Crowdsourcing: Predictify.com

Whilst attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was quite astounded to see how effective a service like Twitter could be for getting answers to random questions fast. Of course, a certain critical mass of followers is required for it to work, but it actually works quite well. Taking this basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Predictify.com is a site dedicated to “crowdsourcing”, or asking the many to predict answers to particular questions. You can even earn a little money by participating, and you can include witty comments on why you predicted a certain result, all displayed in a nice scatter-graph at the end. I personally think this is a “wicked cool” idea as they say, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this approach in future in our private lives and in the enterprise.

Edufire: Online Language Tuition

Today I gave my first Edufire session. Incredible service and set up for tutors and students of languages alike.  The Website itself is very intuitive and sports pretty much every major community tool you may want to use. Within minutes my profile was up and running, and a day or two later (today actually!) I’d completed my first session. The online video conferencing tool is a lot easier to use than most tools I’ve encountered in the enterprise, and the Web 2.0 functionality is reminiscent of similar communities like Facebook. Check it out under: http://edufire.com/.

Common Craft: Video Podcasting

The Common Craft is quite legendary as far as simplifying technology goes. Back to the roots…well…pulp…paper…errr…anyway, well worth a look!

Free Online Family Tree

Those interested in putting together a family tree in a collaborative Web 2.0 way, can do so cheaply and effectively at http://www.itsourtree.com. The resulting trees are exportable to major genealogy-software formats so even if the Website were doomed to failure, your work can be stored offline and imported into a new application. I’ve been playing around with it for a few months now and I’ve got around 130 odd people in there…quite odd actually…