Think Locally

A quick note before a long weekend.

TechCrunch has a much-commented post today about business owners railing against Yelp for negative reviews, and the notion that this is proof of Yelp’s success.

Maybe so, but it remains a problem if the negative reviews are written by spiteful competitors, or conversely if positive reviews are written by shills.

Loladex ensures review reliability, because the audience for any review consists primarily of the reviewer’s social network friends. Why would I bother to write a disingenuous review on Loladex, knowing that my friends would read it? I’d lose credibility.

Yelp and other review sites give the reviewer the option to remain relatively anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. On Loladex, the whole point is to see your friends’ reviews. And friends don’t let friends write fake reviews.

A brontobyte…I’m not kidding…is a million billion terabytes.  That’s a lot of info.

Before I continue, let me explicitly state, I’m not taking sides … in this blog, anyway … on the race for the White House. My mind is made up. It’s just not relevant to this post, which is about how both presumptive candidates are prone to detail-oriented gaffes that rankle their detractors and drive their supporters to sheepish apologies. And how tools to steer through information overload are related.

McCain mixes up Sunnis and Shiites. Now Obama mixes up living versus dead veterans. Is it important to distinguish between religious sects that have been at each other’s throats for a thousand years?  Or between the living and the dead?  Well, of course.  But today I’m going to apologize for both candidates and say, there is just a freakin’ lot of information to keep track of.

It’s hard to imagine Washington or Lincoln or Roosevelt making such seemingly silly statements. And it’s easy to blame modern media for exposing every little thing that a politician says, but that doesn’t help defend McCain and Obama, who have said regrettable things in major forums.

No, in addition to having thousands of lenses and microphones constantly focused on them, information overload has got to be taking a toll.  We want our leaders to know everything, and they simply can’t. In the course of trying to appear to know everything, their brains - designed, like ours, for picking out lions in the savanna - are prone to the occasional glitch.

I remember in college discovering that intellectuals of the 1600’s could legitimately claim to know just about everything there was to know. It was possible to simultaneously be a scientist, politician, novelist and architect. In the 1800’s Lincoln really had just a handful of countries to worry about. News traveled slowly so he had time to ponder his famous speeches, and to prepare for his famous debates. Even in the twentieth century, sources of information were limited, and reactions to events tightly controlled by the very fact that few media channels existed to convey information.

No more. Information in a dizzying variety of detail exists about everything, and is available in real time. In their effort to absorb information about what’s relevant, it’s not surprising to me that the two - three, if you insist - people vying for leadership of the United States occasionally mix things up.

With so many sources of information out there, everyone needs filters, and one of the best filters any of us has is the vetting that is done by people we trust. In 1975 everyone trusted Walter Cronkite to tell them “how it is.” The Yellow Pages was a book, not just a concept. And if you didn’t know where to find something, you called a friend or asked a neighbor, who, by the way, also helped you decide, through your conversation, whether to trust Cronkite in the first place.

The online world needs this vetting process, and social networking is ideally suited to it. Linked In helped pioneer circles of trust. Facebook is bringing it to the masses. And Loladex and others are taking advantage of it to help people cut through mushrooming piles of information to make important decisions.

I don’t know yet whether these trends will help presidential candidates tell Ahmedinijad apart from Bin Laden, or Patton from Petraeus, but the need to improve ways to sift through information is very real, and thankfully being addressed.

Maybe it’s the steady stream of ex-AOLers. Maybe it’s increasing numbers of tech-minded graduates from local universities. Whatever the reason, there’s a thriving and energetic new media community in the greater DC area, and it’s exciting to be a part of it.

The latest round of Frank Gruber’s (Somewhat Frank) Tech Cocktail series took place last night in DuPont Circle, and as usual when it comes to this crowd, it was packed with people with great ideas. I shared demo space with Ann Bernard of Why Go Solo, who’s also spearheading the upcoming Social Dev Camp East. And everywhere I looked in the room there were newly familiar faces from the DC New Media community.

For weeks I’ve been hearing Frank, Ann, Jimmy Gardner, Nick O’Neill and others pump up the vibrancy of the community, and stress the importance of nurturing it. It’s hitting home in a big way. I haven’t lived day-to-day in Silicon Valley, but it’s gratifying to witness first-hand how an entrepreneurial community can fuel itself.

Where does the community go from here, especially in uncertain economic times? In part because of what Loladex is all about, my personal definition of New Media revolves around social networking, which has only scratched the surface of what it can do. Humans have been social networking for a hundred thousand years, and we’re only beginning to figure out how to use the great communications innovation of the 20th Century - the Internet - to facilitate and supercharge social networking.

In the DC area, it’s natural to look for government applications to increase their use of social networking concepts, in conjunction with developments in Enterprise 2.0. Associations and advocacy organizations have been quicker to adopt social networking practices, and the concentration of these organizations in DC ought to appeal to local innovators.

Some have complained about the lack of attention DC’s New Media community gets, but as long events like Tech Cocktail DC keep happening and keep drawing capacity crowds, it won’t go unnoticed for very long.

Mashable   posted this morning on a yet-to-be-released service from a couple of ex-Googlers, code-named Mechanical Zoo, that lets you search the social datastream. This is a great idea, and like so many things, reminds me of a cartoon, in this case an old Schoolhouse Rock jingle about nouns that was going through my head yesterday. The best kind of local search (for places) takes advantage of things (computers and software) and people (human interaction a la Mahalo).

Using the social datastream to get answers to find a restaurant recommendation, for example, is sort of like shouting out in a crowd, at the top of your lungs “hey, anyone know of a good restaurant?” OK, it’s better than that, because with Twitter and similar tools, you know your voice has a chance to get heard, and you can listen to the responses clearly above the din.

Adding search to the social datastream is like having the ability to listen to the echoes of everyone’s responses, and cut straight through to exactly what you want to hear. Using search in this context lets you instantly query a large number of people, and manage their responses efficiently. If you’re looking for something local, specifically, it’s a way for people to help you find places. It uses things (computers), of course, but not completely.

What’s missing in this scenario is a structured database of past questions and responses, categorized by query type. If I ask the social datastream for a restaurant recommendation, I’m very happy to get direct responses to my query. But if I search the echoes for past mentions of restaurants, I don’t want my search results to contain a feed item that says “ran into the awful ex at a restaurant last night.” What I want is a thing (database) that understands at some level what a restaurant is.

Here at Loladex we start from the perspective of the structured database, so a search for a restaurant only returns actual restaurants. We take advantage of social concepts to return results to users based on recommendations from their friends. And we allow users to query their friends directly. We take full advantage of input from people and the power of things to help users find places. We already integrate with the social datastream by publishing users’ recommendations to Facebook feeds, and there’s more to come.

People, Places and Things. Always something to be learned from a cartoon. Which reminds me. Gotta mark the calendar for the opening of Speed Racer. Between that and Schoolhouse Rock, does that date me, or what?