I have meant to post about AideRSS for months now, but I have been so busy at Suited Media gearing up for the launch of Pokerspace that I have completely disregarded this blog and its readers. Rest assured I will be able to put more time back to this blog in the coming months.

For those that are still listening, there is a something you should check out. Simply put, I am very impressed with some software, a web application, created by a small team of local professionals including a fellow UW graduate, Ilya Grigorik, the Chief Architect of AideRSS, Inc.

AideRSS may be the first tool I have found in a long while that has the potential to significantly improve on my Bloglines experiences. Bloglines has been my tool of choice for blog reading for years, but as past posts have detailed I have found some difficulties navigating and enveloping hundreds of feeds a day, many of which post a lot, some of which post rarely. I used to subscribe to almost 500 feeds, but I am now cut down to about 335.

After meeting Ilya I knew he was creating innovative and potentially important software. I met Ilya at my UW graduation ceremony a few months ago. We exchanged some of our experiences and entrepreneurial interests. Conversing with him before the ceremony confirmed my initial impressions that Ilya was a very interesting individual. We exchanged contacts and I actually added him to my LinkedIn, which is something I have never done with someone I have known for such a short time. Now, a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile shows he is linked to more than 100 very interesting people - I not surprised in the slightest.

I played with his site for a few hours one night after work and found it to be a very well designed web application. I explored the site throughly and found it be an exemplary example of modern web design. I imported my entire OPML feed of into the site and it performed flawlessly. The interface was clear and easy to follow. I especially liked the quality feedback it gives the user at the apprioriate times and places. Looking at the CSS confirmed my guess that it was a cleanly coded site. Without any hesitation I subscribed to the AideRSS blog.

I am also impressed with their technology, PostRank. In fact, I use a lot of the same ranking techniques myself and have
experience with most of the sites (Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) that enable the AideRSS application. I still use a lot of these services to run what I call “tracking feeds” for myself, my company, and other key words I care about so that I can hear immediately whenever these terms are mentioned online. I used to love PubSub (if you remember of it… if not, research it). I wish it was still around. Wow, apparently it is coming back…

PubSub is undergoing redevelopment at the moment. We’ll be relaunching as PubSub 2.0 this winter with a host of exciting new features and services.

Anyways, I suggest you check out AideRSS.

Although I have not made any posts in a while, I still continue to follow a large number of blogs. So, just how large you may ask?

I plan to attend an interesting event in Toronto tonight - a meeting of Dorkbot-Toronto.

Dorkbot-Toronto seeks to explore all uses of technology in the development and discussion of art and creative exercise. It is meant to be an informal and collaborative environment where anyone can drop in, listen to presentations, and meet others for future collaborations. We invite people across all disciplines and skill levels to attend and explore ideas of hybridization, as well as perform open investigations into electronics and code.

Meetings are always free and open to the public.

If this sounds like your kind of event, and you are around the Toronto area tonight, I suggest you check it out.

I have added a google map perspective to this post if you need directions.

Three presenters are planned for tonight:

• Jeff Mann & Michelle Teran - LiveForm: Telekinetics
• Rob Cruickshank - Spiral Inscriber
• Greg Judelman - Knowledge Visualisation

I’ve never been to one of these meetings before, but I suspect it will be pretty cool.
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Olivier Toubia, a Ph.D. candidate at the Marketing Group (MIT) has an article (PDF) on Idea Generation, Creativity, and Incentives.

Idea generation is critical … However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their energies on relevant and novel ideas.

This paper examines whether carefully tailored idea generation incentives can improve creative output.

Toubia used three types of incentives to trigger idea generation:

• A Flat condition where participants got $10 for showing up,
• An Own condition where participants got $3 for every idea they submitted, and
• An Impact condition where each participant got $2 for each time an idea they submitted built on one of their previous ideas.

See the sift everything experiment for a graph of the results.

Why I blog this? Because, as Jeremy says, “There is a lesson here for entrepreneurs regarding individual effort. If you can’t spend this kind of time [>20 hours], how can you hope to come up with deep, novel, thought-provoking ideas?”

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 Technorati Tags: Creativity, Ideas, Idea Generation, Incentives, Management Science