PeopleJam News & Highlights

Welcome, and pardon our dust! We’re in the middle of building PeopleJam.  Our goal is to help you find the best value for the time and money you spend on products and services to improve your life. We’ve just finished the first phase: a community tagging and ranking system where you can contribute, discover and rate life lessons learned from everyday experiences. Here are some popular examples:

Lessons from Iron Man

The Real Problem between Men and Women

Life Lessons from GTA IV

When you sign up at PeopleJam you can indicate your personal interests in your profile, then get recommendations for postings from around the site that match your interests.

And if you like being noticed for your contributions, we also feature our Most Active Members on our Home Page.

A web site can’t make you lose weight, reduce debt or have a great relationship. Only you can do that. But just getting through each day takes a lot of effort. We all could use a little help. So in the coming months you’ll find more tools at PeopleJam to help you find the best value for your life improvement investment. That’s our promise.

David Moss

VP, Product 

PeopleJam. Life, but Better.

Every week it seems that another company announces their debut in the “How To” video category on the web. Our experience of sites like VideoJug and HowCast is that the web is saturated in somewhat clever clips that teach you useful things like how to tie a bow tie or how to pole dance or how to unhook a bra with one hand.

What seems to be missing in all the hoopla is the category we call “how not to’. Literally, examples of how not to live your life. Daytime television has absolutely cornered the market on video that features screwups, disasters, warped relationships, odious personalities, obnoxious in-laws, resentful children and spiteful parents, nasty ex-whatevers, and in general life’s rich pageant of trainwrecks, misfits, f*ckups, slackers, slouches, boors and churls.

Where is the “Life How Not To” startup?

After all, most people learn by example. The more vivid the example, the better the lesson. An example of a spectacularly dysfunctional relationship or an egregiously self-absorbed idiot is going to sear the memory a bit more vividly than a pleasantly bland demo about how to fold a t-shirt.

Seeing an obvious gap in the market, we’ve decided to fill the void with programs of our own. Check out our True Confession video series where we feature a series of chuckleheads, nimcompoops and self absorbed posers who reveal the misguided thought process that led them to some spectacularly ill-informed decisions.

Watch and enjoy, but remember, these people are professional misfits. Don’t try this at home.

Go to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. Take a stroll down the biggest aisle in the shop. My guess is that you’d find yourself in the Self Help section. This vast corridor lined with dead trees in bright packaging purportedly contains the collected wisdom of experts in every subject ranging from fitness to diet to attitude and relationships and career management and more. The bookstore contains literally thousands of books on these topics. If you venture online to B&N.com or Amazon you’ll find many, many more.

In the face of massive overchoice, how does one make the right selection?

Advice is highly subjective. The value of the information is in the eye of the beholder. And you can’t really make a useful evaluation until after you’ve consumed the information. But the way self-help content is current packaged and sold requires you to make the purchase decision upfront. While this arrangement makes good sense for book publishers (who churn out volume after volume of advice on the same topic), it’s questionable whether this is the best deal for consumers.

For example, let’s suppose you are considering a diet. If you are a somewhat overweight, well, that puts you in good company along with 90+% of adult Americans. Nearly everybody can benefit from this information. But not everybody has the same body type, metabolism or lifestyle. So how do you go about finding the diet for you? Typically, via word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend. Or a testimonial in a magazine, Or a random stroll down the aforementioned aisle at Borders: perhaps you pick up the book with the best cover or a well known celebrity. In any case, what you haven’t done is any significant research into the matter of which diet is suitable for your own body type and metabolism, your current health factors and lifestyle, your exercise regimen, your medications or supplements.

Dieting is especially personal. Success or failure depend upon highly personal factors. And yet the current means of providing diet information is anything but personalized. It’s almost-but-not-quite random: a chance recommendation, a favorable review in a magazine you happened to peruse, an endorsement from a faded celebrity, or an enthusiastic testimonial from a friend who may have a completely different body type or lifestyle from you.

In sum, the information may be valid, but the mechanism for browsing and discovery is utterly out of date.

There’s got to be a better way.

We believe that there is a great opportunity to help people make better connections to the information and resources that will guide them on their quest for personal improvement. We believe that a responsive software platform can tailor its recommendations and deliver a much better result than an old fashioned bookstore. And we’re doing something about it. During the next couple of weeks, we will release the first version of a new software platform that will make recommendations and suggestions based on the information you share about yourself.

Ultimately, we would like to re-invent the category entirely: we don’t like the term “self help” very much.  We believe that the word “self” highlights a big problem with the self help category.  Every individual has to figure this stuff out by themselves through a cumbersome process of trial-and-error.   Instead of do-it-yourself, we propose an alternative: do it together. Our goal is to make the process of browsing and discovering personal growth content more communal, more supportive, more fun and rewarding. Stay tuned!

Admit it.  If you’re reading this, it’s because you find the idea of $1 million irresistibly appealing.   You read the headline and said, “Right on, a cool mil, I’m down with that.”    You want $1 million.  And who doesn’t?   Young people, old, women, men, persons of every race and creed would respond enthusiastically to the prospect of gaining a huge financial windfall.

And that’s not all.   People of every walk of life would admit to the enduring appeal of superb relationships, top notch health, more family time, more creativity, and a rewarding and meaningful career.   Regardless of background, upbringing or circumstances, we all want the same things in life.

It turns out that we are more united by what we want than who we are.   When you take our hopes and aspirations into account, it turns out that we have a lot more in common with total strangers than you might think.  Next time you stand in a crowded subway, or sit in traffic on a congested freeway,  our linger mindlessly in the checkout line at the drug store, take a look at the people around you.   We all want the same things.

Well, that’s obvious, right?   But it turns out that in real life, it’s not quite so obvious.  If it were, we’d pull together to help each other achieve more.   But that’s not what happens.  Sometimes we get in each other’s way.  Often the people around us are not exactly supportive of our boldest aspirations.   For instance, our family and closest friends sometimes react in ways that diminish our zeal to achieve great things.    They hold us back  in a variety of ways, including scorn, indifference, neediness and guilt trips.   They try to talk us out of our wild dreams, telling us they are talking sense.   If this sounds absurd, then you should be grateful because you enjoy extraordinary relationships with supportive people.   If this sounds familiar, then you know how isolated you can feel when the people closest to you try to crush your dream.

Now there’s a new source of support for those who have big dreams.   The advent of social sofware on the web presents a terrific opportunity to establish a new type of relationship with people who share goals and life dreams in common.   Regardless of age, background, ethnicity or geography,  individuals can connect online on the basis of shared aspirations.

Keep watching PeopleJam.com.   During the next few weeks we are going to introduce a new version of our software that is designed to help people make this type of connection.

If you have ideas, feedback or suggestions, please post them here.  I’d love to hear from you!

RT

Our shared aspirations can provide the basis for strong relationships.

This the company blog where you can peruse scintillating prose written by PeopleJam staff whom our Editor will never allow to become featured bloggers. Keep reading and you’ll soon discover why. Drop in for all that’s fit to print about the internal workings here at PJ!