People who are sceptics can pay to meet the people in the house if they want – connecting the online & offline world. As I say the top suggestion is used in conversation with housemates to make something happen – that’s what gets people hooked. The results are posted up the next day. But it’s not live, in real time. You have to wait to see what happens as a result of each suggested storyline interaction. So it’s mysterious too.

One question that remains for me is what kind of disclaimers would you require for the household participants? And it is important that the people in the household know what’s going on exactly?

The goood thing is that there are lots of neat ways to monetize it, such as allowing one person as the first one to meet the household to then post in the online community that it’s really happening. Which in turn helps stoke demand for other people to meet the householders.

OK enough fun with reality TV and online communities, back to my holiday.

Barely more than two months ago, Hunch began requiring visitors to register/login to use the site. In doing so, all Hunch visitors were required to answer the site’s “Teach Hunch About You” (THAY) questions — the information that Hunch relies on to make more accurate recommendations. To date, Hunch says its users have answered more than 50 million THAY questions. At the time of that June announcement, Hunch said that users with profiles typically get 20% to 40% better results.

In today’s blog post, Hunch shares some of the results of that change:

Since we changed Hunch to login only, our overall site traffic has dropped but the number of users registering daily has tripled to about 3,000 per day, growing aggregate accounts by about 15% every month. The accuracy of recommendations has gotten a lot better since Hunch is much smarter when users have an account.

Hunch also says it will soon announce “a number of partnership deals” that will involve Hunch being used to personalize other web sites.

source here

And could the new recommendations engine from Hunch’s Caterina Fake be such a barrier in social commerce, as reported in the latest edition of Wired US?

What You Want: Flickr Creator Spins Addictive New Web Service

Body is wiser than Ego.
Ego is cleverer than Body.
When Ego catches Body’s tune, a song happens.
When Ego catches Body’s intuition, magic happens.
An idea is born.

When we focus with our hearts on troubling questions, our unconscious comes through for us. Open questions posed to the unconscious act as the strange attractors of chaos theory. They enable the creative speech of discovery.

In this book, you will explore how your ego rises from your body through language. You will appreciate how the creative thinking enabled by body–ego interplay builds your personality overtime. The personal and social realms you create have remarkable properties. When you understand those properties, you open new vistas for viewing empathy, visions, hallucinations, dreams, and the reality of language. You open new ways to understand objective reality, the reality of religious myths, and even the reality of death.

The motif of most Western thought since the time of Zoroaster and Plato is that we are minds (and souls) trapped within physical bodies. St Augustine reinforced this tradition and Descartes formalized it. The upright man, as symbolized by the stick figure (all head and almost no body) became a standard Western conception.

Nietzsche saw the evil of this conception and protested it loudly. Merleau-Ponty demonstrated that our bodies both know and are known. Freud and Lacan showed how the ego rises from the body through the magic of language. Our bodies are microcosms of the universe and bearers of its unspoken secrets. Holograms, chaos theory, and fractal geometry bear witness.

For more about this book and its blog, go to
www.bodywisdombook.com

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for four families of cell phones—HTC Dream (marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US, and Era G1 in Poland) and HTC Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G in the US, DoCoMo HT-03A in Japan and Vodafone Magic in the UK, Germany among some other states.), the Motorola Droid^[2], and the Google Nexus One.^[3]

CyanogenMod is a community-based distribution of the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android-based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones, including support for FLAC Lossless Audio, multi-touch, the ability to store and run downloaded applications from the microSD card, compressed cache (compcache), a large APN list, a reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, as well as other enhancements. CyanogenMod was also the first mobile OS to incorporate BFS as the task scheduler, a change that has been merged into experimental branches in the official Android source tree.^[4] CyanogenMod claims to increase performance and reliability over official firmware releases.

I want England to win the World Cup, but as my lovely partner Shirley comes from Brasil, specifically Kaka’s home town of Taguatinga, then I’m also keeping an eye out for his and his team’s chances.

I think Kaka’s going to have a great tournament, which appears to be at odds with footballing legend Brazil Pele, who has cast doubts on Kaka’s form going into the tournament:

BRAZIL legend Pele admits he is worried about Kaka’s form ahead of the finals.

Real Madrid star Kaka has been plagued by injuries but insists he will be fit for Tuesday’s clash with North Korea.

But Pele admitted: “Kaka worries me. He is very important – a key player for our attack and midfield. But God willing he will be in good form.”

OK, I admit I don’t don’t know football like Pele does. Or to quote the dry humour of the comment on the Sun website from ‘geteducated’: “Who the hell is this “Pele” and what does he know about football?”

Well, I wouldn’t want to argue with Pele. But then given the option I’ll go with the ladies of Taguatinga and say “Come on Kaka!”

I was interested in the points made (jump to page 15) about price comparison and the power of finding similar folks and cross-checking with them, and using multiple sources of online information to make a purchase. Plus the point in the summary that never mind all the tech talk about the power of cloud technology, from a marketing perspective it is really about expressing/representing the individual.

The power of comparison

Consistent with our earlier findings, ‘formal messages from the company’ or ‘brand’ rate very low, with ‘advertising’ placed last with only 5% (4% UK, 6% US), seeing this as at all trustworthy. Second to last was ‘what the company says about itself’ with 8% (9% UK, 6% US), all well behind the hardly surprising ‘friends and family’ (40%).

Perhaps more interestingly was ‘professional reviews on the internet and magazines’ (28%) and the next most trusted source ‘people that are similar to me’ 19% (16% UK, 24% US). Recent research has indicated that, overall, people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped to 25%.

Importantly, Edleman* believes this can be interpreted as ‘it is a sign of the times, and the lesson for marketers is that consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it’.

Key Points

• Empowered consumers are massively connected, always available, expect others to be available and are used to directly interact with content.

• Individuals ‘assemble’ relationships/experiences/things about themselves in an on-demand manner, by doing so they build rich and highly personalized structures.

• Devices and media are clustered round the individual, often providing a ‘rich tapestry’ of multi-mode/channel communications.

• Many of these developments can be traced back to a growing social sense of individuality developed over several decades.

• Social media is one manifestation of this much deeper social change.

• Although the cloud potential of the media receives much attention it is really about expressing/representing the individual.

• Much of the communication/engagement by the individual should be seen as a means to express and establish identity.

• Building strong engagements requires organizations to interact at a personal level.

• Trust is increasingly seen as something established in an interactive manner.

• Beliefs or information are tested by verification from several sources, these may not all be in consistent agreement, the final choice arises from ‘active dialogue’.

* ‘In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust their Friends Less‘, Edleman Trust Barometer, in Advertising Age, (12-02-2010)

Proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:

1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making

Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.

Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.

Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.

2: The Right to Control

Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users’ right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.

Social network services must ask their users’ permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users’ data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be “opt-in” by default, not “opt-out,” meaning that users’ data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.

The Right to Leave

Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.

One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service’s servers.

Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as “data portability” or “data liberation,” is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.”