I’ve always been intrigued by the potential intersection of community-based, user-generated web platforms and algorithmic, machine-based ones. Wikipedia and Wikia have proven to do a pretty darn good job with the former. Search engines clearly do a great job with the latter. But until recently I hadn’t seen a great example of how the two approaches could come together, co-exist and truly complement each other to form something greater than the sum of the parts – which I believe is the future of the web. (Allow me to call it now: this is what we are going to come to call Web 3.0.)

Hunch.com‘s combination of community-sourced content and algorithmically-driven smarts is forging a promising path towards this potential future. And that’s why I’ve decided to join Hunch as a Board Member and an active advisor for the company’s ongoing development. As a result, I’ll be spending some time in Hunch’s NYC offices.

Hunch may be new to many of you; it was launched just 6 months ago. But the decision-making site, powered by a passionate community of active contributors, has already made significant progress and garnered respectable press. I’m impressed with the product, the Hunch community and the Hunch team, but mostly by the great potential I believe the company and its model have to intelligently fuse human input with machine smarts.

I’m looking forward to working closely with the Hunch team going forward (not to mention spending a lot more time in NYC!)