Web comment meeting

Someone just reminded me about this College Humor video that imagines a business meeting attended by internet commenters.  I have to warn you, the language can be pretty offensive.  But it’s dead on.  And the problem that it brings up is exactly what we’re trying to solve with the Qwidget.  Normally, I’d just embed it, but since it’s so NSFW, I’m just going to link to it here.

Laurie Meadoff, one of the co-founders of the Qwidget, is joining a powerful collection of politicians, academics, journalists and thinkers for the US-Islamic World Forum, a series of workshops in Doha, Qatar, seeking to improve relations between the Muslim world and the United States.  She will be speaking about her past communication work, our work with the Qwidget and our successful web series Hometown Baghdad.  Our content partners at findingDulcinea have a great write up about the forum here.  As I wrote on this blog’s first post, fostering dialogue is the primary motivator that led us to create the Qwidget.  We are very proud of Laurie for taking part in this extremely important forum.

I am very happy to announce that Phil Glockner’s great social media blog Scribkin has begun using the Qwidget.  Phil’s got a nice write up about the Qwidget here.  I really like the way he summed up the product: “What is Qwidget? It’s simple. Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness.”  Well said, Phil.

Is it just me or does anyone else desperately hope that the tiny hobbit-like fossils found in Indonesia do not belong to our human ancestors? I love the idea of a species of three feet tall creatures running around that hunted, used tools, and spoke in their own languages. Some scientists have argued that the fossils belong to humans with a growth disorder.  Bah humbug on those guys.  I’m siding with archaeologist and Associate Professor Mike Morwood of the University of New England who said this:

It is a new species of human who actually lived alongside us, yet were half our size. They were the height of a three-year-old child, weighed around 24 kg and had a brain smaller than most chimpanzees. Even so, they used fire, made sophisticated stone tools, and hunted Stegodon (a primitive type of elephant) and giant rats. We also believe that their ancestors may have reached the island using bamboo rafts. The clear implication is that, despite tiny brains, these little humans were intelligent and almost certainly had language.

We are very pleased to announce that findingDulcinea.com has joined our beta program and is now using the Qwidget to enage its audience in conversations around its high quality, professionally written content. FindingDulcinea’s mission is to bring users the best information on the web for any topic, employing human insight and methodical review. Its editors comb the web to present only credible, high-quality and trustworthy Web sites on just about any topic imaginable.

So far, they’ve used the Qwidget on articles about Fox’s new show “Lie to Me”, global warming, Ponzi schemes, Polio, the recession and warfare in Congo and Rwanda.

My favorite question they’ve asked so far is below.  Check out the other ones on their articles.