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Kluster is a platform aimed at helping people to develop their idea into real products by providing a system to support virtually any decision making activity (e.g. product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning). In other words:

kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world…where they belong.

The platforms is based around some neat concepts (phases - to structure the project -, sparks - to make proposals in a phase -, amps - to refine sparks - , watts - gained through participation and sound investments on successful sparks) that provide (IMHO) a “serendipitous” quantification (and reward) of the participation/activity/idea soundness and a game-like engaging and “flowing” experience. The decision making algorithm is quite sophisticated and more important it is open to change based on the activity of the whole system:

All the activity and participation on kluster is stored and analyzed. The data is used in the decision-making process. Each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered. This encourages users to earn respect, to act positively, and most importantly, enables extremely educated decisions to be made using real world logic.

The recursiveness of having future developments (e.g. Collaboration Tools) of Kluster modeled as a Kluster project is also nice.

Kluster officialy launches at TED by the unveiling of the TED Kluster project. Project 72 aims to develop a real product in no more than 72 hours (identity / branding, tagline /ad campaing and packaging included).
From project 72 page:

over the next 72 hours we will harness the collective power of TED attendees, and our online community to develop a totally new, tangible product.

we can make anything that fits within our guidelines, but we would love to see something that has a global impact.

rapid prototyping machines, and a team of modelers are standing by…

things will move quick, so you’ll want to check back often.

Doubts may be on the effectiveness and the scalability of the decision making algorithm and the commenting/refining process: project 72 will provide a quick testbed. Time will tell in what decision-making processes (what about a political agenda? what about the planning of a research project?) and if the system will prove successful; from my first impressions I would definitely invest “my watts” on this project.

It was just a matter of time… sonner or later somebedy should have done it.

Giavasan - No Country For Young Men

Very brilliant movie, just a few memorable quotes.

A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, ‘Oh how wonderful.’ But a Zen master who lives in the village says, ‘We shall see.’ The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, ‘Oh how awful.’ The Zen master says, ‘We shall see.’ The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, ‘Oh, how wonderful.’ The Zen master says, ‘We shall see.’

“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world …
… and then we fucked up the end game”

(Editor’s note: pretty much fucked up - someone would dare to say)

more quotes from Charlie Wilson’s War…

Charles Nesbitt “Charlie” Wilson (on Wikipedia).

This just made my day… or not?

Schrödinger’s LOLcat

via Facebook - xkcd group.

Who said math can’t be funny? This is the definitive t-shirt for music snoobs.

Nothing is any good if other people like it. We’ve just proven it mathematically. I have a theory that the only thing cartoonists bothered learning in math class was Venn Diagrams.

via Fun with Venn and Euler Diagrams , via del.icio.us popular.

It’s all about perspective…

via My Mood Swings.

I do love this web-comic (xkcd), I really really do.

Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

I am fairly confident it also exists the emacs command “C-x M-C M-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything”… you know the result.

By the way, spot the quote in the post .

Begining 2008, Wafer is keeping up with the good ol’Web Cocktail tradition. Yesterday On friday evening I got to the WebCocktail on “MA CHI L’HA DETTO??
REPUTAZIONE, CREDITO, POPOLARITÀ AL TEMPO DI INTERNET“, and it turned, as in past “editions”, a good chance to hear some interesting thoughts and reflections concerning the web (in this case reputation) and have a few talks with intellectually honest and stimulating geeks people.
From the panel, moderated by Alessandra Farabegoli, I got some notes/sketches (I beg you pardon for my poor english which will affect the transposition of the original thoughts hereafter intertwingled with personal considerations):
- [Gianluca Diegoli - Minimarketing] Blogs made the critique (towards products/firms/brands) individual (no more anonymous as it was used in newsgroups time) weighing in the balance the reputation of the critique author (his blog, his thoughts, his social relations) . Bottom line: critiques grain consistency and “value” for the criticized product/firm/brand which can build on these to improve the “user experience”.
With respect to astroturfing the internet and the web do have antibodies, and the ecosystem is quite good at keeping everyone honest, in other words “lies have short legs” on the internet”. If you start a fake-user-generated marketing campaign the chances you got exposed and the firm’s reputation is blown are fairly high. On the other hand there’s an ever increasing interest in fruition of the web as an old-style/main-stream media as entertainment, so it doesn’t bother (this kind of audience) if the video is fake (e.g. Ronaldo and Crescina); it only matters if it is entertaining.
- [Massimo Mantellini] Long live “shop-window” corporate websites; firms hiding beyond fictitious participation (faking positive comments/blog posts) pollutes the value of social interactions on the web reducing the overall ecosystem value and reputation. Is really the case for corporate participation in social networking, does it bring any good (to the community/net-citizens)?
Nice question. Gianluca points out that if the value for a company lies in the relations (interactions) with its customers and hence the company do really value the relations (i.e. honest communication), keeping it apart from the participitative web/social networking scene inhibits it from exploiting its true potential.
- Speaking of transparency and honest communication [Antonella Beccaria] notes that journalism is not any stranger from distortion and pollution (often more subtle and difficultly discoverable due to relations with “strong powers” and interests rather than a “one company affair”); in the last years the consumer perception of the reputation of the main-stream information has been changing: more and more people started questioning newspapers, TV news.

Following the panel it came the so awaited cocktail… There I spoke with Gianluca, Massimo, Enzo, Francesco, and Fullo and Leonora about everything-web-computer-related (from (lack of) “hacking-attitude” of the new generations, to RSS (lack of) adoption, to still dominant portals market share in traffic on the web, to javascript for server-side scripting/agile development, http://appjet.com).

Then, I must thank Laura for being my Local Positioning System, driving me to the restaurant and to the wine bar.
Among the many matters of discussion It is worth noting that talking about methane-fueled vehicles it is always extraordinary amusing and funny (I do remember an incredible methane-powered trip from Cesenatico to Dimaro for a rafting week-end: never ending quests in find of a station, turbo-boost system (AKA fuel switch) to surpass other cars). I recommend you read Elena’s post on the matter: “Son sicura di voler entrare nel tunnel del metano?“.

From the high clock-wise: me, Elena, Tommaso, [mini]moglie and [mini]marketing, Alessandra, Michele, Laura, Luca and Livia. The photo was taken by .
Thank you all for the great time.