OrganizedWisdom Archive

This morning I headed down to the OrganizedWisdom headquarters in NYC to meet with Unity Stoakes. Unity is one of the co-founders and is President of OrganizedWisdom. OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered, doctor-certified curated search. We first reviewed the service last October when they presented their launch demo.

Please view our interview below – it runs about 15 minutes and some of the topics we covered include:

• What is OrganizedWisdom?
• What’s a wisdom card and how many cards are there today?
• Are you creating content or just showing search results?
• Plagerism issues – this was running wild in another human powered search engine
• Do you allow the public to contribute?
• How do you compare to NY-based Hakia’s health search and iMedix?
• What’s the business model — this is actually very interesting – Unity discusses a variety of components to their business plan unlike some of the other human powered search engines that are looking at advertising as their only revenue avenue
• What’s the team like in NYC?
• How does someone become a guide and what qualifications are required?
• and more but you have to watch for the rest!

Unity also shares some details on a brand new service they are offering called "LiveWisdom" – it’s at the 13 minute mark in the interview.

Thanks to Unity for spending some time with me this morning!

Part II from the NY Tech Meetup Recap includes Organized Wisdom and Yoink’d. Check out the other NY Tech Meetup recap posts as well.

OrganizedWisdom

OrganizedWisdom is a human-powered, doctor-certified curated search. It’s Mahalo for health. Mahalo goes wide and shallow, OrganizedWisdom goes narrow and deep (in health). Notes:

• Founders claim its ungameable by those evil SEO people – of course a question was asked about doctors gaming it and it’s just as gameable as any human powered search
• The app uses MediaWiki and is pretty good looking but still looks like a standard human-powered search (see Mahalo and Hakia)
• They use a review system made up of: two guides, a reviewer and a doctor (and each page shows the team who approved it – I like this)
• They are looking to have 10,000 results over the next year
• The founders believe the best combo is humans plus algorithms – of course they have no algo, they use Google and the others I suspect
• They are hiring MediaWiki experts
• They didn’t talk about keeping the results up-to-date which is the biggest issue for anything human-powered

I could see OrganizedWisdom doing very well if they can grow via viral. It appears to have much more potential than Mahalo does as it covers a niche instead of creating pages on a whim like Mahalo does.

Yoink’d

Yoink’d is a mediabox which at a basic level can take any RSS feed with enclosures and turn it into a playlist. The founder showed a Facebook RSS feed as a playlist in Yoink’d. It does three things: take, make and share. The team is located in Berkeley, California (why were they allowed to demo??). The official launch is in a week and below is the demo video.