The points about JuiceTorrent:

1. Gives organizations and individuals (we call them JT stars) the possibility to start their own self-expanding ad networks through the blogs and websites of their fans and supporters.
2. Gives people (fans and supporters) an easy way to start and manage micro-streams of ad revenue from their own blogs and websites - and join them into meaningful “torrents” going directly to entities (JT stars) they choose to support.
3. Gives the JT stars a fast and easy way to plug into and test/compare contextual ad markets (Google AdSense, YPN) without the hassle of changing ad code and micromanaging ad placement.
4. Makes (ad)sense out of the largely unused micro-pools of ad space controlled by the new class of (personal) media owners and publishers - “the people formerly known as the audience.”
5. Creates a new category of social vectors across the online identities of people and organizations - adding the moral/economic dimension of “supporting” to the existing “linking,” “friending,” “visiting,”and “following.”
6. Separates “utility” advertising from “high quality” content while keeping the economic link between them. Mortgage ads on my blog where I rant about home prices will support the independent star blogger/journalist/artist I admire and read daily… or the Red Cross… or both. JT “stars” can stay as high minded, ad free, and/or commercially non-viable as they wish - while the ads on my blog can be trivial, pedestrian, useful, and indeed effective.
7. Gives musicians a possibility to establish ongoing flows of exchange - streaming music for streaming support - as opposed to the discreet consumption/transaction models of the industrial era past.

See how JuiceTorrent works…

We are now actively looking for candidates for JT stardom - nonprofits, star-bloggers, musicians - to start them up with JuiceTorrent.

Please, contact me - in comments here… or by email (emil at sotirov dot com).

And here is one big thought he produced:

“But at a fundamental level, studying complex behavioral and genetic networks in animals is not so different from understanding human social networks.”

Oh yeah… on a fundamental level… we’re all animals. So heartbreakingly true.

But here is the scary part:

“So to some extent, when it comes to explaining social software to military policymakers - I’m the perfect guy for the job.”

Read more… 

There was a joke back then… in the Soviet times… about a Russian boy… from the 21st century… asking his father: “Dad… who’s Brejnev?”… and the father: “Hmmm… I think he was a politician from Solzhenitsyn’s time.” Not a joke anymore.

This reminds me of two older NYT articles (both by David Brooks) which I commented in two older posts - one about “Relationship Blend” vs. “Productive, Rational Behavior” and another about Progressive Realism.

Politically, I identify with the “ecologists” (contextualists) and Robert Wright’s “progressive realism”…

Now, here is the thing (by David Brooks) I am referring to in the title of this post:

“Most politicians are ecologists who turn into engineers once in office.”

December 1991 - I write (in this paper) that “There is no … author/audience … no text, but always, and only, a con-text.” Seventeen years later (July 2008) - Umair Haque is almost there (with this strategy note)… by telling us “There is No Consumer” and by suggesting UGC should, in fact, mean “User Generated Context.”

April 2005 - I co-found Aidpage Inc (aidpage.com) - with the tag line “People Helping People.” Three years later (July 2008) - a Deloitte study (by Beeline) concludes: “The tribalization of business is all about ‘People Helping People.’”

March 2007 - I co-found People Networks Inc. About a year later (February 2008) - Dave Morgan, founder of Real Media and TACODA (acquired by AOL in July 2007), says - in a post titled “The Future: People Networks” - “To me, it’s all about the growing role of “people networks“… promptly followed by AOL announcing (May 2008) the creation of a new business unit called “People Networks.”

Currently - we work on a web service called JuiceTorrent with a tag line “Create Your Own Ad Network.”

I often think of Google with their refusal to manage 20% of their own time. Might this be a “Beta”… precursor of how Google may start non-managing 100% of their time. Now, that would be a God-like behavior.

I use Google Calendar(s)… don’t know of anything better. But still, in most cases - I just cannot realistically assign a duration value to whatever I enter there. So, I use it mostly for the easy way to drag my “To Do” items from day to day.

Now, I am trying to start using Google Notebook(s). You can enter items in notebooks (and sections within them) through an extremely easy interface. You can label each item. There is the easy “suggested” menu of existing labels. So, I have a label “1 Emil” - the “1″ is there to put this label in a easy first alphabetical position in the “Labels” menu. The label pulls a good full screen of all notes across all notebooks labeled “1 Emil”… And, here comes the good part - this screen has an URL. So, I put this in my ”home” set of tabs in my browser. Now, I have an instant view of the notes I need - sitting on a tab in my browser. I don’t even mention the “search” and “share” functions - after Google, we think nothing of these.

However, there is no sharing of labels. Why I wonder. I cannot figure out a reason. Shared labels would work as the “days” in the Calendar(s).

Now, for any faithful user of Google Calendar(s), this description of Google Notebook(s) might be simply boring. But for me, Google Notebook(s) is a way out of the tags which I cannot and would not control - the minutes, hours, days, months, and years. They’re sooooo totally pre-set, fixed, written in stone… and most importantly, soooo shared… with soooo many people… that I still wonder why someone would even try to manage them.

The goodness of asynchronicity (being loosely connected in time) - a good subject for another post.

Running a Hospital (blog)
by Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston

Repairing the Healthcare System (blog found via Brad)
by Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE

The Health Insurance Mafia
(article in today’s Wall Street Journal found via Stanley Feld)

“Wall Street’s five biggest firms together paid a record $39 billion in bonuses [for 2007], even though three of them suffered the worst quarterly losses in their history and shareholders lost more than $80 billion.

Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers Holdings and Bear Stearns together paid $65.6 billion in compensation and benefits last year to their 186,000 employees. Year-end bonuses usually account for 60 percent of the total, meaning bonuses exceeded the $36 billion distributed in 2006 when the industry reported all-time high profits.

The bonuses are larger than the gross domestic products of Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Bulgaria.”

See full article…