Swarm Creativity Blog

Coolhunt Log #10 Friday, April 27, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, Professor of Internet Public Relations at Tulane University Rachelle Matherne, moderator MODERATOR: I'd like to remind everyone of the rules of the Coolhunt. We do at least one site review, one blog post, one comment on another blog, and try to make one personal connection via email or phone. Speakers, please introduce yourselves and tell us where you are dialing in from. SCOTT: Today, I'm calling from the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. STEVE: I'm here in my role as Tulane University professor, calling in from my home office in New Orleans, Louisiana. SCOTT: Part of the preparation for doing this daily call has resulted in finding some interesting things on the web. The weirdest thing I've seen lately was a blog by Alyssa Milano on the L.A. Dodgers. Apparently, she blogs every day for Go Blue, and she seems...

Coolhunt Log #9 Thursday, April 26, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Listening in from Sweden is one of the co-authors of the book Design-Inspired Innovation . Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: Today, we're going to talk about prediction markets. A really great example is InTrade. WEB: http://www.intrade.com PETER: Prediction markets are a great way to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Instead of having an expert predicting the outcome of certain events, you have people placing bets on what's going to happen. SCOTT: This ties in with things we've discussed in previous days. The concept of collective intelligence to predict outcomes is similar to what we talked about with "Mutual Fun" at Rite Solutions. Essentially, anything that hits the news that has an outcome ...

Coolhunt Log #8 Wednesday, April 25, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper. SCOTT: I'm really excited about where we're starting today. In Coolhunting, we talk a lot about bees and beehives. In fact, one of the original ideas for a title was "Innovation Beehive." This morning, when I went to O'Reilly Radar, there was a post entitled "Thoughts on the Hive Mind." WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/thoughts_on_the.html SCOTT: This is a post by Brady Forrest, commenting on Jordan Schwartz's concept of extended thoughts. Let's take a look at Schwartz's blog article entitled "Hive-Mind Backyard Beekeeping." WEB: http://www.hive-mind.com/bee/blog/2007/04/beekeeping-and-hive-mind.html SCOTT: Schwartz te...

Coolhunt Log #7 Tuesday, April 24, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: There was a New York Times article yesterday documenting Wikipedia's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. I find the article really inspiring. WEB: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/technology/23link.html The story begins: IMAGINE a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done. PETER: Further down in the article, there is a quote: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work." Let's now move...

Coolhunt Log #6 Monday, April 23, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper. SCOTT: Let's start with a website that I go to everyday: O'Reilly Radar at Radar.Oreilly.com. WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html SCOTT: I thought it would be interesting to discuss the software program Freebase. The concept behind it is quite amazing, and what it means for bridging ideas for the future of the web. Because it's an alpha product, however, we can't actually look at it at this point. PETER: On our 3/11/07 Swarm Creativity blog post, we discussed Freebase and Danny Hillis. Hillis created Thinking Machines, which involved a massively parallel computer called the Connection Machine. SCOTT: He's the brain behind Freebase, a s...

Coolhunt Log #5 Friday, April 20, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Renaud Richardet, software developer with the Condor software program Steve O'Keefe, moderator MODERATOR: I'm Steve O'Keefe, and welcome to the Coolhunt for Friday, April 20, 2007. Joining us today we have a special guest, Renaud Richardet, developer of the Condor software project. He's also a colleague of Scott and Peter. MODERATOR: The coolhunt consists of one site review, one blog post, one comment on another's post, and one personal connection via email or phone. Please introduce yourself and tell us where you're calling from. RENAUD: I'm calling from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. I met Scott working on this project. SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in MA. I'm going to let Renaud speak for himself but I'll introduce something that's essential to the Coolhunting book. We use a software...

Coolhunt Log #4 Thursday, April 19, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper. SCOTT: I thought we would start today at the Creative Commons website. It's not a blog, but it is a starting point for what we talked about yesterday. We wound up at a website called freebeer.org and we talked about a group of people in Denmark who had developed a recipe for beer. It's not just a copycat of Budweiser. For instance with Mozilla's Firefox, where anyone has access to the source code and can essentially innovate on top of that. WEB: http://www.creativecommons.org MODERATOR: And develop a better recipe. SCOTT: Or a different recipe. The idea is that everything is shared and credit is given where credit is due. But the motivation is to build the best mousetrap, not necessarily to make money. So the beer is really analogous to that and we looked at all ...

Coolhunt Log #3 Wednesday, April 18, 2007 On Stage: Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. MODERATOR: Concluding yesterday's coolhunt, I posted a comment on Steve Rubel's blog, micropersuasion , and I sent email to feedback@whiissick.com and to Jack Dorsy and Biz Stone, the founders of Twitter , to let them know we coolhunted them. A reminder to listeners that a coolhunt consists of: one site review, one blog posting, one blog comment, and one personal connection via email or Skype or phone. MODERATOR: Peter, where are you taking us today? PETER: I want to talk about social networks on the web and how these sources can be analyzed today. I would like to start with a nice example of how a social network can be used: They Rule. WEB: http://www.theyrule.n...