Dylan Hunter

He takes feeds of the latest posts from sponsors’ blogs and puts that in an ad box on Techmeme. That’s their ad. It’s brilliantly simple: dynamic advertising controlled by the advertisers, who will make their ads - their content - relevant to the readers who see their feeds on Techmeme….

Gabe is charging $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 respectively for the three month-long spots (I’ll save you the cipherin - that’s $132,000 per year). For the advertiser, that works out to a $5-8 CPM, which is good.

I definitely agree on the excellence of the idea… For years now, the advertising network folks, (including me while @ Miva) have been talking about how advertising is becoming the content, with this being the perfect pinnacle of that concept - 0 incremental maintenance on the advertiser side, and assistance in feeding the sucking content creation monster, while making money on the publisher side - what the heck’s not to like?

At some point down the road would definitely love to have something that does a contextual match between any given post on the publisher’s side, and X back on the advertiser’s side, to maximize both relevance of the content & CTR, but first things first, and definitely agree with Jeff Jarvis - would definitely be an ad unit that I would think about using myself!

Move over Intel, the days of silicon are numbered, the Borg a mere few decades away. Some excellent fodder for thinking further about the implications of cybernetics, as well as hopefully stimulating further discussions / experimentation as to whether sentience is something purely biological, (in which case, we’ll be creating sentient hybrids - low grade, to be sure, for quite some time, but still) or something else, now that the first combo brain cell / silicon circuit is finally a reality. Much more to come on this path to be sure, but plenty of excitement, (and pitfalls) ahead!

Now this looks like some fun, (and a _whole_ lot o’ work! :-0 ). Just joined today, and would encourage others to do the same, though one does have to wonder a good bit why they’re effectively starting from scratch in trying to determine the web of human knowledge when a whole ton of these kind of assertions / relationships could be preliminarily posited by crawling extant SE’s, Wikipedia, blogs & the whole host of Web 2.0 tagging-type apps, leaving users the far simpler option of just editing the relationships they’ve posited from analysis of these sources - ah well, s’pose that’s the difference between having all the cash and time in the world, and knowing that you’ve got 6 mths to pull something off, or you won’t be making the mortgage payment!

In any case, the concept’s certainly intriguing, at least, and if the method undertaken turns out to be too unwieldy, certainly a good chance that a startup could do as suggested above - anyone got a $1M burning a whole in their pocket?

Cambridge, Mass. — Japanese Computer manufacturer Toshiba and the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday announced a new collaboration, called the “GlobalMind Project,” a program intended “to bring cross-cultural common sense to computer systems.” Toshiba said that it hopes to explore new ways to give computers “human-like” understanding for applications such as Japanese text recognition and processing, car navigation, and robots. On MIT’s end, the program is being led by Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and will include other Media Lab researchers.

Another company shooting for the aging boomer market. On the whole, I like this product concept class in that it’s got a strong, uplifting, celebratory nature to it, if handled well.

To be honest, these kind of things did strike me as initially kind of morbid, but if dealt with in combination with what folks still want to do with the rest of their lives, you’ve got a very nice, postively-oriented combo.

WisdomArk, Inc., developers of a new consumer web service aimed at helping communities of family and friends collaborate in the capture, sharing, and preservation of life stories, announced today that it has received $6.3 million in Series A funding from El Dorado Ventures, Venrock Associates, and Benhamou Global Ventures.

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