Monday, July 30, 2012

Flip side of idea discovery engine: Discover people

Since my earlier blog post about discovering new things, I have been thinking about how discovery works for me.

When I discover new things, I am looking for idea.  New idea that can give fresh perspective to things that I did not think of.  Or new story that inspires me to take the next step.  It's not the latest news.  It's certainly not commentaries on latest events, although it can be.  What I look for is unique perspective and narrative.  What I'm after is new ideas.

But you can flip this to think about it from different perspective.  As talked about yesterday's post, idea is propagated from person to person.  Some people copy and echo idea, some people amplify or mutate idea, and some comes up with idea.


I'm interested in finding those people who synthesize the ideas.  These people are who can defend the idea, evolve them and are more likely to come up with other ideas, perhaps more interesting ideas.

So to say that I'm looking for new ideas means that I'm looking for new authors, new creators, new thought leaders.  There are many renowned industry leaders who have done one thing or another.  Facebook Interests and Twitter Who To Follow do a good job of showing those who had made names for themselves. But truth is that there are many other entrepreneurs and thinkers who are working on next big things.

I want to find out interesting thinkers who have lot to prove for themselves.  Who has lot of good ideas and working really hard to make whatever they are working on happen.  In short, I want to read awesome people's ideas and connect with them.

As Ann Miura-Ko said in her interview with TechCrunch, I also want to check off "how many awesome people that I meet" each week.

My kind of discovery engine will discover people with ideas.  People who had interesting things to say about topics that I'm interested in.



Ann Miura-Ko, a partner at FLOODGATE, talks about how she allocates her time (1:50). 
One of her weekly metrics is how many awesome people she meets.

2 comments:

  1. Jae,

    I've been working on a project with a couple other people - building a Twitter user discovery engine. We are just moving out of private-beta...check it out: http://tweepwise.com

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