You make an interesting point about the incentive system. But I ask: what’s the incentive system to participate in SETI? The infintesimal chance that it’s your machine that finds an alien CQ? Or just the knowledge that you’re advancing science with very little cost to you? I submit that your Globally Distributed Cool Hunting / Trend Spotting system might be able to run on egoboos alone.

Also, tag aggregators are an excellent way to collect the eyes of your Argus. Technorati is good but not great for this, as it won’t archive past posts.

Oh, and thanks for the shout-out! (By the way, you have an extra “br” tag after my URL, so it doesn’t resolve correctly.)

http://www.clevescene.com/issues/2005-03-30/news/feature_print.html

“Microsoft’s army of lawyers was no match for a kid from Kent State.” Funny story, and lets us know where MS is actually investing profit, and it doesn’t look like research.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/psfk/

You’ll also want to look at the very interesting:

http://www.style-arena.jp/english/index.htm

Faith Popcorn recently commented that sites like PSFK were ruining the trendspotting business! Damn, disintermediated again!

the URL is chittahchattah.blogspot.com/2004/07/my-cool-hunting-moment.html

Photo of kids in SF wearing cereal boxes as backpacks, from last summer…