One of the things I love about the tech community, and about my job, is the sheer number of ideas, entrepreneurs, technologies, and investors I come into contact with on a regular basis.  Almost all of them have something inspired about them, or worth learning from; in aggregate, they are awesome.  It’s also been a big year for me on the personal front.

So here are a few things (big, small, and somewhat random) that inspired me to be a better person, work harder on the important things, or help do my share to pull things in the right direction.  In no particular order:

1. Being a techstars mentor.  There’s nothing as rewarding as seeing ideas become reality, and the opportunity to help that along a little.  Seeing this scale as a model is exciting too.
2. The Twitter ecosystem. In particular, the innovation from companies like Bit.ly, CoTweet, Wildfire, and Brizzly, and the way Twitter is encouraging that.
3. Facebook connect.  Changing the game for publishers very much in the way I’d hoped MyBlogLog would, and making the internet better for people.  The future needs to be more open, but FB connect is helping a lot of people get convinced about the power of the social web.
4. Kiva.  I had the good fortune to spend some time this year with the founders and in the offices of Kiva.  In addition to distributed microfinance being an inspired idea well executed as a product, they are really managing their growth with a thoughtful and strong hand on the tiller, and demanding excellence in their organization.
5. iPhone apps.  This is what I always wanted the internet to be when it grew up, and it’s amazing how quickly this has mainstreamed.  Despite the legitimate issues with their closed ecosystem (see #3 also), this is due largely to apple’s execution.
6. Intelligentsia coffee.  I was skeptical of a newcomer to my well-caffeinated, eastside LA neighborhood, but the focus on quality coffee, roasting, preparation, and staff immediately ranked them head and shoulders above anyone else.  It’s a great example of passion and focus in a startup — just doing One Thing Well.
7. Kinnernet, & the Isreali web community.  Yossi Vardi’s invitation to participate in Israel’s equivalent of Barcamp meets Burning Man seemed like a lark, and it did have its share of mentos fountains and robots, but I’m glad I went — there is a terrific tech community being built in Israel and supporters around the world, and some of the most fearless entrepreneurs I’ve met are working there.
8. Jerusalem.  It’s impossible to summarize the unexpected and moving experience of visiting the nexus of so much cultural history, extreme orthodoxy, and conflict, but I highly recommend putting it on your life list.
9. Getting married.  Another good thing for your life list .  Getting married was by far the highlight of the year for me, and a great excuse to convince a large number of friends and family to come celebrate together.  I’ve enjoyed getting closer to Amy’s tightly knit family — and her grandmother Gogi shared some very spirited (and hopefully useful) words of wisdom after decades of marriage.
10. My Uncle Steve, who passed away this year, and who will be missed and remembered for his irreplaceable personality and involvement in our family.
11. The stream.  The general adoption of the real-time, social “river of news” approach is important and has only just begun.  JS-Kit and GetGlue are two companies that I’m really enjoying right now who are engaging with it.
12. Tim O’Reilly.  While I always find his “do things worth doing” approach inspiring, I’m particularly glad to see it applied to Government 2.0, and the community response to this.
13. Gourmet food trucks.  I live in LA, home of the twittering Kogi bbq truck — and within a handful of months, dozens of gastro-hyphenate and gourmet busses, trucks and stands, ranging from architectural ice cream to french bistro fare.  These are the foodie equivalent of cheap web software and SaaS-based startups, and it’s awesome to see just as much innovation and passion coming out of it.  (Check out findlafoodtrucks.com)
14. The Bon Iver sunrise show at the Hollywood Forever cemetery.  While the show this terrific band did at the Wiltern was arguably better, they had an Idea — that having an all-night party in a cemetery, and playing an outdoor show of their stirring music at sunrise, following chanting monks, would be interesting and fun and worth the red tape — and they Made It Happen.
15. The FCC.  For doing what they are doing.
16. The Flaming Lips, who, I got to see at the Greek Theater.  For continuing to do what they do.
17. Glen Hansard.  I stumbled with some newfound friends into a private, music industry showcase show in Boulder.  Not only was he cool, he turned in a political statement about payola in the record industry — biting the hand that feeds rather while promoting his new record.  We need more artists like this — plus he’s great.
18. The Kindle.   Awesome and transformative, and only getting better.  I probably read more books this year than in the previous two combined.  Still – open it and make it social, please.
19. Cory Booker.  A grad school classmate who’s now the Mayor of Newark and taking an inspiring and iconoclastic approach to what can be done to change things for the better.  Cory adopted social media this year with results that are nothing short of amazing.  In a world of tech evangelists, vapid celebrities, and self-described social media consultants, he’s one of the few who deserve the follower base (1,000,000+!) and RT’s.
20. Matt Logelin & David Beach.  Two friends of mine who’ve shown incredible courage in the face of personal adversity and used social media to talk about their difficulties.  There are so many more — #drewscancer and the pablove movement come to mind — but these gentlemen put a personal face on what it means to be brave, exposed, and inspirational (whether intentionally or not) in a world of oversharing.
21. The GTD community. David Allen’s GTD summit was refreshingly free of gurudom and dilettantes, and replete with people who believe that productivity tools aren’t fashion accessories but rather tools for doing things right.
22. Austin musicians.  I took at least three trips to Austin this year and made a point of seeing good, live music on each.  At SXSW, I even dragged a few folks with me, and was able to hire two great bands (Jesse Dayton, Dave Insley & the Careless Smokers) for my wedding.
23. Indie 103.  An attempt to un-clearchannel the LA airwaves and a bit of a throwback business model, Indie gave up the ghost this year, but having punk-rock dj’s on prime frequencies was fun while it lasted.  Once we have internet in our cars, it won’t matter anyway ’cause we’ll all be listening to Pandora.
24. Barack Obama’s inauguration.  His words then, and the collective optimism we had in them, were as inspiring as any political event my generation has experienced.  I’m still hoping he will do more to live up to the vision.
25. Andrew Wyeth, who died this year.  Sometimes dismissed as a lightweight, Wyeth was an iconoclast and an experimental, expressive, honest painter who didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought.  In my view, he was one of America’s true great artists.
26. Unclasses.  I love this idea, and the general idea that amateurs and hobbyists have a lot to teach us and the desire to share.  I hope it spreads.  Speaking of sharing, let’s add Neighborgoods too (friend me if you join).
27. Wikipedia, Creative Commons, OpenID, OpenSocial, and all of the other emerging open web repositories, formats, and ip frameworks that are making it possible to do good things and make incremental contributions to the greater good of the web commons.
28. Friends.  I have so many friends pursuing their passions, big ideas, and family dreams right now.  I’m amazed by what people do every day.
29. Kickstarter.  Go check it out, and fund something that inspires you.

Join us if you can, or drop me a line if you’re going to be there and want to connect.

My premise in making that comment was that social search be defined as a search deriving its results from “a statistically meaningful sample of people meaningfully related to me”. I gave as an example Zagat’s guide to NYC restaurants, which, back in the day, was exactly that – a usefully large group of, mostly, actual foodies.

Mahalo, imho, is simply an extension of the editorial approach into semi-pro range. Instead of one food editor of the NYTimes, you could have, I don’t know, 10?, editors of the NYC pages. Wikia, simply the cult of the amateur doing the same thing. In both cases, these are curated results pages. If the curators are competent, passionate, and/or otherwise motivated, this is great and a step forward from algorithmic results. But making better results pages ain’t social search.

Neither is telling me what my friends think. Sure twitter lazyweb is a great way to get a recommendation for an indian restaurant in Palo Alto, but it’s a lousy way to get one for a dentist in missoula. Especially if you don’t live there and have a bunch of friends there.

Even del.icio.us and other “social search 1.0″ tools are still, more or less, dumb boxes of votes. Those votes are by smart people and often people like me (hence why I find delicious popular interesting), but there’s no variability on a given query on the axis of “social”. And, like mahalo and wikia, the results are mostly url’s – i.e. links to other pages where you as often as not have to execute another search or dig through socially undifferentiated data to extract value (a link to a restaurant page on yelp, for example, with a bunch of reviews from people I don’t know or trust).

There are a bunch of tools that let you ask questions of people. LinkedIn does a great job of this, again within a specific community, but they are very clever in the way things can seep out beyond the first degree network without hitting the undifferentiated population of “everyone”. That said, it’s still an expansion of “me”, on the assumption that my business colleagues and their business colleagues are to some degree usefully alike. While somewhat true, this is not nearly as useful as a larger population of people “like me,” who might or might not be related to me socially.

Lijit is doing a similarly interesting and useful job of letting me search the corpus read by my network, and with a little help from MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, my network’s network. Lijit is awesome, and I often use it to search my own stuff.
But what I really would like to see from “social search” is something that can search my network/neighborhood AND search other neighborhoods like mine, where “like mine” is pivotable based on context (friends, business, geo, special need, etc.). Like last.fm for stuff other than music maybe.

(I’m barely commenting on Friendfeed and Facebook because, to date, those are seredipitous discovery tools more than search ones, and ultimately you’re mostly finding people, not useful data derived from groups of people.)

Is anyone doing anything interestingly like this?

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (“Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”

• refurbished vw beetles
• gtd outlook
• craigslist mexico city
• mark cuban
• vw transmission fail (heh!)
• hyper local communities
• i hate good-byes. i know what i need. i need more hellos.
• point setting on ghia
• gambling vs. insurance
• “farecast” “revenue”
• underwear shoot 2007
• “the world is scary”
• prefab modernism
• widget trends
• linkedin “people you may know” (this is a popular one)
• “why i love new york”
• custom show tractor trailers
• belle and sebastian live at hollywood bowl
• visualizing data journalism
• fairmont sucks (heh!)
• loans that change lives
• is indeed.com illegal
• “my wife thinks you [sic]
• “install propane”
• car+ problem
• new york subway turnstyle
• mexico
• california+ redwoods
• bigfoot vs.
• joel spolsky scientologist
• guy kawasaki 10 rules
• “the wire” “politics”
• cookie+ puss
• writa [sic] a poem
• meaning greetings to the new brunette
• how to build valet stand
• youtube pie fight
• music insults
• decadent societies

In the last two sessions, I’ve looked up the company websites and blogs of several speakers, subscribed to multiple RSS feeds from people I’ve met here, added several people to my social networks, posted a question to the room via twitter, joined a Facebook group (no you can’t join) on a thread of interest created at the conference, posted a clever comment on the wall there, and discovered and followed a twitter account set up to comment the conference. After posting this, I might even link to it there.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I don’t usually do orthogonal multi-tasking well — and I don’t usually take kindly to people opening up laptops in my meetings either. But this has had the opposite effect, enhancing my experience of listening and thinking about things that are being said, rather than distracting from it. I’ve stayed completely off of email and IM and outside distractions (despite having facebook and twitter tabs open).

So it’s sort of like an IRC backchannel – only I get to decide who’s in it and how I want to flavor the experience in terms of tools. Come to think of it, I haven’t used any of the three quasi-official collaboration tools offered through the conference organizers, which validates (for me) two key themes of this show so far — that open standards and identities are going to continue to enable users to drive increasingly customized and personal experiences around idea sharing and group collaboration, and that there’s plenty more to do in the group / enterprise collaboration space.

There’s probably something interesting that could be done to enable the exchange of identities – something like what Chris Pirillo does for Gnomedex with OPML, only less “all or none”.

Defrag, and the people attending it, are changing the way I listen. How do you listen?

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.

My own thinking on this stems from my continual amazement at the way MySpace, which many observers rightly note as a tipping point in the mainstreaming of blogging and personal publishing, perhaps even more importantly fuses general communication and content consumption with content publication. MySpace is not just outbound; it is email inbox 2.0. (And people wonder why mobile hasn’t taken off.)

At the same time, services like flickr and YouTube and Twitter, and technologies like tagging and RSS, continue to arrive to serve specific types of content production and community well (or at least interestingly). And those of us that have crossed into this world of personal & social transparency (a rubicon it seems) will inevitably continue to experiment with and invest in the most compelling.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places – both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing – but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

There are more than a few companies playing successfully at solving parts of these problems – NetVibes, and TACODA come to mind along with others, as do features introduced by Yahoo! and Google to blend some aspects of communication (mail and IM, email and RSS). There have also been some interesting attempts that haven’t quite taken root (e.g., Rojo). But there’s a lot left to do to solve the problem of “distributed aggregation” of content publishing, and I think this is a problem that will continue to resonate and drive valuable innovation this year.

Related to this problem of course is the need for an effective way to manage identity and privacy: it’s easy for me if I can have one list of friends not 12, but I don’t want all my business friends to see all of my flickr posts, I probably don’t want all of my business research behaviors impacting my behaviorally targeted advertising, and I certainly don’t want to publish my bookmarks and shopping behaviors related to sensitive personal topics. At the same time, managing preferences and terminology across all the different social venues I participate in is a pain in the ass.

I would expect some interesting entries that come at this problem in ways we haven’t seen before (and probably also better, easier-to-use versions of things we have). I would also expect some of the GEMAYA properties and “anchor tenants” in the core related businesses (UGC, news and content aggregation, search, advertising) to make moves toward more effectively meshing content production, consumption, and identity. Hopefully, there will be both good internal innovation here and plenty of interesting M&A opportunities.

Finally, I’m gonna go ahead and make one actual prediction: that at least one “unexpected” large company will participate impactfully in this reader/publisher/attention/identity fabric.