Damn this is cool.  It really shows the power of adding an open architecture to community - which has been done before - and wrapping it around a compelling experience.  It also makes me wonder why others didn’t get there first.  Hello, TypeKey?   Found via AVC, which is a great example of a burgeoning niche community driven by topical content and empowered by tools like this.
Eric, sign me up for the WordPress plug-in!!!

I love it when my interests cross: going for over $500 at auction are two tickets to a totally free Silicon Valley party thrown by web2.0 uber-tastemaker Michael Arrington that “sold” out in, like, 15 minutes. Proceeds are going to a charity, the Entrepreneurs Foundation, which I’d never heard of before but quite like the charter of. Go TechCrunch!
Bid on two tickets to the TechCrunch bash - you know you wanna.

Setting aside the fact that the TSA is outsourcing its knowledge base without even getting the company providing it to domain-map, the picture says it all. Original link to the TSA here.

Bradley Horowitz has a post about Yahoo! Answers that helps me put a finger on some things that I’ve been churning on since I started this blog. As he puts it:

Blogging has been heralded as the poster child for “user-generated content” or “amateur publishing” or whatever buzzword you may prefer. And at a technical and procedural level this is certainly true. The process of becoming “a blogger” has never been easier.

The hard part (now that the barriers to entry have melted away) is having something worthwhile to say. That really hasn’t gotten any easier. Moreover as a newly minted “blogger” there’s an expectation that you’ll have a consistent, steady stream of interesting postings for your readers to enjoy. Nothing sadder than a dead blog or inactive blog.

But what of the more casual “blogger?” Someone who has only the occasional gem of wisdom to share? Someone who may not want to carry the baggage associated with owning and maintaining a blog per se?

Interesting, because I started this blog in order to have a place for the occasional point, rather than as an attempt to keep up with the many folks who are out there trying to be the first to jump on every new meme in order to be authoritative, comprehensive, recognized, or whatever. I just want to participate in the conversation. But I do feel a responsibility to not get stale in a way that’s quite different from the way I’ve felt about Auctions for Change over the two years. And I don’t always have something interesting to contribute and/or time to contribute it.

Bradley’s point (or one of them) is Yahoo! Answers is one way users can participate in generating blog-like content, conveniently and whenever they feel like it. Certainly the ability to contribute is not new, but the ability to derive consensus from these contributions is — and thus the level of authority conveyed by crowdsourced approaches has them emerging alongside prominent bloggers in leading and impacting public opinion.

As an example, think about the number of times you’ve had bad customer experiences at restaurants and then fantasized you had a review column in the NY Times in which you could tell the world about it. Not everyone can personally do what Jeff Jarvis did about his “Dell Hell” experience, but anyone can put their two cents in a place where others - if their opinion strikes a chord - are likely to pick up on it and amplify. In this post, an engadget commenter notes the prominence in amazon reviews of a key design flaw in a pair of headphones. Good luck to Logitech in having savvy buyers not pick up on that.

While some of these systems can still be gamed (e.g., Amazon reviews) on a one-off basis, as they are open to each other and overlap with systems like blogging that depend on reputational relationships and relative authority, they become more valuable to all of us who want to see what others have to say and maybe get a word in edgewise ourselves.

I know I wrote about this in a previous post, but it just keeps getting better: the new video, “Here it Goes Again“, is as good as the first one.

Plus, “A Million Ways” in lego, and the new one via a stuporous reaction shot.

This is interesting, and highlights one of the critical risks of basing a business on user-generated content and contributions: sometimes the users don’t go along with you.

I’ve always been under the impression that eBay sets a high bar for best practices in engaging seller community influencers and “grass tops”. This guy is clearly a top eBay seller and appears to have been identified by eBay as a community leader (even if his merch is fringe). Now he’s unhappy with some of eBay’s business changes, so he’s auctioning - on eBay no less! - the chance to sponsor him as he goes public with his discontent. Topping that, he’s giving half the proceeds to charity. . . wait for it: the eBay Foundation.

So he’s clearly a true believer, not just a hater. He’s got comments of support from other eBay sellers who clearly agree with him, and has apparently even made the Pulse (eBays’s most-watched auctions) with his listing (which is going for over $1300 as of this writing). I love the image of him mourning over his broken eBay mug (more photos here).

Kudos to eBay for not cutting him off at the knees by taking this listing down, and for allowing this to highlight the fact that, in order to really empower users, you have to empower them to do things that sour your palate.

At the risk of stretching the comparison (because I don’t think community businesses are truly democratic), it’s a bit like a government that empowers a free press, in that you attract more involvement in your system when your system can take self-criticism - and similarly that you risk breaking it if you try to control it.  On that note, I look forward to seeing how the MySpace community reacts to recent changes that do exactly that.

I dreamed up this very idea years ago and am glad someone has finally determined the world is ready to participate: a site where you can report bad drivers via their license plate numbers. They even have a toll-free number (866-689-2155) you can use to report directly to the web.

Presumably the future holds enhancements and spinoffs allowing you to attach photos & video shot from your cellphone, audio narration, non-automotive misdemeanors, reputational elements, and who knows what other means of improving the quality and credibility of the data in these systems. Video speaks well enough for itself, like the photo below, which LAVoice (the source of this story) has made locally famous, but imagine if your reports were weighted by the quality of your driver record and credit scores as verified by open-API systems?

As I was just saying to a friend the other day, who knew that surveillance culture would come not from Big Brother, but from our friends and neighbors?