Tag Archives: Robert Scoble

Predictify is about building track records of human predictors.

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Robert Scoble interviews their CTO.

Video

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Predictify is not a prediction exchange. We think prediction markets are superior to polls and surveys, don&#8217-t we? :-D

With Predictify, the mechanism delivering the collective verdict is simplistic: it&#8217-s a poll &#8212-with possibility to get down to each individual answer.

Their conversation is very interesting, nevertheless &#8212-in great part due to Robert Scoble&#8217-s intense curiosity.

Technically, the video is awesome and plays well &#8212-even with my old computer and slow DSL line. Kudos to the Fast Company techies. :-D

UPDATE: I don&#8217-t like that their video starts off automatically, though. With YouTube, we decide to play the video &#8212-it is not imposed on us.

UPDATE: Alas, their embedded video does not go into the blog feed. :(

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UPDATE: I e-mailed my remarks to Robert Scoble, and he&#8217-s asked to his techie to look into the issues. :-D

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UPDATE: I see that the video does not start on its own, now. They managed to correct that. :-D Rest the fact that their videos don&#8217-t go into feeds.

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TV News Shows = Entertainment

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The awful French TV program on sports betting (where BetFair&#8217-s Mark Davies croaked in French) reminded me of what Robert Scoble said about TV news shows.

They do not intend to educate you..

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Robert Scoble:

Last week I was on CNBC twice. Once on “Fast Money” and once on Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea.”

The Fast Money segment has been torn apart on the Internet but Roger Ehrenberg of the Information Arbitrage blog had the most intelligent analysis of it.

Here’s the key piece of the Donny Deutsch show, where we had a bunch of bloggers on the Microsoft Blogger Bus asking questions of Bug Labs’ CEO Peter Semmelhack. Bug Labs went onto win CNET’s “Best of CES” award for the emerging tech category.

Some things that are worth underlying about the difference between my video show and CNBC.

1. Expense. CNBC had dozens of people involved in the show, a huge booth, really expensive cameras, satellite time, etc. My show? Get a Nokia phone and go for it.
2. Makeup. Yeah, I wore it. There’s a video out there on the Internet somewhere. I’m not sure why Valleywag hasn’t found it yet.
3. You don’t get to say whatever you want. Donny’s show was tape delayed. If you try doing something wacky, they’ll just cut you out. But even if they keep you on, they have a director who is telling you what they want. She preps you for each segment, giving you “talking points.” If you don’t agree with those talking points you have to negotiate to have them changed. But if they don’t like your talking points they just won’t go with you. Second, she has a big sign and if she thinks you should make a point she makes it clear.
4. These shows are NOT about getting deep, or really getting a good understanding of CES. They were ALL about being entertaining! Hey, who knew? (I tried to pull a bunch of gadgets out and they said “we don’t care about the gadgets.”)
5. They filmed Bug Labs’ CEO for 10 hours for a two-minute segment. Now do you understand why so many CEOs let me come over and film them? I never take more than an hour with an executive, so it’s always easy to get onto someone’s schedule.
6. My show has very little editing, so it’s pretty rare that the context gets lost on an answer. On TV, though, things get cut up, sliced and diced, all for entertainment effect, not necessarily to tell the best story.

LinkedIn feed of your network updates

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UPDATE: Following my protestation published in the post below, LinkedIn has just fixed the problem I described and its network update feeds do now output both a title and a body (a.k.a. description). The body contains information and links, as I asked in this post. 😀

So, kudos to the LinkedIn engineers for computing that, even lately. However, I remain adamant that the TechCrunch writer (Ducan Riley) is an incompetent bozo.

UPDATE #2: The feed that I’m receiving now beams only titles. So we’re back to square one. 🙁

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The information comes as a set of feed item titles… as opposed to full feed items (with each a body and a title). … In that body (a.k.a. “description” in RSS lingo), I would have liked to have each people or organization’s name… with their LinkedIn link embodied into their name… as you’ve got on the LinkedIn website (see the second image, at the bottom of this post).

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TAKEAWAY:

The LinkedIn engineers didn’t do their work correctly.
The TechCrunch writer rushed to publish his blog post and did not pause to experiment the damn thing —or if he did, that Australian bozo (blogging at night while his Silicon Valley boss sleeps) has nothing to do writing for a premier tech publication.
I would expect a tech blog to be more critical, and not to swallow any P.R. crap sent by corporations —even if that P.R. message is sent as a blog post. Just because a P.R. department is “cool” and uses a blog to communicate does not mean that the tech bloggers should swallow everything those “cool” spin doctors say.

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[The feed on the right side of the image below is the one that I’m talking about —not the one on the left site.]

LinkedIn

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Here are the updates from the Midas Oracle networks (the screen shot was taken 2 weeks ago). On the LinkedIn website, the names of people and organizations are clickable. That makes all the difference between an information that is useful and one that is not.

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LinkedIn

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To be part of the Midas Oracle Network, follow this LinkedIn link and send me an invite from there. [ cfm |-at-| midasoracle |.|-com-| ] I’ll accept it.

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Here’s the FaceBook link. Send me an invite from there, if you wish. [ chrisfmasse +++at— gmail +dot— com ]

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And if you wish, we may also become friends on Google, and share feed items within Google Reader. I found this to be usable and useful. Try it. (It’s Robert Scoble who showed me the way. I’m sharing feed items with him and two dozens of people.)

To share items with me (Chris Masse) within Google Reader, go to GMail, and under “Chat” (on the left pane), click on “Add Contact”. Paste my e-mail address there (chrisfmasse +++at— gmail +dot— com). Once I receive your invite, I’ll accept it. You will then see my shared items and I’ll see yours within Google Reader.