Sarah Simkin's blog

Building data sets is expensive and time consuming. That is, if you hire experts. But what if you open your project to anyone who is interested in helping via crowd sourcing?

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The Web is an amazing venue for all types of analysis. No, not the kind on the leather couch…more of the statistical variety. Applications like Google Analytics measure web site traffic while data visualizations depict complex statistical evidence. But is it possible to analyze how people feel while using web sites?

Thanks to Sentiment Analysis, we are now able to scratch this qualitative surface. Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis is used to evaluate the emotional state and intended emotional communication of a speaker, writer, or social network user (like those of us plugged into Facebook). The term was first used in the study of linguistics, but is now being used to determine how products, events, and issues are being perceived online.

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One of the many ways the Tagged Tanakh is unique, is in its social design. While there’s no intention of having the Tagged Tanakh be a Facebook or JDate, the ability of users to interact with the text and each other is an essential part of what we’re doing.

To brush up on how to go about creating this kind of social functionality I read Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter, the design consultant behind Bokardo.

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Of the many things we’re asked about the Tagged Tanakh, one of the most frequent questions is, “But how will it make money?”

A good business plan is an integral part of any successful enterprise, but no single model works across the board. Auctions and Direct Sales work fine for some ventures, but are not feasible methods for sustaining the Tagged Tanakh(TT).

Advertising is the most trusted and ubiquitous revenue stream online, but the latest reports indicate that younger audiences pay little to no attention to web ads.

Another proven online business model is the subscription model, which can also incorporate principles from the razor blade model or the freemium model. I’ve been researching some of the many successful subscription-based businesses out there to find the best examples for the TT to emulate.

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The surviving pages of the world’s oldest Christian Bible, previously stored in four locations around the world for the last 150 years, have finally been reunited: digitally. The Codex Sinaiticus is now available online.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Orthodox Jewish learning website WebYeshiva offers rabbinic teachings via video web conferencing. The self described “Torah learning revolution” was founded in 2007, but has recently surfaced and gained attention.

So how do these two projects compare and contrast with the Tagged Tanakh (TT)?

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The Tagged Tanakh prototype allows users to create profiles where they can identify what type of Jewish person they consider themselves to be. In the Tagged Tanakh, denominations or affiliations are referred to as ‘flavors’. In the prototype, users can choose between nine different ways of identifying as a Jewish person.

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Ever heard of Koolanoo? Probably not.

The Jewish singles social network–not so much a dating site as a social network with a dating focus–folded a few years back. But why?

Giza Venture Capital, which also planned to launch social networks for other religious and ethnic groups (its Chinese social network 360Quan.com is still operational), raised $3 million in funding. Some early reviews were hopeful, others were lukewarm.Mashable.com derided it as “a totally underwhelming effort.”

Koolanoo had all the standard social networking features: profile pages, picture galleries, messaging, and events calenders but users could not customize their personal pages. Clunky URLs were too complex to share on message boards or forums, and would-be users needed to be logged in to browse the site.

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Many synagogues require students to complete tzedakah projects before becoming a bar or bat mitzvah. Usually these community service projects include anything from working at a soup kitchen to organizing a clothing drive, or volunteering to teach underprivileged children to read or to do pet therapy with the elderly.

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What is stealing?

Webster tells us that it is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.”

This seems straight forward enough. But the whole nature of ownership and, consequently, theft becomes blurrier when you move out of the physical world into ideas, that is to say, Intellectual Property (IP). Are an individual’s thoughts his or her property?

Rabbinic tradition tells us yes. Ge-nai-vat da’at, the theft of knowledge, is a serious offense.

Rabbi Leonard Gordon directed me to the following text from Teaching Students to Cheat or Not to Cheat by Norman Amse, which said “Many students who cheat would never think of stealing, but the Tosefta says that cheating is the worst form of stealing, and implies that it is worse to cheat than to rob a bank.”

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