Praise for the first version of said design

From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon’s first Director of Personalization:

Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems [my emphasis]. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have — it’s fascinating stuff.

Re: the current design of said LinkedIn variant

The 1.0 site will feature:

an online market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs)

a virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)

Prices in this virtual currency will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (3682 citations as of November 16, 2016). So prices in the virtual currency will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for people who best complement each other to identify one another. The name of my planned implementation: Adver-ties.

Precedents for Adver-ties

Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)

Peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs (massively open online courses)

PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived.

Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.

From 2013 paper “Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs,” co-authored by several employees of MOOC startup Coursera:

Peer assessment — which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . . — offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.

Re: the Populist revolt of the 1890s

From 2007 book The Populist Vision, published by Oxford University Press:

“[T]he Populist revolt reflected a conflict over divergent paths of modern capitalist development. . . . By the 1880s, two firmly entrenched parties dominated the political scene. At the national level, Democrats and Republicans held much in common as they shared a conservatism that was acceptable to the financial and corporate establishment. . . . Progressive Era legislation in the first years of the new [i.e., 20th] century expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”

Re: popularizing (a clone of) Adver-ties will be a key to achieving another progressive political revolution ASAP

Said popularizing will be foundational for establishing the most popular online market for customized education (details below).

From The Populist Vision:

“The Farmers’ Alliance [was] the largest and most important constituency of what would become the Populist coalition [of the 1890s]. . . . From its earliest stirring [in the 1870s], the Farmers’ Alliance defined itself as an educational movement. . . . The farmers needed to organize for self-education to better engage the complex problems of modern society . . . To get people reading and thinking required what [Alliance president Macune] described as a modern educational machine. The engine driving this machine was the reform press. . . . By the late 1880s, the Alliance had grown to an intellectual enterprise that stretched across much of rural America . . . [The Alliance] built lecture circuits across thirty states, and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers.” “The Farmers’ Alliance . . . realized that without the political levers of control, even the best-laid business plans would come to naught. . . . Convictions about . . . political action flowed directly from business strategies. . . . Most of the Populist ‘revolt’ took place not in the streets but in lodge meetings and convention halls, where participants pored over problems of commerce and government and adopted resolutions for the creation or expansion of state and federal agencies, institutes, commissions, departments and bureaus.” “A Texas experiment provided the most widely imitated prototype . . . The Texas Farmers’ Alliance Exchange . . . would offer Texas cotton growers all the advantages of a centralized and regulated market, with a rational structure and direct access to credit and to the commercial centers . . . From Georgia to California the Farmers’ Alliance set up state exchanges.”

From 2011 book SuperCooperators, by Harvard professor Martin Nowak:

“Whenever individual behavior is relevant to the public good, it should itself be made public to avert tragedy. Advertising is critical. . . . We need new ways to advertise how people behave.” “Much more can and should be done to harness the power of reputation to encourage us to cooperate.”

From 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century:

After two years of research, Chenoweth crunched the numbers. Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns [i.e., social movements], she . . . found a direct correlation between the success of a campaign and the popular involvement [in it.] . . . Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population[”] . . . This is not an insignificant number: in the United States, 3.5 percent of the population would mean gaining the support of some 11 million individuals. . . . Spurring people to this level of engagement is not easy.

Re: online markets for customized education (CE)

From 2008 book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns:

Students need customized pathways and paces to learn. . . . The second [phase of the disruption of standardized education] will be the emergence of a user network, whose analogues in other industries would be eBay . . .

Disrupting Class was co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, originator of the canonical models of disruptive innovation.

From 2015 book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere:

“I asked Michael [Staton, a partner in a venture capital firm that focuses on education and technology] to introduce me to some of the startups that he found most exciting . . . [Clayton] Christensen was cited ad nauseum by everyone we met.” “The University of Everywhere will solve the basic problem that has bedeviled universities since they were first invented over a millennium ago: how to provide a personalized, individual education to large numbers of people at a reasonable price.”

Re: popularizing (a clone of) Adver-ties will be foundational for establishing the most popular CE market

From the July 31, 2015 article in The New York Times titled “Finding a Career Track in LinkedIn Profiles”:

[M]uch of what we need to know about the changing labor market is crowd sourced in real time. And many of those digital breadcrumbs end up in LinkedIn profiles.

From a July 2015 interview of Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class:

[W]e’re really in the early beginnings of the dramatic revolution that we’ve seen in a lot of other technology sectors where really smart recommendation engines come in and assist the student in picking and choosing their unique path. . . . In order to really go towards adaptive learning, you need huge numbers of students on your platform . . . We need platforms that can collect the data we need and can make better use of data so that we can figure out different ways to serve different learners.

More re: the design of Adver-ties, and the link with CE

PostRomCom.com (Form of the write-up: 200 pages of my serial novel Post-Romantic Comedy: A Startup Comedy. Via equity crowdfunding, readers will be able to own part of Adver-ties.)