Hi there! (NASA Photo: H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team, Via Wikimedia Commons)

Fun fact: Pluto was named in 1930 by an 11-year-old girl. In the spirit of her christening skills, Wired reports, astronomers at the SETI Institute is asking the Internet to help name two tiny, newly discovered moons of Pluto. They've created a website dubbed "Pluto Rocks!" with a list of possibilities for which you can cast your ballot.

Included are such dignified options as Persephone, for Hades' captive wife, and Acheron, for one of the rivers flowing through the underworld. Here is a cheat sheet for those who did not spend their childhoods pouring over D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.

On that website, there is also a write-in ballot. We can't believe we even have to say this, but between the We the People fiasco and the elevation of a cat (rather than the obviously superior robot) to the Monopoly canon, we feel we must: Don't submit the names of any fucking Pokemon, or any dumb Internet memes, or Stephen Colbert, or--God forbid--Kim Jong-un. Don't you dare.

These are celestial bodies that will continue to circle Pluto long after your bones have disintegrated into the Earth. Please treat this occasion with the gravity it deserves.

Luckily, the astronomers have already foreseen the biggest pitfall of soliciting the "wisdom" of the crowds, and the ballot stipulates, "Names for the moons of Pluto must come from Greek or Roman mythology and must be related to Pluto/Hades and the underworld."

Unless your cutesy wisecrack is actually a clever riff on the legends of the Greco-Roman ancient world (and remember, Uranus is already taken) please, for the love of Zeus, don't waste their time.

(h/t The Mary Sue)

Mr. Cheever (Photo: Quora)

Following the recent announcement that Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever will be taking a backseat role at the company, something of a revolution has begun to foment at the question and answer site so popular among the Valley's elite. For a platform which purports to embrace openness and honesty as its core ethos, its own staff has not been particularly forthcoming about Mr. Cheever's departure.

Social Times points out that a question about Mr. Cheever's status at the company was answered by Quora's other founder, Adam D'Angelo. Users immediately called Mr. D'Angelo out for his disingenuous reply, which was bathed in a thick coat of PR BS. One such indictment--posted by another startup founder--even garnered more upvotes than the original response.

Could Mr. Cheever's departure and the subsequent user backlash be a signal for what's ahead at Quora? Social Times kicks around a variety of theories about what's up at the startup, from a potentially imminent acquisition to flailing user adoption due to the site's inability to scale.

If you've spent any amount of time on Quora, the mean girling and cattiness becomes evident pretty quickly, and nothing turns off new users more than a powerful cabal of close-minded insiders. Doesn't anyone remember why Gawker initiated that whole commenting overhaul? Writes the Times:

Quora still exists primarily in its Silicon Valley echo chamber. The users who wield the most power seem intent on keeping it that way. Too often, once users outside that inner circle begin to make a mark — such as garnering deserved up votes too easily, or by questioning methodology and moderation — a backlash quickly ensues.  The less powerful users find themselves down voted to the point of having their answers collapsed into oblivion.  Then, they are aggressively pursued and forced to defend their subsequent contributions.

Social Times makes a convincing argument that Quora can't scale because it doesn't want to change the platform's negative dynamics, and in fact is working against the best interests of its own site. Upvotes to that.

Mr. Roth, literary lion. (Photo: flickr.com/cdrummbks)

Like any good high school English teacher, Wikipedia requires writers to cite sources. The site can't have the subject of an article merely leap in and say, "NUH-UH." How would they ever write anything negative about anyone, were it otherwise? Winona Ryder might like to edit that business about shoplifting right out of her biography, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

And that is why Philip Roth had to publish an open letter to Wikipedia--in the New Yorker--to get the crowd-created encyclopedia to admit that his book, The Human Stain, was probably not based on the life of literary critic Anatole Broyard. (In the course of his lengthy rebuttal, Mr. Roth refers to it as a "falsity," based upon "the babble of literary gossip.")

At first, he "petitioned" Wikipedia "to delete this misstatement, along with two others," through an "official interlocutor." The response:

My interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

Outrage! Pistols at dawn! And so Mr. Roth was forced to produce an incredibly detailed accounting of just how poorly he knew Mr. Broyard, and just how utterly the novel was based on the life of someone else entirely:

It is this [incident] that inspired me to write “The Human Stain”: not something that may or may not have happened in the Manhattan life of the cosmopolitan literary figure Anatole Broyard but what actually did happen in the life of Professor Melvin Tumin, sixty miles south of Manhattan in the college town of Princeton, New Jersey, where I had met Mel, his wife, Sylvia, and his two sons when I was Princeton’s writer-in-residence in the early nineteen-sixties.

However, it does appear that Mr. Roth can now rest assured, because his open letter was sufficient to meet Wikipedia's sky-high standards of evidence. The article in question now includes the following passage:

In a 2012, Roth wrote an open letter to Wikipedia, after his efforts to correct this entry were thwarted because he was told he did not have a secondary source for his inspiration. He was responding to claims, given prominence in this entry that Kakutani and other critics have incorrectly speculated that the book was inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard, a writer and New York Times literary critic.^[5][6][7] However, Roth has repeatedly said these opinions are false. Roth explained that he had not learned about Broyard's ancestry until after starting to write The Human Stain.^[8]

Woe unto those of you unable to, on a moment's notice, bring such an august institution as the New Yorker to bear on your literary tiffs.

Internet Week 2012.

Sounds like changes are coming to that staple of the Silicon Alley social calendar, Internet Week New York. Crain Communications--the company behind publications like AdAge and Crain's New York--has made a "strategic investment" in the festival. What's more, the publishing conglomerate will be taking a role in the event itself.

An unlikely marriage, to say the least.

According to an announcement, Crain and the Internet Week team will "grow the festival under a shared vision," but Crain will be taking over day-to-day management.

The press release also says that Crain will "leverage its strong editorial heritage and media expertise to add a robust offering of premium programming and content to the festival’s lineup." It's hard to imagine an old-line powerhouse like Crain adopting some of Internet Week's less traditional planning procedures, like relying on crowd-sourcing for a festival lineup. That just feels a little too... seat of the pants.

Say Internet Week's cofounders:

“For five years we’ve supported and worked closely with New York’s thriving Internet community to create the world’s largest crowd-sourced Internet festival,” said Davies and Vogel, co-founders of Internet Week NY. “We’re thrilled and proud to partner with Crain, an organization with a deep and storied editorial history, to grow and further build the community and festival.”

We'll see what all this means in May 2013, when Internet Week rolls around once more.

We hope Crain's involvement doesn't mean the end of sissy bounce parties under the brand banner?

Mr. Tao (article.wn.com)

There are tons of places where you can complete small online tasks for cash--Fiverr, for example, where you can post tasks you're willing to complete for $5, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, where you can get paid a few pennies for taking online surveys, among other mini jobs.

But some people aren't looking to earn money. Some people are looking to earn porn.

For those enterprising individuals, Extra Lunch Money (NSFW) exists.

Extra Lunch Money has partnered with a third party crowdsourcing platform (though they specifically asked not to be named). Users can complete microtasks--like, ironically, flagging images that are inappropriate or contain adult content--and in turn earn credits that they can redeem for porn on Extra Lunch Money, a website for homemade XXX media.

"Think Etsy for homemade adult content," clarified Ben Tao, cofounder of Extra Lunch Money, of the site's user-submitted model.

Back in February, we told you about Offbeatr, a Kickstarter for porn--but we also called for more pornified startups. So thank you, Mr. Tao, for answering our plea.

"By motivating users with ‘porn’ they contribute work that improves search results, helps companies create better products, and even prevents unwanted penis photos from showing up in people’s news feeds," said Mr. Tao in a press release.

Sounds like a win-win to us.

Mr. Mankins (Google+)

Crounty, a new venture from Fast Company CTO Matt Mankins that takes its name from a portmanteau of "Crowd" and "Bounty," launched on Wednesday for one simple reason: Sometimes you need help from the crowd to locate talented programmers or trusted subletters, and sometimes the things you need help with are so important that you're willing to pay a bounty for them. Crounty is a platform that lets you do just that.

Mr. Mankins told Betabeat that the idea for Crounty was inspired by a project out of DARPA called the Red Balloon Challenge, where DARPA offered $50,000 to the team that could locate five red balloons randomly placed throughout the United States. The winning team, based out of MIT, used the power of social networks (and cash bounties) to find all of the red balloons.

"They agreed to split the $10,000 [per balloon] so that the person who finds the balloon gets $5,000, the person who referred them would get $2,500, the person that referred them would get $1,250 and so on. By using that strategy they were able to find and locate the balloons the fastest," Mr. Mankins told Betabeat by phone. "Crounty applies that principle and gives users that incentive to perpetuate a message closer to where they think someone can fulfill it. So in the case of looking for a job, I know someone who is a Drupal developer or programmer, so I’m more likely to send a message to them because they might actually know someone who could do a job. Crounty is a mechanism for doing that."

In his role as CTO at Fast Company, Mr. Mankins found it incredibly difficult to hire programmers, so he and his team hacked Crounty together in about 24 hours. Crounty is not officially affiliated with Fast Company, but Mr. Mankins is employing the tool to help hire new personnel at the magazine.

What's impressive is that this project, which initially came together over one weekend, already has a functioning business model. According to the site, "Once you confirm that the bounty has successfully been claimed, Crounty divides your $100 bounty up as follows: $50 goes to the person that gave you what you were looking for, $25 went to the person that referred them, $12.50 went to the person that referred them, and so on, with the remainder going to the Crounty.com service."

Crounty has only been around for two days, but Mr. Mankins said people have already signed up to utilize the crowd to rent out a Boston condo and find a set of very specific lawn chairs, among other things.

Challenge: Good AC on the A/C please

Crowdsourced fund raising platforms are in vogue right now. We've written a lot about the growing success of Kickstarter and yesterday we posted about Quirky raising a $16 million B round. Today Peter Kafka reports that ChallengePost has raised $4 million.

In a way a ChallengePost is an inversion of the Kickstarter model. The two year old start-up helps companies and non-profits run "challenges" that pay prizes to the crowd for solving problems. Investors include betaworks, Delicious’ Joshua Schachter and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis.

The company is looking to expand from a two man operation to a 14 person team, just another sign that tech companies with venture money in the bank could be the one bright spot left in a double dip recession.

So far ChallengePost has offered more than $40 million in prizes and is being used by Michele Obama and the City of New York. Right now the MTA is offering $15,000 in prizes through the site to software developers who can use city data to create apps that will improve the transit system. But wait, that not all. One lucky grand prize winner will also receive:

• Custom 5’ Subway Sign by Underground Signs ($325.00)
• iMac and iPad Cases by NYC Subway Line ($60-$70)
• Rug of your choice from Concord Global ($40-$125)
• Subway T-Shirt by Okey-Dokey ($20.00)

Hmmm, you know what might actually attract great developer talent?A free, unlimited Metrocard. For life.

Kickstarter's Fred Benenson and Yancey Strickler put together some great data on what the company has been up to for its first two years. So far more than 26,000 projects have been launched on Kickstarter and 44 percent have been successfully funded. It funded 1,044 projects in its first year and 1,044 in just the month of June, 2011. Music is the leading category, followed by film/video, art, theater and publishing.

The amount of money flowing through Kickstarter is accelerating rapidly. It raised $50 million in its first two years of existence and $10 million in just the last ten weeks. For the curious reader, here are the 10,000 successful projects compressed into a 5:30 minute video. Kickstarter is currently still sorting through all project submissions by hand, but it looks like we might have to eat a little crow on that whole - DIY doesn't scale thing...

Crown Prince

Here's a new one for the startup kiddies. The New York Times took a spin through SXSW, and discovered a digital elite that needed some deflating.

The technocracy, according to Anand Giridharadas, is the new aristocracy. "Like aristocracies past, it has its own rituals and symbols and practices, and it conceives of itself as uncynically serving the best interests of mankind. Like aristocracies past, it seeks to remake the remainder of humanity in its image. It reaches into the innards of our consciousness to shape what we believe, how we spend our days, how we love and reason and remember."

What kind of anthropological gems did the NYT discover about this breed of mind controlling machine freaks while exploring through the wilds of Austin? "When listening to this music, the technocrats dance in their own way. You will seldom see two technocrats dancing together, as the old-fashioned and the young and lusty do elsewhere. Technocrats tend to dance facing forward, solo, eyes on the band, spared of having to overcome physical awkwardness."

Geez. Someone needs to get out to a General Assembly happy hour.

These technocrats aren't just bad dancers, they are also amoral, algorithmic geeks. Giridharadas attended a panel on crowdsourcing hosted by Kickstarter's Fred Benson. Panelist and professor Jonthan Zitrain raised some questions about the ethical ambiguities of distributed labor. "These are moral questions, not algorithmic ones," wrote Giridharadas. "Amid the dancing and feasting and networking at SXSW, they drizzled like rain on the parade."

Many New York startups, like Jumo and Catchafire, apply this maxim to the non-profit causes working for the greater good. As for the rest, they are focused on building a business that solves concrete problems, not ignorant or dismissive of the world's larger moral quandaries.