May 2006 Archives
Monday is Memorial Day and these links have nothing do with that.
It's the Friday before memorial day and you've got better stuff to do than read what I've got to say, so here are some good links from the week for you to enjoy.
- marktd: PSFK's answer to Digg. While PSFK is on vacation marktd exists for everyone to get their trend fill (and it will continue to exist for that after they return).
- "24-Hour Sweaty People": A photographer friend of mine asked me recently what graveyard shift job I thought he should do a photo essay of. My answer was 24-hour gym workers. This New York Times article is all about spending one whole day (or actually one half of two days) in a New York City Gym.
- "The Audience as Enemy (Reprise)": A newspaper managing director said bloggers are losers (basically), Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics responds "Newspaper readers are people. Bloggers are people. Often, astonishing though this apparently seems to many who should know better, they are the same people. If you're going to hold your paying customers in contempt at least don't stand up in a public forum and crack jokes about it. As I've said before and will surely say again...when your audience is your enemy, the game is already over." So true.
- "The Changing Media Business Model": This post from Forrester analyst Charlene Li was actually going to be an entry on it's own (and still may be). It's a very well written "state of the media." I especially like this explanation: "Media companies in the past derived their value from either: 1) their distribution channel; or 2) the content they created. I believe that in the future media companies will generate the bulk of their value from serving their ability to aggregate and serve audiences better than the competition."
- "Life in the Fast-Food Lane: Frank Bruni traveled cross-country eating fast food and writes about it for the New York Times. Don't miss his top 10.
- "Consumers are the New Medium": Scott Karp sums it up quite nicely: "Consumers are the new medium for marketing 2.0  they are the medium and the message."
- "Can We Please Kill This Meme Now": Steven Johnson rails against the argument that the web is the end of browsing and thus the end of serendipity. A great read.
That's it. Have a good Memorial Day. Do a little BBQing for me.
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Some of the most interesting 'attention services' out there are the ones no one would ever label as such.
This week Nike and Apple announced a very cool partnership. If you buy Nike+iPod Sport Kit you can make your shoes and MP3 player talk to each other. Basically what happens is you put a sensor in your Nike+ shoes and attach a special device to your iPod nano and you can track your distance, speed and all that good stuff. The really cool part comes when you get home and plug your iPod in, which downloads all your data to the Nike+ site where you can track your progress. Here's some screenshots:
After my initial 'wow' reaction, I got to thinking about this as a kind of attention data. Essentially what Nike and Apple are doing is allowing you to capture some of your data and layering services on top of it. The value is immediate: You get to examine data that would otherwise be difficult to record, which gets me to the more geeky side of attention (I say that with the utmost respect).
I really believe these kind of services have to be leveraged as models. What better companies are there to help understand what the mass consumer wants than Nike and Apple? Both are leaders and innovators in their industries who have reached their place of power by making an active effort to understand their customers. As Ed Batista wrote just today on the AttentionTrust blog: "I've heard Felix Miller, CEO of Last.fm, describe his enterprise as an 'attention service' running on 'attention data,' and I think it's important to use those terms, to make the connection between our attention and all of these new services--not just music discovery systems, of course--explicit and crystal-clear."
With that said, what are some other 'attention services' that we might not otherwise label as such?
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My latest marketing project: Creating my online identity.
Blog networks are all the rage. 9rules just asked for another round of submissions and recieved 700 entries. That's a pretty big number for a geeky blog network. What makes 9rules special is who you're associated with, a 9rules badge has come to mean quality and their careful selection process helps them maintain this position. Problem is, that kind of quality control doesn't exist everywhere.
On a few occasions I've been asked to join blog networks. I've turned it down every time for one simple reason: I don't want to be associated with a group unless I have absolute belief in what they represent and the quality of product they put forth. Put shortly, I'm incredibly controlling of my online image. More and more lately I've been thinking of myself as a brand that needs to be managed carefully. NoahBrier.com becomes the online hub of that brand. The way the site looks and everything written here becomes a reflection of me.
That's why I'm so careful about who I associate myself with. Nike wouldn't align itself with a brand or charity it didn't absolutely believe in, so why should I? My online identity is incredibly important and will most likely travel with me for much of my life. The fact that I control the top Google spot for my name is powerful. I am defining myself.
I expect that this idea will become increasingly important as more and more information ends up online. Think about kids growing up now with Myspace, Facebook and whatever else accounts. Much of their life is being documented from a young age. That means when they're looking for a job and are Google 10 years from now all that stuff will show up. This doesn't have to be a problem, but it's certainly something to be aware of. I personally stand with Bryan over at Avalonstar who wrote: "When it comes to jobs, let your blog be your screener. If you run into potential employers similiar to those Kristine had to deal with, then screw ‘em, there are better places out there that’ll have more respect for you."
The problem is many people can't afford to take that attitude. Unless you're fairly confident with the online identity you've created it's hard to take this angle. That's why it's so important to be aware of what's out there. If you're in high school you should go out and start a site with your name as the title. Put whatever information you want associated with you.
Don't let others define you. Define yourself!
When I had this conversation with Kareem a few weeks ago his question was, "what about the people who write bad stuff about you?" My answer: "Bring it on." The wonder of the internet is it proves that there's no such thing as bad press. As long as a detractor includes a link they're upping your pagerank and if they've got a comments section, you've even got an opportunity to defend yourself on their site. Returning to the branding idea: The best brands are the ones that inspire both the positive and negative. If you're writing something that someone feels passionate enough about to write a response then you're doing something right (assuming you're not just viciously attacking others).
It's especially interesting to bring the "Brand of Me" back to the current attention debate. In discussing some comments by Esther Dyson in the WSJ Andrew Keen wrote: "Dyson says that the Internet in 2016 will come to reflect our hunger for attention. It will be electronic proof of our existence. To misquote Descartes, "I can be googled, therefore I am." The future of media, therefore, for Dyson, is partly a Darwinian struggle to rank higher than others, and partly an existential struggle to prove one's own identity."
Certainly part of why I have this website is to attract attention to myself. However, I think it's a mistake to call online identity creation only an act of attention. In the real world it's easy to shape your identity. People see you, talk to you, shake your hand, interact with you. All of these things play into their opinion of you. Online those physical interactions aren't possible. Online you can be anything. That's part of what attracted so many to the internet in the first place. More and more, however, people are choosing to be themselves online, not someone else. It is becoming an extension of us and as an extension we must be aware that it is also a reflection.
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Lots of stuff (especially about Guns N' Roses) that I couldn't fit anywhere else.
I have a more serious entry in the works, but there were a couple things I've been meaning to write about but haven't gotten around to and I figured I'd throw them into one post.
- I went to see Guns N' Roses at Hammerstein Ballroom on Sunday and it was amazing as can be expected. Axl is back down to fighting weight and Sebastian Bach of Skid Row fame even joined him for a song. When I told a coworker about the show he had the best description I've heard yet of this current incarnation of the band: "So basically you saw a GNR cover band fronted by Axl Rose." Yes, yes I did. And it was amazing.
- While at said Guns N' Roses show I was standing next to a guy in a leather jacket with his arms crossed who refused to even clap between songs. This guy was totally killing my mood with his "too cool for school" attitude. A few minutes later my girlfriend tells me it's Constantine from American Idol. Argh . . .
- You know when you tell someone something that you know they don't like so they'll like it less. That's "haterade." (Another quote via a coworker.)
- I went to the Pheedo RSS roundtable dinner the other night. Much of the discussion revolved around how to educate the public about RSS. My thoughts: No more educating needs to be done. Enough people know what RSS is and if the user experience weren't so terrible they'd teach everyone else. Of course that's to say that there will be anything to educate. If RSS really succeeds it will be completely invisible (which it is in many ways already).
- I also think trying to think of a new name for RSS is a waste of time.
- Akismet recently came out for MT and it's really helping me with what was again becoming a seriously big comment spam problem.
- Last but not least, Customer-Made is an incredibly in-depth look at brand democratization/co-creation. Give it a read.
That's it. Got another, more serious, post on deck . . . maybe today.
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I'm going to be away for the next few days, so here are some links to keep you busy.
In the next two days I will be in Chicago, New York and Washington DC. Should be interesting . . . Also means I won't be around this site, so let me leave you with plenty to read while I'm gone. (As usual, these links come from my Sidenotes, you can subscribe to the feed here.)
- Google release Google Trends, basically you can search for a term and see its popularity over the last few years. You can also easily compare one search term to another. Simple but a nice addition to the Google roster. (Just so everyone knows, Noah Brier doesn't come up when you search for it, what a shame . . . )
- Tyger is an absolutely beautiful multimedia video based on a William Blake poem called "The Tiger".
- "Cookie monster searches deep within himself and asks: Is me really monster?" Poor cookie monster, just read what he says: "When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can't stand looking in mirrorâ€â€fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don't think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way."
- "Why Don't Ad Agencies Advertise?" That is a fine question. They're all into PR, but very few actually go for the big bucks they recommend to their clients.
- Welcome to the New Dollhouse is a great article about how children, especially young girls are playing The Sims instead of playing with dolls. It's a really interesting way for children to experiment with identity and unlike dolls, the game actually has built in feedback mechanisms.
- Douglas Rushkoff takes religion to task. Not going to say much about this one, I'll just let you read it yourself.
- In Am I Condemning Myself Bryan Veloso tells the story of a friend of his who lost a job because her potential employer felt as though the image she put forward on her blog was not a good one. Bryan's take is an interesting one: "When it comes to jobs, let your blog be your screener. If you run into potential employers similiar to those Kristine had to deal with, then screw ‘em, there are better places out there that’ll have more respect for you." I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I'm very controlling of my online identity and believe it's important for everyone, especially young people, to understand that everything they put online makes up their image. That's not to say don't be honest and post what you want, just that you should be aware that people may see it, for better or for worse.
- Time's big article about the Nintendo Wii. I have no clue whether they'll make inroads on XBox/Playstation, but I can respect that they've innovated based on an insight (what's keeping many groups from playing video games is the inaccessibility of the controllers).
Well, that's it. If anyone's got any comments on any of the articles, feel free to drop 'em in the comments.
Update (5/11/06): I don't normally do this (I usually only link to things I've read), but in an effort to keep things interesting, here are the tabs I have open at the moment in case you get through all this and want more to read: The Lucent Logo Legacy: Long Live the Big Red Donut, The Things You Never Hear, We're All Stellar Designers, Now, Being a Good Judge of Personality, As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching and The Best and the Interesting. Like I said, haven't read any of them yet, so let me know if they're worthwhile. Now I'm really out. Bye.
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How can it be that nothing has changed about search since 1998?
Microsoft's newest version of Internet Explorer will finally include a built in search box (like all the other browsers out there). Unlike the other browsers, however, IE will default to MSN not Google. Here's a description of the IE7 situation from a New York Times article (via Michael Gartenberg):
The new browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors. The move, Google claims, limits consumer choice and is reminiscent of the tactics that got Microsoft into antitrust trouble in the late 1990's.
Everyone knows Google, everyone uses the search engine, but how strong is their position? If every IE user in the world used MSN for search, that would probably put a pretty big dent in Google's market share (considering IE accounts for over 80 percent of the browser market). Yeah, Google's got lots of other stuff going on, but the core of their company is the engine and the marketing they sell as a result of it. Without that, where would they be? More interesting, to me, though, is that since Google revolutionized search with pagerank, there have not really been any serious advancements. It's been the other engines catching up and then everyone just scurrying for position. To be honest I don't even know if Google's the best engine out there since its the only one I ever use.
The whole issue was summed up well in an interview I read with Alex Galloway. "At the end of the day Google is still a modern answer to a postmodern question: it is a massive, centralized hub enlisted to parse and catalog the universe of human endeavor." It's an idea I've gone back and forth with, and search is certainly a good way of finding information in a giant database. But with a structure as unique as the internet, how is it possible that there's only one point of entry?
Update (3/9/06): Josh Porter wrote a little about this topic in an article titled "Google and Microsoft Understand the Power of the Default".
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Google wants to help you funnel the world's data straight into your brain. Or something like that.
One of the things that keeps coming up in conversations is this little feature buried deep in Google's personalized search. Assuming you have a Google account when you go to Google.com you should see a link in the top right corner that says "search history," click it. That is a saved archive of Google searches you did while signed in. That's not really what we're interested in, though. In the lefthand nav you should see a link that says "Trends." Click that. Now we're getting somewhere. What you should be looking at are some charts and graphs that describe how you use Google. Again, while interesting, not exactly what we're looking for at the moment, that is until you scroll down to the bottom of the page. Where you should see this:
"Top gaining queries related to your searches" seems innocent enough, until you really start to think about what that is. Google is taking all my search data, comparing it to everyone else's search data and making recommendations on other searches I may find interesting. That's some pretty badass collaborative filtering.
Think about that power for a second? How many people use Google? How many searches do they do? When you start to think about the mass it has some pretty amazing potential and may just speak to some future plans of Google. After all, helping you wade through the information you're bombarded with everyday certainly seems to fall under the category of "[organizing] the world's information and [making] it universally accessible and useful". This, by the way, is the definition of attention data. Google is recording what you spend attention to on their site, it's not so complicated when you can see a simple example like this.
Now for the downside, you don't own a bit of it. Yeah you have to sign in to get it, but it's not yours to keep. You can't share that information with Yahoo! and see what you have in common with searchers on that engine. Nope. It's stuck.
That, of course, is where AttentionTrust comes in. They believe, and rightly so, that you should own your own data. What you put in, you should be able to take out. If you want to take your Google searches and share them with Yahoo!, why should anyone stop you? Their recorder allows you to save a local copy of all your online clicks and keep it for a time when you might want to share it with someone else.
Unfortunately there aren't that many options for gaining serious value from your data yet. Root is working on some visualizations and exchanges that are starting to tap into the power of your data and Steve Gillmor is taking a different tack with Gesture Bank. But neither are there yet (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).
The point is, to understand attention you have to look elsewhere. To sites like Last FM who record all the songs you listen to and offer lots of services around that data (here's my page if you're interested).
Anyway, the real point of this post was to share that Google thing and now I'm rambling, so I'm going to bring it to a close.
Thoughts?
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Maybe, just maybe, all that really matters about the internet is transparency . . .
I was sitting outside at lunch today and I had a kind of crazy though pop into my head. Maybe there's nothing new about the internet, it's just more transparent. Now hear me out because I am working through this idea as you read it.
I think the most important effect of the internet thus far is that it's exposed the network. For the first time everyone can understand what a network is and how it works. Now that we do, we're beginning to take that knowledge and exploit it.
Collective intelligence isn't really new is it? Desire lines are the unpaved paths that people wear down over time. In a way, does that represent collective intelligence? What about the "ask the audience" feature on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Yeah, it's post internet, but the idea is not revolutionary. When people can contribute to the group anonymously, without worry of social repercussions, honest answers will emerge. When aggregated, those honest answers will represent collective intelligence. (Like I said, I'm working through this as I write, please tell me I'm wrong if I am.)
None of the communication aspects of the internet are really 'new', they're mostly just faster. That's not to say their cultural implications aren't completely different, just that I don't know how revolutionary they really are.
Rather, what's revolutionary is that we now understand how things work. For instance, I've been thinking a lot lately about how information gets to me. The first stop is generally a specialist, someone who knows and reads a lot about a particular topic. From there it gets passed down the ladder by individuals who are less and less specialized. I thought about this pattern first in blogs, but really its the same way a newspaper works. A number of writers contribute to the business section of a newspaper for instance. They all have areas of interest/specialization where they consume as much information as possible. It's then the less specialized business editor who aggregates the writing of the individual authors, deciding what gets used in that day's paper.
While I may have understood that process in some way, it never occurred to me in the way it has since the network was exposed by the internet. The other day Brian Dear wrote about how he's now getting news before the outlets he used to rely on. He credits the collective intelligence of Digg and the gang with helping him beat them to the punch. In the comments, Andy Baio (of Waxy.org) writes: "The collective will almost always beat the individual, if the software is engineered in a way to surface that information well."
I think that nails it, the collective beating the individual's not a new thing, it's engineering the software to make that information rise to the surface that's tough. Of course the technology is a big part, but I think what's more important is that we are beginning to understand how information flows through networks. That's exciting stuff.
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Now that everyone has their own webpage they want to decorate them with your content.
Everything's shrinking on the internet. I'm not talking about file size or site depth, mind you, but rather the essence of what makes up the web. While we once discussed websites, we now discuss entries or even links. We're finally beginning to accept that the web is a network made up of individual nodes of information. While there are clusters, they are really secondary to those singular elements.
What happened to precipitate this change? Put shortly: Google. Like most revolutions online in the last few years, the search engine that could played a huge part in the restructuring of how we understand the internet. When you search for a term you don't often arrive at a home page, but rather somewhere deeper in the site's structure with the exact information you're looking for. Once blogs rose to prominence, with their entries and permalinks (individual URLs for every entry), the shift was on in full force. Part of the reason blogs have grown so quickly is because of the juice they get from Google. When you write about lots of different things and have individual pages for it all, people are bound to run across it.
Now people are beginning to think of individual pages as fragmented entities thanks to Myspace and the gang. Widgets are the new thing: A little bit of code that someone can add to their site. It could describe their personality via Blogthings, display their photos via Flickr or show the latest video of someone lighting a fart on fire via YouTube. The point is that a user can take it and put it anywhere they want. It's theirs to play with, though it often holds your logo.
Widgets are the new email-to-a-friend. It's no longer good enough to just give people an option to share something with a few. Now that they have their own pages they want to share it with the masses. So ask yourself, how are you helping them?
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I recommend two SF restaurants and one article I wrote.
Just got back from San Francisco and don't have much to report at the moment. Just wanted to make two food recommendations to anyone on their way out (or if you live there and don't know about them, I guess).
Isa
3324 Steiner Street (Isa on Citysearch)
Delicious food, family style with small plates. Really reasonably priced. Interesting combinations including Halibut with beets and Asparagus with pine nuts (as I remember).
Cafe Kati
1963 Sutter Street (cafekati.com)
This was a hotel recommendation (I stayed at the Majestic). California cuisine with some Asian flare. Really solid. A bit on the pricey side.
Also, for those interested, I've got an article over at iMedia that I cowrote with the president of Renegade titled "What to Expect from CGC". CGC apparently is what the cool kids are calling "consumer generated content" . . . who knew. Anyhow, here's the summary: "Renegade execs predict that the branding opportunities of the future lie in filtering, repackaging and ultimately paying for quality consumer-generated content." Go read the whole thing. Now!
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Hi, I'm 