It was awesome that Jeff blogged about us on his website.

For those of you new to the term crowdsourcing, Jeff is the contributing editor of Wired magazine who coined the phrase when he wrote this article. We are big fans of Jeff and enjoyed his article highlighting how companies like iStockPhoto radically changed the face of stock photography using crowds.

We highly recommend Jeff’s blog for keeping up-to-date on all the latest and greatest happenings in the crowdsource space.

General:
-Updated honoring Google page - check back for video footage of the pizza delivery.

Submit Ideas:
- fixed e-mail confirmation,  now contains content (instead of just blank - duh)
 
My Profile:
- pwnit award fixed

Blog updates:
- rss feed fixed
- added blog to main nav
- most recent blog posting title displayed under main nav  

Pwnit:
- leaderboard fixed

* Special thanks to Deepak, Lucas, Russell, Greg, Dave, Koder for reporting bugs! *

It was a dark and stormy night. The team had been working furiously for the last three days straight to pump out our developer puzzle challenge (Pwn-it).

Late at night an e-mail enters the teams in-box. It was a blog post from a guy who saw our puzzle on reddit.

In the blog he comments on the puzzle (was not a big fan) and follows up with how much he dislikes stealth startups. He ended the post with a few tips on how to do URL rewrites on php (something we hadn’t got to yet) and even offered to help out.

At first we were super worried he was going to lift the curtain on us and pre-maturely announce our existence (now I know how Hollywood feels when Internet sites release plot and script spoilers before the movie is released). Will get to this…

But what was really interesting, was what he said about our business model …

MJ I think he likes it

What was pumpin’ about this Peter Harkins post was that Peter was the first human, with no prior contact with us, to comment on our business model. He actually liked it!

there’s going to be a ridiculous amount of buzz around this company when it launches.

This feedback was heart warming. It gave the team a much needed boost when we really needed it.

Further, if Peter wanted to he could have really screwed us by announcing our upcoming launch. We know there are lots of people who would have delighted in this - but not Peter.

What was needed now was a special way to respond to Peter’s comments, and thank him for not lifting our curtain.

Peter Harkins #9

Peter noted in his blog that he was user #9 out of a company of 17 at time. MJ figured what better way to pay homage to the dude who discovered us than giving him a special place in Cambrian House’s annals of history as our 9th user.

The team created a banner, posted it on the website, and sent Peter our response. Here is Peter’s follow up blog with our response:

Since I posted about Cambrian House last night, they’ve responded to me. I sent a heads-up mail to them (because I saw their blog didn’t pick up the trackback I sent) and got a brief thank-you note back from the CEO/founder saying they’d fix their permissions problem.

And this morning their development site had a new banner on it:

A classy response beats threatening a Lawyerclypse. And it’s a darn good sign given that public trust is a big part of their business model, which is all I’m going to say on the matter for 27 days or so.

Note to detailed readers: don’t sweat the ‘T Minus 27’ in the banner. We’ve added a few things since then.

Thank you Peter

A toast! For being the first to blog about us, be tempted to lift our curtain, and then pull back from the brink at the last moment.

Peter confirmed one of the core values we are building our community around – people are trustworthy.

He didn’t have to pull back. He could have gotten all the glory for being the first to expose us. And in a way he did.

Thanks Peter.

Peter’s original blog posts:

http://push.cx/2006/pre-cambrian-house

http://push.cx/2006/cambrian-development

http://push.cx/2006/cambrian-house-party

You get what you project.

When building our community, we need to show our intent towards the kind of a community we want to live in. Do we want an Orwellian community full of exhaustive checks and balances where big brother is looking over everyone’s shoulders? Or do we want a community that believes people are inherently trustworthy, and will do the right thing? For us, the answer is obvious.

Acting as if people are trustworthy is our way projecting good positive karma back into the community.

If you have been following our previous blogs here, here, and here you will know today our agents dropped off some pizza at the Googleplex.

So much pizza, when we stacked the boxes on top of one another, they stretched into outer space.

Check out this killer video taken by NASA of what the pizzas looked like from the earth’s outer atmosphere.

Kudos to Christine for delivering the most annoying sound made ever by a human.