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Theofanis D. Lekkas, a longtime Zenpundit reader who comments here occasionally under the handle “TDL“, is in the process of launching a fantastic Web 2.0 start-up, RealScoop.com, currently in Beta. In a nutshell, it’s a mediacentric Youtube mashed up with a voice-stress analyzer lie detector. Any celebrities or politicians you love, hate or love to hate ?  See what topics send them off the Richter Scale.  A few examples:

Senator Barack Obama

Vice President Dick Cheney

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer

And on a lighter note, Tom Cruise on a deranged rant about psychiatry

This is all in good fun and I wish Theo every success with RealScoop.com but there are interesting implications if this platform were to become as ubiquitous as is youtube or yahoo. Imagine, being a politician or public spokesman and knowing that your every word simply isn’t going to be parsed but run through a voice stress analyzer and transformed into a virally formatted visual clip. How would that change your media strategy ? Your deposition strategy? Being a laconic, strong, silent type might actually come back into style.

TDL may have hit on something here. Feel free to send him any comments when you peruse RealScoop or leave some here – he’s interested in your feedback.

“If you build it, they will come…”

A start-up called Creative Weblogging  is attempting to build a stable of  business/finance/tech bloggers from scratch by paying unknowns a modest but not unattractive sum ($ 84 -140/ month) for steady posting.  In fact, they offer a “Pro Blogger Compensation Package” of sorts:

Pro Blogger Compensation Package:

• Monthly compensation: $84-140 (US) – paid via PayPal or Moneybookers
• 3-5 posts per week are required, min. of 70 words each.
• Traffic bonuses for aggressively growing traffic are available.
• Access to our vibrant community discussion group with 80+ bloggers, where you can share tips and network.
• We take care of all the technology with an advanced blogging platform.
• We also provide marketing support.
• Virtual shares program: blog with us for a year and you can earn virtual shares in the company.

Hmmmm…..Do “virtual shares” pay real dividends? 

Kind of interesting. Where Newsvine tried relying upon an ego-driven reputation management economy to gain free content, these folks are betting on actually sharing some of the wealth with creators will assemble a social network that can be commoditized.  As most bloggers produce inane drivel, especially when they are new to the game, the payment is far more than the labor is worth – until they find a blogger who can pull in hundreds of thousands of hits a week. Four of five of them should pay the bills for all the failures.

Presumably their business model is some kind of targeted RSS feed subscription marketing to justify ad revenues and later by hyping products by raising their status in the attention economy, assuming the network ever commands that kind of traffic leverage. I suspect the company retains intellectual property rights to what their bloggers write but I could be wrong. Bears watching as an experiment in the evolution of Web 2.0.

( Hat tip to Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

I’ve decided to follow John’s lead and hop back on to this platform once more as more of my blogfriends seem to be active on Twitter this time around.

Long day but a productive one.  Just realized that networking and leveraging attention is half the battle.

Two demographics that  I’m certain have a degree of congruency, as it stands.

Blogfriend Gunnar Peterson, the cybersecurity guru at 1 Raindrop sent me this.

John Boyd used to preach that “Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds!”. Which is of course true but sometimes they use their minds to make new machines or use old ones in a novel way. So, as a counterbalance to the frequent discussions here of 4GW, COIN and the mental and moral levels of war, how about some computer wizardry as a change of pace? LOL!

About the Technology in Wartime Conference

“This conference will explore how computer technology is used during war — both for the purposes of combat/defense, as well as for human rights interventions into war-torn regions. Topics will include high tech weapons systems, cyberwarfare, autonomous aircraft, mobile robots, internet surveillance, anonymous communication, and privacy-enhancing technologies that aid human rights workers documenting conditions in war-torn countries and help soldiers communicate their experiences in blogs and e-mail.

Our goal will be to consider the ethical implications of wartime technologies and how these technologies are likely to affect civilization in years to come. Ultimately we want to engage a pressing question of our time: What should socially-responsible computer professionals do in a time of high tech warfare?

The proceedings will be broadcast live on the Web, and the presentations collected in book form online, released under a CC license, and made available to the public and policy makers looking for expert opinions on wartime technology issues during the election year”

Joi Ito is one of the sponsors and the list of confirmed speakers includes Noah Schachtman of WIRED and Bruce Schneier . They could use a few more warriors in their geek and academic heavy mix but it looks like it’s shaping up to be an excellent conference.

Hat tip to Charles Cameron.