[Note: This site is under construction. To receive notification of our official launch please register or send an email here.]
What makes us unique?
Aloha!
Kakool.com is a massive interactive entertainment resource (featuring tens of thousands of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, images and videos) and community with a kakool twist. Suppose you search for a favorite topic (dogs, perhaps, or Mike Myers). Naturally, you'll find a host of related blog entries, jokes, quotes, pictures, and anecdotes. That's pretty kool. But here's the twist: As soon as you start rating items, we can start recommending other items (based on your ratings) that you may also like!1 And, because this is a social networking site, you can easily find other Mike Myers fans or dog-lovers, which is pretty kool too. But, here's another twist: By comparing your ratings with those of other users we can help you find similar users, polar opposites, maybe even a soul mate.
1: This so-called collaborative filtering is used by businesses like amazon to recommend products to their customers. It is also used by sites like LastFM and Launchcast to recommend music to visitors. Click here for more information.
How does the recommendations system work?
To generate recommendations, we use an algorithm to predict your ratings for unrated items (recommendations are just lists of items that you have not yet rated, ordered by your predicted ratings).
First, the so-called adjusted cosine (or similar) method is used to estimate the similarity between every pair of (rated) items on the site.
Next, to predict your rating for a given item, your ratings are examined to find items that you have rated that are similar to that item. Finally a weighted average is used to generate your predicted rating.
Standard Features
In addition to the unique features outlined above, registered users can do everything they can do on other networking sites and more. Members can customize the layout of their pages and display almost any type of content, including:
-- RSS feeds (news and other content pulled in from other sites)
-- Images, videos and other content which they have posted
-- Most recent, top-rated, favorite &/or recommended images, videos and other content
-- Personal and group messages and event notifications
-- Blog and forum entries to which they have subscribed
-- New site content containing specified keywords
-- Network posts and personal news feeds (Sally got married, Joe posted a blog entry)
-- Friend lists and twitter updates (Andy is bored, Jessica is busy)
-- Similar (and opposite!) members
-- Internet widgets (including Google Gadgets)...
Users can also:
Browse...
-- tens of thousands of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, images and videos
-- member blogs, pages, and other content (including RSS feeds)
Share...
-- blogs, anecdotes, videos, pictures, jokes, and other items
-- image and video galleries
Network...
-- by finding other members with similar interests and/or tastes
-- by creating and joining groups and forums
Our Name
Kako'o (pronounced Kah-koh-oh) is a Hawaiian word whose meanings nicely encapsulate our mission:
-- we or ours (community)
-- aid / assist (friendship)
-- recommend (recommendations)
Our Team
Kakool.com CEO Jay Julian Payne is the founder of anecdotage.com (motto: Famous People, Funny Stories), a former Hollywood Correspondent on KPRI 102.1 and author of Celebrity Anecdotes. Jay is a fount of funny stories and useless trivia. To book him for interviews and other engagements please contact us here.
Kakool.com COO Craig Garrett is a programming wizard and founder of the forthcoming dating website Go Ahead Make My Date.
Kakool.com CTO Tony Holmes is a programming wizard and co-founder of crosswinds.net.
Our History
Kakool.com was launched in 2008 to add social networking and collaborative filtering features to anecdotage.com (motto: Famous People, Funny Stories), a rudimentary website devoted to the collection of anecdotes about Hollywood celebrities, as well as scientists, politicians, athletes, actors, artists, writers and other people of historical interest.
[Anecdotage.com was launched, in 2000, after it's founder was baffled by the results of an early Google search: "One wintry eve near the turn of the Millennium, a certain surf-a-holic scribe (your trivia-mad editor) searched google.com for a classic anecdote about Winston Churchill - and was astonished by the result: According to Google, the prefered search engine among the blognoscenti, the search in question 'did not match any documents.' Come again? Google -- a tool which might, for example, yield 150+ results for a search on 'Fork in the eye' or 'musical toilet seat' -- returned no results? Nevermind that the very word 'anecdote' stems from a Greek word (anekdota) meaning 'unpublished items'. A remarkable cyber-niche remained conspicuously unoccupied and, like Mother Nature, your editor abhors a vacuum..."]
Our Mission
Our mission (nicely encompassed by the chief meanings of the word which inspired our name) can be split into the following areas:
Assistance
Very generally, we aim to:
-- provide web-based social networking services which our members will find useful
-- continue, through our continuous improvement program, to provide enhancements to existing features and to add new features as technology evolves
Community
We aim to:
-- build and nurture a vibrant community
-- attract and cater to a wide variety of users
-- encourage members to contribute to the growth of our collection of entertaining information
Recommendations
We aim to:
-- provide our members with high-quality personalized content recommendations (including jokes, images, music, and videos)
-- provide our members with high-quality personalized social recommendations (including groups, forums, and other members)
Our Continuous Improvement Program
We are devout advocates of continuous improvement and constantly endeavor to improve and enhance this site. Among the projects we are planning:
-- Facebook/Myspace Profile Import: This will allow Facebook/Myspace users to import data & invite friends when signing up.
-- Member Page Layout Tool: This would allow users to further customize their pages.
-- Chat
-- Improved recommendations: We are currently using a fairly simple regression algorithm. Incorporating a more complex (model-based) collaborative filtering algorithm could improve recommendations (especially for users who have not rated many items) by up to 20%. Our current algorithm also calculates similarity coefficients for every pair of rated items. Unfortunately, as our user-base (and the number of ratings) rises, the table holding these coefficients will grow exponentially (if every item on the site had a rating, it would already contain more than a billion entries). We will soon need to switch this brute-force method for something more efficient.
-- Improved search: The advanced search tool should allow users to, say, filter by content warnings and sort by date.
-- Porter-Stemmer: Implementing the Porter-Stemmer algorithm, reducing each word in the index to its basic root or stem so that variations on a word (eg: 'blogs', 'blogger', 'blogging', 'blog') are considered equivalent when searching, would result in more relevant results.
Support Kakool
You can support Kakool in a number of ways:
-- Participate! A community is only as vibrant as its members. Meet and network with other users. Create and join groups and forums. Add, edit, rate, and flag jokes, images, and other content.
-- Visit our sponsors: Ad revenues help us fund our operations and continued improvements to the site.
-- Make a donation: Donations also help us fund our operations and continued improvements to the site. If you wish to donate, you may use the Donations block on the sidebar or send your donation to the address listed
here. A tax receipt will be issued automatically.
-- Invite your friends: You can invite your Facebook and MySpace friends or click here to send email invitations.
-- Spread the word: Send our content to your friends and family. Every item on the site has a "Forward this" link. You can also send links to blocks of content.. for example:
http://www.kakool.com/top/jokes
http://www.kakool.com/popular/anecdotes
http://www.kakool.com/new/images
http://www.kakool.com/jay/music/videos (music videos I have posted)
http://www.kakool.com/kakoolmom/india/images (my mom's pictures from India)
-- Send feedback: Vote in our usability polls or Contact us with suggestions.
