Tag: victus media

What You Bring to the Table

Matt Mireles called out a growing disparity between non-tech and technical cofounders in the NYC startup scene. I was in this situation last year where I had an idea for a product, but had no idea how, where, or who could begin making it. Before I describe my experiences after the last few months, I’d like to take a hard look at the value of founders in a startup.

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Seize Moments of Opportunity, Doubling Down

In the past few days I’ve come across a great way to invest in the future of Victus Media, the open source community, and (tech) journalists with one three sided shiny nickel :) . Tyler’s been busy swimming upstream with the the Salmon protocol, and crafting an open source Ruby implementation of Status.net. While he’s in the zone it’s better I let him keep on cranking than distract him with any interruptions. That gave me some time to work on landing pages for social feed browsing as well as laying out a simple point system which will reward users for tagging content in their streams (and other constructive activities). Spammers can be identified by distributed moderation (anyone can flag an abuser, friendfeed has a great implementation of this).

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Social Tagging for a Social Browser

In the quest to design a social reader thats fun and useful, Tyler and I have previously leaned heavily on semantic entity extraction from web feeds. While useful, entity matching APIs are lossy, noisy, and can become expensive very quickly (many thousands of dollars per month). It is our belief that between the creators and curators of content there is more than enough “human intelligence” out there to categorize media. In nearly all instances a knowledgable reader is capable of more precisely tagging content.

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