Taking note: the wisdom of invisible crowds
Becky Carroll interviews Jack Jia, founder and CEO of Baynote Inc, in person on May 16, 2007.
Jack is a founder and CEO of Baynote, Inc. For eight years, he was SVP & CTO of Interwoven Inc. with executive responsibilities in engineering, products, marketing, strategy and vision. Prior to Interwoven, he was a founder and CEO of V-max America. Jack led operating systems and applications development at SGI, Sun Microsystems, Stratus and NASA for over a decade. He is a frequent speaker at major conferences and has appeared on television programs in several countries. He is a contributing author in "XML Handbook, the 4th Edition," "Online! The Book," "Content Management Bible," and writes regularly about key technology issues and trends. He is a board advisor for Santa Clara University, and the president of HYSTA, a premier non-profit organization for promoting entrepreneurship.
Becky talked with Jack about crowdsourcing information on websites. Customers are often reluctant to give feedback on the usefulness of website information, thus creating a challenge for web teams. Customers are even less likely to “rank” or “tag” useful items. This interview tackles this subject as well as using the “wisdom of invisible crowdsTM” to grasp the long tail.
Becky Carroll: What do you think is new about crowdsourcing and where do you see it going?
Jack Jia: I think crowdsourcing, up to this point, you can define it as the first generation of Web 2.0, as being very explicit crowdsourcing, which is really forums, blogs, and people coming to write things. That has been very useful in connecting a lot of people in the world together. At least from our end goal, the biggest missing piece is what we call "the invisible crowd." These are the people behind the website, the ones who don’t have time to write blogs, who don’t have time to write comments.
