The Progress Bar

The Progress Bar read by people interested in emerging Internet marketing, technology, social media, reputation, virtual environments, blogs, the Boston Internet scene and much more. If you like what you see you should subscribe to my RSS feed or via email in the sidebar. Thanks for visiting!According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook has quietly added the ability [...]

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Color-coded Wikipedia entries indicate trust.
A new program developed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to help with the problem by color-coding an entry’s individual phrases based on contributors’ past performance.
The program analyzes Wikipedia’s entire editing history–nearly two million pages and some 40 million edits for the English-language site alone–to estimate the trustworthiness of [...]

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Apologies for the 3.0 moniker, but blog readers are brutally selective when searching for interesting headlines.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about  identity, attention and reputation. These reoccurring themes keep popping up in my consulting work and the blogosphere has no shortage of pundits who opine about the role of identity from time to time.
I [...]

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I was on the phone with a new acquaintance today, deeply immersed in our second finishing-each-others sentences discussion, when at some point the conversation skimmed over Boston-based Compete. Catching up on the Compete blog tonight, I came across this:
Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured [...]

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Brad Feld, one of my favorite VC bloggers, has announced the Defrag Conference.
Last year, Eric Norlin sent me an email in response to my post titled Intelligence Amplification which was an attempt to put a label on the theme for companies I’d been investing in that address the Trust / Attention / Relevance problem.  Eric and I had crossed paths [...]

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Adam Carstens from the Attention Company emailed from Tokyo to share recent research done by the company.  They surveyed a group of managers and found their attention profiles varied greatly depending on the type of media involved. These attention maps make it easy to discover, measure and analyze where attention is being focused. I signed [...]

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Over the summer I attended the Identity Mashup at Harvard. One of the many supersmart people I met there was Nicholas Givotovsky. Nicholas is working on some interesting angles of the identity space that I can’t talk about, but guarantee will be parts of our lives in the near future. Very exciting stuff.
I visited Nicholas [...]

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I finally got around to watching Douglas Rushkoff narrate The Merchants of Cool (2001). Somewhat dated yet insightful look into teen marketing. Still shocking to see the reality of teen culture and it’s relationship with handful of multinational corporations.
I followed up with The Persuaders (2004), another Rushkoff/PBS production. General premise is the more adverting we [...]

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The abstract from bud.com may be of interest
bud.com is an experiment to turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game. Call it passively multiplayer - the reality of communication networks. Already, Web 2.0 and social networking sites keep track of our relationships and communications. bud.com proposes to make that [...]

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Silicon Beat tells us that Google will launch Gbuy, their answer to Paypal. The service will track shoppers from the browsing to post-purchase stages of e-commerce transactions. This kind of attention data is going to be quite useful, depending on whether or not Google will release an API to let sellers and third parties access [...]

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