The Power of Crowds: Why People Care What Others Think

In a world dominated by expert opinions and algorithm-driven content, there’s something fundamentally human about wanting to know what others think. Whether we admit it or not, we’re drawn to understand the collective mindset. There’s wisdom in crowds. While large groups may not always converge on absolute truths (in fact, many truthful views begin as contrarian positions), they provide something equally valuable: comfort and context. Being part of a group, understanding its thoughts and values, creates a sense of safety and belonging that’s deeply wired into our social nature. Even when we disagree with mainstream opinions, understanding them helps us navigate social landscapes and provides reference points for our own thinking. This isn’t mere conformity—it’s about contextualizing our experiences within the broader human narrative. ...

Date: May 12, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

Value Add of AI: Generation as Distribution

The Evolution of AI Value The first wave of generative AI focused primarily on content creation - ChatGPT writing articles, Midjourney generating images, essentially replacing traditional production roles. However, as these technologies mature, their greatest value might well shift towards distribution and personalization rather than raw production. From RSS to Recommender Systems The evolution of content distribution reveals how technology repeatedly transforms information access. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) represented an early attempt to solve content discovery, providing a pull-based system where users subscribed to feeds they cared about. ...

Date: May 8, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

A Practical Guide to SEO with Claude

SEO Guide: Implementation & Best Practices Table of Contents Search Engine Basics Technical Implementation On-Page Optimization Off-Page Strategies Modern Approaches Analytics & Tools What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization improves website visibility in organic search results. Three core processes determine rankings: Crawling Process and Timeframes Search engines discover pages by following links. New websites typically take 4-6 weeks for complete indexing. Factors affecting speed include site structure, server response time, and internal linking. The more efficiently your site is structured, the faster search engines can discover and index your content. ...

Date: May 7, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

Interesting Reads

Here’s a list of articles that I founding interesting. I’ve attached the original article / transcript for easy refernece as well. Gary Tan on Manus: The New General-Purpose AI Agent Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOYSDqJdiro Usable AI agents are finally here from deep research platforms out of OpenAI and Google to similar tools from XAI and DeepSeek. Joining the competition now is Manus, a brand new agentic AI platform that has taken the world by storm. ...

Date: April 1, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

User Needs & Opportunities

When you want to look for user pain points, go to a bar in the middle of the week, look for the most desparate looking person and buy them a beer. They’d probably have something substantial to talk about. While I don’t usually go to bars during weekdays, I’ve found some similar ways of identifying user needs, mostly through conversations or online forums. This is a running document of the user needs or pain points that I’ve found to be interesting. Perhaps some of them will turn out to be viable business oppportunities. ...

Date: March 25, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

Smart Expense Tracker

The Smart Expense Tracker with Auto-Categorization is a cloud-native application built on AWS serverless architecture. The system automates the tedious process of expense tracking by leveraging AWS services to process receipts, categorize transactions, and provide financial insights. The application offers several key features including receipt scanning and data extraction using AWS Textract, automatic expense categorization with AI (using AWS Bedrock), comprehensive expense tracking, budget setting with automated alerts via SNS, and financial report generation in CSV or PDF formats. ...

Date: March 21, 2025 | Author: Terry Chen

Towards Differentiable Quality - Content Synthesis

Interactive chat interface with multiple AI agents, enabling dynamic conversation flows and specialized problem-solving capabilities.

Date: December 28, 2024 | Author: Terry Chen

LLM Enhanced Recommendation and Search

Content recommendation system leveraging embedding similarity for personalized content recommendation (based on profile).

Date: December 21, 2024 | Author: Terry Chen

Exploring Unknown Unknowns - Textbook Interface

Interactive learning aids for reading comprehension and engagement.

Date: December 7, 2024 | Author: Terry Chen

Crowdlistening

Inspiring insights, amplifying voices. (crowdlistening.com) From Content Aggregation to Original Research Crowdlistening transforms large-scale social conversations into actionable insight by integrating llm reasoning with expanding model context protocol(MCP) capabilities. While extracting quantatitive patterns from realtime data is already an rewarding task, our focus is not just on analyzing content at scale, but rather conducting original research directly from raw social data, generating insights that haven’t yet appeared in established reporting. ...

Date: November 6, 2024 | Author: Terry Chen