Swarm Creativity Blog

Newt or Mitt: Predicting the 2012 US Presidential Republican Candidate

2011-12-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

Based on earlier work analyzing and visualizing the hidden links in Wikipedia, we have added a new dynamic Wikipedia mapping function to Condor. The new Wiki-Evolution feature collects all links originating and/or pointing to one or more Wikipedia articles over a given time period.
Today I used this feature, to see what the Wikipedians have to say about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. The picture below shows the bidirectional link network of the most important articles about the two contenders for RepublicanUS presidential candidate. The nodes are colored by actuality (the more edits they have in the last 14 days, the darker the red. (0 to 20 edits is grey, 21 to 50 edits is orange, over 50 edits is dark red).

As we can see, the articles about the two candidates have attracted the most edits, but also the rock group LMFAO (whose singer SkyBlu was involved in an altercation in a plane with Romney in 2010), Pope John Paul II (who shares the distinction with Gingrich of having been chosen by Time Magazine as a Person of the Year) have had lots of edits. Among the other presidential contenders, only Herman Cain has attracted a similar number of recent edits.
The video below shows 4 months, August 2011 to December 2011, in the candidate's life reflected through Wikipedia. The pages linked to Mitt are in blue, the pages linked to Newt are in green.

The timeline comes out marvelously:
It starts with the Ames Straw Poll (August 13) where both candidates did very poorly. It then shows Mitt Romney embedded into the network of other candidates, with an explosion of activity around September 18 (his shuffle with the surging Rick Perry candidacy). Discussions about Bain Capital and his membership in the Mormon church are continuous editing topics. October 8 the Newt Gingrich candidacy takes off, slowly at first, but then really exploding October 24th, when he and Herman Cain, the favorite at that time, accepted a Tea Party sponsored debate. It subsequently illustrates the fight between Mitt and Newt, taking punches at each other, ending with Gingrich's link to the National Review, and Tim Pawlenty's support of Romney's campaign.

Finally, I was also curious whom the Wikipedians, as of December 27, would vote for. The picture below shows the betweenness of the two candidate pages in the Wikipedia link network.

While the race is close, Mitt (betweenness centrality of 0.54) is slightly ahead of Newt (betweenness centrality of 0.53). Let's wait and see how well the swarm predicts!

Will the EURO break up?

2011-11-27T14:16:00.001-08:00

With the crisis in the Eurozone approaching its climax, I was curious to read the collective mind. On the Web, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter there is a lot of buzz about Eurozone breakup or survival.

I decided to ask both the swarm (through blogs) and experts (through News Web sites) as well as the crowd (through Twitter), using our Condor coolhunting tool.
It turns out, swarm and experts think the Euro will survive intact - albeit by quite a slim margin:

The picture above shows the Blog/Web site network, with the two search terms weighted by the importance (betweenness centrality) of the bloggers and Web sites. The bloggers/Web sites vote 52% for Eurozone survival, and 48% for Eurozone breakup.

The crowd, measured through the tweeters , believes the opposite. The picture below shows the snapshot of today (11/27/2011) of the retweets about “euro survive” and “euro breakup”.

The crowd on Twitter votes only 33% for Eurozone survival, with a decisive 67% of the vote for Eurozone breakup.

The question now is: whom to trust? The crowd is fickle, and the wisdom of crowds easily flips to madness, while the swarm usually has a much better grasp of what the future might be bringing. So perhaps it’s not as bleak for the EURO, as everybody thinks?

What do the Wikipedians think about the Euro?
As an additional expert opinion, I also checked, using our new Wikimaps tool, what the Wikipedians think about the EURO, exploiting the hidden link structure in Wikipedia. I ranked the links by two different algorithms: (1) by the numbers of links and backlinks, and by (2) actuality, i.e. freshness of the edits.
As the two pictures below show, the link-network looks very different for the two rating-algorithms:

Just looking at the Wikipedia linking structure (top picture) puts the different coins and currencies making up the Euro closest. While the economy of Europe is important for both networks, in the actuality picture (bottom network) the economy of Greece and Portugal, Frankfurt, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel suddenly become key players.

Occupy Wallstreet battling TeaParty – Divided they tweet!

2011-11-20T20:23:00.000-08:00

Today (11/20/11) I ran a Condor twitter analysis for #ows (the Occupy Wallstreet Twitter tag) and #teaparty (the Tea Party Twitter tag), trying to predict public sentiment for these two social movements.
I only collected retweets, and constructed the retweet-network, measuring the importance of people retweeting based on their social network position. The picture below shows the resulting network, each dot is a twitterer, each line is one or more retweets. Surprisingly we get three clear clusters, a Occupy Wallstreet cluster (blue, at the bottom), a Tea Party cluster (yellow, in the center) and a mixed cluster at the top. Red dots are people tweeting both about #ows and #teaparty.

A closer look at these three clusters tells us that the blue cluster is Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers talking about issues near and dear to them, the yellow cluster is Tea-Party sympathizers doing the same about their cause, while the mixed cluster at the top consists of Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers badmouthing the Tea Party, and Tea Party sympathizers lambasting Occupy Wallstreet and Barack Obama.

Aggregating the network, and weighing the tweet of each twitterer with her/his social network position, lead to 55% of weighted votes for Occupy Wallstreet, and 45% for the TeaParty. The results are clear: Occupy wall street sympathizers carry more weight in the Twittersphere than Tea Party members – the question of course remains how representative this is for the rest of the American population.

I then also checked positivity and negativity of tweets. Again I was in for a surprise. Usually human beings are optimists, and positivity is much larger than negativity. But not so here, for both Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet tweets negativity was about two times bigger than positivity. In an additional twist, the (mostly negative) tweets about the Tea Party were more positive than the tweets about Occupy Wallstreet (see picture below).

The first conclusion of this chart is the general unhappiness with the current political situation. While both Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers are very unhappy, Tea Party twitterers are slightly happier, although they seem to carry less political weight.
At last I looked at what the key issues of the Occupy Wallstreet discussion today were, collecting the most recent blog posts with Condor (see semantic network picture below).

While the Tea Party members rejoice about the booing of Michelle Obama and Joe Biden at the Nascar race in Florida, the Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers lambast Mayor Bloomberg for his lifestyle and the closing of Zuccotti Park. Religion is quite central - as expected - for the Tea Party sympathizers, while a large part of the discussion is focussed on the presidential candidates.

What creative swarms can learn from the bees

2011-11-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night I had a great discussion with Billie Bivins, host of the show "Make Art...Feel Better" at the Belmont Media Center about creative swarming and the bees. She even got me to cobble together my own bee. Here is the link to the resulting video. Very cool.

Wikimaps Revised

2011-07-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

The first version of the Wikimaps Page (http://bit.ly/Wiki-Map-Project) that we published a couple of weeks ago helped to visualize the basic idea of Wikimaps. It consists of an interactive animation that allows visitors to visually track the changes in Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Real world activities and events are reflected in updates of the respective articles and the links between them.

Rise and Fall (of Swiss Tennis Star Hingis) on Wikimaps
A good example is the retirement of the Swiss tennis player Martina Hingis. While her page (node) is still well connected to the network in 2008 (roughly a year after she retired), the page is not listed in the network anymore after February 2010. It is important to note that this view of the network is filtered and only displays nodes that “survive the cut”: The page of the former number one ranked player is still there and has many links pointing to it, just not enough to appear in this filtered “most important pages” view.

Another example is the case of the former president of the International Monetary Found, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. We tracked changes in related pages for a time span of approximately 8 months and built a network with weekly snapshots. On May 14th 2011, Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York City, this event lead to an spike in the activities in the network surrounding the page of Strauss-Kahn. Interestingly enough the increased activities that lead to this spike were not solely based on pages directly related to the arrest. The attention lead to a general increase of activities on related pages.

Watch a video of the changes in the Dominique Strass-Kahn graph:

The following graph shows the spike in activities in the graph around the 14th of May.

(Activity in a network is defined as the sum of additions and deletions of nodes within a given time frame)

Although we think this first visualization is already pretty cool, the results did not really surprise anyone. The data that was initially used was very static. We simply picked (seemingly related) categories and selected the pages that had the highest indegree values. Pages that would be “close” or relevant but not members of the selected categories would never show up in the graph.

To mitigate the shortcomings of this approach we decided to change our approach for the collection of the pages that would be considered candidates for the graph. The most promising idea was and still is, a combination of weighted components, possibly applied in multiple iterations. Or as we call it, a Filtered Breadth First Search.

Effective Filtering is Key
One of the challenges of working with the Wikipedia graph is the size of it. An optimal algorithm should therefore handle the trade-off between maintaining a small sub-graph while still returning meaningful results. A naively executed BFS would quickly lead to an explosion of articles that would have to be considered. To prevent this we only follow edges (links) that are considered interesting or relevant. The decision whether to follow a link during the execution of the search is based on a weighted mix of the following metrics:
● Local Indegree
● Global Indegree
● Number of recent page edits
● Reciprocal Links to source page
● Shortest Path Distance to Source Page
● Wikipedia Full-text search results

Naive Degree-Based Filtering leads to “boring” results
It would be a lot easier to simply include pages based on a single metric, namely the one that is the least expensive and seemingly a very meaningful one: The (local) Indegree, the number of pages that link to a certain page. The problem is, that this metric strongly favors so called hub-pages, these are pages that are linked to a lot altough they are semantically not directly related. Typical examples are pages for certain dates or countries. There were ideas to filter these pages using blacklists or to work with an Indegree-Band (as opposed to a lower limit).

These two ideas to however turned out to be very tedious and error-prone. We further believe that the most relevant results can only be found by a cleverly tuned combination of many factors.

Outlook
There is another network on wikipedia besides the one that based on articles and links. It’s the network of the Wikipedia authors and their collaborations. We anticipate that the incorporation of these informations will additionally improve the relevance of the nodes in a Wikimap network. Read this previous blog post for an explanation of the basic idea.

posted by Reto Kleeb

Wikimaps: Dynamic Maps of Knowledge

2011-06-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia does not only provide the digital world with a vast amount of high quality information, it also opens up new opportunities to investigate the processes that lie behind the creation of the content as well as the relations between knowledge domains.

In their daily work Wikipedia editors make sure to keep articles updated: Natural disasters, shiny new pop icons and scandals are reflected in new articles or in links between them. But how do these pages and their links evolve over time? Can we visually track how ties between subject-areas grow stronger, is there a way to notice that an article becomes more influential?

Our first attempt to come up with an answer to these questions was the development of a visualization that renders pages as nodes of a graph. If there is a link between two pages, the corresponding links are represented as an edge. Each graph represents a snapshot of the articles at a specific date, the slider and the video controls on the left allow you to navigate back and forth in time.

http://bit.ly/Wiki-Map-Project
Try it out: Scroll to zoom in and out, use the video controls to start and pause the animation or drag to slider to any point in time.

Selection of the Nodes
There are currently 3,6 Million articles in the English Wikipedia and displaying nodes for all of them at the same time does barely make sense. For our first prototype we decided to display a subset of the 50 most important nodes out of a given data-set.

How do we define importance? We decided to select the top nodes by using their indegree value - the number of links that point to an article, a trivial way to measure basic influence and relevance. The data-sets that are used, are based on related categories on Wikipedia e.g. to look at modern Musical groups we look at all the members of the categories “Musical groups established in 1990”, “Musical groups established in 1991” and so forth.

Collecting the necessary data is a time consuming process. The usual approach for doing network analysis on Wikipedia is to use complete database dumps that are provided by the Wikipedia foundation. The problem with these dumps is that they are either very large (complete dump that contains all historical data: 5 TB) or do not provide a high enough date resolution to accurately track the development of current events. To get around these issues we developed a data fetcher that uses the HTTP API. It continuously collects and stores the minimal amount of information that we need to build link-networks for a selected list of articles with the desired date resolution.

Future Work
Looking at the changes in the graph over time, it becomes clear that the simple indegree criterion does suffer from some shortcomings. It does not work to discover (fast) rising subjects. Or speaking figuratively: Despite the attention they currently receive, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber do not stand a chance against Madonna or Eric Clapton. While one might claim that this situation is perfectly justified and reflects their artistic contributions, it would still be interesting to develop a set of metrics to select and rank nodes based on short term spikes in interest or relevance.
posted by Reto Kleeb

The US – a Loophole Society – or a Society of Trust?

2011-04-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

My immersion into the loophole society concept took place in 2007 when I was bringing used computers to Ghana, to be donated to schools. While the total value of the computers was about $1200, getting them through Ghanaian customs took two weeks and cost me another $1200. I had to hire an agent, who was a relative of the headmaster at the receiving school, who expected to be paid $200 to shepherd me through the myriad customs clearance offices. This customs process, designed to plug customs loopholes for importers, doubled the costs of the goods. However when I had delivered the computers I found out that I could have bought the same computers for about $1200 on the public Makola market in Accra – so it seems clever people always find ways to exploit the loopholes.

It is my perception that the loophole society concept is not restricted to African countries. Even the US has become more and more a society where people exploiting loopholes are rewarded and admired. Last week we learned that, by clever exploitation of tax loopholes, GE had 10.8 billion of profits, but a tax bill of $0 for 2009. The loophole phenomenon however is by no means restricted to big companies, but trickles down to individuals looking for loopholes to get a little break in dealing with others.

For me, the culture of loopholes, as compared to a culture of trust, is based on small worlds, or more precisely, the lack of small worlds. In a society with a small world structure where everybody knows everybody, loopholes have little chance. Exploiting loopholes is replaced by a culture of trust. The smaller the “world”, the more people value their reputation and their social capital and therefore don’t dare exploiting loopholes.

I learned about the differences between “small worlds” – engendering trust, and the “big world” encouraging exploitation of loopholes recently when I was attending a meeting of the Swiss-American chamber of commerce. A frustrated Swiss businessman – coming from a very small world – bitterly complained about the 500 page contract that the lawyers of his US business partners wanted him to sign. As he said, in Switzerland business contracts are still one or two pages, containing the key points of the business deals, and not 500 pages of provisions trying to plug every possible loophole. Because, as he said, if something goes wrong, instead of trying to resolve the issue, lawyers from both parties will start pouring over the 500 pages, and try to find the loopholes in their favor. This is great news for the lawyers, as it keeps them happily employed. It is not so great news for the Swiss business owner, because he will have to spend most of his profits, and then some, for the fees of his American lawyers.

Doing sponsored research in both the US and Switzerland gives another opportunity to compare the loophole society with the trust society. Research dollars spent at a top US university carry an overhead of 70%. This compares to an overhead rate of 15% in Switzerland. This means, that out of every US research dollar, 70 cents are spent on internal university administration, whose main task it is to make sure that the other 30 cents are not squandered. Compare this to the overhead at the Swiss university, where 15 cents on every Swiss Franc are spent on oversight and administration, and the remaining 85 cents on the researchers.

While the last two examples are somewhat oversimplified, they nevertheless illustrate a larger trend. The point really is that we should be moving towards a society of trust, and not a society of exploiting loopholes. This means that we should try to create localized small worlds based on self-organization and trust, where individuals are trusted to do the “right thing”, but are also held accountable for their own actions.

Might growing health care costs be a good thing?

2011-04-16T14:04:00.000-07:00

Everybody is complaining about the ever-rising costs of health care. But could it be that this is actually a good thing, because it means we can afford to spend an ever-rising share of our dispensable income on our health?
While there is undoubtedly some misuse of our healthcare dollars, and money is wasted on unnecessary beauty operations, or even worse, on lawyers filing malpractice suits, I think that the overall fraction of dispensable income a society can afford to spend on healthcare is a good benchmark for gross national happiness.
There are many variables influencing happiness, such as income, being married, and age, but being in good health has been found to be one of the most reliable predictors of happiness, as has been shown by many researchers. Countries which are able to spend a large amount of their income on healthcare should therefore be happier.

Does national happiness and healthcare spending indeed correlate? Because I could not find statistics, I did a quick calculation myself. I looked up mean health care spending per head in PPPS (purchasing parity adjusted dollars) of the OECD countries in 2001. I then compared these numbers to the gross national happiness index as listed on the World Database of Happiness. As a control variable in my model I took country size, looking up the population numbers on Wikipedia. Below are the actual numbers, showing that the US and Switzerland are the record spenders on healthcare per head, but are also fairly happy, although small countries like Denmark, Iceland, and Luxembourg are even happier, while spending less money on healthcare.

When I did a linear multivariate regression with these numbers, using health spending per head and country size as independent variables, and happiness as the dependent variable, I found an adjusted R squared of 0.58, with standardized significant coefficients of 0.83** for health spending per head, and -0.38** for population size. To put this in simple language, this means that 58% of the happiness of a country is explained by the health care spending and the country's size. The more a country spends on individual health care, and the smaller the country is, the happier its inhabitants are.

What’s the conclusion for the US? Well, this means investing money in health care actually might not be such a bad thing, but please, allow for local autonomy, giving subgroups of the population a say on how the money is being spent.

Prediction Market predicted Oscars correctly 11 out of 12 times

2011-03-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

I just stumbled on this interesting Blog post which compared the predictive quality of the Intrade prediction market to correctly predict this and last year's Oscars. It seems the market picked the winner correctly 11 out of 12 times.
Also interesting is the comment by BarTaxCa on the post, noting that depending on which prediction market one picks (HSX, Intrade, Inkling market) prediction differs. So it seems there is still a role to play for analyzing the wisdom of swarms through their Web buzz on IMDB and Rottentomatoes. In fact, what we found is that throwing the two together (prediction market + Web buzz) leads to the best results.

Facebook Pages, and why we know that you probably like Lady Gaga.

2011-01-17T07:03:00.001-08:00

The Idea

Ever since Facebook rolled out pages in 2007, it has become very easy for users to show their interest in music, film, books, artists and other entities in various categories by clicking the "like" button on a specific facebook page. Most of the time, the information about your personal “likes” is not protected automatically and therefore can therefore accessed by everyone, even if not logged in.

We know that Mark Zuckerberg likes the Yankees and is a fan of Jay-Z, but that might just be of interest to his friends or People magazine. But there is much more information that we can infer from the social graph. Can Barack Obama know about the preferred beverages or favorite books of his fans? He can! ...but he probably doesn' t care. With the information provided by Facebook’s social graph it is easy to identify connections between books, films or brands - without conducting a survey.

The Data

Building a network by linking two pages, depending on the frequency of their occurrence on the same user profile produces graphs like the following.

The fact that people are providing this rich information creates different opportunities for analysis. Surely Facebook is already taking advantage of their data, but in social science and marketing user behaviour could be analysed. Certainly the advertising industry could benefit from, and would pay money for, such demographic information.

Demo Prototype

This web application illustrates a potential use of the data, which is based on 20 000 public Facebook profiles from different countries. An underlying bipartite “user to page” relation is used as a data source.

You can navigate through the TagCloud by clicking on a random entity. Different colors indicate categories (film, books, music, interests, other). The average of other pages listed in categories for the current page can be seen in the middle graph. The last graph shows the relative percentage of users liking this page in different countries.

It gives you a broad idea of the structure, though the current data is not representative of all Facebook users as the data was crawled from just 8 countries.

The key findings from this visualization:

The most popular pages are so commonly liked that they do not give a strong indication of individual personalities. E.g. Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Barack Obama.
Clicking through less popular pages reveals the “long tail” of Facebook pages with interesting cliques, and connections between them. E.g. Conservatives in the U.S. or Movie Fans.
Brand awareness and popularity in specific countries, e.g. Nutella in Italy can be observed.

So, if you want to stand out among those 500 million Facebook users, just don't like Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson or Barack Obama.

Facebook Pages - Categories

The chart below shows how categories of Facebook pages are used in different countries.

On average, users from Great Britain and the United States list twice as many pages in their profiles than users from Brazil. Furthermore, differences in certain categories can be identified. Listing books or activities seems to be very unpopular, in contrast to pages in the music or TV categories.

To Be a Better Manager Means Not to Be a Manager!

2011-01-04T06:43:00.001-08:00

I think that time has come to fundamentally rethink the way we train and reward managers. While social entrepreneurship has become a popular buzzword at management schools, and Andrew Cuomo, the new governor of the state of New York asked all his senior staff to take an ethics class in the first sixty days of his tenure, this is still just lip service. My proposal is far more radical:
Make managers redundant!

Let me explain what I mean.

4 Motivational Phenotypes of Knowledge Workers
When trying to understand the behavior and motivation of knowledge workers, it helps to group them into four phenotypes. These four types of knowledge workers, vastly differing in skill set and motivation, are: (1) the artists, (2) the scientists, (3) the teachers, and (4) the managers.

Artists want to create something new and beautiful, to touch the lives of people interacting with their art. Whether it is painters, sculptors, actors, singers, or orchestra musicians, they do what they do mostly not because they are paid to do it, but because they love what they do.

Scientists want to discover something new, to further the state of the art in their chosen field of science. Whether it is pure science like physics or astronomy, or applied science like medicine or engineering, their goal is to create something new by taking what is there, and combining it in new, innovative ways.

Teachers want to impart knowledge to their students. They want their pupils to understand, to become lifelong learners, and to be self-sustaining members of society. The creativity of teachers consists of developing new ways and methods of conveying and transferring knowledge.

Managers want to increase the success of the organization they are leading. Their creativity consists of taking the output of scientists, artists, and teachers to make the organizations they lead succeed. The main motivation of managers, as stipulated by proponents of the free market theory, is to increase the revenue of the organization they are leading, and thus also their own paycheck.

While artists and scientists want to create something radically new, either a new piece of art, or a new scientific insight, managers and teachers are mostly executors. Most of the time they do not really excel in creating new things, but in executing project plans, or executing curricula. Our education system rewards teachers to produce managers, not artists and scientists.

Income is negatively correlated to intrinsic motivation
Artists do what they do because they love it. They are the most intrinsically motivated of the four phenotypes – followed by the scientists and the teachers, who are scientists and teachers because that’s what they like, and not to get rich quick. This is very different for the managers, who most of the time chose their profession to be successful. They expect their success to be rewarded by fat paychecks and high status in society. The income of artists, on the other hand, shows a definitively long-tail distribution, meaning that there are very few Picassos and Brad Pitts getting rich and famous. Rather, the vast majority of artists can expect to make very little money over the course of their careers. Salaries of scientists and teachers show a similar distribution with most of them living off quite modest salaries. Income distribution of managers, on the other hand, shows a fat tail, meaning that many can expect to make a substantial income, and a still sizeable number can expect to make a lot of money. The most popular way for scientists, artists, and teachers to increase the size of their salaries is to accept “managerial” roles.

The key difference therefore between managers and the three other phenotypes is that artists, scientists, and teachers are intrinsically motivated, while managers are motivated extrinsically.

On a side note I would like to emphasize however that this discussion is about phenotypes. This means that this distinction into four categories is about oversimplified role types. Artists, scientists, and teachers don’t mind getting rich and famous, and managers might genuinely want their company to succeed in making the world a better place. Reality is never black or white, but rather somewhere in the middle, and most managers also have traits of an artist, scientist, or teacher, and the other way round.

So what are my recommendations for a manager?
The answer is very short: Forget about being a manager!

Trust your emotions. Become an artist, teacher, and scientist. Discover the joys of creating something new, of coaching your employees and help them grow. This will help you start doing what you love, and not what you are paid to, becoming intrinsically motivated in your job. This will also make you much happier. In short, become a coolfarmer!

Latest News Through Wikipedia - Wikipedians are the real Citizen Journalists

2010-12-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

People have long predicted the demise of traditional news media and the rise of the citizen journalists. Various initiatives have tried to create new media outlets on the Web, Blog, and Twitter powered by creative swarms of hobby journalists - but none of them has been a breakthrough success so far. Well, it turns out that there is such a citizen Web site, venerable old Wikipedia!

In a series of earlier projects we have analyzed collaboration among Wikipedia authors when creating new Wikipedia articles, for example studying how they collaborate as COINs in different cultures (http://www.ickn.org/documents/COINS2010_Nemoto_Gloor.pdf).
In our current project we are creating a map based on Who-works-with-whom-on-Wikipedia (the "W5-map"). We build a semantic network of concepts by constructing a link between two Wikipedia articles if the same author has worked on both articles. This W5-map shows us to what kind of articles the swarm flocks to. By repeating this process for every month in 2010 we are able to see how the W5-map changes over time.

As the whole Wikipedia includes millions of article, drawing a whole map of Wikipedia in one step is too much. Instead we employed a "snowball sampling" method, which allows us to draw a partial map by selecting a start article or editor. For our first experiment, we used the article about "Wikipedia" as the starting point. We collected the top 10 editors based on the number of edits on this article, then we gathered the top 10 articles of each editor. We repeated this steps recursively up to 3 degrees of separation from the start point. Restricting this analysis to a certain period of time (e.g. one month starting Jan. 1 2010), permits us to obtain a temporal W5 map from this start point. Applying this process repeatedly we calculated 11 snapshots of one month from Jan. 2010 to Nov. 2010. Each node corresponds to an article in Wikipedia. We draw an edge between articles A and B if there are at least 2 editors who made edits both on article A and article B.

The pictures below show our results. Each map was drawn by Gephi, and the size of the article title was determined by the undirected PageRank score of the W5 network. The major topics (based on PageRank Score) for each month are shown below. Surprisingly they reflect the major news item of the month:

Jan. 2010: 2010 Haiti earthquake
Feb. 2010: 2010 Winter Olympics
Mar. 2010: 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash
Apr. 2010: Telephone (song)
May. 2010: Gaza flotilla raid
Jun. 2010: 2010 FIFA World Cup
Jul. 2010: 2010 FIFA World Cup
Aug. 2010: 2010 Israel-Lebanon border clash
Sep. 2010: 2010 Atlantic hurricane season
Oct. 2010: Copiapo mining accident
Nov. 2010: United States diplomatic cables leak

Furthermore, we can also find clusters of articles, representing a group of similar topics (e.g. a cluster on Lady Gaga or on WikiLeaks).

This means that groups of similarly minded Wikipedians tend to aggregate around a set of articles on a topic they are most interested in.

Looking at Nov. 2010, the United States diplomatic cables leak was strongly connected to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, which makes perfect sense because both of them are part of the WikiLeaks dispute. Bombardment of Yeonpyeong had many edges from the WikiLeaks cluster while there were no edges from the 2010 Asian Games cluster, which means that Wikipedians working on the Bombardment of Yeonpyeong are interested in the diplomatic problem, not in the topics in Asia.

Our preliminary investigation suggests that looking at Wikipedia through the W5 map might be a new way to identify latest news. We find the news of the world even if we start from a neutral article such as the one about "Wikipedia". The swarm of Wikipedians seems to be a perfect group of coolhunters and citizen journalists to report latest news on politics, celebrities, and sports.

How Much Are People Smiling in the US, Germany, and Switzerland?

2010-12-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

Who are happier, people in Switzerland, in Germany, or in the US? To answer this question, I looked at the use of smiley’s in Twitter tweets – smileys are those emoticons used to express one’s emotions like
:) smile
:D big grin
:( sad, frown
:P sticking the tongue out, “raspberry”

My hypothesis is that the larger the fraction of happy smileys :) and :D in all tweets containing emoticons is, the happier people in this region are.

Using Condor’s Twitter collector, I collected 24 hours worth of tweets containing the smileys listed above in 6 cities in three countries: New York and Los Angeles (USA), Berlin and Hamburg (Germany) and Zurich and Berne (Switzerland). I collected all tweets inside a radius of 25 kilometers around the geocoordinates of these 6 cities returned by Google.

The table below lists the results, showing the number of people using each emoticon in each city, as well as the betweenness centrality of the emoticon in the social network of people using it.

As we can see, there are not too many people tweeting in Berne, compared to the people in New York, which makes perfect sense, considering the number of inhabitants of Berne (130,000) compared to New York’s 19 million.

I constructed the retweet network in Condor, drawing a link from person A to person B, if B retweeted A (see network picture above). The table only lists the number of people, ignoring the number of tweets per person, as I was interested in the emotional state of each person.
The picture below visualizes the results. Percentages in the pie charts for each type of smiley are based on betweenness centrality of the people using these smileys. This also accounts for the influence of somebody who for example used two different types of smileys and is being retweeted a lot.

A few things immediately stand out:

(1) The Europeans seem much happier than the Americans!
(2) Germans seem slightly happier than the Swiss, although not by much.
(3) People in Hamburg are the happiest (68% happy smileys ":)" and ":D"), followed by the people in Zurich.
(4) People in Berne have the biggest smile (30% have ":D").
(5) People in New York are the least happy (23% of ":(") with a large margin to all other cities.
(6) People in LA are the most skeptical (27% sticking their tongue out ":P").

When looking at the most active tweeter in each of the cities, it is amazing that most are young girls and artists mostly from Indonesia. For example the most emotional person in Hamburg (130 tweets) is “Bijiganja”, an Indonesian singer and “sinner”, as can be read on his profile on Myspace. The most emotional tweeter in Berne is a girl from Brazil. This means that the good mood in Switzerland and Germany might actually be imported from other regions of the World, where people traditionally are more extrovert than the somewhat reserved Germans and Swiss.

This is very different in the US. In New York, the most active emotional tweeter is a disc jockey and radio host, mostly promoting himself, while Actress and singer ciara is the most active tweeter in LA. This shows that Twitter in the US seems to be much more used as a platform for (commercial) self-promotion, although not a particularly happy one!
Let’s hope that the mood will pick up also in the US – after all there are a lot of people from Asia and Latin America here that might improve the collective mood!

Another Day of Hope (mostly), and some Fear and Worry in the US

2010-11-12T20:04:00.000-08:00

Today I checked on the mood of the US Population through Twitter, using Twitter’s Geotagging feature. Alan Mislove from Northeastern had already found that the mood of the nation changes over the course of the day, with people having a low over lunch, and getting collectively happier in the evening, when work is over. Using our Twitter-collector-tool built into Condor, I was able to easily replicate this result.

I counted the number of retweets about “hope”, “fear”, and “worry” in the major population centers of the US, by collecting the tweets at four 2000 kilometers circles with centers at Pittburgh (North East), Atlanta (South East) Las Vegas (South West), and Boise (North West). (see picture below) I then constructed the social network between the retweeters as described in a previous blog post. The way it is calculated, it also factors in the importance of the retweeters, where a link is drawn between two people if a person retweets a post from the other person.

The picture above shows the areas I covered, as well as the fraction of retweets on hope (green), fear (blue), and worry (red) around noon. As we can see, people are more hopeful in the West around noon EST (which is still in the morning in the West) than they are on the east coast.
The picture changes four hours later. The graph below shows hopefulness (fraction of retweets on hope/fractions of retweets on fear and worry) around noon EST and around 6pm EST. Hopfulness shoots up sharply in the Northeast (NE), Southeast (SE), and Southwest (SW). It also goes up in the Northwest (NW), although much less.

Note that there are always more retweets on hope than there are on fear or worry, showing that people are basically hopeful, particularly when work is over. Let’s hope that hopefulness will also go up in the evening in the Northwest!

Monitoring Midterm Election Night Through Twitter Buzz

2010-11-03T03:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday November 2nd 2010 was midterm election day in the US. I was curious what Twitter would tell us about the mood of the voters. It was already clear that things did not look good for the Democrats. In prior work analyzing data from 2009 we had already found that monitoring posts for the occurrence of “hope”, “happy”, “fear”, and “worry” would give us a good proxy for the mood of the population, particularly if we focused on the retweeted posts. So this time I repeatedly ran our Twitter data collector in 30 minute intervals, each time collecting the 200 most retweeted Tweets containing either hope, happy, fear, or worry. The picture below shows all tweets, with the red dots depicting the tweets containing more than one of the search words.

Measuring the betweenness value (i.e. the importance of the search term) shows that popular tweeters prefer tweeting about “happy” (32%) and “hope” (30%) over the “worry” (19%) and “fear” (19%) tweets. Note that I collected precisely the same amount of tweets for each search term (24*2*200), but then constructed the social network of the tweeters based on who retweeted whom’s post. To illustrate the point, the picture below only shows the social network (without drawing the links of the tweets to the search terms – these links were used in the first picture to calculate betweenness.)

As this picture shows, the tweeters about hope and happiness (yellow and light brown) are mixed in the center, while the tweeters about fear (blue) and worry (green) keep mostly to themselves in the periphery. So even in the Tweetersphere, happy people connect, while worriers stay put at the borders of the tweeter-network.

Here is the picture analyzing the contents of all tweets I collected containing the term "fear", displaying the semantic network of the most important terms about fear:

As the picture shows, Democrats are on the losing side, Republicans won, but the term "republican" is close to the term "jobless", so fear about continuing joblessness was the main cause for their win. Harry Reid’s win is also predicted by Twitter - the terms "Reid" and "Nevada" are connected to "won".

Now the picture with worry:

It shows Republicans worrying about a potential victory of Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania (which did not happen), Tea party members worrying about the loyalty of John Boehner, moms happy they don’t have to worry about their health care thanks to Barack Obama, and somebody worrying about loosing his Facebook account.

And here is the term view for “hope”:

It seems Justin Bieber and Harry Reid from Nevada share the stage of hope, with some tweets about the elections in California thrown in. Adam Lambert’s Halloween discussion of his costume is picked up by his fans. Barack Obama still draws lots of emotions and inspires hope among some tweeters.

Finally the concept network for “happy” showing a quite different picture:

The top tweets containing “happy” are not about the elections – these elections are nothing to be happy about according to Twitter - but are by young girls, talking about their moms, and Justin Bieber. It is interesting that the term “happy” does not even show centrally in the term network.Rather, the discussion is about things that make these girls, who are mostly not even from the US but from Asia, happy, like love, and surprisingly, their moms, and it seems, eating a Burger at MacDonald’s in San Francisco.
The only election tweets are by girls rejoicing that voting is finally over, so they don’t get the weird calls at their doors by election workers anymore.

Emotions Draw Close Friends: Analyzing the Social Network Structure of Facebook Fan Pages

2010-08-31T03:23:00.000-07:00

Recently we were wondering if the social network structure of fans of a brand, a star, or a cause tells us how passionate the fans are. To be more precise, we were looking at the network structure of the friendship network of Facebook fan pages. This means that we collected – as far a publicly accessible – the friendship network of the people who clicked on the “like” button on a fan page.
For a start, look at the fan page of our own COINs2010 conference (by the way, the conference will be soon in Savannah Oct 7 to 9, at SCAD, we hope to see many of you there ☺ ).

The dark dots in the network are the fans of COINs2010, the green dots are their friends. This means that for this initial analysis we looked at how many and how well-connected friends a fan of COINs2010 has. We ignored direct links between the fans, but focused on their external friendship network.

In this first attempt we looked at a total of 15 fan groups in 5 categories, see the table below:

We (admittedly subjectively) ranked the emotionality from 1 (product brands) to 5 (medical causes). We found positive correlation of 0.33 (although non-significant) between the network density and emotionality. This means, the more connected the friends of a cause or brand are, the more emotional they are about their cause. Even more interestingly, we found significant negative correlation between the clustering coefficient of -0.57. This means that the more the friends of fans are clustered in subgroups, the less emotional they are.

The conclusions would be that the causes with the most emotional supporters have a dense, but evenly spread out network, with few clearly separated subgroups.

Based on this admittedly very preliminary analysis, what are actions you can take to further you cause? The answer is simple: Help to weave the network of your supporters.
1. broker connections between supporters
2. fight fragmentation of supporters by connecting subgroups
In short – help build one large happy familiy!

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

2010-08-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz, predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office. Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title.

The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volume of all tweets, as the total volume in 2009 was about 2,5 million tweets per day. We tried to measure collective hope and fear on each day by applying the simple metric of counting all tweets containing the words “hope” – there were 54 to 467 tweets per day, and “fear” or “worry” – there were 9 to 100 tweets per day. This tells us that people prefer optimistic words (hope) to pessimist words (fear or worry).

As external benchmark of investor fear we used the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index VIX, which is strongly negatively correlated with Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, which is not surprising, as the spread of stock options on a given day is used to calculate VIX. Initially we expected the number of tweets with hope to negatively correlate with VIX, and the number of tweets with fear or worry to correlate positively with VIX. Surprisingly, we found positive weak but insignificant correlation for both “hope” (0.135) and “fear” or “worry” (0.172) with VIX, and negative significant correlation with both “fear” and “worry” and “hope” with Dow NASDAQ and S&P500 (This means that people start using more emotional words such as hope, fear, worry in times of economic uncertainty. We therefore created a simple twitter-volatility index combining mentions of hope, fear and worry, normalizing it with the total amount of tweets per day as a baseline. This index displays strong significant negative correlations to Dow, NASDAQ and S&P500, and strong significant positive correlation to VIX (see table below).

The picture below visualized the negative correlation between Dow (blue) and “hope, fear, and worry” (green) in the period March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009.

To put this in simple words, when the emotions on twitter fly high, that is when people express a lot of hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes down the next day. When people have less hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes up. It therefore seems that just checking on twitter for emotional outbursts of any kind gives a predictor of how the stock market will be doing the next day.

Just to be clear, what we have presented here are very early preliminary results, and much more work is needed to scientifically verify it.

My new Coolfarming Book out

2010-07-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to announce that – finally - my new book
"Coolfarming - Turn Your Idea Into The Next Big Thing" just came out.

“Coolfarming” is about how to grow your own trends by creating an environment where COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) flourish; then - once a product has become established - extend the creative pool into a Collaborative Learning Network, or CLN, whereby a targeted group of interested people are brought in to learn the basics of the product, make suggestions for improvements, point out deficiencies, and push the idea forward.
When this feedback gets incorporated, things get really interesting, expanding the process further outward to a Collaborative Interest Network (CIN) that encompasses thousands or even millions of users, building what hopefully turns into a loyal fan base…and virtually guaranteeing the success of the idea.

Based on case studies and examples from Linux to the Twilight series, from Procter & Gamble to Apple, this book lets you in on the practical, step-by-step processes that will allow you to successfully cultivate the kind of swarm creativity that generates hot new trends . . . and then push them over the tipping point to commercial success.

Get it from the publisher
Get it from Amazon

If you are interested in hearing about it firsthand, I will be teaching a workshop about coolfarming at the 2nd International COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) 2010 conference in Savannah, it would be cool to see many of you there.

Insightful review by Barry Richardson

Predicting the World Cup 2010 Winner

2010-06-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today I was giving a presentation about Coolhunting through Swarm Creativity at the CRM Forum in Zurich. As there is currently Soccer World Championship time in South Africa, at the end, the moderator Susanne Wille asked me to make my predictions about which team would win the World Cup. Unfortunately, reading the collective mind on the Web does not predict the outcome of 22 soccer players fighting each other particularly well, not to speak about inexplicable decisions of the referee. I therefore refused to make a prediction. Nevertheless, of course we have our prediction system running on our new CoolTrend 2.0 for the last few weeks, because the wisdom of the crowd is still better than chance, although not on the level of accuracy we can reach when predicting political elections or movie box office returns.
So here are our trend curves about which team will win the World Cup, as of June 24, 2010, first the trends on the Web, then on the Blogs

The first thing to note are the huge oscillations among the leaders. Even Italy, out by now, has been traded once (around May 18) as a leader. Currently (June 23rd), the crowd both on the Web and Blogs thinks that Argentina and Brazil have the best chances to be the 2010 Soccer World Champion. Well, there are still many - unpredictable - things that can happen until we will know at the final, July 11, in Johannesburg.

When are we ready for eternal life?

2010-05-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess most of us would like to live forever. At least that’s what I think when I see how old people are clinging to their lives. On the other hand, if all of us would live forever, while producing more offspring, earth would soon overflow. So the solution, if we get eternal life, would be to have no children anymore.

This, however, is in contradiction to Darwin’s evolution. We need to reproduce, to mix our gene pool, and adapt to the changes in environment. Evolution is brutal, too. It’s all about survival of the fittest, of trying to beat the competitor and make sure that my own genes reproduce. Mankind is no exception among the other species. The history of mankind is a history of wars, of killing one's enemies. Today this has been ritualized; the Geneva Convention describes what’s allowed and what’s not. But this is still far from perfect, frequently broken, abused, or ignored.

The conclusion is, then, that we will be ready for eternal life when we will have reached perfection - no need for evolution anymore. In perfect state there is no need for competition, for beating or killing the competitor anymore. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. But if we can get rid of aggression, of getting our satisfaction from working together to create new things instead of competing against each other, we have come at least a little bit closer to perfection.

50 best blogs on creative thinking

2010-05-06T04:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I got a nice e-mail from Anna Miller, alerting me to the fact that the swarmcreativity blog has been listed in her post on "50 Best Blogs on Creative Thinking". I quickly looked at them, excellent selection. Thanks Anna!

The world’s greatest coolfarmers – what we can learn from Jazz

2010-04-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I was part of a great coolfarming experience. It was the final performance of Jazzaar, a one week workshop of practical music for talented young musicians culminating in public concerts on Friday and Saturday evening. Jazzaar is the brainchild of Fritz Renold, a Jazz musician, composer and music teacher. Every year since 1998 Jazzaar invites internationally renowned Jazz musicians to Aarau, where they teach and play with the most talented and motivated young musicians age 14 to 24 of the Canton of Aargau.

For me how Jazz musicians play together is a great blueprint for how creative teams should work together. In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making old things up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammar and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
According to “A Passion for Jazz”…”Jazz players will choose phrases that seem to be preordained so they intuitively know where they are going, even though it's being created at the instant they are hearing it. The musicians are actually spontaneously creating a very intricate form of theme and variation; they all know the tune and the role of their instrument. The guitar, piano, bass and drums, while all able to solo, basically provide the rhythm and harmony over which the soloist will create improvised variations. The structure is flexible so that the soloist may venture in various directions depending on the inspiration of the moment.”

With their rotating lead among the soloists, this model of collaboration - based on a common language - is precisely how COINs should operate.

Yesterday Saturday evening was the final concert for this year, in the sold out KUK (Kultur&Kongresshauss) Aarau. As the official guest of honor, the Swiss President, Doris Leuthard, was there with members of the government of the Canton of Aargau and the City of Aarau.

It was a great evening, with the band made up by famous professionals such as Buster Williams, Corey Allen, Mark Gross, and half a dozen others. The conductor, Kevin Fields, was marvelous. But my vote for greatest coolfarmer of all goes to the singer, Roseanna Vitro, who did a tremendous job integrating the audience and sharing credits for all the pieces she performed with the other soloists. The soloists were always made up both by famous stars and young musicians from Aargau. The climax came when, after frenetic applause, she led into the encore. She asked the audience to sing along, which we did soulfully. And then she asked the young soloists to improvise along with the old experts. It was a decisive moment for the young artists, because all the other pieces and solos they had played until now they had carefully practiced the previous week. But at the end of the concert, with an enthusiastic audience, the young players dared unlocking their own creativity, and one young soloist after the other, bass, sax, piano, trumpet joined in, taking control of the performance for a short, but infinitely intense moment and then passing on leadership to the next.
Coolfarming at its best!

What Motivates Creators – Lessons from a Cool Artist

2010-03-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

Little did I know when I was attending one of the evening events of Swissnex that I was about to meet a truly impressive creator. After filling a heaped plate of food at the sumptuous buffet after the talks, I was looking for a place to eat when I noticed two attractive women in the back of the room. As soon as we started talking I noticed that they were not just a pleasure to look at and talk with but real creators. In my discussion with Magdalena, she told me that she was a graphic artist producing digital art. When she invited me to visit her in her studio I jumped at the opportunity.

On a sunny afternoon the next week I climbed the stairs to her studio in Revere outside of Boston. The studio doubles as a gallery, displaying really cool art. When we sat on her couch in the middle of art books and framed digital pictures, Magdalena told me a bit about her life. She was born in Poland to parents of German descent, as a young adult she moved to Germany, later after she had married an American she moved to Boston, where initially she continued working as a biologist for a research company. Ten years ago, however, she decided to quit natural science and to exclusively focus on art. In her art she takes digital photographs of people, dressing them in medieval cloth and embedding them in a renaissance style environment, giving her digital pictures the feel of Rubens or Boticelli paintings. For her digital paintings she needs lots of models, whose pictures she takes on the floor of her living room. She has a wide circle of models and friends, drawn from fellow artists, painters, photographers, and actors but also including scientists from her previous work. One of the more interesting ones is Niki the crossdresser with large wig at night - Nick the scientist during the day.

Her masterpiece until now is “the sleepers” (extract pictured below), a digital composition of 35 models, combining 35 digital photographs of 25 different people into a surreal nightly landscape of ethereal beauty.

When I asked her how she finances her art, she told me that she works seven days a week, only now it’s not work anymore but her passion and labor of love. She explained “I want to spend my time to become a better artist, and not wasting my time selling art”. This of course means, that besides creating art, and occasionally selling art, Magdalena is doing all sorts of odd jobs. She has folded towels in “bed & bath”, and she worked as a temp usher during the entire last stay of Cirque du Soleil in Boston. During these jobs she never stops promoting her art. While working at Cirque du Soleil, she produced one of her signature large digital artistic creations with some models from Cirque du Soleil, and asked for permission to put it up in the tent. When her temp manager denied the request she found another employee of Cirque du Soleil who put it up for her in the break room of the internal employees of the Cirque.

She even succeeded in having some of her art shown in the ICA – the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. This happened when one day she learned that next Saturday morning the ICA would show 100 pieces of art from local artists. Needless to say she was the first one at the door next Saturday at six in the morning, not only assuring a premium spot for her piece of art, but even winning an award for the best picture.

For a change, Magdalena likes to go out to art shows and cultural events like the one from Swissnex at the Harvard Business School where we met. Another favorite of hers are the events from the Goethe Institute in downtown Boston. Not only is there good food at these events, but also good company, and the opportunity to recruit more models for her masterpieces, and perhaps even a customer or two.

When I asked her what motivates her, the first thing I noticed was a fierce sense of independence and self-determination. This reminded me of the famous quote of Perikles, politician during Athen’s golden age of democracy: “Make up your mind that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous”. Magdalena put her own principle into the following words “You end up where you want to go if you let go without knowing how you will get there.”
Her main motivation to do what she does is twofold: seeing the happiness of people when they acquire her art, and the big satisfaction she draws from the process of creating new art.

One of her ways of increasing dissemination of her art is to choose her models well. If they like her art and their own representation in Magdalena’s pictures, they will spread the word. Usually this works very well, at least it worked for me. At the end of my visit she had successfully recruited me as a model for her next masterpiece, tentatively named “the wall”, which will combine a large number of people building up and tearing down a wall.

I think every member of a COIN can learn a lot from Magdalena!

2010-03-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

Oscar Predictions Updated

Here is an updated analysis of the Oscar predictions, run on March 2^nd, 2010. Again, sources being used were the collective mind of movie enthusiasts on IMDb.com and movie fans from all around the world represented by bloggers and Web masters. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was analyzed using a specialized version of sentiment retrieval with an adapted bag-of-words. Web and blog buzz values come from Cooltrend. Tapping the thoughts of this swarm delivered the following update to our older analysis:

While IMDb users have two clear favorites, Hurt Locker and Avatar, the Web seems to favor Hurt Locker. Bloggers are seeing 500 Days of Summer in front right now, but this might change since the blogosphere tends to be relatively volatile in opinion trends. So, in sum we would expect Avatar to have the best chances on winning best picture, followed by Hurt Locker.

Directors – here it is again a head-to-head race between Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker) and James Cameron (Avatar). They seem to be tightly correlated with the best picture results and this is probably not too surprising. Interestingly the Web sees James Cameron while Kathryn Bigelow is really not that popular. Blogosphere is undecided in this category, Mr. Cameron is clearly behind in the buzz though.

The surprise nomination of Sandra Bullock for the best actress award caught us last time we made the prediction – including her this time shows that she still is behind IMDb’s favorite Meryl Streep. Looking at actors the following picture rises:

Again IMDb decided on a clear favorite and it is Jeff Bridges. While Jeremy Renner and Colin Firth certainly receive some attention in discussion they are both only half as popular in the forums as Jeff Bridges is.

In summary we now give our final prediction, with a primary (the most likely winner) and a secondary choice, based on the collective mind of the Internet’s movie swarm:

It is really a close decision in best picture and director, but considering the combined Web, Blog, and IMDb metrics there is a slight preference for the movie Avatar to be this year’s best picture winner – Hurt Locker is very close though. Director category discussion sees Kathryn Bigelow receiving the award while James Cameron is put second here. In actors it looks like Jeff Bridges pretty much made the race, however in actresses it is not completely clear yet who will cross the finish line first – though Meryl Streep has a slight advantage. Let us look back at this once the Awards have been given out!

It’s In a Name - How much is an athlete worth?

2010-02-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

These days Forbes again published sport’s top earning athletes. In spite of his transgressions, Tiger Woods still leads the pack with $64 million, followed by soccer player David Beckham ($18 million), tennis star Roger Federer ($16 million), Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt ($14 million) and basket ball players LeBron James ($13 million) and Kobe Bryant ($12 million).
I was curious to see if Web buzz and valuation of a player's attractiveness for corporate marketing executives from Nike, Addidas, Reebook and the like had any correlation. The two pictures below show the Web buzz share of five of the six athletes (I skipped the Nascar driver):

And the blog buzz share:

As the pictures show, the ranking at the top corresponds nicely. Tiger Woods is lonely at the top both on the Web and on blogs, but then there are some interesting differences. Kobe Bryant has more than his share on Web buzz compared to what corporate marketers paid for him, which means they got a good deal considering his high Web popularity. David Beckham, on the other hand, seems somewhat overpriced considering that he commands only 16% Blog and 20% Web buzz, well behind Roger Federer’s 21% and 25%. The conclusion: invest into the Swiss, he seems on the rise right now, at least as far as Web and Blog buzz goes.

Oscar Predictions 2010 – Official Nominations of 82nd Academy Awards

2010-02-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

Oscar Night is getting closer. On Tuesday Hollywood announced this year’s official nominees of the 82nd Academy Awards. As previously posted on this blog we are running our own Oscar predictions based on buzz in the Oscar forum on imdb.com and Web and Blog buzz analysis. Our latest results presented here were calculated on January 5th 2010 which is over one month before the nominations were released. In our analysis we focus on four categories, best picture, best director, best actress, and best actor.
The following table for best picture shows the results of our Oscar-Coolhunting four weeks ago. We computed an Oscar Index for every movie. This index consists of combined Web-, blog-, and message board – buzz and can be interpreted as the relative probability of a movie to receive an Academy Award on March 7th. Our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says (in a forum or blog) with her/his influence.

Our top 4 ranked movies correspond very well with the most promising nominations. Hurt Locker, Precious, Avatar, and Inglourious Basterds are head-to-head and clearly leading in our Coolhunting study. The following table nicely shows that these four blockbusters including the film with George Clooney – Up in the Air – also received the most nominations this year.

This year’s nominees for best directing match perfectly with our five candidates predicted through analyzing Web buzz. Kathryn Bigelow and Quentin Tarantino have a decent lead in our ranking. James Cameron with Avatar, however, will definitely be in the game when it comes to the showdown on Oscar Night.

Our predictions in the category for best actress illustrate a clear lead for Meryl Streep (30%) for her performance in Julie & Julia. Hollywood newcomer Gabby Sidibe playing a great role in the drama Precious was also on our list four weeks ago. We are missing Sandra Bullock and Helen Mirren.

The race for best actor in a leading role 2010 is much more competitive and no clear favorite could be identified in the run-up to the awards ceremony. George Clooney is definitely in a favorite position however Jeff Bridges seems to be in good shape this year. Unfortunately, we could not anticipate this at an early stage.

We are very excited to see who actually will win the Oscars on March 7th 2010. We will definitely stay tuned and provide updates as soon as we have new results.
Apropos, since the hype about the Academy Awards all around the globe is always very high we were recorded in our Coolhunting by Swiss TV in January. They will broadcast our story in the show “Einstein” prior to Oscar Night.

Who will become the next Massachusetts Senator

2010-01-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points.

I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley.

It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere.
The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points.

The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leading to Martha Coakley's slight lead.

Let's wait until January 19, then we will know for sure.

Scientists, Monks and Bankers - It's All About Love

2010-01-01T05:30:00.000-08:00

Why do people collaboratively engage in innovative tasks? What’s the motivation to work together to develop something new? After all, if I do everything by myself, I will reap all the rewards for myself, and don’t have to share. Nevertheless, humans are the most social species of all, and progress is only possible by collectively creating new things “standing on the shoulders of giants”, by learning from what others have done, and apply it in novel ways.

According to my colleagues at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Tom Malone, Rob Laubacher, and Chris Dellarocas there are three main reasons why people engage in collective intelligence systems:
Money – financial gain is a strong motivator for people participating in markets and traditional organizations, either for direct payment, or for future payment, e.g. acquiring new skills.
Glory – getting recognition and building up a reputation can be an important motivator.
Love – love can be an important motivator, be it because people intrinsically enjoy an activity, because they like to socialize with others, or because they feel they are contributing to a cause larger than themselves.

Randall Collins links together these motivators in his theory of interaction ritual chains. He extends Emile Durkheim’s concept of effervescence, the energy that groups of people experience when they are together at a sporting event, a rave, or a riot. For Collins the mechanisms that drive society are nothing but interaction rituals. Interaction rituals consist of 4 components:
1. the people need to be bodily present at the same place. Through mutual feedback they will charge up the situation with excitement and significance.
2. there needs to be a boundary that demarcates the insiders from the outsiders, giving insiders a feeling to be privileged.
3. all insiders have a shared focus of attention, by communicating this focus to each other they become mutually aware of this focus.
4. by experiencing 1 to 3, all participants share a “common mood or emotional experience”.

When these 4 components combine successfully, participants are infused with emotional energy, the feeling of excitement, achievement, and enthusiasm – in short they are happy! Applying the concept of interaction ritual chains to the above three motivators "money", "glory", and "love" means that "love" as experienced in ritual interaction chains is the key motivator at the core, glory and money are simply enablers to obtain "love". Just look at Tiger Woods, who used his money and glory to buy love.

What motivates scientists?
To explain how love is the main motivator for people interested in collaborative innovation, let’s look at what motivates scientists, people whose profession it is to innovate. At the outset, scientists are motivated mostly by glory: it’s all about publish or perish, i.e. getting one’s papers into highly-ranked journals, and then be quoted by others.
Swiss researchers Margrit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey - himself a highly-cited researcher - analyze the deficiencies of the current academic ranking system based on peer review and citation count. Currently academics are ranked first by how many papers they get into top-ranked scientific journals. The decision on which paper makes it into a journal is based on peer reviews. The second criterion of success is citation count of their paper, i.e. how many other researchers cite the papers in their own academic work. Unfortunately both of these ranking systems have serious deficiencies, even leading to what Frey calls “academic prostitution”: As has been shown repeatedly, peer reviews have very low to no correlation with future citation, and citation count by other authors is seriously biased towards authors choosing articles they quote to increase acceptance of their own papers. Frey therefore proposes to revise peer review and quote-based ranking to reward intrinsic motivation. After all intrinsic motivation is what usually gets young researchers started on their career path: factors such as curiosity, flow experience in a fascinating activity, self-image, compliance with civic virtues, social or professional norms. In other words, all factors based on love with what they do.
While scientists therefore make a good role model for people involved in collaborative innovation, there is an even better one, which has been tried and tested for well over a thousand years, and has been analyzed by the same Bruno S. Frey: Benedictine monasteries (recently profiled in NZZ).

Why monks are coolfarmers (c)
In a paper on management principles of monastic life, Katja Rost, Emil Inauen, Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey study corporate governance at 134 Benedictine Abbeys in Southern Germany and Switzerland with an average age of nearly 500 years per monastery. It turns out COIN members can learn a lot from the monks. Benedictine monks organize their monastic life around three pillars:
Self-management: normally monks choose their own abbots from among their own ranks. Among the democratically elected abbots, only 11% turned out to be incapable, while among the externally imposed abbots, 67% were judged bad leaders. The Benedictine monks also have a lot of say in daily monastic life: there is a democratically elected “executive board” working with the abbot, a “consilium” advising and supervising the executive board, and there is also the full “parliament” of all monks convening multiple times per year and making fundamental decisions.
Core value system: Benedictine monks adhere to core values such as fairness, justice, mutual respect, mutual agreement, and forgiveness. Monasteries invest a lot of time into carefully selecting their new brothers, which join brotherhood over a well-calibrated multi-step multi-year process. Spending a lot of time with older monks, the young learn core values by example from the old. Additional learning happens through institutionalized readings during the meals.
External control: All the Benedictine monasteries are members of the congregation, lead by the archabbot. A visitation committee from the congregation inspects each monastery every five years, checking financial and spiritual health, with focus on advice, not on control.
Daily life in the Benedictine monasteries is governed by core values instead of control. This autonomy and self-organization increase intrinsic motivation, leading to higher quality results. Comparing average lifetime of a monastery (500 years) with the lifetime of large companies, which rarely survive 50 years, monks easily beat company executives. Love, the main motivating factor in Benedictine abbeys, therefore again trumps money and glory as corporate motivator.

What motivates creativity?
So far it seems that “love” is the main motivating factor for collaborative innovation. So is there a difference between love-driven “good creativity” and “bad creativity”? Creativity defined as “creating new things by combining existing things and processes in novel ways that have not been done before" is neither good nor bad.
But thinking this through further raises the question if e.g. creating a new derivative product for a Wallstreet bank is creativity also. After all, the Wallstreet banker is applying existing thinking to a new area to create value – mostly for himself. And that’s why I think that this is NOT sustainable creativity. The Wallstreet banker is entirely extrinsically motivated – he does what he does to make a lot of money, preferably for himself. Enron employees were highly creative in trading energy options, and even more creative in gaming the Californian energy system – all to create value, towards the outside for Enron and its shareholders, in the end, however, it all boiled down to optimizing their own bonuses. As history has shown, this was not and will never be sustainable! For some time, Enron revenue and share price went up, all to come down with an ugly crash after a few years. All that Enron employees did, was create one heck of a Ponzi scheme. As it now turned out, the real estate bubble in the US, created by “genius traders” at Wallstreet, was just yet another Enron, only at a vastly larger scale.
Enron employees did not break the laws of the United States, what they broke is the laws of good and ethical behavior. The schemes the Enron employees cooked up might have been legal, but they ripped off the majority – all of the users of electricity, i.e. all of us, to the advantage of a tiny minority: firstly the shareholders of Enron, and more importantly, the inventors of the energy trading systems.
And that’s why free markets don’t work. The underlying premise of Adam Smith’s invisible hand is that if everybody is off to fend for himself, trading on an unrestricted market will make society at large to be better off also. Well, this would only be true if there were total transparency, and no law of the bell curve, i.e. of smarter people trying to profit from not-so-smart people. And that’s why I think that only collaborative innovation motivated by “love” leads to sustainable progress.

What is better: banker or monk?

Who will win the 2010 Oscar – Early predictions?

2009-11-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

March 7th, 2010, the 82nd Academy Awards, commonly known as Oscars, will be given out for best picture, for best actor and actress, and in 21 other categories.
Two years ago we successfully predicted who would win an Oscar Award, almost two months before the Awards were actually given out. This blog post contains our first predictions for the 2010 Oscars, more than three months before the Awards will be actually given out.

There are other places on the Web also making Oscar predictions, for example movie site moviefone and Internet betting site intrade:

While the above predictions are made by experts (moviefone) and people placing bets on the outcome (intrade), our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says with her/his influence.
Below are our combined coolhunting results, based on evaluating the buzz in the Oscar Forum in the Internet movie database imdb.com and on running queries for [moviename] & “Oscar 2010” on the Web and in Blogs.

The light blue bar in the above chart is based on the buzz in the Oscar forum in imdb.com (see table below)

The second half of the prediction in the bar chart above is based on the betweenness of the movies on the Web and on Blogs. To illustrate this approach, below is the Blog network for the query [moviename] & “Oscar 2010”. If we wanted to drill down and predict which Oscar a movie might get, for example “Best Picture”, we would rerun the query as [moviename] & “Oscar 2010 Best Picture”.

To resume, the top predictions as of November 30, 2009, are:
1. nine
2. 500 days of summer
3. julie & julia
4. precious
5. hurt locker
6. lovely bones
7. Up in the air

Here are the predictions for best actor/actress, based on the discussion in the Oscar forum on imdb.com:

Obviously, 2009 is not over yet as some films are only coming out in December, and so things might still change. We will rerun the calculations at the end of 2009 to get more accurate predictions.

Taoism and COINs

2009-10-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

The principles of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism have many parallels with the ways how COINs operate.

The way is the goal - Tao means “way”, and “way” is the cornerstone of Taoism. This is very different from Western philosophies, where the “being” and “truth” are in the center. In Taoism, on the other hand, “the way is the goal”, this means it’s not the solution, which is important, but the way to get to the solution. COINs achieve their big vision in many small incremental steps along the way. It is the way, the joy of completing small incremental steps together, which are the main motivators for COIN members. Working extremely hard in the company of likeminded people and reaching a goal together is immensely rewarding. This way of working under positive stress is similar to the concept of “flow” defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people are most happy when they are in the state of flow – a state of complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. Csíkszentmihályi describes flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one.”

Let go – one of the core principles of Taoism is “wu-wei” or “non-action”. The main point is that one has to know when NOT to act. The underlying concept is that things basically will take care of themselves, if they only get the chance. For the individual, applying this principle is quite hard, as it means letting things go, and let them take their own way. We need to achieve a high level of self-assuredness and self-awareness to apply this principle. If we have reached this level, we will feel a sense of inner tranquility and self-emptiness that will allow us to let go. On the highest level, we will get rid of our own ego - becoming one with our activity - and do things for the sake of things, and not to further our own ego, reaching the state of flow. Among Linux opensource developers, Linus Torvalds, is famous for non-action and just “letting things taking care of themselves”. For individual COIN members it means that they are ready to let go of their individual idea and let the team take it over and bring it to completion. Because COIN members participate out of their own will – and not external pressure - they get the liberty to do whatever they think is right, and not what the boss or the company tells them to do.

Ethics – the three jewels of the Tao are compassion, moderation, and humility. The first one, compassion, also means kindness, and undemanding love like the love of a parent for her/his child. The second one, moderation and frugality, frees us from being driven by desires. If we are happy with what we have, and do not always want more, this will liberate us. The third one, humility, will help us recognize and be grateful for the contribution of others. In a well-functioning COIN, all three concepts come together. COIN members treat each other with respect, and respect the contribution of each member. They take care of each other, and through their focus on reaching their goal first and obtaining external recognition second, they are quite frugal in their demands. The last principle, humility, is the hardest to follow. This was already recognized by Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography, when he confessed how hard it was to acquire it “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.” He then goes on to describe how much easier it became to convince others when he presented his ideas in a humble way. The same should be true for COIN members, who respect the opinion of others and are grateful for the contribution of each member.
The principles of Taoism give us a great framework of how to work together in a COIN for the highest benefit of both the COIN and the individual members.

Reflections on COINs2009 - Towards a Science of Collaboration

2009-10-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

I am writing this blog post on my way back from the first Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs2009. It was a cool event, taking place Oct. 8-11 2009 at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. SCAD was a fitting place and perfect host for this conference, with its mascot the bee, paragon of collaborative swarms. The themes of the COINs conference cover a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration. Thinking about these topics in the plane on the trip back to Boston, it dawned on me that the time has come to put these topics into a solid scientific framework.

While it has been scientifically recognized that swarms of bees are better thought of as one big superorganism, it is only now that similar insights are coming up for the human superorganism. Slowly this human superorganism is starting to become self aware with the indivuum seeing its identity defined not in isolation, but through its connections. We therefore need a new science of collaboration, recognizing that each human is not just an individual, but a product of his and her connections to other humans.

Why is the Science of Collaboration relevant now? For thousands of years people have collaborated, from the first tribal bands hunting for large game to the feudal states in the middle ages to the large multinational companies of today. But only now with the emergence of the Internet and the Web do we have the means to solve tasks collaboratively at a large scale, with anybody, about anything, at anytime, and anywhere. Anybody planning a totally crazy project has the chance now to find the few other people on the world who care about the same topic with the same passion, and form the COIN, the Collaborative Innovation Network, to tackle the issue and collaboratively develop a solution.

While at the COINs2009 conference we got some great examples of co-located teams working on the same task, most of these collaborative tasks happen long-distance. Whether it’s designing a new piece of furniture, collaboratively writing an article, or authoring a flash movie, COINs pop up all around the globe, creatively collaborating over the Internet to solve their task.

Collaboration Science has many facets, ranging from analyzing and measuring collaboration by dynamic social network analysis, through making teams more collaborative by applying principles of group dynamics, to developing new Internet-based software tools and methods for collaboration. The COINs2009 call for papers lists the following subjects as parts of collaboration science:
• Dynamic Social Network Analysis
• Semantic Social Network Analysis
• Social System Design and Architectures
• Social Behavior Modeling
• Social Intelligence and Social Cognition
• Emotional Intelligence, Cultural Dynamics, Opinion Representation, Influence Process
• Trust, Privacy, Risk, Transparency and Security in social contexts
• Virtual Communication and Collaboration
• Measuring the performance of COINs
• Patterns of swarm creativity
• Collaborative Leadership
• Design and visualization in interdisciplinary collaboration
• Group dynamics and global teaming in virtual collaboration
• Organizational optimization in COINs
• The psychology and sociality of collaboration

Collaboration Science therefore includes principles and methods from many fields such as Network Science, Coordination Science and Web Science. The strongest contrast for me however is between Collaboration and Competition, i.e. using the power of the swarm for the egoistic benefit on one single individual. While people collaborate for egoistic goals, for me collaboration includes an altruistic element. While free markets are based on utilitarian principles, i.e. everybody being in it for his or her individual benefit, members of collaborative innovation networks are in it not just for themselves, but for the benefits of their community, knowing that if they do good to the community, the community will pay it back, leaving everybody much better off in the end.

Dustin Larimer, a conference participant from SCAD, allowed me to share the following three tag clouds. The clouds reflect feedback from conference participants after the first conference day, where three different workshops on the subject were offered, very cool:

Bundestagswahlen in Germany - Who will be the next Federal Chancellor

2009-09-26T00:39:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow September 27th, 2009, there are elections to the German parliament. It's the conservative (by German standards) CDU/CSU led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, against the social democrats (SPD) led by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, with the liberal democrats (FDP,Guido Westerwelle) and the Green party (Jürgen Trittin) as minor players. Predictions still seem to project a win of CDU, although it is not clear if CDU and FDP together will get a clear majority.
A quick coolhunting in blogs seems to speak a clear language:

Angela Merkel seems the clear leader, being in a sphere of her own, and her competitors huddled together in the other corner. SPD candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier has a large support network, although of lesser influence.

But wait! What we are looking at above is what the WORLD thinks and blogs - and there Angela Merkel, as the incumbent Chancellor, has a huge advantage. If we zoom in on German language blogs, using the German title "Bundeskanzler" as attribute, to make sure we get the German bloggers, the picture changes dramatically:

Now Frank-Walter Steinmeier is the leader. But there is still hope for Angela Merkel, together with Guide Westerwelle's FDP, she gets a majority, at least in the blogosphere. The situation worsens for Angela Merkel, if we factor in the other candidates from farther left, the Greens (Jürgen Trittin) and Gregor Gysi from the Left Party:

In this constellation, the left wins (size of the font of the politician's name is proportional to percentage of votes). As of yesterday, the long-term trend in the blogosphere still predicts victory for CDU, although the lead is shrinking:

But this was the general coolhunt, which as I explained at the beginning of this post, measures what the WORLD says. Let's wait until tomorrow evening, to see if German Bloggers and the German population agree.

Coolhunting for the next Swiss Federal Councilor - yes it works

2009-09-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

In the last three posts I have looked at what the crowd on the Web was saying about the chances of the 3 main candidates for Swiss Federal Councilor in the elections of Sept. 16 to succeed Bundesrat Pascal Couchepin. And note that we had to predict what the crowd was thinking what the 248 members of the Swiss National Assembly would be doing. The ranking was (see three previous posts):
1. Urs Schwaller
2. Christian Luescher
3. Didier Burkhalter

If you look at the voting in the Assembly yesterday, it is (from Wikipedia)

So the crowd PERFECTLY predicted the voting pattern in round 1!
The group dynamics in the Assembly in the succeeding rounds, and in particular the behavior of individual people like the withdrawal of Christian Luescher after round 3, the crowd can NOT predict, that's up to Mr Luescher - there are still good uses for the crystal ball.

Who will be the next Swiss Federal Councillor - Final update

2009-09-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Sept 16 will be the elections for next Swiss Federal Councillor in succession of Pascal Couchepin. Here the latest coolhunting results on the blogs for the four main candidates:

Who will be the next Swiss Federal Councillor - 2nd update

2009-09-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

The elections for the successor of Swiss Federal Councilor (Bundesrat) Pascal Couchepin will be this Wednesday, Sept 16. Here is a new update on the trend prediction, as of this evening, Sunday Sept 13.
Again the disclaimer is that it is not the Swiss population who is electing the Bundesrat, but the 248 members of parliament, which of course makes it much harder to predict the outcome. Nevertheless, here first the general trend for the currently three official candidates, Christian Lüscher, Didier Burkhalter, and Urs Schwaller, and three other candidates based on the "electoral votes", i.e. Web Betweenness of the Swiss German bloggers for the last three days.

Christian Lüscher lost his lead, Urs Schwaller is the leader, Dominique de Buman is number two. This is based on the accumulated coolhunting in the German language blogosphere over the last week:

Weltwoche.ch, Bernerzeitung.ch, and Politreport.ch are the most influential Blogs - the kingmakers - to promote the candidates.

Doing a combined coolhunting for the German language Web and blogosphere and adding the French Swiss (by including tracking the prominence of Web sites talking about "conseil federal urs schwaller", etc.) gives a slightly different picture:

Now Dominque de Buman is the leader (betweenness 0.31), ahead of Urs Schwaller (betweenness 0.29). It does not look good for the two candidates from FDP, Lüscher and Burkhalter.
I also included the social Web networks for the queries "Nachfolge Bundesrat Couchepin Ständerat" und "Nachfolge Bundesrat Couchepin Nationalrat" to accomodate for the fact that Ständerat and Nationalrat (the Swiss National Assembly) will elect the "Nachfolger" (successor) of the Bundesrat. One side result is that the Ständerat (betweenness 0.04) has more influence on the election of the successor than the Nationalrat (betweenness 0.03) - at least on the Web.

Here is also the content map of the German language blogs about the four main candidates Schwaller, Buman, Lüscher, and Burkhalter. The size of each square denotes the betwenness of a term.

The term cloud is nicely split into an FDP and a CVP side. What stands out is that Christian Lüscher is haunted by his lawyer colleague Poncet who is representing Gadaffi in his dispute with Switzerland. On the other hand it seems that the FDP has a slightly larger claim (higher betweenness) on the vacant seat than the CVP. Blocher, another politician from the right-wing SVP also comes out prominently as an influencer, together with FDP president Pelli. There is speculation about Bundesrat Merz stepping down soon also.

Who will be the next Swiss Federal Councillor - appended

2009-09-04T05:05:00.000-07:00

After I did my first automatic coolhunting yesterday, I got feedback that I had forgotten to include one of the main candidates, Christian Lüscher (FDP, Geneva) into my coolhunting. So I repeated the process for both the German and French speaking parts of Switzerland. Here are the results:

Web in French speaking Switzerland:

Blogs in French speaking Switzerland:

Web in German speaking Switzerland:

Blogs in German speaking Switzerland

To resume: The French speaking Swiss favor non-candidate Fulvio Pelli, both in long term recognition (Web) and prospects for tomorrow (Blog). For the German speaking Swiss, Christian Lüscher is the clear favorite, particularly on the blogs.

Looking at the social network on the Swiss German Web confirms the central position of Christian Lüscher:

So what are the main lessons: automatic coolhunting needs to be complemented by human coolhunters - thank you for pointing out my omission of Christian Lüscher. The automatic coolhunting system is only as good as its input.

Who will be the next Swiss Federal Councillor

2009-09-03T09:30:00.001-07:00

Sept 16, 2009, the Swiss Federal Assembly will elect the successor of longtime Swiss Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin, who will step back after over ten years in office. The Swiss Federal Council is the executive seven-member council who serves as the collective head of state of Switzerland.
Although this means that not the entire Swiss population, but the Swiss Federal Assembly - an admittedly biased subsample of 246 mostly male (75%) members of the Swiss establishment - will vote for the next Federal Councillor, it will still be very interesting to see what the entire swarm of all Swiss thinks who will be the next Federal Councillor.

For my coolhunting I looked at the popularity of 8 leading candidates (Martine Brunschwig Graf, Dominique de Buman, Fulvio Pelli, Urs Schwaller, Daniel Brelaz, Jean-Francois Rime, Pascal Broulis, Didier Burkhalter). I ran the queries both on the Web, and just for blogs. I also checked who is the most popular candidate among the Swiss Germans by adding the word "Bundesrat" (this is the title of a Swiss Federal Councillor in German) to the name as well as "Conseil Federal" - the French title - to coolhunt among the Romands, the native French speakers of Switzerland.

The results are quite interesting. Here is the percentages on the Web for the leading 7 candidates:

On the Web, Dominique de Buman (CVP, 21%), Martine Brunschwig Graf (FDP, 19%), and Jean-Francois Rime (SVP, 17%) are the most popular. As the Web reflects the election history until now, this means that these three candidates have the widest general recognition today.
Just for fun, let's also see if there are some alliances among the politicians on the Web, based on the linking structure on the Web:

It seems as if Dominique de Buman is in a category of his own, while Martine Brunschwig Graf (FDP) and Jean-Francois Rime (SVP) seem to overlap really closely. That's not too surprising, because FDP and SVP in many isues align themselves. Didier Burkhalter (also FDP) is the candidate in the center, close to Fulvio Pelli, (non-)candidate and president of the Swiss FDP.

Now let's see what the blogs are telling us - the network below tells the story. Again Dominique de Buman commands a large share of the vote of the Swiss bloggers. Jean-Francois Rime is much less central here. Daniel Brelaz is even more popular with the bloggers, but wait a moment and look his position in the social blogging network:

The explanation for his popularity is that he is also frequently quoted by bloggers in his role as the mayor of the city of Lausanne, as well as an active member of the green party, which puts him into quite a polarizing position. Not a place to be in to become the next Federal Councillor in consensus-loving Switzerland.

Now let's look what the French speaking Swiss think. Here is the Web ranking:

Martine Brunschwig Graf leads, with Dominique de Buman and Pascal Broulis tied for second place.
The German speaking part of Switzerland shows a different picture on the Web.

Here official non-candidate and president of the Swiss FDP Fulvio Pelli leads ahead of Daniel Brelaz and Dominique de Buman. In the Swiss German Blogosphere, Pelli is out, while Jean-Francois Rime is in the lead, ahead of Didier Burkhalter and Martine Brunschwig Graf.

It is also interesting to see what Web sites are the most brand-building for the candidates (i.e. they have the highest betweenness centrality in the networking pictures). Here is the list:
1. Swissinfo
2. Youtube
3. Wikipedia
4. Facebook
5. Reuters press releases
6. LinkedIn
7. NZZ.ch
8. Parlament.ch

The first Web site is an official Swiss news Web site, but the next ones are the Web 2.0 sites popular with teens and tweens. NZZ.ch, the leading Swiss newspaper, is only number 7. The lesson is obvious: social networking rules the world, at least on the Web!

Back to our original question: who will be the next Federal Councillor: It is still very hard to tell as the leading candidates seem almost tied. Nevertheless, here my try based on the coolhunting insights:
- Dominque de Buman, the leader in two categories across all of Switzerland is my front runner.
- Martine Brunschwig Graf is a consistent third on most charts, so she might take the lead from behind.
- as a long shot, I would nominate Didier Burkhalter (current favorite among the Swiss German bloggers, representative for the largest group in the Swiss Assembly)
Check back in a week, to see how the positions will have changed.

Coolhunting Today's Iranian Presidential Elections

2009-06-12T11:30:00.001-07:00

This weekend the Iranians are electing a new president. Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad competes against reformist candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee. It seems that Ahmadinejad's fiery rethoric did little to help him improve his chances to win the elections, at least on the Web.
Coolhunting with Condor today for the frontrunner on the Web and the Blogs, once on the entire Web, and once restricted to the "ir" Iranian domain brought a clear picture: not once was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading.

First the global analysis, searching the entire blogosphere

and then the entire Web.

It seems as if Mehdi Karroubi would be emerging as the clear leader, at least on the global (uncensored) Internet!

Now restricted only to blogs within the Iranian domain:

And finally all Web sites within the "ir" Iranian domain:

Inside Iran, the three reform candidates are tied with Mir-Hossein Mousavi slightly ahead on blogs, and Mohsen Rezaee the clear leader on the Web, Ahmadinejad is again coming in last. As the blogosphere is the better short term predictor, Mousavi would be the leading candidate this evening inside Iran.

Just for fun, here is also the linking structure of the global Web sites talking about the four candidates:

Note the central position of Karoubi and Mousavi, with the large blue (Karoubi) and brown (Mousavi) Webs. Ahmadinejad has a far flung, but very thin Web (green). Mousavi is in the center, and Karoubi has a tight network, reflecting his well-organized support network.

Based on this coolhunting, Web Buzz today seems to favor Mousavi and Karroubi. Tomorrow we will know more.

Who innovates better - the small or the tall?

2009-05-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times has an article by Steve Lohr "Who Says innovation Belongs to the Small?" which makes the argument that "These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game".

I beg to differ.

While it might be true that it takes the resources of large companies to implement fundamentally new things, large companies are extremely bad in recognizing the value of these fundamentally new things. Managers like to preserve the status quo, which means that new ideas inside a large company have a much harder time to succeed than if they are set free in the ecosystem of small startups reminiscent of the wild wild west. Other articles in today's NYT give compelling examples, such as bestselling author Jim Collins and Daniel Carasso, founder of Yoghurt giant Danone. It would be hard to envision for both Carasso and Collins to have found any traction for their groundbreaking ideas in large organizations. People with radically new ideas have a hard time to succeed in large organizations. Rather, they follow what I call the three-year-rule: Once they come to a new organization, they identify and try to implement new ideas inside their company. After three years of trying and being frustrated multiple times they usually leave the company and start afresh at another organization. Or, like Messrs Collins and Carasso, they don't join any new organization anymore, but start on their own. But they might still leave some of their creative ideas behind which are then picked up by the large company, leading to success stories like the ones described in Mr. Lohrs' article, such as IBM creating a large datamining system, or (even!) Microsoft starting some social software applications.

So, to put it in a nutshell, it does not matter at all if the innovation is promoted by a large or a small organization, what matters is the collective intelligence and creativity of the creators of the innovation, how well they are embedded into a support network, which can be inside or outside an existing organization. All things being equal, I'd rather say, in agreement with Clayton Christensen's arguments, that chances outside of organizational boundaries and restrictions are much better for a new idea to succeed. Sorry, Mr. Lohr.

Creative Ideas as Galactic Black Holes

2009-05-13T14:41:00.000-07:00

“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo (loose translation)

When following the diffusion of a cool new idea in a social network, an interesting similarity with the structure of our universe and its stars and galaxies can be recognized. Readers of “Swarm Creativity – Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks” know that a cool idea runs through several stages before becoming widely influential and accepted. At first there is a creator who has a brilliant solution for something. Then, his idea attracts a small group of people who consequently work on spreading the word – until it eventually makes its way into a general known concept which is adapted by a larger crowd in the social net. The final stage is the interest network – this is when the idea has been widely recognized and most people in the social network already know about it or even use it.

How does this compare to the structure of stars and galaxies? A common theory of cosmologists nowadays is that every larger galaxy has a black hole in its center, holding together the stars of the galaxy with its ginormous gravity. So, if we consider the black hole center being a creator who attracts people (stars) with his gravity (idea), how would the whole process of an idea’s evolution be reflected in these terms? Of course it would compare to the creation of a new galaxy.

When a star with a certain minimum mass “dies”, meaning its thermonuclear fusion processes run out of hydrogen, it is the birth hour for a new black whole. Thus, the fusion processes can be considered to be the creator “brainstorming” his new idea. When emergence of the idea has reached a certain stage, the creator starts spreading it to other people – the birth of the black hole. A black hole’s nature is to never release anything which went past its event horizon, thus agglomerating mass and consequently increasing gravity. For our creator/black hole analogy this is the phase of where the creator elaborates and develops his idea further and thereby increasing its attraction potential (gravity in terms of black holes).

At a point, the mass of the black hole will become so great that it actually starts drawing other stars in its surrounding area, bringing them to orbit around it. This is, as for the analogy, when the creator assembles a group of believers who begin working on further developing and spreading his idea. Because the orbiting stars themselves also draw further stars with their own gravity (the believers spread the word), the few initial ones will be joined by more after a while. Over time, a local system of stars (the learning network) and eventually a whole galaxy (interest network) is formed that way, with a galactic black hole in its center.

This is not where it ends. We could now examine what reflects ideas which did not make it beyond the second stage (the black hole could not draw enough mass – the idea was not “cool” enough, or the creator was a bad communicator of making it plausible to other people) or how new black holes form inside the galaxy (new ideas emerge in the interest network). I invite you to give your own thoughts in the comments for now.

If you would like to know more about the evolution of galaxies I recommend the Wikipedia links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

It doesn't look good for the Republicans, or does it?

2009-05-10T14:57:00.001-07:00

Today's attack of Dick Cheney against Colin Powell, who 'd rather choose Rush Limbaugh over Powell prompted me to check what the Web buzz is saying about the Republicans against Democrats, using our CoolTrend application. At first, checking Web buzz at large, I got the expected result:

The Democrats lead on the Web, with 53% over 47%. But then I took a closer look at the spiderweb of web links deciding on the percentages of Web buzz. Compared to older pictures, where the Republican Web sites always were closely clustered, while the Democratic Web sites were widely spread out, the Republican Web these days is similarly scattered:

This means that a lot of discussion and soul searching is going on in the Republican parts of the Web, with many dissenting opinions, as reflected in today's comment of Cheney on Powell.
I then repeated the same query restricted to the blogosphere, because what is said by bloggers today, frequently becomes mainstream opinion tomorrow. I got quite a surprising result, the blogsphere was evenly split: both Democrats and Republicans got exactly 50%. And the Blogger network structure reflects that result also:

So no need to write off the Republicans prematurely. They are undergoing a lot of discussion and goal setting, with a network structure which right now looks surprisingly similar to the Democratic one, but at least in the Blogosphere, they are even with the Democrats.

ORF Swarmcreativity Podcast (in German)

2009-05-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

This week I participated in the EduMedia eCreativity Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) was also present, and put togethera very nice online interview and podcast describing the foundations of Swarm Creativity (in German)

Predicting the Iranian Presidential Elections?

2009-04-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

Recently I was asked if I could predict the outcome of the Iranian Presidential elections on June 12, 2009, based on what people are saying on Blogs and the Web about the candidates. Unfortunately this is a much harder task than predicting the US Presidential elections, or the Zurich Mayoral elections, as our system is not set up to parse and rank Farsi Web sites.

Nevertheless, I was curious what I would find out. I took the leading candidates from the Wikipedia page. They are Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current incumbent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who is running as an independent, and Mehdi Karroubi. There is a whole list of other potential candidates listed on Wikipedia, which I ignored for my tests. I included Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, who has endorsed Mousavi.

Below is the Condor/CoolTrend picture of what the English Web said for the last four days:

Mehdi Karoubi leads the Web Buzz in the US/English Web.
In the US/English Blogosphere, the picture is different:

Current incumbent Ahmadinejad is leading. Based on prior analysis of many other elections, Blogs predict the trend fairly well, so things look bright for Ahmadinejad, at least today.
BUT, this is only on English blogs. So let's look what Iranian Web sites and blogs say. As we don't have a Farsi analysis system, I just entered the same query into CoolTrend, limiting it however to the "ir" domain. A very different picture is emerging. Inside Iran, on the Web, Mousavi and Kahatimi, who is supporting Mousavi, are leading:

The same picture is true for the blogosphere, Khatami and Mousavi are leading. This is confirmed by a poll from late March, which puts Mousavi ahead.

The final picture shows the social network of candidates and their shares today (April 13, 2009), restricted to Iranian Web sites. As our system can not handle Farsi characters, only the candidates' names are displayed, the URLs could not be shown:

So, on the Internet, we know who the next Iranian President might be, at least for today: Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Panopticon or Bee Hive – living in total transparency

2009-04-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

People need to be watched, otherwise they will not do their job. That was the idea of Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison, the Panopticon, where every prisoner could easily be watched by much fewer guards.

Today there is software that does a similar job. For example, LiveJobs, a company that operates virtual call centers all over the US, distinguishes itself from competitors by meticulously tracking performance of its call center agents. Whether it is selling insurance, transcribing documents, or taking pizza delivery calls, LiveOps software monitors individual performance on the most granular level, and delivers it to both LiveOps management and the individual employee.

So, in a sense, big brother is always watching. People are “operating in total transparency”. At least for LiveOps employees, this does not seem to be such a bad thing. They continuously check their own performance every day. If they don’t perform, they will not be fired, but they will not get more work from LiveOps.

For knowledge workers, monitoring e-mail does provide the role of the panopticon. When we do a knowledge flow analysis of an organization, we provide the same function, offering individuals a “virtual mirror” based on their communication behavior. But other than the Panopticon, we only offer a condensed view of the organization to management – transparency for the individual, but guaranteeing their privacy to management, only releasing individual information at the request of the individual.

Creating iPhone Apps - the Swarm takes over

2009-04-07T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today's NYT describes a list of computer programmers turned entrepreneurs, creating cool apps for the iPhone. With the barriers to entry as low as they are here: one basically just needs a computer to download the app developer kit, plus of course programmer skills, this is the perfect opportunity for swarm business. People like Ethan Nicholas, a (former) Java developer at Sun, making $800,000 with a shooter game, are the new members of the swarm. Apple, handling sales and marketing including money collection though its App store, proves once more superb coolfarming skills.

Interview on "Open Innovation and Swarm Creativity" on "World of Possibilities" Radio Show

2009-03-31T14:38:00.000-07:00

Today the "A World of Possibilities" Radio Show published my interview with host Mark Sommer talking about Open Innovation, Swarm Creativity, COINs, and the role and inspiration of bees.

Predicting Zurich Mayoral Elections - It Works!

2009-03-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

In a blogpost on January 8 I spoke about the CoolTrend prediction system for the Zurich mayoral elections I had set up. At that time candidate Corinne Mauch was already ahead of candidate Kathrin Martelli. In the meantime our Coolhunting system collected the statistics from the blogosphere every day (see picture below:

Until the main elections on February 8 things were fuzzy, with Corinne Mauch and Kathrin Martelli changing the lead a few times. In the elections February 8 - again as predicted by our tool - Martelli had a slight lead over Mauch, but not enough to overcome the absolute majority threshold, which means that a second round became necessary. After February 16 things became clear in the blogosphere, Corinne Mauch always had a solid lead.

Towards the end, Kathrin Martelli's buzz went up also - not surprisingly, as in the final days bloggers from both sides became more active. But it was never enough to challenge the lead of Corinne Mauch, and so she easily won the elections in Zurich today! Congratulations, Corinne Mauch!

2009-03-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

Web Science 2.0 – Online Analysis of Entrepreneurship Activity at German Universities
Which university is the place to go to become a successful entrepreneur? Where do I find a strong entrepreneurial network and prosperous environment to start off my business? By mining and analyzing online social networking sites we found interesting answers to these questions. Out of representative samples of alumni students from eleven German universities we retrieved company and startup founders as well as other executives. We looked at the largest universities including high potential institutions (LMU Munich, TU Munich, and University of Karlsruhe) and top ranked private business schools (European Business School (EBS) and WHU Vallendar). On average we identified 1,070 people that match the entrepreneurial profile. Through our sources we were also able to get internal and external relationships for every entrepreneur. By loading this data into our powerful social network analysis machine Condor we constructed the social network for all eleven universities.

Picture 1: Social network of entrepreneurs of eleven German universities
Picture 1 shows the network of entrepreneurs of all eleven universities. There are significant differences of how the various schools are connected and located in the overall graph. While some universities (Hamburg (green-brown), Munich (purple), and Cologne (light green)) are very central and dense connected clusters others are peripheral and almost isolated from the rest (e.g. University of Mannheim (dark purple), Karlsruhe (dark green), and Hannover (grey)). The two analyzed private business schools (EBS Oestrich-Winkel (blue) and WHU (dark blue)) form very dense networks, too. As opposed to EBS which is fairly peripheral and loosely connected to University of Hamburg, WHU is totally located in the center and seems to be the ultimate connector of the overall network. The top ranked schools for mechanical and technical engineering (RWTH Aachen (pink) and TU Munich (light blue)) both are located on the very right side of the graph depict some interconnections. Some people from RWTH Aachen are very well integrated while others are isolated completely and only related through their peers. TU Munich is not a coherent network and is mostly overlapped by University of Munich which might be on the one hand a result of their co-location but also an indication for a close cooperation between both schools. However, there is no interconnectivity between the high potential institutions University of Karlsruhe and LMU or TU Munich. Based on these results we can conclude that Munich provides a very strong environment for entrepreneurs and is also well connected to other institutions. We also see that WHU is the place where founders and potential entrepreneurs find ideal conditions to ramp off their own company.
A content analysis of the founder’s attributes brought up some interesting insights.

Picture 2: Popular industries for entrepreneurs from different universities
Picture 2 shows most popular industries for entrepreneurs from different universities. While the consulting business is strong across all institutions some sectors are particularly centralized on one school. Marketing is prevalent at University of Cologne which reflects the fact that Cologne is the capital of media and ad agencies in Germany. Karlsruhe dominates the IT sector whereas Banking is most popular at European Business School Oestrich-Winkel which is closely located to Frankfurt, the mecca of European banking.

Swarmcreativity Essentials Video on I-Open Education

2009-03-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Wednesday afternoon I had a visit by Betsey Merkel from I-Open Education, in its own words "...a community that shares best practices in collaborative leadership, networks and Strategic Doing to strengthen Open Source Economic Development". She did a really nice video interview that gives an overview in a nutshell of the principles of COINs and swarm creativity (you will need to register first).

Predicting the results of today's Swiss vote on freedom of movement and residence

2009-02-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

Today the Swiss voted about extension of the right of free movement and residence with the rest of the European Union. The vote was brought by the extension of the right of free movement and residence (Personenfreizügigkeit) to new EC member states Rumania and Bulgaria, which had previously been approved by the Swiss government. The right-wing people's party collected enough votes against it to ask for a referendum. The vote was today, and according to early polls it started looking good for the supporters of the right of freedom and movement. I wanted to know what the Web and Blog would predict, and here are the Coolhunting results:

on the Web:
Yes (Personenfreizügigkeit Annahme) 73%
No (Personenfreizügigkeit Ablehnung) 27%

on the Blogs:
Yes (Personenfreizügigkeit Annahme) 58%
No (Personenfreizügigkeit Ablehnung) 42%

By now (Feb 8, 4 pm), the final results are here, and the right on freedom on movement and residence (Personenfreizügigkeit) has been approved by the Swiss voters with a 59,6% yes vote - the same as the coolhunting predictions on the Web and Blog.

How to make Washington cool - followup

2009-01-28T11:48:00.000-08:00

Recently (see my previous blog post) I was interviewed by a journalist from the Washington Post about how cool Washington is. Her conclusion was that DC is not cool. This led to a backlash of negative reactions - I got my share of it also, see the post here and the comments on the original story.

I would like to point out there are very cool places in Washingon. There is for example the hotel I stayed in one of my last trips to DC, the Tabard Inn, a very cool boutique hotel. But there are also less cool things in DC, like when I was scheduled to give a presentation on Collaborative Innovation at the World Bank, and was not let in for 45 minutes because security was so tight they could not find anybody with the right credentials to identify me.

But actually it would be quite easy to make Washington very cool. Cool places are made by cool people, and one of them just started in his new job last week. It’s now up to all of us to get more of the same to Washington!

How to make things and places “cool”?

2009-01-25T18:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Washington Post published a timely opinion piece on “how to make D.C. cool”, pondering the question whether Washington D.C. could ever be cool. The journalist had interviewed me for this article, and the discussion with her got me thinking about what it takes to make a place “cool”.

Why is it that NYC, SF, or Boston are cool, while D.C, a popular tourist destination, seems in dire want of coolness? Let’s first look at what makes things cool.

“Cool” things have four properties. First, they need to be fresh and new, we don’t want yesterday’s stale old ideas, but radically new and better ones. Apple is cool, Microsoft is not. Why? By ushering in a new era in computers with the Macintosh, in music players with the iPod, or in mobile phones with the iPhone, Apple has shown a unique knack in coming up with beautiful new things. Microsoft may be more profitable, and having grown to much bigger size with its copycat strategy, but nobody has ever accused it of being cool – that’s reserved for creators of radically new things. Microsoft’s technology does the job, but it’s clunky, arcane, clogged with features that nobody wants. Apple, on the other hand, consistently defined new markets with superbly designed innovative products.

Second, cool things make us part of a community, they help us be with people like us. As psychologists and sociologists have found out, if we have the chance, we would like to be with as many people “like us” as possible – the more the merrier. Why was it that two million people trekked to Washington, to the inauguration of President Obama? Why did people stand in line for eight hours to get to the Mall to Obama’s inauguration, and not just watch it on TV? Simple answer: other people. It was the chance to be part of something cool and new, to witness change, jointly with two million likeminded souls. Even something as simple as owning the latest iPhone or Blackberry makes the owner part of a community, a sister and brotherhood , with the token of entry being the iPhone or Blackberry.

Third, cool things are fun. Owning an iPhone is fun, because it looks so well-designed and cool. Going to a musical on Broadway is fun and relaxing. Making calls and surfing the Web on an iPhone is fun, playing music on an iPod is fun. Drinking coffee in Starbucks is fun too, not the least because every Starbucks customer is in good company with other people who are enjoying a good cup of coffee in a relaxing atmosphere. It’s not for nothing that Starbucks carefully selects and trains its barristas to provide a superior customer experience.

Finally, cool things give meaning to our life. Cool things make people happier and feel good. Owning a cool thing can become a goal all by itself, whether it is the new iPhone, the bag from Adidas, or the car we always wanted, or joining an activist group fighting global warming. For many people the thing that gives meaning to their life is making the world a better place – the ultimate in cool.

Now that we know why something is cool or not, the next question is what makes up – or does not – the coolness of a place like Washington. The main thing that makes a place cool is cool people. For cool people to show up at a place, they must find cool things there, not the least other cool people. Once a place is bustling with stars, actors, models, artists, movie stars, or star entrepreneurs, more of them will show up.

What are the external landmarks of a cool city? There are three parts to it: a recreational, educational, and a business part. Recreational components of a cool city are funky cafes, elegant boutiques, artistic shops, art galleries, all sorts of restaurants from cheap and greasy to organic and healthy, theaters, museums and parks to stroll around. The second ingredient of a cool place is educational institutions such as universities, colleges, or art schools, bringing the droves of students who provide the social glue of the cool city. A third mark of a cool place is a dense organic mix of business life, scores of startups combined with larger well-established companies. The more of these three things – recreation, education, and business – there are compressed within a city, the cooler it is. That’s why NYC is cool, or Boston and San Francisco.

One of my recent favorites among cool places is Savannah, a port city in Georgia, which until just a few years ago was in serious decay. But when I was visiting Savannah last fall, I found a city bustling with life, full of artists, students, and tourists. Talking with locals I found there is one institution that heavily influenced this conversion to coolness: SCAD – the Savannah College of Art and Design, founded in 1978, with 9000 students as of today. SCAD has renovated many of the old mansions and historic buildings that had been rotting for the last fifty to hundred years into lecture halls and student dorms. During my visit in Savannah I noticed all components of a cool city – coffee shops and art galleries, theaters and music festivals, educational institutions, and an active business life, ranging from numerous startups to Gulfstream Aerospace, a large manufacturer of jets.

Who will be the next "Stadtpraesident" (mayor) of Zurich?

2009-01-08T19:08:00.000-08:00

There is a hot race currently between the two ladies Kathrin Martelli and Corinne Mauch for the succession of the popular mayor of Zurich, Elmar Ledergerber, who stepped back recently. I was curious to see what Web and Blog have to say about the chances of the two candidates.
Here is the Coolhunting result of Condor for today on the Blog (Jan 8th, 2009) - Corinne Mauch leads with 53%

Repeating the same process on the Web, to get the more long term trend, leads to the same result - it looks even worse for Kathrin Martelli who gets only 35% of the Coolhunting vote.

We will know Feb 8, after the election. The only thing certain: Zurich's next mayor will be female.

Analyzing film scripts with condor

2009-01-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

While participating this winter in a seminar on Social Network Analysis and COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) by Peter Gloor and Kai Fischbach at the University of Cologne, it occurred to me that a film script provides a great source for Social Network Analysis.

Each character in a movie receives and sends messages through dialogues with other characters. These are represented as edges in Condor - the social network tool we are using in this seminar. As the film script only allocates the sender of each dialogue, one has to manually add one or more receivers. A timestamp for each conversation can be created by looking at the scene in which the conversation is initiated.

As you can see in the picture above, the film industry has very strict rules on the layout of a film script. So once one writes a parser for one script, it will work for almost every other script too. There are a few good sources like awesomefilm.com, imsdb.com or simplyscripts.com where you can find film scripts in almost every genre.

The movie Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu as an example is interesting because it not only is set in different regions of the world. There can also be identified four sub groups that rarely get in contact with each other as can be seen in the picture below.

One group of characters in Tokyo doesn’t share any dialogue with any other main character from other regions, whereas two other sub groups in Morocco are connected through a side character (gatekeeper) who doesn’t even have a name in the movie. So the story is not carried by a global social connection between the characters but through a unifying object (a rifle) with which the characters are connected.

Looking at the contribution index of each character, you can identify different roles. The main characters seem to have a very balanced talk/listen ratio, except a character called “chieko” who is deaf and hardly replies to anybody. Side characters often act as advisors (doctor, grandmother) or as servers (driver, bartender). As a advisor you send more messages than you receive, as a server you receive more than you send.

The following video shows how the connections between characters develop throughout the story of the film.

Other movies can have a completely different representation in a graph. In “The Graduate” by Mike Nichols the main character is a star and almost every other character is connected through him. “The Godfather” by Francis Ford Coppola shows a big galaxy with a high group density. “Burn After Reading” by the Coen Brothers brings up several social groups that are autonomous at the beginning but get mixed up at the end.

Register for CoolPeople Beta

2008-12-21T01:54:00.000-08:00

We have now opened registration for our cool new CoolPeople application. CoolPeople finds influencers, trendsetters, and creators, and even measures their success. This can be done for example for "nanotechnology entrepreneurs in India", but also for "John Smith". It even finds the attributes of the people related to "John Smith".

The picture below shows the CoolPeople network about the topic "Swarm Creativity" as a cybermap social network picture.

The next picture shows the CoolPeople list view of the CoolPeople query "US President"

If you want to see even more before pre-registering, try a dynamic preview: click on the "Condor" picture here which will bring up a dynamic cybermap about "swarm creativity".

Bankers are all Mad(off) – it’s communities we trust!

2008-12-20T05:26:00.000-08:00

There are two articles in today’s NYT which resume where we stand regarding trust in ourselves, society, and our future. The first one is by NYT columnist Paul Krugmann, who talks about the Madoff economy. While everybody deplores the criminal tactics of Bernie Madoff, who, in the biggest Ponzi scheme of all times, squandered 50 billion dollars of investor money coming from anywhere on earth, Krugman makes the point that the rest of the Wallstreet bankers is not much better than Madoff. All of them got outrageously rich through outsized bonuses collected on trades in high-yielding, but highly risky assets. As the smoke at Wallstreet is slowly clearing, the bankers are keeping their bonuses, while the investors' money is gone. While Mr. Madoff skipped a few steps, simply stealing his customers’ money while passing on some of it to his earlier investors, the other bankers collected huge fees while exposing investors to risks they did not understand.

The incomes of these employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investment” have exploded over the last years, to the level where an annual income of a million dollar was nothing special, and even incomes of $ 20 million were fairly common. This has led to a magnetic pull of quick wealth, distracting the smartest students into investment banking, away from science, public service, and everything else. The vast riches that could be earned corrupted their sense of reality and ethics, leading to a society where people like Mr. Madoff, who were making a lot of money, were idolized. To quote Paul Krugmann “What we are looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff!”

Where are people putting their trust and money today, now that they have been let down by the brilliant investment stars at Wallstreet who were most brilliant in optimizing their own bonuses and checkbooks? Part of the answer to this question is in another article in today’s NYT. It seems that in rapidly growing numbers people are turning to the Web for investment advice. Web based investment community sites such as Wesabe, CakeFinancial, and Credit Karma and online banking sites such as Mint and Smartypig have been experiencing double digit membership growth since September, adding up to 25% new members in the last two or three months.

The biggest challenge for these Web sites is to earn the trust of their users. After all, users are asked to upload sensitive information such as their social security number, investment portfolios, credit card numbers and bank account information. Comments by users of these online community Web sites are quite telling:

Because of the crisis, I actually felt more comfortable than if this were some big bank. With everything that’s going on with banks, I’m not ready to give them my money. This Web site makes me feel safer.

Compared to simple old online banking, people particularly appreciate the feeling of community that these new financial communities are offering through Facebook and Twitter feeds. This way they can get immediate feedback and advice from otherwise anonymous people who are in the same situation.
It’s communities we trust!

Not Chief Executives, but Chief Creators we need!

2008-11-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

The leaders of today’s companies are still called CEOs, Chief Executive Officers. “Nomen est omen”, the CEOs put their emphasis on execution, and not on creation. They hire management consultants to create their new strategies for them, which they then “execute”. They have obtained their MBA from top-ranked business schools in the US or Europe, where they were taught the ropes of management and leadership. This also means that they all lead in the same way, following the ‘best practices’, blueprints and rules they got hammered in at business school. There they were asked to study zillions of ‘cases’ of how the most successful among them did it ‘the right way’. Not surprisingly, they all were like lemmings, following the management gurus and each other into the abyss of today’s financial crisis, teetering along and pulling each other down to the brink of bankruptcy.

I propose a totally different style of leadership. This new style of leadership is based not on ‘best practices’, not on cookbook recipes of how to do it ONE right way, but on creativity – individual creativity, and swarm creativity. The step I am proposing is a bold one – empowering individual people at the company, instead of massing all the power in the hand of the Chief Executive who is also the Chief Executor. In this new type of organization there is no Chief Executor anymore, this role has been given away to all the stakeholders in the company. Stakeholders are the employees, the customers, the suppliers, and yes, also the management of the company. The managers are not CEOs anymore, but they are “Chief Creators”, Chief Creative Officers. Being highly creative themselves, they really stand out by unleashing the creativity of their swarm – their employees, their lead users, their customers, and anybody they touch through their vision and products.

If we look at the leaders who stand out today, Steve Jobs at Apple, the founders of Google, or Oprah Winfrey, all of them leaders of multibillion-dollar businesses which are highly resilient in today’s acid economic climate. None of them has come the conventional management way. They were never the CEOs of their companies in the conventional sense, never the chief executors. Rather, they are the chief creators of their respective enterprises. They might have assumed the CEO title to make them recognizable in their role to the rest of the world. What they really did however, is not execute somebody else’s strategy, but create radically new products, and create real, sustainable value. They did what they thought would be the right thing, listening first and foremost to themselves and to their swarm. Instead of listening to management gurus, business school professors, and strategy consultants, these leaders not just listen, but immerse themselves into their swarm. While conventional businesses like Motorola, GM, Ford and Chrysler, not to talk about the once mighty banks at Wallstreet, are foundering, the businesses of these creators are thriving. Leaders like Oprah or Steve Jobs are not afraid to go to the front line every day, listening to what their swarm has to say. When Steve Jobs started Apple, instead of obtaining an MBA, he immersed himself into his swarm. He first listened to what others did in the same space, visiting world famous Xerox Parc to learn about personal computers and computer mice, and hitching a job at a computer company to learn even more, until he had figured it out and was ready to start building his own computers at Apple.

These creators also give back to their swarm. Google famously encourages its employees to be creative, come up with new product ideas, which are then given away for free in some form, until the company has figured out a way of making money from it. Google acquired picture sharing Web site Picasa, set up the social networking community Orkut, and converted a startup into Google Docs, the Web-enabled office suite, all available for free to the end user. When Steve Job’s swarm of fanatic iPhone owners complained about a new price cut, he immediately gave back the difference in price to anybody who had bought the iPhone at the old, higher price.

In short, Chief Creative Officers, other than CEOs, immerse themselves into their swarm, they share with their swarm, and go where their swarm wants to go. Just like great farmers, their main task as coolfarmers is to provide a nurturing environment, and let the swarm do it by and for itself.

Why Coolhunting is more accurate than "plain" Web Metrics

2008-10-13T14:47:00.000-07:00

Today I stumbled on an interesting web post "Using Web Metrics to Analyze the ‘Palin Effect’ & 2008 Presidential Campaign". It is by Brent Payne, Head of Web Search at the Tribune whose holdings include the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. He was showing that Sarah Palin indeed is the most Web-researched among the 4 candidates on the Presidential ticket.

The picture below shows the percentage of users explicitly searching for one of the candidates on the Tribune's Web sites:

As we can see, Sarah Palin is by far the most researched. Brent then also shows the corresponding curves on Google Search, which confirm the same picture:

Compare this with our Condorview coolhunting. On the Web, we get a similar picture as Brent did for today. Today Sarah Palin commands 44%, buth then the rankings already change:

The big difference is that Joe Biden (26%) gets more buzz than Barack (16%). This is because Condorview is not counting what people search, but what important Web sites (by betweenness centrality) say about the candidates. As you can see on the right side in the above picture, wikipedia, twitter, barackobama.com, technorati, washingtonpost, facebook, and search.com all talk more about Sarah Palin and Joe Biden these days than they do about the Presidential candidates themselves.

But does this mean that Palin's popularity will translate in a vote for McCain?
To see the short term trend, just repeating the same Condorview Coolhunt for Blogs already shows a different picture:

The Presidential candidates command a larger share than their potential Vice Presidents. McCain leads Obama - for today (actually, for this very minute, Monday October 13, 2008, 5:55pm EDT, as these coolhunts, particularly in the blogosphere, can change by the minute.) This might suggest that Palin is indeed boosting McCain's popularity. But wait a minute!

The Condorview trend curves over the last five weeks show a different picture:

Since beginning of October, Obama beats McCain, consistent with what the polls are currently telling us.

Barack is back

2008-10-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

Helped by the faltering economy and Wallstreet banking crashes Barack Obama is rebounding against John McCain. As I had mentioned before, measuring Webbuzz with Condorview has shown for the last few months a solid lead for John McCain.

Well, this seems to have changed for now, both when measured on the Web with Condorview

as well as measured by conventional polls. The picture below is from a poll taken in Florida, one of the key battleground states, end of September.

Galaxyadvisors at CTI Swiss Venture Day (9/3/08)

2008-09-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday we had the chance to present our software startup galaxyadvisors at the CTI Swiss Venture Day in the SWX Swiss stock exchange in Zurich. While small in quantity (there were just 5 startups which could make their pitch to about 40 venture capitalists), we felt in excellent company. CTI also made two very nice videos about our pitch, the teaser video is here, contact me if you would like to see the full length video.

What is more accurate - polls or the Wisdom of the Web?

2008-08-11T18:58:00.000-07:00

Polls about US Presidential elections are notoriously inaccurate - that's what Swiss newspaper NZZ (Neue Zuercher Zeitung) says in an article in yesterday's issue. While Barack Obama is still leading his competitor John McCain in the polls by 3 to 6 percentage points, this is far less than the 15 points with which the Democrats lead the Republicans in the senatorial elections.
According to many analysts, one hidden reason for the low-digit lead of Barack is the issue of race. This is an issue that Americans are afraid to admit to pollsters. This is why they lie to the pollster, similarly to how they lied when asked about going to church, doing sport, and drinking alcohol.
When asked in person about whether they'd go to church regularly, 56% answered yes. When asked anonymously, it only were 25%. When personally asked if they did sports regularly, 58% claimed they did. When asked anonymously, this number dropped to 35%. When asked about drinking alcohol regularly, anonymous answers resulted in 53% of people regularly consuming alcohol, personally asked, only 39% admitted to drinking regularly.

This leads one to wonder if people are not telling the truth about planning to vote for a black president? Using our coolhunting tool Condorview, I today checked what the Wisdom of the Web predicts:

It does not look good for Barack Obama, at least on the Web. Who is telling the truth - the Web or the polls? At the latest, we will know after the elections.

Streetparade - Swarm Creativity of another kind

2008-08-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Today (Aug 9, 2008) was again streetparade in Zurich, arguably the second largest Techno party in the world (the largest seems to be the Love Parade in Dortmund), with over 800,000 participants.

This has now been happening every year since it was started by math student Marek Krynski in 1992. A huge swarm, and hugely creative. About 30 love mobiles, huge trucks as mobile dancing platforms, and hundreds of thousands of people dressed up (or down) as creatively and sexy as possible. I have always been wondering: why are people participating in such huge numbers? My answer is: emotional energy. The street party is a unique way of combining collectivism and individualism, the feeling of being part of a huge swarm, while still showing off as a unique individual. The techno rave gives a rythm to the swarm, increasing the we-feeling immensely.

The end of the Federer era - is it close?

2008-08-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

The answer seems to be yes, at least when looking at the wisdom of the crowd through Web coolhunting with Condor. There the longtime number two, Rafael Nadal, is ahead of Roger Federer by Web buzz for the last four days.

It has been a masterful four and a half years for Roger Federer, but now it seems there is not much that he still can do to defend his number one position, at least that's what the Web crowd seems to think.

Fethullah Gülen - the world's most influential intellectual

2008-07-22T07:19:00.000-07:00

Today I read a brief article in the Swiss Newspaper NZZ about the newly published ranking of the top 100 living intellectuals. Over a half million people voted over the Internet to find out the World's top intellectuals in a vote organized by the UK magazine "Prospect and Foreign Policy". This was a rerun of a campaign that concluded in 2005 that Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco were the most influential intellectuals.

This time, early leaders were Maria Vargas Llosa, Gary Kasparov, and Al Gore. But then a campaign was organized for the Turkish islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, leading him to a resounding victory.
According to Prospect, the leading Turkish newspaper Zaman with a circulation of over 700000 succeeded in rallying its readers behind Fethullah Gülen. However, other newspapers in Indonesia, Bulgaria, or Malaysia launched similar campaigns, with little success.
Here are the top 12 intellectuals (in parenthesis is the ranking of 2005):
1 Fethullah Gülen (*)
2 Muhammad Yunus (*)
3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)
4 Orhan Pamuk (54)
5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)
6 Amr Khaled (*)
7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)
8 Tariq Ramadan (58)
9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)
10 Shirin Ebadi (12)
11 Noam Chomsky (1)
12 Al Gore (*)

There are now quite a few claims that the campaign does not reflect the real world, so I was curious to see what our Coolhunting with Condorview would tell.
Here is the resulting picture:

as well as the spiderweb of Web sites which "voted" Fethullah Gülen to victory

Amazingly, our Coolhunting pretty much confirms the ranking in Prospect and Foreign Policy, although I only checked for five people out of the 100. And none of the top Web sites "voting" for Fethullah Gülen was the Zaman Web site. So it could well be that the Prospect and Foreign Policy poll indeed mirrors global intellectual influence, as the Internet is being used more and more actively also in the developing world outside of the Western World, where a large fraction of the population is Muslim, or at least Anti-US.

Video of Swarmcreativity keynote at IAOC conference

2008-06-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

I was in Iceland this week, giving the keynote speech at the annual international conference of the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC) in Reykjavik June 13, 2008. A video of my keynote is available online (thanks, Luc!), it gives a nice overview of the state of the art of swarmcreativity and coolhunting concepts.

Barack against John McCain

2008-05-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

While the race - not just on the Web, see picture below - seems pretty much over for Hillary, John McCain and Barack are pretty close. In fact, today (May 31, 2008), John just got a boost (see line graph today).

Zooming in on the social network of Web sites, John is really popular in Texas. The biggest blue circle in the picture is the McCain Texas Web site, boosted by other Republican Web sites, helping him to beat Barack, at least for today and on the Web.

Time is running out for Barack Obama

2008-05-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

When I checked the Condorview blog buzz scores of the three presidential candidates this morning, thinks looked really bad for Barack Obama. The damage done by the inflammatory remarks of his (former) pastor Jeremiah Wright really undermined his standing in the blogosphere. His score (in blue) has never been as low since I started tracking him in March. While scores of all three candidates went down, in relative terms, Hillay seems to rebound (light brown).

On the Web buzz level, Barack still is leading (as in the polls in the "real world"), but the Blogs point the way. Drastic action needed now!

Predicting the Italian Elections

2008-04-13T01:48:00.000-07:00

The deterioration of Italian society seems unstoppable. Today and tomorrow there are parliamentary elections in Italy. The assessment of the LA Times today is damning "In Italy, crime pays and may get you elected". This is in sharp contrast to the successful swarm businesses in the Silicon Valley described in my previous post today.

I still was curious to see who of the two top candidates would have better chances to become Italy's next prime minister - Silvio Berlusconi, or Walter Veltroni. Below are the results of a global Web coolhunt using our Condorview tool

It seems they two candidates are in a perfect tie, with 50% of the Web vote for Berlusconi and Veltroni each. I then also did a Blog coolhunt. Here the picture looks quite different.

Berlusconi beats Veltroni by a clear margin. While both coolhunts have been done using the global Web, discussion undoubtedly is most active in Italy, so the coolhunting results should give a fair reflection of the mindshare of the Web and Blogosphere. Let's now see what the Italian voters decide.

Swarm Business is Social Business - in the Silicon Valley

2008-04-13T00:56:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today has a great article about social entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley. While many companies in the Silicon Valley have had a social conscience to start with - most prominently Google, whose credo is "don't be evil" - a new breed of non-profits have successfully merged being a vibrant business with doing good to society. High-profile examples are the Mozilla Foundation, maintainers of the open source Firefox Web browser, TechSoup, a distributor of commercial software to non-profits in 14 countries, and the Internet Archive, started by successful entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, storing old versions of Web sites. In the New York Times article, Brewster lists core principles of social businesses like transparency, staying out of debt, giving away information and refusing to hoard.

These are the guiding principles of swarm businesses, where the goal of the business is not to make the owners rich, but to serve all stakeholders. The NYT describes the process of how these social businesses start: "The new companies ... typically begin as small groups of intensely motivated people dedicated to the goal of building a product or service." This is the key part of the definition of a COIN. According to the NYT, these social businesses are evolving into an ecosystem of companies combining solid profits with serving the greater good. This again corresponds to how COINs evolve into entire communities of COINs, CLNs (Collaborative Learning Networks), and CINs (Collaborative Interest Networks). For more see the SwarmCreativity Web site.

It is wonderful to see more and more COINs turning into real world businesses. There are few limits to what the creative swarm can achieve.

COINs featured on CNN Web Site

2008-04-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

I recently had an interview with Paul Willis from CNN Europe, his excellent article about Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) is now up.

Why Swarm Business is much better in dealing with Black Swans

2008-04-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

The financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one falls, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. ……. We would be far better off if there were a different ecology, in which financial institutions went bust on occasion and were rapidly replaced by new ones. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007)

NTT, as Nassim Nichals Taleb calls himself, showed uncanny foresight when he wrote “The Black Swan”, only a year before the subprime mortgage crisis is pulling the largest banks down into the deepest disaster of their history. Banks like Citi, UBS, or Bear Sterns supposedly had ironclad risk management, to precisely avoid the sort of financial meltdown they are currently experiencing. As NTT writes, these banks are extremely good at planning for all sorts of foreseeable risks, only to be hit by the “big one”, the black swan, the one devastating blow that nobody could predict.

Swarm businesses are much better in dealing with those sorts of catastrophes. In a swarm of bees, if some of the honey collectors are hit by accidents, the swarm just continues functioning flawlessly. Even if a really big crisis – a black swan – hits the swarm, it copes extremely well. Take for example unexpected death of the queen. In this case bees will immediately and autonomously engage into succession planning. They will choose an ordinary larva, and start feeding it royal jelly, which will turn it into a queen. They do this without central intervention, by self-organizing decision of the swarm. This way the swarm evades extinction, and quickly gets a new egg-laying queen ensuring further prosperity of the swarm.

The same is true for swarm business. In a decentralized self-organizing business, risk management is not a highly centralized function directly reporting to an imperial CEO, but is part of everybody’s daily job. In a swarm business there continuously will be minor glitches and small catastrophes, but it will not be possible to get the maximum meltdown we are currently experiencing in the financial markets.

Why Hillary and Barack should stop bickering

2008-03-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

Using our Web Condorview Coolhunting engine we have been keeping track of the political fortunes of the three US Presidential frontrunners for the last year or so. For the last month the wisdom of the crowds (on the Web) and the wisdom of the "experts" (the blogosphere) was predicting the political realities quite nicely, with Barack commanding about 50% of the mindshare, and Hillary and John McCain splitting the rest almost evenly. Yesterday, I noticed a total turnaround, however.
John McCain was passing both Hillary and Barack by a wide margin, and the same was still true today:

Very surprised, I checked the blogosphere also, where I got the same picture: John McCain leading the bickering democrats by a wide margin. This had obviously already been building up for almost a week:

It seems to me the conclusion is simple: Hillary and Barack, if you want to keep the chances of a Democratic President intact, stop bickering and decide on who will be the candidate!

Essentials of Swarmcreativity, Coolhunting and Coolfarming on Idea Connection

2008-03-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

I recently completed the second of two e-mail interviews with Vern Burkhard from Idea Connection. My answers to Vern's excellent questions provide a nicely condensed introduction to swarm creativity (that's the first interview) and coolhunting and coolfarming.

Coolhunting in New Scientist and in Vienna

2008-02-08T12:56:00.001-08:00

The New Scientist just published a really nice article about trend prediction through Coolhunting with Condor. It took the journalists a few iterations, but in the end they explained the basic ideas in better words than I could myself (unfortunately the full article requires subscription).

I also spoke about Coolhunting recently at an event in Vienna, which triggered a thought-provoking blog post about trend prediction through swarm intelligence by Oliver Nitz and Werner Buhre (in German). The same Web site also has a podcast where Oliver and Werner asked me some provocative questions (also in German)

It's Barack against Rudy...

2008-01-05T02:12:00.001-08:00

.. at least on the Web. When I checked our Condorview trend curves of the US presidential candidates after yesterday's primaries in Iowa, things did not look good for Hillary and Mitt.

Setting up an Internet Café for a Ghanaian School

2007-08-23T08:40:00.001-07:00

I had already been involved in a project getting computers to Kenyan schools for a number of years. When I was visiting Ghana for the first time, my friend Marlene and I went to see the Akosombo dam, which is holding back the Volta river to create the largest man made lake in Africa, and the second largest globally - as I was told. On our way back we were looking for a hotel to spend the night. When we came through the fishermen’s village of Anloga at the coast of Ghana towards Togo, we noticed a large and clean looking building in Western style among all the fishermen’s houses in native style. Our curiosity aroused, we came to the “Pin Drop Inn”, a neat little hotel. Quite unexpectedly, each of the rooms was up to Western standards, offering its own bathroom – with shower, toilet, and running water, air conditioning, and satellite TV. And most surprisingly, everything worked! I then started talking with Jerry, the owner of the hotel. His bright 11-year-old son offered to take me through a tour of the village. When I got back, Jerry’s daughter joined our discussion. The three of them were asking all sorts of questions about computers and the Internet. It soon became clear that their biggest dream was to get an Internet café to Anloga. When I left the Pin Drop Inn the next morning, I promised Jerry to help him set up an Internet café for the secondary school of Anloga.

Back in Switzerland and the US I asked around for used computers. One of my Swiss friends, the CIO of Elektro-Material AG, a large electronics parts wholesaler, offered to donate a dozen used but still usable computers, fully equipped. He even agreed, together with some colleagues, to install Windows XP and Office on the computers so we would only have to plug them in in Anloga. Microsoft had also generously agreed to provide us with free Windows and Office licenses for our school Internet café project. The only thing left to do now was to pack the computers up and ship them to Ghana. I found a shipper who specializes in moving stuff to Africa. He promised to ship the computers to Ghana to be there around July 8th such that they would be ready for us when we would get to Accra on July 24th. I was therefore not too pleased when he called me a few days after I had paid his bill to tell me that the computers had been lost on the way from Zurich to Antwerp, and that the ship therefore had left without our computers. He would put them on the next ship which was scheduled to arrive at the Ghanaian port of Tema July 24th. Timing started to get quite tight now. To get the computers out at the port in Tema I again contacted the Ghanaian Embassy in Berne. This time, the Embassy was very helpful, and – within 2 days – wrote and faxed me back a confirmation letter, also asking the customs authorities in Tema to forego import duties, as the computers were destined to go to a school.

However, getting the computers to Ghana was the easy part. Connecting them to the Internet, once they were in Anloga, proved to be a harder nut to crack. When I was visiting Anloga for the first time more than a year ago, the closest phone land line was still dozens of kilometers away, so the only viable option seemed to be to get Internet through satellite connection - using a so-called VSAT connection. I was told that setting up the station would cost about $10,000, while monthly access fees would amount to at least $800. As this seemed quite excessive to me, I started asking around. Through a friend at the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) I was referred to Jack Constanza, CSAIL’s infrastructure director. Jack told me about Don, a professor at the University of Maryland, who was involved with similar projects. Don knew Erik Osiakwan, an Internet journalist in Ghana, who in turn referred me to Kwaku Boadu, owner of Ghanaian Internet access provider arrownetworks. Kwaku told me that he might be able to get me Internet access at lower cost than through setting up a vsat connection myself in Anloga. He had an access point in the nearby border town of Afloa, and my location in Anloga might be close enough to get a terrestrial point to point connection. For that, however, I would need the GPS coordinates of Jerry’s Pin Drop Inn. When I called my friend Marlene in Ghana, her husband knew of a surveyor working for the Ghanaian state who might be able to give us the GPS coordinates, but it would be quite expensive because he would have to drive to Anloga, to get a GPS reading right at the Pin Drop Inn. It then occurred to me, that using Google Earth, and locating the Pin Drop Inn that way might be an easier way to get the GPS coordinates.

So, when, I and my children finally arrived in Ghana on July 25th, it was one of my first activites to ask Jerry to come to Accra, and locate the Pin Drop Inn on Google Earth, which I had loaded and cached on my laptop. Jerry was indeed able to spot the Pin Drop Inn on Google Earth, and when I called Kwaku to tell him the coordinates, I got back the good news that we would be capable of getting a terrestrial signal from Kwaku’s access point in Afloa to Anloga. But we still might have to set up a 30-meter high pole to capture the signal directly from the access point in Afloa.

In the meantime, I also tried to get the computers out at the port in Tema. I asked Jerry to look into this. When he contacted the port, he was told that, while the ship had indeed arrived on time, unloading it was backed up by a week, and the earliest time the ship could be unloaded and the computers be obtained would be one week later, on Monday August 6. My children and I therefore decided to do our sightseeing in Ghana during the first week of our stay, and set the computers up during the second week. I arranged with Jerry that he and I would meet again August 6 at the port to get the computers. When I called Jerry on Sunday August 5 to arrange for the computers to be unloaded, he told me that to obtain the computers within the next few days I would not only have to pay customs, but also a handling agent, and a substantial release fee for the local representative of the shipping company which had shipped the computers from Antwerp to Tema. I was also told that while I could indeed claim an exemption from customs for the computers, this would take a few weeks to be approved by the ministry. Also, if I would try to deal with the complexities of clearing goods at the port of Tema myself, this would further slow me down. As I learned I had not only to pay customs duties, but also the so-called documentation fee of the handling agent who would be walking me through the release process at the port, and the release fee of the local agent of the shipping company. I agreed with Jerry that he would come Monday August 6 morning to the house of my friends to pick me up, and we would then go to the port of Tema together.

Unfortunately, Monday morning no Jerry showed up, and when I finally called him around noon, he told me that he would only be able to come Monday afternoon. We then agreed to meet Tuesday morning. I was pleasantly surprised when on Tuesday morning Jerry was only one hour late for the meeting at our house. We then went to the port of Tema, where it turned out that Nick, the handling agent at the port, was a relative of Jerry – and a former customs officer. Nick generously agreed to manage the clearance process of the computers for a reduced fee of $100 (he originally wanted $150). Nick then promised that I would get the computers the same day, but first I would have to come with him to the various offices to pay my dues to the different parties asking for money in return for the promise to release the computers. Off we went in his glitzy new Nissan Infinity SUV, first to the local representative of the shipping line. There, the lady initially requested the equivalent of 247 dollars, but after same bartering accepted 207 dollars. After I had also handed the $180 for customs to Nick, I was sent home, but was promised that next day I would get the computers.

When I came to Nick’s office the next morning – it was now Wednesday, and our return tickets to Zurich were for Friday evening – nobody was there. After a half hour wait Nick showed up. First, he took me to the bank, where he had me wait outside and went inside to pay the customs duties. Afterwards, we drove to the port, where I was handed over to Edward. Edward was one of the young clearing agents who do the actual legwork for Nick. Edward now took me on a tour criss-crossing the port of Tema from one office to the other. After the first four stops I lost track of where we were, I just noticed that one of the stops was with the lady who had wanted to pay me the 247 dollars, and another one was at the customs office, to show our receipt that we had actually paid customs duty. In the evening, with sore legs and totally exhausted from a day walking around at the port with Edward, I was sent home again with the promise that finally, on Thursday, I would get the computers.

Thursday morning, after my mandatory wait for Jerry at Nick’s office, Jerry appeared in a Trotro, that is a Ghanaian taxicab. Jerry had rented this Trotro, a Mazda minivan, including driver and driver’s mate (the fare collector), to shuttle our computers to Anloga. Jerry also told me that the Trotro would cost me about 60 dollars. The three of us, Jerry, Trotro driver, and driver’s mate, went to the port, where Edward was waiting for us. After some more waiting, and after paying an entry fee of one dollar for each of us at the port, we were finally allowed to go to see the container with the computers.

After the customs officer had checked that the lading bill and the contents of the container matched, we were then allowed to load our 12 computers including accessories into the Trotro. I never thought that all the equipment would fit into the Trotro, but in the end Jerry and the Trotro driver succeeded in squeezing everything into our little bus, even the driver’s mate, who could only sit sideways on top of some monitors.

On our drive to Anloga, we had to stop a few times at police barriers, which were supposed to check the safety of the vehicles passing through. Paying a “small gift” at each roadblock ensured that the policemen waved our fully loaded mini bus through.

Two hours later, it was now Thursday at 5pm, we arrived at Jerry’s house, where a group of about half a dozen children was eagerly waiting for the computers. In no time had we unloaded the computers, and set them up.

I was amazed how the kids, who had only seen computers a few times in an Internet café, succeeded, by observing me, to assemble the computers. About half an hour later all the computers were set up, and the kids were already starting to experiment with Microsoft Office.

How to force the swarm to do the “right thing”

2007-08-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

Usually I get along really well with the Ghanaians. Most of the time they are friendly people who are helpful and go out of their way to make guests feel at home. Occasionally, however, there seem to be clashes of cultures. I am still trying to make sense out of two tumultuous encounters with Ghanaian authorities where I only got what I needed after serious yelling, screaming, and threat of force. The first one occurred when I was applying for my visa for Ghana, the second one happened when we tried to check in for our flights back from Accra to Zurich.

When I applied in June for a visa for my two children and me with the Ghanaian embassy in Berne, Switzerland, I was expecting a smooth process. After all, I had done the same thing last year, and had gotten back my passport with the visa stamp three days after I had sent it in. This time, however, things were different. I got the first warning, when, ten days after having sent in the passports, I got back a form asking for missing information instead of the passports. I immediately called back and provided the missing information. I also told the consular officer that I would be grateful if he could process my visas in the next few days, because I would be leaving for the US the following Tuesday. When I still had not gotten back my passports on Saturday, I got really nervous. I checked with the Swiss post, and they told me that no registered letter was underway. I then decided to drive to Berne on Monday – my flight from Zurich to Boston was on Tuesday. I was at the Ghanaian embassy when it opened at 9 in the morning. No consular officer was there, but the friendly lady at the reception checked for me on the desk of the consular officer, and told me that our three passports were indeed on the pile of visas to be processed. At 11, the consular officer finally arrived, and I was promised to get my visas signed by the consul first thing in the afternoon. When I came back in the afternoon, there was only the friendly lady informing me that my passport could not be processed. I now freaked out, and yelled at everybody that I would camp out at the reception and only leave the building with my three passports – and indeed, after another 45 minutes, I got my three passports with the visa stamps for Ghana.

After this tumultuous beginning of my second trip to Ghana, things inside Ghana went mostly fine, except for the few glitches described elsewhere in this blog. The flight back from Accra to Zurich, however, was an altogether different story.

At the end of our stay in Ghana, when we tried to check in at the airport in Accra for our Lufthansa flight back to Zurich by way of Lagos, we were expecting smooth check in. But after I had handed over our tickets to the agent at the check in counter, she continued typing at the keyboard and staring at the monitor, looking more and more worried. In the end she asked us to drag our heavy suitcases off the carrier belt, and move to another counter. There, the same process was repeated, and then we were sent to a third counter. There, the agent told us that she could not check us in because we had two bookings, an e-booking and a paper ticket. I told her that we had traveled to Accra with Alitalia without any check in problems – and the only problem, if there even was one, was that each of us had two bookings, an electronic one and a paper ticket. She then tried to call the Lufthansa head office, which told her to go ahead and check us in. The agent, however, still refused to check us in. I then started yelling at her, in turn she generously agreed to check in our baggage for Zurich, and to give us stand-by boarding cards, but only to Frankfurt. Some more yelling on my side brought her to “informally” promise us three seats together, which she would hold for us at the gate, but for now we could only get in with stand-by boarding passes for Frankfurt. She also proclaimed to be unable to check us through to Zurich. As this seemed to be the best deal for us to be obtained for now, the three of us rushed through security and customs, as we had already spent well over an hour fighting with the different Lufthansa check in agents at Accra airport. When we were at the gate, the agent there took away our stand-by boarding passes, and told us to be patient and wait for our boarding passes. After waiting for another half hour, it was now close to scheduled departure time, we still had not gotten any boarding passes. I now exploded, and started screaming for our boarding passes. Only after me having thrown around a few chairs in the check-in area to show that I was serious, another agent came to the gate, and after unsuccessfully trying to print the boarding passes with the electronic check-in system, manually wrote the seat numbers on our boarding passes and allowed us to board the plane.
Needless to say that in Frankfurt we had no problems to get the follow-on boarding passes from Lufthansa for the final leg of our trip to Zurich.

Obviously, in the end in both instances we got what we wanted – and what was due to us. But I am really wondering if we would also have gotten it without all my screaming and yelling in the very last minute. I have to point out that in both instances, for getting back the passports at the embassy, and to get checked in for our return flight, I had waited until the very last minute until I escalated the process and started making troubles.

So my suspicion is that sometimes the swarm only does the right thing if one makes it more trouble for the swarm not to do the right thing.

What happens when the light goes out – made in China

2007-08-15T14:42:00.000-07:00

The state-run Ghanaian electricity company is periodically turning off electricity because of power shortages. One night we had no electricity in the house of my friends in Accra. As a precaution they had recently bought two Chinese-made lamps with battery chargers, each giving light bright enough to light a room for reading. That night, unfortunately, one of the freshly charged lamps went out after 5 minutes. I opened the lamp, and fiddled with the electrical contacts between bulb and battery. The light went on again. My friend then decided to go to bed and took the working lamp with her. My children and I were left with the temperamental lamp, which went out again after 3 minutes. Opening up the lamp cover under the weak light of another flashlight and fiddling with the contacts got the lights back on for another 3 minutes. After having repeated this process 4 times, my kids and I decided to give up on reading and went to bed. Next morning both lamps worked fine again, as did the electrical power grid.
Lights made in China can be quite fickle – even more so in Ghana.

There are different types of snakes in Ghana

2007-08-14T01:10:00.001-07:00

Yesterday morning our houseboy killed a poisonous snake in our garden. The property of my friend is not that big, it has a small, but well-tended garden. The garden is fenced in, and the fence is lined by overgrowing flower bushes. When the houseboy was cutting the bushes, he suddenly got really exited and called us to show us a pretty large snake, about 1.2 meters long, with dark green and yellow stripes. The snake was resting high up in the bushes, right within the flower bush which had overgrown the side door where all the visitors were passing through. It was a pretty eerie feeling that we might have come and gone for some days right underneath a poisonous snake. The fix of the houseboy to this problem was as radical as it was short and brutal. He called another man from the neighborhood for help. With a long stick the houseboy threw the snake out of the bush on the street, and then the other man shattered the snake’s head with a large stone – Risk management by eliminating the risks.

Later in the day the children and I decided to go to downtown Accra. My friend agreed to lend us her car. First thing was to fill up the tank at the filling station. After pumping gas, the guy at the station asked for 57 new cedies (about 57 dollars). The meter at the pump station only read 52 cedies. The guy explained that he had first pumped gas for 5 cedies, and then incidentally reset the meter by returning the nozzle into the holder. As this story sounded really fishy to me, I refused to pay. We got into a little argument, the manager of the station also came, and in the end I paid what the meter read, 52 cedies. The 5 cedies the guy at the pumping station was trying to extract from me would have been about one week of wages for him, at least.
There are different types of snakes in Ghana.

Sharing with the swarm can lead to bruises

2007-08-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

While the driver and I were standing outside the car and waiting to have our inflated tire repaired (see previous post), my children inside the car were eating candy. When they saw a few kids approaching, they threw them out some of the shrink-wrapped candy. First, the kids did not know what to do with the little square pieces wrapped into glittering aluminum foil, but once the first one had unwrapped the candy and put it into her little mouth, a delighted smile lighted up all over her face. More children started flocking to the car, and then even some half-grown-ups joined them. My children were busy throwing candy out the car window. But then things started getting out of control. The swarm of kids became more aggressive, banging at the car door, so I started getting worried for my friend’s car. I took the bag of candies and stepped away from the car. Now the entire swarm, about 20 children, aged from probably three to sixteen years, was surrounding me. I could not get out the candies fast enough for them. Hands were reaching out and touching me everywhere. And now even some adults were joining in. In the end a tall guy, probably half a head larger than I – and I am over six feet – wrestled the torn bag out of my hand. The rest of the candy fell on the ground. Now the swarm started fighting on the floor. Thirty seconds later all the candies were gone, and another few seconds later the swarm had dissolved. The only thing remaining was some dispersed candy paper lying on the floor.
Some times the swarm can get out of control – in particular if the protocol of sharing with the swarm has not been previously established.

Fixing a flat tire in Ghana

2007-08-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

At the end of our beach holidays we drove back from Axim to Accra. Our friends had sent their SUV with a driver to pick us up at the beach resort. Suddenly, we were near the old capital of Ghana Cape Coast, our driver pulled the car in a filling station, telling us that he had noticed a strange sound. I then walked around the car, and noticed that one of the tires was flat. At the filling station, however, they told us that they were only equipped to pump gas and could not exchange our spare tire. Suddenly, and without comment, our driver disappeared, taking the car keys with him. We could do nothing but wait in the hot sun and make sure that our belongings left in the unlocked car stayed where they were. We were very relieved when 15 minutes later our driver came back, bringing with him a powerfully built young man in a mechanic’s overall. The young man then searched for our car jack, which, as it turned out, was not working. The young man disappeared again, and 20 minutes later, came back with an old car jack, and ten minutes later our spare tire was put properly in place, and we could resume our trip.

I then asked our driver if it would be possible to have our flat tire fixed immediately. He assured me that this would be no problem, and another ten minutes later pulled over at what appeared to me to be a tiny shack in the midst of a large collection of small market stands along the road. Our particular stand had four broken tires heaped in front of it. It turned out the wiry little man in the shack was operating a bustling flat tire fixing business. Only using the most primitive tools, it took him no time to plug the hole in our tire and put the tire back on the rim. Then, with the one sophisticated piece of equipment he had, a fuel-operated compressor, he put the air back into our inflated tire. It’s amazing how the swarm can fix things.

Getting immersed into the swarm is a learning experience

2007-08-03T08:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we went to the small town of Axim. Axim is an old town with a similarly old historic slave castle. My children and I walked around in the small town, looking at the slave castle and the street vendors and their stalls lining the sides of the street. While I was quite fascinated by the bustling street live, I was surprised to learn that my kids were less than taken with the colorful scenery. They found the streets and houses very dirty, and the smell coming from the open sewage canals disgusting. While the kids were right in that the red dust was indeed everywhere because the streets are mostly unpaved, and the canals indeed, well, stank, I found the scenery so full of life that I could have watched it for a long time. Not so my kids. After a ten-minute walk, and after quickly drinking a cold coke from one of the street vendors, they insisted to take a taxi and get back to the hotel as quickly as possible.

It seems that becoming immersed into a new swarm is a long learning experience.

Different swarms have different rules – getting the right ice cream in Axim

2007-08-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

I frequently noticed in Ghana that while my opposite was trying to do the best for me, his failure to explain me his reasoning converted the result into the opposite. Sometime this can go to some extremes where the motivations on both sides are not really clear. Our experiences in the beach restaurant at the romantic Axim beach resort set an excellent example.

It is no easy thing to get ice cream in Ghana. Electricity breaks down all the time, and frequently it is turned off for half a day which means that it is hard to keep ice cream in its icy state for extended periods of time. The more pleasant our surprise, when the menu of our beach hotel in Axim offered ice cream. When we ordered our ice cream, the three of us chose chocolate and strawberry from the waiter. We were slightly surprised when the restaurant manager himself proudly brought us mixed strawberry and vanilla ice. When we informed him that we had ordered strawberry and chocolate, he deeply apologized and promised to bring us what we had ordered. We saw him throw away the strawberry and vanilla ice and head back to the restaurant kitchen. But a few seconds later he was back, even more apologetic, telling us that the chocolate ice had melted in the hot Ghanaian climate, and that strawberry and vanilla ice was all that was still available. The chef had decided on his own that substituting chocolate ice with vanilla ice was what we wanted. Of course the chef had guessed right – we were starving to get some cold ice cream – but the chef had not bothered to inform the manager about our order and the changes the chef had made without asking us. In the end we gladly accepted a new vanilla and strawberry ice, but the wasted ice cream was a heavy price to pay in a country where ice cream is a highly valued rare treat.

In the same restaurant we experienced a second communication breakdown and misunderstanding of cultures. One day I told the waiter I wanted a chef’s salad as a starter for the three of us – my two kids and I would share one salad as we were not that hungry and would also have a second dish each for lunch. And indeed I got a large heaped plate of salad as the first course of our lunch. The not-so-pleasant surprise came afterwards, when the waiter doubled the price of the salad – explaining that I had asked for a “big” salad. He claimed he had only tried to follow my wishes, and could not understand that I refused to pay the double price.

A trip with Alitalia – locating surplus bags in Lagos

2007-08-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

Our adventures started well before boarding our flight for Accra. Seven days before we were supposed to get on the Lufthansa plane from Zurich to Accra – I was still in Boston at that time – I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the travel agent, telling me that the flight to Accra had been cancelled by Lufthansa. He could not explain why. I then started calling around, and in the end the travel agent was able to book a flight for the three of us one day later than planned from Alitalia, through Milan instead of Frankfurt.

The reason Lufthansa could not fly was that it had started a squabble with the Ghanaian government about landing rights. As it was flying from Frankfurt to Accra with a stop in Lagos on behalf of Air Ghana, the Ghanaian government wanted compensation for these flights, which Lufthansa refused to pay. After a week of squabbling, the two parties came to agreement, and our flight back to Zurich should now happen with Lufthansa as planned.

Our flight with Alitalia from Milan to Accra was quite an adventure. It already started in Milan, when we noticed an excitedly gesticulating lady of seemingly Ghanaian descent. It turned out she had four pieces of hand luggage she wanted to take with her into the plane, and refused to let the flight attendants check in the surplus bags. In the end the surplus bags were checked in under police protection, and an obviously very unhappy lady boarded the plane. Everything went well until our stop in Lagos. The plane stayed on the ground for an extended period of time, and in the end the captain informed us that we were short of three passengers – meaning that in Milan three passengers had their baggage checked in, but did not board the plane. It seems this went undetected in Milan, and was only noticed by the Nigerian authorities. In stern words the Alitalia captain now requested the passengers to identify their luggage manually. At this time the already aggravated Ghanaian lady shot up, and asked for more dignified treatment of passengers. The Italian captain came running back through the plane, reinforced by a few male flight attendants. A shouting match followed, and things started getting really ugly. Tempers only cooled down after some Nigerian police officers (they also might have been customs officers, I could not tell the difference) also joined the fray. In the end the Ghanaian lady and some other unruly passengers were forcefully convinced to take their seats again. In the subsequent two hours passengers had to leave the plane in small groups to manually identify their pieces of luggage which were spread out widely on the tarmac of the airport, once this task was completed, they were let back into the plane. With 3 hours delay the plane finally took off for the last 40 minute hop to Accra.

Overall this was a surprisingly eventful trip to Ghana, free entertainment provided thanks to an explosive mix of Lufthansa’s mishandled negotiation with Ghana airline authorities, Alitalia’s mishandling of the passenger count and rough treatment of passengers, and the explosive temper of same passengers.

New impressions from Ghana - Aug 2008

2007-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

This summer we (my son, 14, and my daughter, 15 years old, and I) are spending our holidays in Ghana. The “official” purpose of our trip is to install 12 computers and set up an Internet cafe for the secondary school of Anloga, a fishermen’s village at the coast of Ghana close to the border to Togo. Unofficially, we are also visiting friends in Accra and spending sunny days at the long Ghanaian beaches.

Book Promotion Reports for Coolhunting

2007-05-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

Among our objectives on this Coolhunt program was a desire to find new ways to publicize the release of a new book on the Internet. The publisher, AMACOM Books, who paid to have this online program produced, is hoping for sales at the end of the day to cover the marketing costs. The authors, who benefit modestly from sales and more from reputation enhancement, desire that the book gets an opportunity to reach its target audience.

At Patron Saint Productions, we try to find novel ways to bring books to the attention of readers without bothering those who aren't interested. It's a delicate operation, blending these interests into an online publicity campaign. I think you might find this behind-the-scenes look at some of the results to be interesting.

Access to the following reports normally is limited to campaign insiders. We are able to make these reports available here with the blessings of AMACOM Books:

Discussion Group Postings Report

(Microsoft Word document)

Shows the 50-plus discussion groups where we posted a message about the Coolhunt program and offered to send an excerpt from the book upon request.

Blog PR Report

(HTML document)

Shows a couple dozen blogs we approached -- besides those visited in the Coolhunt. We visited blogs listed in the Author Questionnaire completed by Scott Cooper, as well as blogs found through our own searches. At these blogs, we either posted comments or asked the blogmaster to post an announcement about the Coolhunt program. We offered the blogmasters free review copies of the book.

Review Copy Requests
We pitched media contacts, offering a review copy of "Coolhunting" and a press kit. Here is a list of the media who responded to our pitches and requested a review copy of the book. Due to privacy concerns, we are not releasing their contact information:

Kristin Clarke, CAE
ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership
CATEGORY: Magazine, Journal, or Newsletter
TOPICS: leadership, business

Geoffrey P. Lantos, PhD
Professor of Business Administration
Stonehill College
TOPICS: business, marketing
NOTES: Marketing Program Director at Stonehill College, and Book Reviews Editor for Journal of Consumer Marketing, Journal of Product and Brand Management

Roy Bragg
San Antonio Express-News
TOPICS: San Antonio, general interest

Mary Beth Guard
Executive Editor
Bankers Online
TOPICS: banking, finance

Mark Gibbs
GibbsBlog
TOPICS: technology, computers
NOTES: Contributor to NetworkWorld

Marie Leone
Senior Editor
CFO.com
TOPICS: finance, business

Jason Thibeault
CTO/Co-Founder
GoWare, Inc.
TOPICS: technology, computers

Paul J. Wilczynski
Krislyn Corporation
TOPICS: business

Ari Herzog
TOPICS: travel, entertainment
NOTES: Freelance writer and reporter for such publications as The Boston Globe; launching new blog

Mordechai (Morty) Schiller
TOPICS: marketing, Judaism

Allan Alter
Executive Editor, CIO Insight
TOPICS: technology, computers

Chris Locke
TOPICS: business, Internet
NOTES: author of Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing

Alan Chumley
TOPICS: public relations, media

Guy Kawasaki
How to Change the World
TOPICS: entrepreneurship, business

Dion Hinchcliffe
Web 2.0 Blog
TOPICS: technology, Internet

Tom Davenport
Babson Knowledge
TOPICS: business, management

Coolhunt Log #20 - Friday, May 11, 2007

2007-05-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

Coolhunt Log #20
Friday, May 11, 2007

On Stage:
Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

MODERATOR: This is the last day of our month-long coolhunt. Could you tell us where you're calling from?

SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA.

PETER: I'm calling from Switzerland.

MODERATOR: Today, on our last coolhunt I was hoping we could go over where we've been and talk about where we're going in the future with social networking. Can you tell me what you think about the list of all the sites we've visited that Gary Michael Smith posted last night?

PETER: I can't believe we've visited so many sites.

SCOTT: I was pretty impressed when I saw the list.

MODERATOR: Some of the things that jumped out at me is that we had a very protracted and good discussion about who are the news originators, places that have reporters doing research and bringing out facts. Then we looked at how searchers for information would find sites -- the whole yin and yang about new forms and old forms of finding information.

SCOTT: I was struck after looking at the list and reading some of my emails. In an email from the New York Times about a column from David Pogue, Asking the Crowd to Spread the News. He says that we haven't even scratched the surface about the audience supplying materials. Why isn't there a website that says, "Yes, this is going around and you'll be vomiting for two days"? There should be a map of such information. I just reminded me that we really were coolhunting over this past month.

WEB: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/asking-the-crowd-to-spread-the-news/

PETER: I would like to know what all the other crowds are thinking and reading. I think it's a double-edge sword, creating news stories and making them available. You know what to expect from certain branded, boilerplated sources. If old-time media does it right -- whatever that means -- there will always be a place for those types of news providers. Getting access is
another story. Will people stumble across it or will there be more organized dissemination that will tell me all the stories that I'm normally interested in.

MODERATOR: The New York Times really never has had an opportunity to know what readers thought about its stories until recently. Now this has changed with journalists' blogs. Let's go to the Apple Store. If you look at this cutting-edge site you'll see "moving stills" as well as video in the advertising and display of presentations. Going into the store and looking for a particular product such as a power cord you'll find eight matches. Under the description of the product is a customer rating. You don't even have to drill down into the product because the customer rating is so important. Based on the rating, the shopper will drill down into the sites of particular products. I'm used to seeing customer reviews on books such as those with Amazon.

WEB: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore

SCOTT: We make that obvious in our book Coolhunting by writing that power is gained by Amazon by giving power away in the form of user reviews.

MODERATOR: Reviews probably are only going to grow and wisdom of the hive will grow as well because reviews probably will not ever be removed.

PETER: I noticed the rankings on our Coolhunting book based on ratings. One reviewer says that Amazon nearly always processes orders quickly, but if you have any problems you can almost never get a person on the phone the settle it.

WEB:
http://www.amazon.com/Coolhunting-Chasing-Down-Next-Thing/dp/0814473865/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2487262-1981740?ie=UTF8&s=books&q

MODERATOR: We looked quite a bit at citizen reviews and ratings. We looked at tagging, digging, rating, and reviewing as well as censorship. Look where it asks if reviews are useful to you, allowing readers to rate the value of the comment. Where does the helix stop?

SCOTT: I think it's linked to the other discussion we had about the news business. If you let the swarm through all these mechanisms, it's empowering the swarm to take early steps toward self organization. I rarely buy books from Amazon -- preferring to go into bookstores -- but I'll look at reviews and listen to snippets of music online. And the reviews will often give totally opposing viewpoints even though they're listening to the same thing. So the collective intelligence allows the swarm to feed off such information.

PETER: This mix can tell us where the next big trends are. The New York Times has added a new feature allowing readers to dig or post information. This will allow them to know more about what people think about the Times' articles.

SCOTT: I notice that U.S. newspapers in general are so far ahead on this. Peter reads the New York Times and a Swiss newspaper and I read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German daily newspaper, and the foreign papers are less user-friendly regarding blogs, comments, etc., not allowing web 2.0 services as with U.S. news services. A couple years ago there was an article about the bloglessness of German politics. Politicians still think that handing out pens at a supermarket is more effective, or setting up a table and giving out something for free, including a printed copy of their campaign platform.

MODERATOR: We've seen that in many cases, elitists are afraid of the wisdom of the crowd as with the censorship of Google in China and suppression of news in Afghanistan. Can you talk more about this battle between the receiving elite and the growing power of the crowd.

SCOTT: Here's one specific example of the enabling of the swarm. I listen to a lot German lieder and British art songs. Gramophone, a venerable record review magazine in England that's been around for about 100 years, had long been the arbiter of taste and quality for such vocal music. Reviews from "experts" makes one wonder if they ever actually listen to the music. But now, blogs and forums by younger people make for a much broader discussion of what makes for good music. These experts no longer have hegemony because of new technology.

WEB: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum.asp

PETER: "Elite" is the wrong word. Not all bloggers are equal. It's a meritocracy.

SCOTT: Let's talk about what "elite" means. First, it comes from the French for "select." More often than not the elite select themselves. Mike Arrington has not set himself off as one of the elite. He's just a guy who wants to provoke and share in a conversation, whereas others end a blog reminding readers how much of an expert they are on a topic.

MODERATOR: It was fascinating during our visit to Debian that the group had quite an elaborate structure, unlike something like YouTube. The web right now is struggling to come up with guidelines for bloggers' epics. You seem to be saying that the rules already are in force by people blocking you from email.

PETER: In the standards world, there is the International Standards Organization (ISO) group in Geneva. In the networking world, it competed against the much more self-organizing and less hierarchical Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and lost. If given free reign, the crowd is much more capable of setting up its own ethics and rules of operation than a formal group. It's a stable, robust, and self-correcting system. The crowd is very efficient in policing themselves.

SCOTT: Regarding the code of conduct among elitists in the blogosphere, such as Tim O'Reilly who issued a call for a bloggers code of conduct because of the case of Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users) where she was threatened by readers as reported by the BBC and the San Francisco Chronicle.

WEB: http://headrush.typepad.com/

SCOTT: See his "Lessons Learned So Far."

WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/code_of_conduct.html

MODERATOR: Also, see the Word of mouth Marketing Association.

WEB: http://womma.org/

MODERATOR: One person meritocracy is another person's cesspool. People who contribute often are driven offline by the rude behavior of others who post vitriol material. You're saying that the hive can narrow the range into some kind of consensus. How do we deal with the issue of poor manners, spammers, etc.

PETER: The few bad apples such as spammers spoil all our fun but sometimes the entire swarm is spoiled. I think people have learned from the mistakes of the past. Most is self-correcting and self-policing. Many just withdraw from a community when they don't like it, making it self-correcting. I'm quite an optimist.

SCOTT: So am I. I have to say that the swarm on MySpace is self-protecting, keeping off bad programming. I don't know the answer, but I feel that MySpace is populated by so many teenagers, making it a problem. I think it'll work out it's own problems, though.

MODERATOR: Allowing more content to be posted on your sites by the hive is labor-intensive.

SCOTT: You could create a site like Wikipedia and let users create and update it.

PETER: In our case we had to change our community model and start asking for registration in our second version of a website to limit users to a higher quality.

MODERATOR: I wonder if the verification letters required on some sites was a hive-generated concept.

PETER: I think it was a professor who developed the "captcha" algorithm. It's again a great example of the power of the swarm.

MODERATOR: Regarding prediction markets where large groups of people steer decision making on a large scale such as in the stock market, how about using prediction markets in medicine? An op-ed in today's WSJ basically argues that Congress needs to back prediction markets for the gambling industry.

SCOTT: A lot of the ways in which prediction markets could be used turns our stomachs. The military had to take down one model because Congress said it was immoral. But whether you like it or not, it still proves the point about the value of collective intelligence.

MODERATOR: The article talks about a lot cases. A consensus plan suggests that a safe harbor will encourage experimentation. The goal is to allow the federal government to have prediction markets. I'd like to move to my last point on altruism, people releasing copyrights and companies letting go of trademarks. Everything we've covered in the coolhunt seems to say that if you drop your protection and let things go, you'll be better off.

SCOTT: There's a growing recognition for the need to consider stakeholder rather than shareholder value. This is a first step toward altruism. It's a step in the right direction.

PETER: It's a great starting point. The point is that all those communities are driven to a certain extent by altruism. The programmers are motivated by recognition of their peers, and ultimately the well-paying jobs. Prediction markets only work if you have real skin in the game, if you have a stake at risk. In the SpineConnect case they hope to start a company with their
altruistic endeavors. You need to have a healthy respect for your own well-being as well as be concerned with the well-being of the entire society.

SCOTT: Aristotle said "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."

MODERATOR: We've been speaking for the past month with Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper, the very generous authors of Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing. Gary Michael Smith, professor at the University of New Orleans, has transcribed our journey to over a hundred websites, and has posted them at http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/. Any final words
gentlemen?

PETER: This has been an extremely enriching experience.

SCOTT: I'd like also to add Rachelle to the list to thank.

MODERATOR: We're going to post some of the documents from this campaign to give those who are interested the opportunity to view them. I'd like to thank everyone for listening and invite them to comment.

Copyright Notice: Please feel free to duplicate or distribute this log as long as the contents are not altered and this notice is intact.

Thank you.