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I've been fascinated with the internet for as long as I can remember. In college, my fascination evolved into a passion and it began to look more like a career than a hobby.
I'm the General Manager for a startup at
betaworks called
News.me. We're fascinated by the social web and what it means for the present and future of content discovery and consumption. We're creating a space for news discovery and conversation that is beautiful, accessible, and fundamentally social.
Learn more about News.me
Prior to working on News.me, I was Entrepreneur in Residence at betaworks. Prior to that, I worked in Strategic Development at TheLadders.com, working on product strategy, business development, and investor relations. My first job out of school was in the Technology Investment Banking group at
Morgan Stanley.
I graduated from
Wesleyan University in 2008 with degrees in the
College of Social Studies and Economics. I now organize a series of events for a group of like-minded nerds in NYC called
Digital Wesleyan.
I like to think about topics like
identity,
discovery, and
net neutrality, and I often write about them on my
blog. I've also contributed to
Reuters,
Business Insider, and the New York Observer's
Betabeat.
About
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A few selections are below, for more please visit my blog at
jakelevine.me/blog
The network neutrality / common carriage debate is one of the most important debates of our time. At stake is the freedom to innovate, the freedom to listen, and the freedom to speak. To date, arguments for or against common carriage have focused largely on the relationship between Internet service providers and content creators, but a new threat is emerging.
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Today, I was lucky enough to attend the second day of sessions at Personal Democracy Forum. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. As a social web / identity junkie, I was excited to see Vivek Kundra, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, and Doc Searls. I hadn't heard of many of the other presenters, including one whose talk would be the most inspiring I had ever seen on a live stage.
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Serendipity, in other words, is a form of passive discovery. It describes relevant information that is pushed to the user, in contrast to search results, which are pulled via the act of explicitly surfacing one's intent. It replaces the exchange "I want this: ok, here you go" with "I thought you might like this: thanks, you're right."
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The broader the audience, the more difficult it will be to produce a slice of content that is relevant to all participants. With distributed social curation, however, that same relationship (between size and relevance) is not even contemplated.
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The history of relevance on the web is therefore the history of a long steady march towards the holy grail of discovery - consumption without intent: content that you don't even know that you want.
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Looking back at my experience (or, let's be honest, the lack thereof) and after fielding the question about 74 times from rising Juniors and Seniors in College, I thought I'd jot down a few thoughts on the similarities and differences between the two experiences. I don't know if I've had anything like a "typical" experience in either case, so I won't claim that these "lessons" are universally applicable. Still, to the extent that there exists, somewhere out there, someone who is exactly like me, this might prove helpful.
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I fundamentally believe that no single social web service can accurately represent the identity of a human being. In the offline world we present different personalities in different social contexts. There is a nuance to identity in the offline world that is not easily replicable in a single, catch-all, generic, online social experience. I can't quite crystallize why this is important, but my hunch is that this human nuance is critical to meaningful social interaction.
Read More.