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.
AdamThinks.com just added the Qwidget to his latest post and this one is pretty funny. It’s a riff on that immortal subway prank in which someone takes a wet paint sign, tears it up and tapes them all back together. I agree with Adam when he says, “Whoever first thought to tear off the P and rearrange the words is a genius. So perfect in both form and function, it’s hard to believe the idea ever did not exist.”
Adam has been on a mission to bring a little poetry to the prank and has been creating little bits of absurdist wet paint humor in subways all over New York City. Here’s my favorite:
He’s now used a Qwidget to pull readers in to give their ideas on new ideas for Wet Paint anagrams. I went for a reference to the famous SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skit in which Sean Connery keeps mistaking “A petit” for “Ape Tit.”
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.
Notice how Marshall placed the Qwidget in the middle of his post. It’s an interesting use of the Qwidget that I have played with a bit on this blog. Initially, we thought the Qwidget would always sit at the bottom of a post. But it obviously can be used anywhere within a post to entice readers to engage in dialogue, even if it interrupts the flow of the post. I’ll be interested to see how and where other bloggers use the Qwidget.
I am very pleased to announce that Marshall Sponder’s The Analytics Guru blog has become the very first blog (other than this one) to use the Qwidget. The question asked involves the cool Facebook-CNN inauguration mashup that allowed you to stream the inauguration ceremony while chatting with your Facebook friends via status updates all on CNN.com. Marshall will continue to use the Qwidget on some of the other sites in his blog network - Blog Speedway.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 61% of Americans support Obama’s choice of mega-church pastor Rick Warren to give the inauguration invocation. One might expect the disapproving minority to be made up of liberals incensed over Rev. Warren’s opposition to gay marriage.
However, this is not the case. According to the same poll, a full 66% of Democrats endorsed the pick while only 60% of both Republicans and Independents did. Is this a case of partisans on the right disapproving of Obama’s pick even though Warren seems to share more values with evangelical conservatives?
Read Write Web recently covered a new online commenting tool built by Jim Jeffers called Encouraged Commentary. As RWW writes, “The new commenting features … [allows] users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.” There are a few other great features that will make those of us predisposed to commenting more likely to do so. The potential for Jim’s idea is big because he is letting other developers freely tinker with the code. Serious kudos on that.
Encouraged commentary could work especially well with Jason Santa Maria’s idea for comment milemarkers, as Jim himself points out. I have talked about milemarkers on this blog as well. I hope that companies like Disqus and IntenseDebate begin to add features like these.
While commenting is only done by a small minority of web users, it needs to be improved. And RWW’s Rick Turoczy obviously agrees. He begins the coverage of Encouraged Commentary with the following: “Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It’s not designed to facilitate conversations.”
Despite the room for improvement, there is obviously a need for a different mechanism for blog engagement. Good content amasses wide audiences which creates potential for great conversations. To really capitalize on these opportunities, both financial and social, we need to pull more people into rewarding dialogue with tools that focus conversation and eliminate excess noise. The Qwidget is our best shot at doing just that.
Among their amazing findings are these further indications of the failure of web comments to capture healthy online dialogue:
“Among derogatory comments, cussing and threats accounted for 65.3 percent, while repeated postings of the same comments to prevent users from reading the posts of others took up 36.4 percent.”
“Five percent of frequent posters accounted for as much as 30.5 percent of all Internet comments.”
“Only 2.5 percent of readers among Web users post comments.”
“Only 0.12 percent of users reading online news reports generated a third of all Internet comments”
“The top five percent of those posting comments wrote 44.2 percent of the Internet comments considered derogatory.”
Even as someone who can be down on the online commenting, these stats still managed to surprise me.
Stories, Updates and Thoughts From the Qwidget Makers
What's the Qwidget
The Qwidget is a tool that publishers and bloggers install on their sites to make it easier for readers to engage in dialogue around their content.
Our mission
With the Qwidget, we are building a cross-web dialogue platform. We aim to make the web a better place for meeting new people and starting conversations about the issues and content that interest people.
This blog will tell that story. It's written by Mike DiBenedetto, the manager of product development for the Qwidget.
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:
We are very pleased to announce that 
Stories, Updates and Thoughts From the Qwidget Makers
The Qwidget is a tool that publishers and bloggers install on their sites to make it easier for readers to engage in dialogue around their content.
With the Qwidget, we are building a cross-web dialogue platform. We aim to make the web a better place for meeting new people and starting conversations about the issues and content that interest people.
