Check out Jaron’s resume and you’ll see this guy is at the top of his game. Consultant and advisor to some of the biggest businesses south of san jose, regular speaker and visiting scholar at top universities, Jaron, a renaissance technologist of sorts, manages to apply his tech wisdom to fields ranging from medicine to artificial intelligence. But it doesn’t end there, Jaron has a musical career that has put him on stage with the likes of george clinton and vernon ried! Jealous yet? Get this, he is credited with developing the concept of Virtual Reality.
So by most accounts this is the guy you love to hate. Because he has done it all, one would think that he is a fairly confident character, however, when you read his article “Digital Moaism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” he comes across as horribly insecure about his future as an expert. Jaron believes that when you let everyone into the sandbox (crowd source, open source, flat organizational structure, etc.), the chances of creating something of value declines because those who actually know what they’re doing will have their voices drowned out, which, in turn, dooms us to a future of crap decision making.
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Although I worked in the financial services for almost 3 years, the ways of the markets have always been a mystery to me. (For the record, I worked in the “Back Office” as a programmer/developer of inter-office admin communication. Although some of my closest friends during that period were traders, I never got any good tips from them!) For my next travelogue, I’m going to do something outside-the-normal for me: I’m going to become an investor (albeit a virtual one) using kaChing, the hottest web service that allows users to participate in what could be called the fantasy football of investing.
kaChing was started in 2008 by Dan Caroll and is financially backed by angel money from various Sillicon Valley hard-hitters, including the co-founder of Netscape. What’s so interesting about kaChing is its approach to the roll of the masses in investing: it hinges on the idea that the “wisdom of crowds,” coupled with the direction of “genius” investors, can lead us to better predict how the markets will behave. Also, kaChing exemplifies open-source computing in its technological make-up: in addition to the crowdsourcing of investment research, kaChing has partnered up with Xignite (a cloud-service startup that serves on-demand market and financial data), and has released an API to allow any interested party to mash-up data from other sources. (I am totally an interested party, you guys…)
In this travelogue, I will attempt to 1) understand how kaChing’s open-source structure crafts the user’s experience and makes the service better as a whole, 2) discover how we as users are not only reacting to the market, but shaping it or influencing it, 3) explore kaChing’s API and how its data can be used in congress with other websites concerned with “trafficking in the zeitgeist,” and 4) become a frickin’ virtual millionaire! Too bad the cash is not really real 
Let me know what you think!
The social networking site Neighbors for Neighbors provides individual networks for each neighborhood in Boston. The idea is to improve civic engagement in each community as well as increase visibility of social service resources. In my research, I will focus on two of the neighborhoods, look at how the sites are being used, and ask some of the users about their experience on the site. From there I will explore the concept of community based social networking through the lens of community informatics to learn more about the benchmarks for a successful network. I will also use the field of community informatics as a point of departure for learning about other such networks and their successes and challenges.
From this research I hope to get an idea of the what design and implementation methods have led to improved civic engagement and visibility of resources. I would also like to get an idea of how people see these networks as supplementing local government services.
Social networking sites have been a booming business in the recent years especially with the more prominent sites such as Myspace and Facebook, and although social networking isn’t altogether a new thing, these versions have brought social networking to a whole new level through the use of new media. These sites have also opened up the door to other entrepreneurs to find their own audiences to entice through social networking that caters to a particular social subset. For me, this brings about my interest in new media’s part in the creation of identity for a new generation, as well as questions about the positive or negative impacts of exclusionary social groups. Read More »
