For me, starting a blog was an experiment to see if anyone “out there” would be interested in reading what I had to say about various technology and startup-related topics. And I mostly wrote about what I wanted at first.  I knew the maximum audience for what I was writing about was maybe a few hundred people anyway.

But then this weird thing happened that I like to call “page view whoring” (PVW), where I started to scheme about how to up my page view counts instead of just writing about some weird topic that I thought was interesting (bit.ly speculation, anyone?). PVW is a vicious cycle where you realize that effectively monetizing your content means you have to appeal to a wider audience, dilute your voice and probably alienate your early adopters - the ones who appreciated your niche content to begin with.

I don’t even run ads on this blog! It wasn’t about money right away. But it WAS about motivation.  Why was I putting in the time to write stuff?  Well, for non-ad-driven blogs they usually start out as a for-the-love side project and then the good ones can turn into branding tools for the authors who leverage “their brand” in some creative way (shilling products to their audience, lead gen for various businesses, “deal-flow”, speaking engagements, book deals, etc.).

But I don’t want to build “a brand” - I just want to write about kind of weird stuff that I like and have people appreciate it. And the PVW was starting to creep me out.  Like, “If I write something about privacy and Facebook it will get some points on Hacker News!” And then I did.  And then it did. Turns out you can get pretty decent at PVW if you put your mind to it.

And that’s when it stopped being a purely for-the-love side project.

It became “Hey! 5000 page views this month! If I can just get that to 10,000 maybe I can start making money from this” and that was the moment when I agreed to dilute my message for the sake of maybe making a little cash off this side project.  I hate admitting this in public, but it’s true: I am a fucking capitalist.

My hypothesis is this: by introducing the money part at the beginning of the cycle instead of the end, one can avoid the vicious PVW cycle. When I heard about Sam Lessin’s new side project Letter.ly, I was intrigued.

The model is just a bit different, but I think awesome. You state your price (mine is $2/month) and people can pay it if they want to subscribe. Not a new idea necessarily, but extremely well-executed and easy to set up.

Example: John Gruber gets 3 million page views at Daring Fireball and charges $4500/week for sponsorship. I only need 9000 subscribers to make the same amount of money, which coincidentally is probably the maximum number of people who’d be interested in what I have to say anyway. It’s just as much work to get to 9000 paid subscribers as it is to get to 3m page views, but the paths are *very* different. I think mine will probably top out at maybe a few hundred, but the drastic difference between 3 million and 9000 is notable.

I am already starting to see the difference - I feel a true sense of responsibility to my new subscribers - to produce something that I think is quality niche content and that’s mine. I am only writing for people who care enough about what I have to say that they paid for it, which creates a new sort of incentive cycle that to me is more likely to produce interesting stuff. It’s also a new way to filter an audience - effectively eliminating those “off-the-Google” spammers who stumble on your blog and try to hype Viagra in the comments section. And for those of us this far down the long tail, it’s an interesting option.

And isn’t it bizarre that switching *away* from the free model might be a way to keep niche content truly niche? The internet surprises you sometimes.

Sign up if you want: http://letter.ly/amanda.

**Sidenote: I don’t think this model will work AT ALL for big media properties.  Paywalls for publications like the NY Times are, I think, likely to fail.  But that’s another post for another time.

Right, graduation. The last one I experienced was 2005 from undergrad and I can’t say I am any more sure now about my future than I was then.  I certainly had no job then (what employable skills does a 21 year-old History major have, exactly?) and spent the summer following graduation lying around my parent’s house wondering how I could take over the world while still watching 3-4 hours of daytime television.  Not so successful.  This is when I learned an extremely important life lesson: nothing productive EVER happens when you’re living with your parents.  So I headed to Beijing to stir up some trouble.

After some time in Beijing figuring out how to do basic things like eat and buy train tickets, and a stint in Austin, TX I found myself at MIT in August 2008, ready to drink some more academic kool-aid.

Two years later, and I’m not dreading graduation like I was before. Maybe it took an extra two years of school (some of us are slower than others), but I am pretty excited to land in the startup world with no structured “career path.”  Instead, this summer I’ll be living in a rental house near Stanford working on cool web stuff.  It is going to be amazing, and it will be nice to get back to “survival mode,” academia was beginning to spoil me.

But there’s something about putting on a cap and gown - it’s one of the few American traditions that people still keep pretty sacred.  As my third graduation, this may be the first one I am actually excited about. Not because I have any more of a plan than I did before, but because I have finally learned that uncertainty is something that should be cherished.

But wait, they employ approx 1000 people, prolly more at this point. They are a business. So if I’m not paying them anything, how am I in any position to make demands?  Sadly, although I am every bit as “entitled” as every other Gen-Y-er out there (thank you Jason Calacanis), I really can’t.

If their business model is to take my data and do whatever they please with it, I have almost no negotiating power to tell them to do otherwise, except maybe delete my account and try to convince my friends to do the same. Like any other business, if you don’t like what they’re doing you vote with your feet.

I don’t think “privacy is dead”, but I do think that just like in the real, physical world, privacy is expensive. And the internet is moving that way.

If you want to eat at a restaurant in a room all by yourself, you have to pay extra for that. If you want a house that’s so secluded that you can’t see any of your neighbors, you pay for that too.  If you want your phone number unlisted?  Extra $$$. Security systems, big hotel rooms, etc. etc. etc. all require cash.

So then how is it that privacy on the internet is anyone’s obligation?  I love privacy and I love all those internet business that don’t sell my email address to porn and Viagra peddlers. But they don’t do that because they have to - they do it because it has been a competitive advantage to do so and telling your users that their data is safe with you is a way to get more users (and in my opinion part of what makes the internet great).

While Facebook started out by exploiting this desire for privacy, I think they’ve realized that it’s just not a sustainable business model - privacy costs money, yo! And living in an internet utopia sponsored by Digital Sky Technologies just can’t last forever.

What this change has created - in my mind - is a very unique opportunity that I’m sure many savvy entrepreneurs will exploit.  As much as I hoped the internet would continue to remain this amazing force where privacy is assumed and valued and treasured, I think that - just like in the physical world - privacy will become something strictly available to the haves, and there will be this new kind of “digital-divide” where instead of just an issue of broadband access, it’s a divide centered around the types of services that you use and their level of privacy.

It’s an unsettling thought, because for me the reason why I love the internet as an industry is because of its quirky dissimilarity to real-world businesses, and I really hoped it would stay that way.  Guess I was wrong.

Seems to me the tech startup world and the music business have more in common than either would probably like to admit. They are hit-driven businesses. Like record companies, venture capitalists invest in 10 companies hoping for one huge hit. I’m not sure what the numbers are in the music business, but I imagine they’re similar. VCs are, in certain ways, like music agents – though instead of hanging out at smoky bars and high school talent shows they lurk around hackathons and Stanford. But there’s a similar hunt for “one-in-a-million” stars and certain investors who seem to have an almost sixth sense for hit-makers.

So in these hit-driven businesses, is there anything other than just “general gut” that can point to winners? Since I fall more on the tech side, I can’t help but think that there has to be some way to mathematically model the future popularity of a service. This post is the beginning of that quest.

Of course by “model” I don’t mean manipulate real, actual metrics like number of users, daily active use, angle of hockey-stick growth curve, etc. – any intern with an Excel model can do that. It’s more subtle than that. Instead, if you can somehow ascribe numerical value to the non-measurable attributes of a startup (or perhaps a musician) that might give a more complete picture of future adoption.

In the academic world, I have seen this refered to as memetics – the growing field that uses principles from several disciplines to gauge how quickly something will spread. As one author describes it: “At the center of this overlap lies cybernetic theory, but it also entails strategies from marketing, psychology, social networking, cultural analysis, rhetorical principles, and biological theory, (specifically viral and epidemiological models).” 

For these qualities – I’m not really talking about useful but boring services. I’m much more interested in those few products that for whatever reason do a good job of capturing attention/consciousness (ahem, Twitter).

In other words, is there a way to quantify je ne sais quoi in the world of consumer tech? I suppose there are worse ways to spend a Sunday.

I came up with a list of levers/attributes that I believe contribute to popularity. The next step would be to take these qualities and begin to assign values – though I’ll leave that for another, far nerdier post. Here’s the working list – and I’m definitely looking for more suggestions:

Product: The product itself is extremely important – I hope the rest of the post does not indicate that I think otherwise. All of the established product prinicples – about making something people want, cherishing your users, finding product-market fit, etc. all apply. I suppose I am more trying to debunk the “build it and they’ll come” idea that the fight for users begins and ends at the product stage. From what I’ve seen as an outsider, this is far from true.

Tech: The tech cannot suck. The product must work and it should be fast. Every single dollar spent on amazing engineering talent is worth it.

Market Trends: Macro trends are important – there are certain general umbrellas that investors, journalists and consumers will find compelling. Don’t pursue niches that are overexposed – which right now is group-buying (Groupon knock-offs!), social gaming (Zynga) and location-based social networks (Foursquare). Instead, find a niche where there are indicators that it will be a huge market. If I knew what these were I’d be starting businesses in them, but talk to any investor and they can give you some theories.

Early Users: This is incredibly important. There’s a great post from Tara Hunt about how many marketers assume that if you just spam the “influencer” types that that can make a product. That’s fine, and sure I’d love it if Beyonce wants to endorse whatever I’ve made, but it seems like it’s actually better to get more rabid fans early on and court the influencers later. (Have you read “1000 True Fans” yet?)

Internal and External Storytelling: Two angles here – how the startup tells its own story and how it presents itself to the outside world, and the second, and perhaps more importantly, how the product/company’s story is told by third-party sources – whether that’s early users, journalists, or just a person-to-person interaction at a conference or in a coffee shop.

Graspable Depth: What I mean here is that your service has to be complex enough to be interesting to early-adopter-types who have “seen it all” but simple enough to be appealing to your average consumer. Wolfram Alpha suffers from too much depth, while the plethora of group-buying sites are now uninteresting.

Rawness: Perhaps I have saved the most important for last. I wasn’t sure really what to call this, but it’s that pang of guilt and curiosity that comes when you see a new service that is somehow mold-breaking. Do you remember the first time you signed on to Facebook? When you saw that the person in your math class loves Wes Anderson movies as much as you? Previously, this information was only attainable through person-to-person contact (there were other social networking sites, yes, but it wasn’t the same sort of feeling). There’s a certain excitement in an interaction becoming automated. Or Chatroulette. Did you really think I’d write a whole post about popularity and not mention Chatroulette? The first time you see it, you’re like “I SHOULD NOT BE LOOKING” – but you do anyway. It is the willingness to sit at the intersection of appropriateness and lunacy – that is what I mean by rawness.

I think there’s this big misconception in the tech world that good tech can save you. If you make your site faster or use the hotttttest new web framework that that will somehow make up for the lack of other attributes (this is related to “product-market fit” in a way). I don’t buy it – amazing technology is assumed. I would relate it to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon – her music on its own is pretty pedestrian, but her willingness to embrace ridiculousness and create a story around herself that shows both depth and actual musical talent has propelled her past pop musician to superstar.

So what will be the next mega-hit in the world of consumer tech? If I had a few million bucks, my money would be on Blippy. Sure, tech-heads already know that the company has some interesting buzz, but to me the case for Blippy is more complex than just general chatter coming from all the right places. When I look at the list above, it all seems to fit – the rawness of looking at someone’s financial history, the interesting macro talk around financial and social data, especially in light of the recent Mint acquisition, the simplicity of sharing your accounts combined with the gravity of what it actually *means* to do so, the evangelism around the product and the fact that their tech seems to be awesome (though I don’t have any info on whether it actually is or not).

And, oh yes. The fact that one of the founders had a tech-bubble website called FUCKEDCOMPANY. Do you need more evidence that this is someone willing to challenge widely-held perceptions of what is and is not appropriate on the internet? Even if the gi-normous round of funding Blippy apparently just raised (according to TechCrunch, no official confirmation) is just a rumor, I am not surprised at all.

The seven qualities above are just the beginning – I’m very interested in feedback and criticism on popularity modeling. With startups, looking beyond the product itself is difficult and not always a productive use of time, but to me it’s where you can find all the most interesting indicators of future success.

I saw a link to Ling’s Cars last week on Twitter and stared in shock and awe for a good 10 seconds at the website. Animated gifs, FOR SERIOUS. It took me an additional 30 seconds of pretty concentrated analysis to decide whether the site was a farce, a scam or maybe-just-maybe a site that actually leases cars? You can take a look at the image below, but that’s just a small taste.  Click the link. Go ahead, I dare you.

That was just the beginning. In the hours that followed, I realized that Ling’s Cars is actually totally effing brilliant. I find myself sometimes so sucked into the rounded-corners gospel that I forget no one really notices that stuff except for *other design snobs*. I think good design is extremely important but I’m starting to realize design and usability aren’t as tied together as I once thought.

So why is Ling’s Cars awesome? Thoughts:

Authenticity

Car salesman have a (often well-deserved) reputation for sleaziness. Every time I interact with a car salesman, I am trying to pinpoint how exactly I am getting screwed, and for how much. Ling’s whimsical site prompts the opposite response - all the “shiny objects” prevent the buyer from going on the offensive the minute he/she lands on the site.

Did everyone see Jesse Schell’s awesome talk from DICE last month about “Design Outside the Box”? I think it’s relevant here - start watching at about 12:00, where he talks about authenticity.  The most interesting quote:

“Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept, that the most valuable thing in products today is ‘are they real?’ ‘are they authentic?’…we live in a bubble of fake bullsh*t, and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.”

If nothing else, Ling’s Cars is authentic - you can tell it’s a real person behind the site and not just some SEO factory. Perhaps you missed this quote: “Note: I live inside this website Monday to Friday 9am-6pm, to give you the very best service and make your experience a happy one! - I am Ling, accept no substitutes.”

Entire video here:

Insane Understanding of Importance of Referral Traffic

After I found the site, I was curious to see what the smart folks at Hacker News thought of it. So I posted this thread and within 30 minutes, Ling had found the link, responded and emailed me. A personal email. From Ling.

I think many web business owners underestimate the importance of referral traffic, especially traffic that comes from sites that aren’t search engines.

Personal Attention

Given the quote about living in the website, the personal email I got from Ling and the piles and piles of customer letters on the site, it is clear to me that Ling really takes good care of her customers, in a genuine way. If I ever need a car in the UK, guess who I am going to call? Perhaps it’s not directly “conversion” but it’s that step before conversion -  “awareness”- that’s just as important.

Give The Customer What they Want

The reason why Ling’s Cars was getting so much attention on Twitter a few weeks ago was likely tied to this presentation from the 2010 Online Marketing Summit (start at slide 54). After doing some research I also found a blog post that speaks about the usability win of the site.

I think something the site excels at is giving people what they want. It’s surprisingly easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.

I have been thinking about how FMA applies to web startups, and after some thought, I now believe first-mover advantage is a myth in the web world.

If the premise of FMA relies on the fact that a first-mover will gain resources and advantages that  later entrants will not be able to match, then these advantages have to be compelling enough to warrant fighting to be first. And I’m not sure they are any more.

Argument below. Thoughts/criticism welcome.  Put this together pretty quickly (and highly unscientifically) so I’m sure there are lots of holes.

1.  Moore’s Law and speed.

Moore’s law is one of those “golden rules” in the tech world. Everybody looooves to cite it. Moore’s law is to tech nerds what Foucault is to philosophy junkies.

It’s because there’s a lot of brilliance in Moore’s law.  As I understand it - the real brilliance here was the observation that technology progresses much quicker than people would think possible (or more accurately, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months).

If you think about how this plays out in the consumer world, it means that consumers will become socialized to adopting more advanced technology faster.  So the amount of time it takes for a market to develop, hit a peak, and become saturated (say, photo sharing) is shrinking.

How does this affect first-mover advantage?  Take a look at my lovely graph below. If a technology markets develop more quickly, this will seriously reduce the potential upside for a first-mover. The top graph is what we think is FMA, the bottom is what I believe it really looks like.

If this is true, the potential upside you can gain from FMA is shrinking.

2.  Underestimated importance of initial users (adoption) and marketing.

I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have the “if you build it they will come” mentality. No one will admit to this, obviously.  They talk to you all day about marketing and user acquisition, but it seems like very very few web startups actually do this well.

I know I’m not alone here - Dave McClure wrote an excellent rant on this about a month ago.

Initial users are the ones that will evangelize your service and make it zeitgeisty and remarkable. I saw this great video last night on the importance of “first followers” and how they help to create mass movements.

Sharp marketing and committed users have nothing to do with FMA and seemingly everything to do with popularity and adoption.

3.  Zero barriers to entry, commodification of apps, low switching costs.

Have you noticed all of those “hey look at what I built in a weekend” links on Hacker News? The ease-of-use afforded by these new slick web frameworks like Rails and Django make it pretty easy and quick to build a site and enter a market.

Web sites and mobile apps are undergoing a process of commodification as they become easier and easier to make, and the move toward cloud-based apps makes the switching costs for the user nearly zero. It’s no longer enough to have a single hit with a single great app.

All of these trends are really cutting into the upside of being first.

4.  “Early is the same as wrong”. This is something I heard a lot in Silicon Valley. I don’t necessarily agree - if you are early but are smart enough about your cash to hold on until the market matures, then you’re not necessarily wrong. Seems like the emphasis on being first is flawed - it’s about timing.

The tough part is finding the trade-off. There’s this sweet spot between the first-mover land-grab and market readiness, but you have to hold on until the wave hits.  Everyone’s favorite example here is online video - there were plenty of video sites pre-YouTube but they were slow and mostly annoying. The strategic use of flash and rise in broadband internet in homes helped to make the market timing nearly perfect, though with the dominance window narrowing I think even trying to time the market is an exercise in futility.

Market Dominance in the Brave New Web World

So, if not from FMA, where does real market dominance come from?

I suppose in a way I’m making an argument for extreme iteration. But it’s more than that. I think the consumer web industry - similar to fashion and music - is incredibly driven by trends and timing.  If you can hit a curve at the point right before widespread adoption, and do this consistently, you will become more invaluable to your user.

See the graph below - the point here is that it’s no longer a single curve and a single market. Instead, the companies that will do the best, in my mind, are the ones that can take advantage of many markets consecutively.

The company that I believe does this best is Facebook. If they had stayed a profile -n- poke site, they’d surely be dead by now. Instead, each product launch happens right around the top end of a curve - photos, videos, Twitter-style-messages, and now talk of geo-enabled features and even “check-ins”.

While FMA as a concept is not dead to me completely - it can be incredibly helpful in many many other markets, to me in the app-driven world of the web (and increasingly mobile too) it just doesn’t seem all that important.

Conclusion: “someone’s already doing this” should be a crappy deterrent.

I am currently in an ongoing love affair with the internets. This, mixed with the liberal dispensing of tech-related kool-aid that goes on at MIT, has provided enough of an impetus for me to begin learning how to actually write beautiful code. The hack-job e-commerce sites I had developed and run and SEO-ed like mad before school just will not do. No, this is a completely different undertaking.

And guess what? Writing respectable code is REALLY EFFING HARD.

Genius conclusion, I know. I wanted to write this post though, not to announce to the world that hey-guess-what-coding-is-hard, but rather to analyze why I believe business-y people like myself tend to abandon ship at this point in the learning process.

I do not plan to quit. In fact, I am only *more* determined and believe that over the next 2 years I can learn enough Python to be dangerous. That said, long-term-progress undertakings are really easy to quit.

The reason I’m not quitting is because I’ve been through this before, when I decided in 2005 that I just had to learn Chinese. So I did what any normal/sane person would do and packed my bags and moved to Beijing. I was not leaving until I could speak Chinese. Period.

I wanted to learn Chinese because my ultimate plan was to get a PhD in Chinese-American relations and become a badass diplomat (translation: spy). I really believe that in order to understand something at the most intimate level you need to learn the entire chain - ie, in order for me to understand the inner workings of the Chinese government, I had to be able to understand how the interactions take place in their most basic form.  Same thing with computers and the internet. In order to truly understand macro trends, it seems like one needs to be familiar with the most granular aspects of the trade.

I enrolled in a beginner (level 0) Chinese class here and off I went. What I did not realize is that any Chinese class worth a damn will spend at least the first month going over the fundamentals of the language. This means you don’t even learn how to say a single sentence until at least one month in - and keep in mind this is full-time studying. See the video below. Welcome to my entire life, September 2005.  I’ll call this the “bopomofo” period. Day after day it was “bo po mo fo”, again! repeat! You learn sounds and tones and initials and finals and radicals and you leave each day not one bit more prepared to go and order lunch than you were the day before.

I was frustrated, and wanted to quit. Why was I wasting my time learning how to shape my mouth and twist my tounge just right and listen for the difference between first tone and fourth tone? Hello! I had dumplings to order, and fake-North-face vendors to haggle with!

With Chinese, you can’t just take what you know from English or Spanish or German or whatever and apply it. You have to start from scratch and completely re-conceptualize how you think about language and structures and communication fundamentally.

After three months, it started to make sense. If I wanted to actually become good and not just some dummy with a phrase book, I had to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. I couldn’t go straight to learning phrases otherwise I would have to eventually unlearn all of my bad habits. So I sucked it up and went back and really really mastered all those mouth formations. And then I skipped two levels of class and ended my year having an all-in-Chinese throw-down with a military doctor in Tibet. Good times. (Though sadly now I’ve forgotten a good chunk of what I learned).

Seems to be the same in the world of developers. There are probably more than a few who have some knowledge here and there but don’t really have a clue how the entire system works together. These are the people with the phrase books who can say enough to sound impressive but in reality have a really shallow knowledge-base.

I am in the “bopomofo” period of learning to program, which is fine with me only because I know it’s going to be these micro-incremental teeny tiny baby steps for a while. But man, it sucks.

Now I understand why so many business students and other non-technical types who love technology make the attempt to learn how to code and then quit right around now. In non-technical professions there really is no equivalent to this particular type of learning. Spending an entire day to get the “name” field to work on a form for your website is easy to dismiss as a “non-optimal” use of time, especially when there’s someone you can hire who can do it in 5 minutes.

Though I think that is completely missing the point.

Knowing the “bopomofo” of the web world can be extremely helpful for non-technical people when interacting with a technical team. And once you make it through mastering the fundamentals, your ability to learn new concepts improves exponentially.

At least that’s what I’m hoping.

I never had one in undergrad (silly quarter system) so I was unable to appreciate that four weeks of “do-a-small-project” at the beginning of the year is a most excellent way to try something new.  Almost no downside.  It’s not like the “internship” during the summer between the two years of business school - a popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties among MBAs.

When I started business school, I was totally S.O.L.D. on cleantech. Coming from Texas, I had drank the energy kool-aid hard. I was extremely lucky to land an opportunity to work for a clean-tech startup in Beijing over January 2009 and it was through that opportunity that I realized that although I was in love with cleantech conceptually, I needed to have a more direct interaction with consumers. And that I loved the internet too much.

So, as they say here in Silicon Valley (SV from now on), I “pivoted” away from Cleantech and approx one year ago decided that the consumer web and everything that goes along with it was really my jam.

Instead of another international trip this January, I decided instead to pursue a different type of “cultural immersion”: spending the entire month in Silicon Valley. I am curious how I’ll do here - after many failed attempts to ditch my East Coast attitude problem, I have mostly stopped trying (which could potentially conflict with the “hella chill” personality type pervasive here in norcal).

The first few days of January was the MIT Entpreneurship Center’s “Silicon Valley Study Tour” where first-year students visit tech startups (both early and later stage) around Silicon Valley. 93 first-year students plus a few wise second-years stayed at the Stanford Park Hotel (which BTW is totally awesome - one of those places where you really feel “taken care of”) and organized a crazy scheme of rental-car-key-trading to get to lots of different startups over 4 days. Company List included below.

The two companies I visited - Pandora and Digg - were interesting to see because I am a user of both sites. Hearing stories from the execs about the challenges that each company is facing and the underlying shifts in the media industry that both companies are helping to perpetuate left me with a new respect for both companies.

Though the tour is over, I am very excited to be taking a class this January through Stanford/Harvard Law Schools called “Difficult Problems” taught by Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark. The course will wrap up its first week tomorrow and has already provided a fantastic overview of a few very pressing current and future problems in cyberspace. For more on the class, check out the wiki, blog and twitter pages.

Finally, I’m working on a side project of my own in January while living in Palo Alto.  Because there’s always a side project.

I’m hoping after this month I’ll come away with something insightful to say about the startup ecosystem here in SV.  We’ll see.

MIT E & I Silicon Valley Study Tour Company List -

I was totally fascinated by the DARPA red balloon challenge earlier this month, and obviously pumped to see an MIT team named the winner. It took less than 9 hours for the team to locate the 10 red weather balloons deployed in different cities around the U.S.

If that stat alone doesn’t for the zillionth time reiterate the astounding power of the internet, please return to your cave.  K thx.

What was most interesting, though, was not the shockingly short duration of the competition, but the very different strategies used by the MIT and Harvard teams and how each played out during the competition itself. To me, the strategies proved to me that effectively deployed crowdsourcing is an extremely powerful tool.

First, some disclaimers:

-I am currently a student at MIT, though I was not involved at all in the team’s efforts.  I didn’t even register on their site.  But I’m still biased.

-Everything I know about the Harvard team I got from these two great and thorough blog posts from Rafael Corrales and Caren Kelleher.

So, my thesis. The MIT team’s use of recursive incentives (ahem, cash money) to compel participation indicates to me that:

-Even on the web, greed and personal gain are powerful motivational forces

-Although the Harvard team was able to mobilize and engage their extremely powerful student and alumni network, the MIT team’s more tangible incentives were better suited to encourage widespread participation. Could this be an indicator of the potentially diminishing power of single networks (no matter how powerful)?  I think it is.

Here’s why:

Based on the articles I read about the Harvard team, although they ran a Google adwords campaign, had a website, a twitter account (@helpredballoon) and a pledge to donate the entire $40,000 to charity, by far the most useful tool they employed was leveraging the current student and alumni networks.  The Harvard network is arguably the most powerful network in the world - a common bond that ties together world leaders, politicians, billionaires, academics, etc. The sheer level of participation and engagement that the group received from this network is notable.

The MIT team, on the other hand, created an incentive structure that encouraged people to not only participate themselves, but get their friends to participate as well.

I think to me that was a key difference - converting participants versus converting them AND compelling them to get their friends involved too (the Facebook application Causes comes to mind here).

I don’t think the tools available on the web even five years ago would have had such success when pitted against a network as powerful as Harvard’s. But web tools are becoming downright easy to make, which I believe will enable this sort of mobilization to take many forms in the next few years and continue to chip away at the relative power of these very elite and deeply entrenched networks (examples: big media + youtube, finance industry + kaching, etc.)

The web/software as a tool of democratization is not a new idea; it has been very artfully articulated for years. Though few instances have provided such a clear case for why the process is so game-changing and how the web’s ability to mobilize disparate groups is changing the meaning of elitism.

Pluralists, take note.