Tara Hunt, one of Jimmy's old friends Options

[thekohser]

I stumbled across this video today, an interview between Tara Hunt and Jimmy Wales. (Thanks to what appears to be a botched editing job, you'll want to let the video run for about 40 seconds before paying attention.)

Ms. Hunt describes Jimmy as one of her friends and heroes, though it's been so long since they last chatted, she thought he still lived in San Francisco, unaware that (Golden Acres) Florida is where he puts down roots now.

I got to researching just what Tara Hunt does for a living, and it's difficult to understand how she pays the bills. She apparently identifies as a "consultant", running a website called HorsePigCow.com, which according to Alexa reaches about one-half the people and garners about one-fifth the page views that Wikipedia Review does.

She claims to have founded Citizen Agency, but then left it in early 2009, and they haven't blogged about themselves since October 2007.

When Tara and Jimmy were both living in San Francisco, they "could never see each other there", but they would meet up in Paris or London, at conferences and such.

Seriously, what is the means of income for someone like Tara Hunt? I didn't spy a wedding band.

Other tidbits:

04:10 -- Jimmy Wales: "I have a friend who is a TV host in Saudi Arabia. And she..."

05:16 -- Jimmy Wales' copy of the book, The Victorian Internet, was given to him by Marc Andreesen. Marc used to date his co-founder of Ning, Gina Bianchini, whom we've discussed here before, but has recently stepped down from Ning... into Marc's venture capital firm.

For more of my thoughts on this video snippet, you may join the conversation here.

[Somey]

As I understand it, shwowp.com is some sort of "social network for shoppers," which hopes that people are going to take the trouble to enter the details of all their shopping, online and off, into Shwowp's database in exchange for "value-added services" that apparently amount to the same sort of thing you can do with a common spreadsheet program and a few Google searches, though of course you have to know how to use the common spreadsheet program, and you have to be able to use Google without it constantly crashing your browser.

It looks like they're hoping people will ignore the obvious privacy implications of this, not to mention the effort involved in submitting all this data to a third party, and that instead they'll enter in their ongoing expenditure reports because it's "fun," and that the site will "go viral" and become "the Facebook/Twitter of e-Commerce."

Call me a cynic, but I don't think it's gonna work, personally...

This blogger saw Ms. Hunt's presentation back in May at a similar "startup camp"-type conference and was also less than fully impressed.

Jimbo would be well-advised to avoid being ensnared in this venture - that doesn't mean he has to stop being friends with Tara Hunt, who is (arguably) very cute, but Wikipedia and Wikia are already too privacy-invasive for most non-passive internet users as it is. This looks to be at least 10 to 20 times more so.