Ready to have some people start playing with my new project: http://notepad.cc/

Here's a neat little web application made by Jacbo Bijani, Tumblr's creative director. It's one of those things that's so simple you have to wonder why no one has thought of it before. It's a little notepad-esque application that allows for simple collaborative text editing.

Not sure what it was written in. Seems like one of those projects that could be written in few hundred lines of code, if that.

Cool stuff. Check it out. :)

2009 marked the most exciting year for Vimeo to date. Besides adding more than 1.5 million creators to our community, we saw thousands of the most creative videos in the world added to the site. It's been an amazing ride.

Here are our favorite videos of the year in no particular order.

The quality of the productions on Vimeo has always impressed me. This year was no exception. The videos that top their list feature some quite stunning pieces of work.

Go watch them.

December 11, 2009

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released 10 red weather balloons across the country and offered $40,000 to the first group to locate them all. Riley Crane, of MIT, explains how his team bagged the prize by locating the balloons in fewer than nine hours.

This week's Science Friday covered the recent DARPA Network Challenge, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of a little thing called the Internet (which DARPA helped create). The interview is a little over 10-minutes long, and definitely worth a listen. MIT's Riley Crane explained how his team won the contest by creating a "recursive incentive" – what amounts to a social media affiliate program. As he explains it,

We offered a recursive incentive, which allowed us not only to reward the people who actually found balloons, but we could also reward the people who helped us find those people.

The first question you might ask yourself is this, "Why did DARPA fund this, and how is this even remotely useful?" Well, as Mr. Crane goes on to explain,

… imagine that a building collapses during a natural disaster and you need to rapidly find 10 people who can operate heavy machinery in a certain location. I think these are a lot of the challenges that are facing society that nobody really knows yet how to mobilize people on a large scale, and I think that's what our team was able to demonstrate, that these things are possible and that we've built the technology to try to do it.

I can't wait to see what the results of Mr. Crane's analysis. Hidden in this experiement, they may be some data points that help reveal exactly what the thresholds are (and the incentives need to be) in order to cause people to take an action.

Today, when you present an advertising concept to a client, you will inevitably launch into a discussion on how your experience, application or content spreads virally, and what your strategy is for making sure that something "goes viral." Doubly so if it's a digital concept. And while you can't guarantee that anything goes viral, I've long thought about the idea of incentivizing sharing. A monetary incentive, in most cases, is the best incentive. But in the digital realm, virtual currencies may be just as good.

This is a topic I intend to explore with more depth in a later post. Hopefully, after I get my hands on MIT's official report.