I don’t think I’m being conceited to think that the 2006 marketing campaign “Ask the Planet” for Yahoo! Answers paved the way for yesterday’s online townhall Q&A Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/
Here is a list of all the Celebrities that have used Yahoo! Answers as a public invitation to ask them questions or answer a question they posed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers#Special_guests
Here is what I presented to a bunch of MBA students at Stanford Business School last Sunday about running a Crowd-sourced Community.
While composing the preso for a talk about Crowdsourcing that I presented last Sunday at Stanford Business School, I thought of a catchy way to describe the Community Manager’s job. Community Manager = Chief Thank You Officer - the person that makes sure that everyone who deserves to be “thanked” in a community is thanked.
From my experience at both Yahoo! Answers and at FixYa, I came up with a theory that Crowd-sourced communities can best be described as a marketplace between providers of content (sellers) and consumers of content (buyers). The currency that makes most of the free content generation possible is “thank you’s”. The key ingredient to making this work is that most providers of content need nothing more than an authentic “Thank You” for them to feel that their contribution (whether its an answer to a question, a video, or photograph) is appreciated, and worth the trouble of posting.
From this perspective, I think that Community Managers are filling in a hole where sometimes the “market” doesn’t work and the content providers are not compensated with proper appreciation. This is especially true when there is not enough consumers of content - or when content production far outstrip the audience. So Chief Thank You Officer is also a “market maker” often found on stock exchanges.
A community manager’s job is also to curb abuse - which often is when there is improper feedback (mean-spirited, personal attacks, meaningless responses) from a consumer of content to the provider of content. Yes, there is also provider - provider conflict that community managers get into, but I do think the chief purpose of online community management for a crowd-sourced site is making sure that Thank You’s are doled out to the right people in the community.
The Geithner Housing Bailout plan has only highlighted what is essentially true about any form of government intervention in the markets - that there are winners & losers, and its basically fair/unfair depending on which group you belong.
But there is one universal truth to the effectiveness of such plans, and it is that they should be simple and easy to understand. One of the major benefits of a market system is its transparency and easy to understand signals (high price = sell, low price = buy, if you don’t value something at $500, don’t buy it at $500). So any assistance program with complicated rules (like the Geithner plan) is bound to fail with many people not taking advantage of it, and it will empower the middle-men (loan brokers) who have the financial incentive to interpret the rules and find loop holes.
This is precisely how the whole derivatives mess happened in the first place, with the financial instruments being too complicated even for execs to understand, and the middle men (Wall Street quant jocks & loan brokers) making decisions that enriched them, but collectively took the economy down with them.
So my suggestion would be that the government should step into the market, but with more clear rules - they should set up a Resolution Trust Co. to just buy the houses that are about to go into foreclosure, and then rent them back out to the occupants on a long term lease.
This would be similar to how a government take over of a bank or auto company might look like, where the government ponies up the cash and keeps the employees (occupants) and factories (house) , but wipes out the equity holder and basically takes over.
The rent can be determined by market rates in the area, and the government can bascially sign itself a contract to own the houses until the housing prices in the area stabilize (or rise above a certain threshold), which would then stabilize housing prices because all these foreclosed homes would have a government guaranteed floor price.
Jason Furman - economic advisor to Obama, and acquaintance from my grad school days, if you see this please give it a thought! 
As all modern economists (not dogmatic crazies) would agree, recessions are largely caused by behavioral shifts in expectations and consumer confidence. The marginal investments and consumer spending that drive economies in & out of booms & busts are largely driven by how we collectively feel about the economy, rather than actual job losses or industrial contraction. Its a chicken & egg - but feeling bad, worried, and fearful certainly will only prolong this recession.
But as Americans, I’m confident this will end soon, as we will collectively get bored with continously worrying & talking about “the economy”. Just like the housing boom was all anyone could talk about for a long time, we will soon reach an overload of yet another bad news, and just start to spend & invest because we get tired of it.
What kept the Japanese in recession for so long was their (our) penchant for pessimism, and self-flagellation. Even during the 80s boom, everyone secretly thought we would be punished for excessive consumption & land grabbing. But Americans are not so puritanical or at least there is a good segment who will just simply tire of all this doom & gloom.
This is the land of Disneyland & Hollywood.
