Trend scouting by SETI@home

April 30th, 2005 | J Lee | Trends

A reader of This Blog Sits at the offered this comment:
"Install a good SETI system."
How about a SETI@Home system? Distributed coolhunting/trendspotting via the blogosphere?

As McCracken notes this is an excellent example of the lucrative intellectual capital opportunities that the internet makes possible. This is a clever idea and I can only imagine the scale of such an endeavor.

McCracken lists 2 conditions that are currently in place for a SETI@home system and one that has yet to arrive:

• Any willing participants are qualified as observers. This isn’t just for the professional gurus that had once occupied this task.
• The blogosphere provides instantaneous access to all participants so that observation and value-adding intelligence can swarm in a "decision markets" kind of way.*

*As stated in a review of The Wisdom of Crowds, SETI@home provides all of these: (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of
members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method
for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different
information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single
opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including
all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single
expert had been in charge.

• A third condition has yet to arrive, which is an incentives-based system. No one is going to create value unless they have some way to harvest value. I have seen trend scouters such as Look-Look and Trendwatching that pays (small amounts of cash) /rewards (gifts) participants. It would be interesting to be rewarded with more ‘value’.

What McCracken provides is more or less a conventional business model. We monetize the outcome (trend reports, trend conferences, etc.) and
then pay the participants.

Everyone contributes to the lowest rung of SETI@home. This is on the
order of “something I just noticed.” This is the equivalent of the
“pictures” of space that SETI has us work on. Then everyone takes a
small problem, often their own contribution, and thinks about them
carefully and well. Then we need a line of editors who sort, bundle and
promote various things. This creates a much smaller, but still quite
large universe. So we need another set of editors working at this still
higher level. I guess that’s maybe how it would work. We get access to
the next aggregated level of SETI@home if one of our contributions have
“made the cut.” (Presumably, we want to aggregate this too, so that we
get to keep our access privileges even if our latest contribution has
not make the latest cut.)

Our incentive here is that we get access to streams of intelligence
and analysis. We give to take. But it would also be possible to give
people in industry access to one of the levels through a subscription
fee, and this could then be distributed to editors and participants. Or
it might be used to fund an annual conference for the SETI@home
players. This would be a fully participatory TED or POPTECH operation
and it should probably be held in conjunction with same. (I prefer the
latter and that’s because Andrew Zolli is the man.)

I know someone is going to say that this entire affair is just too
damn Canadian, that’s it tries to organize what is ought to be and is
in fact emergent. I beg to differ (though of course the criticism of
Canada is precisely right). As it stands, we are reading one another
and citing one another. But I don’t hear anyone sitting down, taking
the feeds from x blogs and given them a systematic, clarifying,
aggregating treatment which in turn becomes a feed to some still larger
act of aggregation and analysis.

As a last note: for the list people we would want to contribute, may
I suggest John Maeda, Allen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT
Media Laboratory, author of “Design by Numbers,” “Meada@media,”
and”Creative code” and Scott Fedje, Director, Image Design at Cole
Haan. I heard them both talk at the FUSE conference and they were
sensationally good. Fedje did some great stuff on remarkable
developments taking place in Japanese retail design, including a store
the internal space of which changes shape constantly.

Link: This Blog Sits at the: SETI@home.