So an interesting fact, trailing the hubaloo over how Jason Calacanis does (or does not) treat his startup squad at Mahalo (working them like slaves or merely encouraging the best out of them) — turns out that the Mahalo worker bees are looking for just about any content/fodder to create indexable pages, and that includes stuff which suggested by *you*.

What do I mean?  Well, put it more plainly, Mahalo will create a page on a topic that you suggest, populated with links that they find (and self-edit).  How?  Utilizing Twitter, actually.

If you send a suggestion to @MahaloToDo, they’ll create a page in a couple days. 

Out of fun, I decided to suggested a fairly obscure topic: Capgras Syndrome, to see how they’d do with it.  Here’s the actual page, as they got it done yesterday, which is pretty sparse, but to be fair, its a pretty sparse topic.

For those interested (and if you’re not, read on, because its kind of wierd-type interesting), Capgras Syndrome is a condition where people believe that people they know are actually replaced by imposters.

Here is one description, via Wikipedia:

Mrs. D, a 74-year old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalize her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognized other family members and would misidentify her husband only.

Although a lot of pages on the web refer to it as a psychiatric condition (i.e. they are “crazy”) associated with schizophrenia (which it may be), it is also associated with damage to the brain in some fairly specific areas; in particular lesions (or changes) in the non-dominant hemisphere of one’s brain, for example because of a stroke or trauma, can cause all kinds of peculiar conditions, some examples might be …

• an increased tendency to experience deja vu and “mystical” experiences (right temporal lesions)
• an inability to understand the emotional content of language (they don’t “get” sarcasm), also known as receptive prosody,
• Reduplicative Paramnesia, in which folks believe that a person, place or object exists as two identical copies.

The worker bees at Mahalo haven’t done a bad job (but not a great job either) of a difficult topic.  If you want to try this “function” of Mahalo’s ‘mechanical turk’, try and messaging @mahalotodo, and see what comes up.  Its surprisingly fast, and maybe you’ll get some free usable research out of it too.

Well … in not so many words, of course.

Matt Ivester, founder of JuicyCampus.com, the “gossip” site for College kids notoriously known for being an unrestrained melting pot of libelous and defamatory remarks, has made a plea for decorum and decency on the JuicyCampus blog (hosted curiously at Blogspot — surely setting up a Wordpress installation at a sub-domain of JuicyCampus isn’t all that onerous?)

While JuicyCampus’s origins may have started out as an anonymous means to discuss all manner of things, whether they be fun, breezy, erudite, or cheezy, it has quickly, and obviously (anonymized identities + college demographic), devolved into a giant bulletin board uniting colleges and Universities coast to coast in gossip and innuendo.

Furthermore, its gotten some national attention as you may probably be aware, with stories being picked up by a bunch of papers, and now, most recently through the Washington Post, as students (and families) are up in arms with the kind of inflammatory and defamatory remarks therein.

Which is why I find Mr. Ivestor’s plea’s so quaint.

In some ways, JuicyCampus is a grand experiment in “crowd-sourcing’s” worst excesses, as it allows people to contribute content — in this case gossip — without any controls or accountability.

One need only saunter over to the most discussed, or most viewed, topics of discussion, and you can find that the vast majority are around observations of who is Hot, who is Not, and ranking which girls of potentially loose moral character (a polite way of saying, as the title of one of these posts are “Who is the sluttiest girl??????“). And lest you think that the targets of such thought provoking discussions are exclusively women, you would be wrong.In a post titled “ALL URBANA BOYS RANKED”, guys *are* ranked, but not, say, numerically from #1 to #50. No, instead, they are grouped according to their different levels of hotness (because clearly there isn’t a linear relationship in this ranking), with pithy descriptions like “Top Tier” and “Party Boys”.

What’s also troubling is the second to last ranking (incredibly, not *THE* last ranking) which describes a few unfortunate gentlemen as “Child Molesters”. [I would happily link to this post, but it seems like its literally impossible as the magic of Ajax makes direct links a hard thing to find].The last ranking, which, is some how worse than being a Child Molester, is merely “Totally Useless”.

No, the only saving grace about JuicyCampus is that they’ve thankfully turned on the “no follow” portion in their Robots.txt file, so that Google won’t be able to index JuicyCampus. So those unfortunate guys who were listed as “Child Molesters” thankfully do *NOT* show up when you google their name, even when you throw the switch “site:http://www.juicycampus.com”.

I think the bottom line is that JuicyCampus will continue to thrive precisely because it is an anonymized means of being … well, mean. And I think its human nature that a small part of us loves their drama, and the cheap, if guilty pleasure, of watching human train wrecks, particularly if there is no emotional cost to you (i.e. being anonymous). To be fair, some commenters do try and argue against the bottom-denominator quality of the content on JuicyCampus, but its far from the majority.

The only way for JuicyCampus to cross the bridge from being a harbor of defamatory remarks to an island of decorum — or at least, having the thinnest, sheerest veneer of it — is if Mr. Iverson decides to radically change the site (say, via the Terms of Service), and have more moderators enforcing it (because, believe it or not, there is a clause in their, under section 7 which states that users are not “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy”).

But I suspect he won’t, and as such, it will continue being an example of what “crowdsourcing” can do when all the controls and accountability is thrown out the window.

And all the hand-wringing in the world can’t prevent that.

(As an aside, for the love of Pete, can someone make sure that Andrew Keen never hears of JuicyCampus?)

I love Picnik, the online image editor.  I’ve said so in the past, mostly because it is so slick, smooth and user-friendly. Therefore, it made my day to hear that Picnik has, in fact, gone Free!  Waved its premium membership, so that average (read: thrifty) folks can use their advanced editing features that were initially closed to them.  If you’ve waited to use Picnik, now’s the time to try it out!*

*Spending 5 more minutes trying things out / finishing the announcement, I realized that there is *still* a premium membership, and everything that *was* premium before is now available to all, and what they’ve done is made *another* set of features “premium” (including exclusive fonts and an unlimited “undo” history).  Second of all, they’ve opted to pay for these changes by going to an ad-supported model (which they can probably afford to do now that Picnik has an ‘arrangement’ with Flickr that probably pads the bottom line enough to move to this kind of revenue model).  I should warn you, if you hate ads, these ones are as intrusive as heck — they shrink your editing space by taking up real estate to the right and bottom of your screen.  On the other hand, if you hate ads and you’re using Firefox, you’re probably using no-script anyway, in which case the effects of these changes are to merely shrink your usable area.  Is it still “worth” it?  I’d still give it a “hell yea”, as some of these effects are still very slick, and very smooth.  And to be honest, probably worth the extra $25 to get rid of. 

The funny thing is that unlike Twitter, which took me over a year to “get”, it took me all of 5 minutes to “get” Friendfeed (which just announced a 5M dollar round of funding).  Anyway, the service is a bit mindblowing in as much as that you can basically have conversations *with* friends about things you share.  That description sounds underwhelming until you ask it to automatically broadcast things you want to share — Twitters, Blog postings, and almost anything with an RSS feed — and what you get is one long river of combined updates (you and your friends), with the ability to comment and have a conversation on any one of those “activities”.

Think of it like Twitter, except that it can pull in online activities automatically (that you choose), and there are opportunities to create nested comments for each activity that is broadcast.  In an odd way, its like having a better, more automated, more accurately annotated version of Twitter, although the emphasis on adding bare comments to your stream (which has no character limit) seems to be the difference so far (this is having played with it for 5 minutes).

Its one of those things you have to try, and since they’ve added the “add friend” function, which allows you to scour your email lists for people who are already *on* Friendfeed, it becomes a slam dunk.

Add me, and let’s try this conversation together. :)

More

• Louis Gray has been stalking Friendfeed for months
• Eric Eldon has an ongoing love affair with Friendfeed, and gives some Facebook-perspective
• Robert Scoble has finally jumped in (which is like the signal for other early adopters, I’m sure)
• Jason Kaneshiro puts in his three cents
• Erick Schonfield gives a review, and the Google-y backstory behind Friendfeed

So I had a chance to listen in on the Digg Town Hall today, which wasn’t quite the format I was expecting, as they fielded 20 questions that were sent to them (ordered by Diggs, naturally), rather than answer live question from the (virtual floor).

Nevertheless, what I got out of it was a few things:

1. Catching spam is a big priority: Digg is putting a lot of cash and resources into hiring people who can find algorithmic ways to tackle this stuff. And Kevin and Jay are keenly aware that the integrity of their site hinges on being able to catch spam — so much so that they self-censored themselves when trying to describe exactly how Digg promotes stuff, because they don’t want spammers using that information against Digg. One of the more interesting stories I heard was how one blog would pay a top Digger to submit stories — often good stories, quality stuff — have it promoted to the front page, and then weeks later, have that URL re-direct to another URL (or another page), thereby increasing traffic to that other page. Pretty crafty / black-hat stuff! Anyway, that’s just one example of the stuff they’re trying to fight off. Another one that they described was one enterprising guy hiring dozens (hundreds?) of people in eastern Europe (Romania?), and they caught the spamming as they were all from the same region (caught by IP address) which looked pretty suspicious.

2. They will never disclose their exit strategy: People ask them “all the time” whether Digg is going to get sold. They never talk about it, and probably never will talk about it. Rather, they want to invest their time into improving features with the site, such as the comments section and searching, and duplicate checking, which they readily admit, is something that they’re trying to fix.

3. Their emphasis is on improving Digg’s features — not its customer support: Ok, that’s not entirely true, because one of the things that’s coming in the pipeline (or so we’re told) is a forum of some kind for people to ask questions and have their questions answered; apparently there’s going to be two broad categories … one for general user type questions, and another for technical questions (how to get the Digg badge to work, and so on). What I actually mean is that there are a small but vocal (and important) group of Digg users, some of whom are considered the Digg elite (top Diggers, etc etc), who are pining for a way to get their emails answered in a personal, timely manner, about questions that probably have nothing to do with not understanding the FAQ. Questions around why people were banned, how they can get re-instated, blacklisting of URLs and the rationale for why that might be happening. These are all legitimate concerns, but it seems like Digg’s big focus is on features, and in spite of Jay’s reassurances (”we don’t just ban anyone; there’s a back and forth … a dialogue, before someone gets banned” for example), unconfirmed reports suggest that for many Diggers, that just hasn’t been their experience.

Other miscellania that I remember:

• There is no auto-bury function, rather just a sophisticated algorithm for judging which stories get promoted
• there is probably *as* a sophisticated function for burying just as their is for promoting
• “diversity” of people digging clearly has some importance (and weights each Digg differently, is what I got out of it). What diversity means exactly, they didn’t want to reveal.
• Kevin gets together with the guy from Delicious, and the other guy from Reddit (don’t know their names) to regularly commiserate over the never-ending battle between spammers, trying to game these social sites, and the kind of solutions they have to come up with to detect it, and then end it.
• There is only one guy “moderating” at any one time
• They don’t like to call him a moderator (they used another name, like “sys admin”, or something)
• They rely quite heavily on focus groups to help them decide which features suck, which ones they introduce, and to test new features.  There is a way to get into these groups, but by that time, either my own connection conked out, or they merely decided to pull the plug on the presentation.

The bottom line that I got out of it was they gave the appearance that they were trying to make Digg better — and that it takes time, and that they actually get most of the feedback that comes to them, positive and no.

Lastly, for the vocal Digger / social media crowd who are keen to get some better answers to their questions, unfortunately, while the mechanism that currently exists to get in touch with them is probably lacking (and sorely, from the sounds of some Diggers), its clear that this aspect of Digg isn’t something that’s a priority for them to fix — improving and adding new features to Digg is.

It’ll be interesting to see how that part of the debate evolves from townhall meeting, to townhall meeting.

More:

• Mat Ingram’s wrap up
• Social News Watch’s thoughts on the auto bury denial
• Mashable’s embeded Ustream of the entire Digg Town Hall
• CNet who thinks there was too much navel gazing

Just read Mr. Rheingold’s thoughts on Twitter (he’s the chap behind Smart Mobs), and I think I can sum it up even more succinctly than he can (granted, his answer was off the cuff when asked by a student), i.e. the answer to “why are you hooked on Twitter?”

My answer? <drum roll please>

Its because I can listen and participate, in real time, with a giant chat room full off interesting people, who at any given time, are thinking out loud, reporting on things they find important, but doing so in a fairly terse and concise way; and, who are almost always reachable and generally approachable about answering any particular question you might have.

Ok, fine. Its a long sentence. :)

The importance of that above explanation is partially dependent on the quality of people in the chat room, i.e. the people who you are following on Twitter, and how important what they’re doing at any one time is to you, but also dependent on the fact that Twitter necessarily restricts you to 140 characters, meaning there’s little room for bluster or irrelevant blatherings (although there are exceptions) by well meaning “friends”.

This is a good thing, because, as a whole, reducing the irrelevancy of stuff will necessarily increase the overall utility and relevancy of the remaining “content”.

Furthermore, because you can Twitter while not tethered to a desk/lap top, its possible to provide insights and report on observations while you’re out doing / seeing stuff, as in conferences, meet ups and much more. There’s a reason why Twitter took off at SXSW last year, and that’s because people were using it to report on stuff they were seeing, attending, editorialize it with their own thoughts, and other, more practical things, like where to meet up for drinks.

Not philosophical enough for you?

Well, if you wanted to get philosophical, you could phrase it thusly (I know its not really a word, “thusly”, but anyway) — getting hooked into Twitter is almost like a bit of a psychedelic experience, in that its like getting hooked into a shared consciousness, where, if you’ve got the appropriate Twitter appliance, you’ll discover an automatic flowing stream of thoughts, feelings, observations, and terse insights of a very interesting crowd of peers.

Without any pharmaceutical aids, that is. :)

Now whether or not you find that something that is utterly fascinating, utterly useful, or an utter waste of time (and its not mutually exclusive, really), is probably a function of a number of things.

But if you don’t “get” it, the best thing to do is just experience it, preferably by “friending” people you know, which is getting easier all the time with Twitter’s ability to find people that you might know, and get you hooked up into ‘finding’ them on Twitter.

You may have heard about one Texas Senator, named Kirk Watson, an how he spectacularly flubbed on national television, when, as a Barack Obama supporter, was grilled by Chris Matthews (on CNBC) about Obama’s record — and came up blank.

Thanks to things like blogs, Mr. Watson gets to set the record straight on his own terms and without being misquoted.  And in fact does so right on his own blog.

What’s refreshing is that this a great post.  From a politician, its refreshingly honest, insofar as how embarassed he felt for himself and Obama’s campaign.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of a great deal of pimping throughout my medical training, I know what its like to blank out when someone has asked you a question you know (and in fact, just read about or studied the night before), so I understand a little bit of what Mr. Watson went through.

But that’s the great thing about blogs and blogging.  You get to have your say — on your own time, and without fear of being misquoted.

{and all the better if people know about it, and are listening}

Boo-yah.