Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake launched a new startup this Spring called Hunch and today announced that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has joined the company's board of directors. Hunch is a social Q&A service that, in effect, says, "people who are like you and who have preferences like yours tend to be happiest with the following answer to that question you're asking." The company reports seeing one million unique visitors last month, and in his own blog post about the announcement, Wales calls the intersection of community and algorithm "the future of the web." "This," he writes, "is what we are going to come to call Web 3.0." Sponsor Hunch relies on users providing information about themselves, something they do by answering a series of fun multiple-choice questions. The company says that 28 million of these "Teach Hunch About You" questions have now been answered, and all kinds of interesting correlations can be drawn as a result. Hunch went so far as to write a 13 page report all about the differences it has observed between the self-perception of Mac owners vs. Windows owners. In another report about the intersection of food choices and political ideologies, the company says it found the following: When it comes to choice of lettuce, everyone likes romaine, but conservatives trend heavily towards iceberg and liberals trend heavily towards arugula. For kitchen styles, conservatives vote for the wooden, country look and liberals lean towards sleek, stainless steel. Conservatives are more likely to drink sugar soda but less likely to drink wine; liberals are more likely to eat vegetarian options and more frequent portions of fruit. These questions and answers are ostensibly not the point of Hunch, though. The point is to help users make decisions about things like what blue jeans to buy or what neighborhood to move into. The site has undergone some recent design changes and it's unclear that the main Q&A is as compelling or interesting as the Teach Hunch About You part. Hunch says it aims to become the "Wikipedia for decision making." The sites are clearly similar: both are user-created and curated collections of knowledge. While that's a laudable goal, I haven't found myself going back to it regularly after our initial review. I'm more of an Aardvark kind of guy when it comes to social Q&A. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise then that Hunch says Jimmy Wales and I have a lot in common demographically but very little in common in our ways of thinking. Discuss

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Wikipedia Co-founder Joins Flickr Co-founder's New Startup

One of the risks facing any enterprise is how to deal with people who use the corporate network to post rude, sexist or even racist material on public facing web sites. That issue is coming home to roost for Volvo , following the news that Wikipedia has banned editing from machines inside the Volvo IT Department for racist remarks left on the pages of two well-known Pakistani Cricket players. Sponsor According to the Channel Register , someone in the Volvo IT Department wrote a number of racist remarks in articles about two Pakistani cricket players: Wasim Akram and Inzamam-ul-Haq . The IP Address, 192.138.116.230, maps back to the Volvo IT Department. The rants were not directed at the players but other contributors to the site. Less than 20 minutes after the rants were left on the site, Wikipedia banned the Volvo IP address until early December. Volvo made a statement that they are investigating the incident. According to Channel Register, Volvo stated: "We have a policy describing acceptable and prohibited use of Internet services and the measures to be taken if these services are misused." How to deal with the way people conduct themselves using the web and real-time applications will become an increasingly challenging issue for the enterprise. How this pans out will come down to the policies companies establish. The truth is, we are in the early days of microblogging and even writing to the web. Corporate policies are few and far between. But you know this issue is going to be on the minds of managers everywhere as as incidents like the one at Volvo repeat themselves in any number of ways. Discuss

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Volvo IT Department Gets Banned From Wikipedia For Racist Rants

It always gives us joy to tell our readers that Microsoft is actually doing cool things. The company's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth , a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged. Today, the Live Labs' latest creation has launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks great and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information. Sponsor The official demo video is was pretty cool, but is proving unembeddable. Instead, take a look at this onstage demo from Neowin: In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established. Or, on a nerdier note, think about riffling through decks of Magic: The Gathering cards, zooming in for larger-than-life detail of the card's artwork and then zooming out to see how each was related or linked to others in the set. This probably reminds you - as it did us - a lot of Wikipedia. But imagine Wikipedia as an infinitely scannable, shuffleable, expandable, retractable, linked, and yet still detachable deck of digital cards; and then you have an inkling of how Pivot looks and feels. Collections can be created by anyone, including third-party developers . Types of collections include simple, linked, and dynamic, which are each progressively more difficult to create. Developers are also encouraged to create collections from existing online datasets, such as the Internet Archive or data.gov. It's very exciting, indeed; and it's available for Windows users only at the moment. Mac users, we're sorry. Why don't you go write some complaint letters on your beautifully designed, virus-immune machines? We'd love to rub it in some more by posting a few screenshots with gloating captions, but we're too busy trying to get this machine to stop being so Windows-y and just run the software Right now, the service is invitation-only. We encourage you to Google around for your invite codes or check in here later to see if the kind folks at Live Labs have passed along any to us. Discuss

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Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects