Take a look at OrganizedWisdom.com and you see a strange mix of ambitions. The website’s category pages (acid reflux, erectile dysfunction, IBS) and general clickable clutter might make you suspect that it’s a content farm intent on picking up WebMD’s scraps. But under the hood, there’s an interesting idea cooking. OrganizedWisdom is creating a way of evaluating the authority of health-related social media users, which they can layer over Google’s relevance algorithms, so that they can surface useful health information from vetted sources. As doctors and other health experts increase their output on social media, Organized Wisdom thinks they can scoop up that information and turn it into the backbone for their site. As explained by new board member and former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin, the site wants to “correct an algorithm frenzy” by which people search for health information online and find only perfectly search engine optimized content written by people who may or may not know what they’re talking about. OrganizedWisdom has verified more than 6,000 social media accounts as having some kind of expert knowledge. Levin sees their output on Facebook, blogs, and Twitter as “a treasure trove that needs to be organized.” Of course, that is the hard part. Unity Stoakes, one of the company’s co-founders, described their mission as building a “trust filter for health and wellness, something that’s never been done.” He compared their task to eBay’s — connecting sellers (patients) with respectable buyers (doctors/experts). His other corollary was Quora , the Silicon Valley question-and-answer site, which has morphed into a community filled with technology experts. But eBay had the advantage that sellers had a far greater incentive to be vetted and verified on the site than do the doctors OrganizedWisdom’s collecting. And Quora established a very strong early community that was dedicated to maintaining the quality of the information on the site. Organized Wisdom’s relationship with its experts is one step removed. They’re scraping what doctors and experts do on other sites and re-presenting it in ways that they think are more useful. Though Levin and Stoakes contend that doctors will see value in what their website does, I doubt the good ones will work as hard as eBay sellers or Quora users do to make sure that their reputation on the site will be well-maintained.  The germ of an idea represented by OrganizedWisdom is fascinating. Distilling and storing useful health information from the social web would be a valuable service indeed, but I’m not sure it’s going to be easy or even doable.

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Can Curating Doctors’ Tweets Improve People’s Health?

Twitter still faces one more San Francisco vote before it gets a tax break for staying in the city.

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Bits: Twitter’s Tax Break Clears One Hurdle

I am again grateful for the eloquent, varied, carefully wrought and illustrated, and — as I look back on them as a whole — strikingly humane perspectives we have heard this past week. To give just an example or two from each of the week’s guests: From Piero Garau in Rome, suggestions on why Italy was troubled on its 150th birthday and what might make it feel better , plus this tribute to an international legacy that has enriched Rome’s architecture; from Shelley Hayduk in LA, several suggestions on how we all might feel better about the onslaught of digital over-stimulation, plus what technology lets us know, and makes us know, about ourselves ; from Sam Roggeveen in Sydney, tough love for Americans about our diminished world status, plus the secret reward for conservatives of embracing the UN; and from Guy Raz in Washington, the joys and challenges of being a stay-at-home dad who happens also to run a radio show. Plus, from Parker Donham in Nova Scotia, insights on many life fronts , including one that, if you missed it in the wee hours last night, I very much hope you will go back to read (and view — you will not forget this). Sincere thanks to them all. We have two more rotations left in this, the inaugural guest-blogger era for our site. When it is all over I will find some appropriate way to express thanks to the diverse participants as a group. For now, I turn the stage over to another four voices. Please welcome: Eric Bonabeau , originally from France and now of Santa Fe, NM, a mathematician and physicist who is the founder and chairman of the Icosystem company. If I tried to get too specific about what Icosystem does, I would no doubt trip over a detail. For now I’ll leave it at saying that Eric’s recent professional life has involved various aspects of artificial intelligence and predictive analysis. At an “isn’t that cute!!” level, this includes his renowned “Ominous Panda” image-generating system (right) plus an addictive baby-naming system, Nymbler . He also is responsible for the Infomous idea-visualizing device you see on the Atlantic’s home page. We met years ago, when he was working on “Swarm Intelligence” concepts at the Santa Fe institute and I introduced him to the late Michael Crichton , who had cited his writings in Prey . I expect we’ll hear from him about how we can (begin to) make sense of an overly info-packed world. James Cham , of Silicon Valley, was introduced here several weeks ago but has had to postpone his actual blogging until now. He is a principal with Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Ca. He previously was part of Bessemer Venture Partners and is generally in the middle of the culture of high-tech startups that we all hope will improve our lives. That’s how he’s known to the world. He’s additionally known to me for having taken time years ago to set up an early pre-Atlantic version of this site. I expect he will be describing the nature of start-up culture now, whether we’re in another tech bubble, and related topics. Glenna Hall , originally from New Jersey, now lives in the the (incredibly beautiful) San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle. (Hey, nothing against Santa Fe or Silicon Valley.) Like many people who have appeared here in previous weeks, she has had a lot of different roles over the years. She has been a political scientist, a researcher at an organization funded by the CIA, an editor, a private-practice lawyer, and for a dozen years a judge. She has retired from the bench but is still a mediator — and an active pilot and a software buff. I came to know of her though a software-fanatics forum on, gasp, Compuserve, back at technology’s dawn. Her topics could range from the state of the courts to the state of aviation, with other subjects in between. And: Christina Larson . Last week, there was no China person in the rotation! Thus I am all the more pleased to introduce Christina Larson, who was traveled extensively in China and Southeast Asia and written often about environmental issues there, including in this recent post here on the Atlantic’s site. She is originally from Atlanta, is now based mainly in Washington, and has experience with a number of great journalistic and policy institutions, including the New America Foundation and the fabled Washington Monthly magazine. Her reporting from Asia has mainly been bottom-up, covering the local organizers, administrators, researchers, and plain citizens who have tried to address Asia’s environmental emergencies. I expect that we will hear some of these personal views of China and its environs. Thanks to this past week’s crew, and welcome to the new group.

Originally posted here:
Our Penultimate Crew: Bonabeau, Cham, Hall, and Larson

Introduction On January 29, 1993, workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale, California, filed out of its doors for the last time. Seventeen years have passed since, but there are still electronics workers in Silicon Valley who remember the company’s name. It was the first Valley plant struck by production employees and the first where a strike won recognition of their union. The struggle of these workers, almost all immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Philippines, demolished some of the most cherished myths about the Silicon Valley workforce. read more

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Up Against the Open Shop – the Hidden Story of Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Workers

If the U.S. were a corporation, it would be in bad shape, says venture capitalist and Silicon Valley analyst Mary Meeker. It has a net worth estimated at negative $44 trillion, and it’s underinvested in productive capital, education, and technology-the…

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If the U.S. Was a Business

President Barack Obama meets Silicon Valley bosses, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

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Obama ‘friends’ Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg

Turns out our passing thoughts are worth a lot. Twitter has become one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley-with some market estimates placing the social-media site’s value at $8 billion to $10 billion. The valuation comes as a shock to some,…

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Twitter Valued at Up to $10 Billion

Corporate espionage in Silicon Valley: Google has accused Microsoft’s search engine Bing of copying its search results. On Tuesday, Google revealed a “sting” operation, in which it altered its search-results algorithm to see if Microsoft would do the…

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Google: Microsoft Cheated

Google says that in a sting operation, it uncovered instances in which its Microsoft rival, Bing, appears to have copied its results.

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Bits: Google to Microsoft: Search ‘Gotcha’

IPhone customers were still confused and upset after the phone’s built-in alarm failed to go off for the third day in a row.

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Bits: iPhone Alarm Still Remains Silent

Google on Thursday released its yearly Zeitgeist report, which showcases the top search terms of 2010.

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Bits: Words We Searched in 2010, From Google

Sean Parker, of Napster and Facebook fame, has a gloomy view of the future of venture capitalism and that once-fertile hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley.

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DealBook: A Dim View of Betting on Start-Ups

In what The Wall Street Journal calls “one of the oddest episodes in the annals of Silicon Valley,” Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd was forced to resign after violating H-P’s standards of business conduct. His firing was due to expense account…

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Hurd Allegedly Leaked H-P Plans

Evan Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type: the entrepreneur with good ideas for a start-up, but not the leader to execute a sophisticated business strategy.

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Why Twitter’s C.E.O. Demoted Himself

A nonprofit’s designs to solve developing nations’ problems Catapult Design is a San Francisco-based consortium of engineers, designers and educators largely handpicked from the innovative hotbed of Silicon Valley to find simple, practical solutions to global problems faced by billions of people in the developing world. Around for less than two years their list of accomplishments is impressive from harnessing wind power in rural Central America to dealing with water scarcity in arid regions of Africa. “We develop products for impoverished communities, working through clients who are primarily based in developing countries,” explains co-founder Heather Fleming . Hatching a good idea isn’t enough. Getting it to the people who need it and finding a way to pay for it is critical lest a good idea languish on paper or stockpiled in warehouses where they are no good to anyone. Take BioLite for example. This Berkeley, California-based company has developed a clean-burning cookstove that generates electricity to charge small appliances like mobile phones. Millions of people are poisoned by toxic fumes from makeshift cookstoves and villagers living off-the-grid are unable to use telephones because they can’t charge the handsets even if the village itself is within the network. Enter Catapult Design which conducted market research in India, one of the largest market countries and the outlook looks good for the fledging cookstoves . Meanwhile in Guatemala villagers are harnessing windpower that would allow villagers to charge a car battery in conditions of about 15 mph of breeze. Catapult is helping develop this project to keep the cost relatively affordable at around $100, well within the reach of rural villages. Scarcity of water is an endemic problem in the eastern African nation of Kenya. Households that eke by on $300 a year are also plagued with water shortages and often are forced to cut down trees which exacerbates the problem of dry weather. Catapult spent a week partnering with Komaza , an nongovernmental organization that helps East African farmers. Now in the works is a portable rainwater catchment system that will help individual farmers conserve rainwater to irrigate their crops. Other projects in the works including super-efficient LED lamps to replace noxious kerosene lamps that exist in areas that lack electrification. The result is a prototype pedal-powered LED lamp that’s been distributed across Tanzania.

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Catapult Design