Google is starting to smack down spam, but it’s still an issue – affiliate links.
Calacanis had some suggestions for the attendees about how to manage this:
- Build curation into your service.
- Police your service
- Reduce anonymity without reducing freedom
- Punish bad people
Users have to “own your words”. The movement is away from fake people: MySpace had loads, Facebook had less, LinkedIn has none.
He also gave us a quick demo of [Mahalo’s new social element](http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/Special:FollowDownload). It’s already a human-powered search engine – ie real people rather than algorithms are behind the results. The new element appears to bring link sharing/recommending to social groups. It could be more than that – I’ll play with it later to see.
What’s the benefit to new companies of following his suggestions? “Nobody wants to buy real estate in a town filled with toxic waste,” Calacanis replied. “There’s a small amount of pain to go green.”
The best quote of all? “As internet people, we shouldn’t bother with people who don’t understand the internet, because they’ll be dead soon.”
Adam is a lecturer, trainer and writer. He's been a blogger for over 20 years, and a journalist for more than 25. He lectures on audience strategy and engagement at City, University of London.
Sign up for e-mail updates
Join the newsletter to receive the latest posts in your inbox.
To conclude The Zeitgeist Project Berlin, the eight curators who talked previously returned to the stage to pitch us on their choice of object that best represented the cultural zeitgeist. This is what they picked:
Simon Waterfall
The one speaker that frightened the life out of him was the Google
There were a couple of interesting, but ill-attended talks yesterday before
lunch, which I wanted to draw together.
June Cohen [http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/view/id/13] of the TED
Conference [http://www.ted.com/talks?gclid=CKeB5LjIopACFRRSZwodakfhqw] made some
interesting points about media, and in particular,