenues for collaboration that allow for cumulative creativity and the ability to use others’ ideas as springboards. Where jam sessions are an ‘aggregation tool’ for musicians, the web 2.0 movement seeks its own mechanisms with which to speak with one voice and capture collective wisdom. We see quintessential web 2.0 websites like Digg and Facebook dependent upon a symbiosis among community members not so different from the connection between musicians in a band. And at an “unconference,” blurred lines between the audience and presenter and a belief in improvisation allows anyone to present and the whole group to decide which subjects will be covered on the fly.

Such unstructured and decentralized solutions to otherwise complicated problems (such as planning a multi-day conference) has become the basis for the next step in the evolution of the internet. The MixedInk collaborative writing platform is inspired by the world of music. It allows people to come together spontaneously and fluidly to improvise and innovate, build on and improve upon what has already been started, and create a unified output that reflects the energy and nuanced views of each of its participants.

Most of the time, when you try out some new software, you are able to get the intended functionality out of the program - without significant learning time or technical issues, if you’re lucky. It does what you needed it to do, and that’s that.

On rare occasions, however, the process is almost magical: you try out the program, and your jaw drops when you realize how much power it gives you; how much more information is at your fingertips; how much faster, simpler, and more fun your life can be made by this previously irrelevant (to you) chunk of code.

We’ve been using Google Analytics and Crazy Egg on our blog since day one, and would definitely put these nifty little (free!!) tools in the latter category. Google Analytics allows us to track our site visitor data with a shocking degree of precision - by time spent on the site, by location, by browser used, by incoming link followed, by navigation pathways through the site, by Java version installed, and by a whole bunch of other characteristics (all anonymously, of course). And we’re not even using several of the more advanced features yet.

The most impressive thing about the program is how easy and fun it is to use. It’s got a super intuitive interface, and it’s full of interactive visualization tools like the one to the right, which shows where in the US our visitors came from during a brief period last month.

Similarly, Crazy Egg lets us see what visitors do with their mouse pointers as they browse the site using four main views. The “overlay” view shows how many times each of the links were clicked (shown below) as well as the site from which the viewer was referred; a “heatmap” shows where the most clicks on the page occurred, ranging from ‘hotspots’ in red to less popular links in blue; a new “confetti view” shows the top 15 referral sites, top 15 search terms, browsers, etc. of those who clicked; and the “list” view provides much of this information in exportable chart form.

Now that the initial wow factor has worn off, we don’t check our stats on Google Analytics or look at heat maps from Crazy Egg particularly often. (And don’t worry, we’re not stalking our readers, as our soon-to-be-posted privacy policy will confirm!) The real benefit of having these tools will come later, after we’ve launched MixedInk. We’ll need to see where people are coming from, which sites send them here, and how they navigate around the site, so that we can improve the user experience and grow our user base.

If you’re tech-savvy, this may not be news to you. You may rightly point out that there are more powerful programs out there (though not any free ones, as far as we are aware). But I hope this at least helped you relive your long-lost moments of technological awe.

If you’re not a techie, maybe this little love-fest will inspire you to try new software - including MixedInk, when the time comes. The potential payoffs of using well-designed software are worth it!