May 2007 Archives
Naked New York has a blog . . . Woohoo!
Over the last few months I've been working on a semi-secret project. Just about the first day I got to Naked I started working on a blog for our New York Office. Well, it's finally time to unveil it (since AdWeek did a bit of spoiling). Anyway, it's called House of Naked, it belongs to the New York Office of Naked Commications and I think it's pretty sweet.
Here's the entry I just posted over there explaining what the site is all about. As you'll see, it's a bit different than most other corporate blogs.
Well, it seems the cat's out of the bag. We've been putting together this site for a few months now and I guess it's just about ready for the prime time (or as just about ready as it will ever be). Part of the point of House of Naked is to continually refine and iterate, so I can't imagine it will ever actually be done.
With that said, we're pretty happy with what we've got at the moment and think it's worth doing a bit of explaining. You see, this site is a bit of an experiment in transparency. The aggregator (on the right side of the homepage) is actually pulling in links from across the web (blogs, del.icio.us, twitter and flickr). The basic idea is that the people who work here already do lots of blogging elsewhere. They post pictures and save links on other sites, so why not use that for our own site? This does two things I think, one it allows people to add content to the site without thinking about it and two, it gives this site some real personality. For the most part these are not run through some 'Naked filter', it's just us being us.
It's always struck me as slightly odd that companies try to make group blogs that have a single, 'corporate', voice. A large part of what makes a business run is the people who are part of it and those people don't all have the same personality (at least I hope not). Anyway, what I hope this will become is a place for people to bring their own thoughts, ideas and insights. To be honest, it's probably most interesting for us, but that's cool. If all this site turns out to be is a great tool for Naked, then we've accomplished something.
Anyway, that's enough from me. Welcome to the site. Feel free to poke around. If you find anything broken, please let us know. Thanks for coming by.
Oh, and big ups to Joe, Fangohr and Uncommon Projects for making this happen.
Just as a side note, I promise not to do a lot of cross-posting or any of that. Part of the wonder of the site is that I can contribute just by adding to this one. So please pop over to the House of Naked and if you've got any thoughts, leave them in the comments or drop me a line.
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A few random questions from my friend Jason.
A few weeks ago my friend Jason asked if I would mind answering a few questions for him on my blog. I agreed. Unfortunately (or fortunately) they turned out much more difficult than I imagined. So, after a few weeks of thinking, here they are (still basically half-baked).
1. Certain people were highly offended when The New York Times purchased search keywords related to the Virginia Tech massacre, linking to the paper's coverage. Now, I can understand the outrage if a political candidate had bought the terms to shove an anti- (or even pro-) gun control message. Or if the University of Virginia had tried to encourage VT students to transfer. But the people were ostensibly searching for news, and news is what The Times provides. While perhaps it's beneath the Paper of Record, I'm not sure I see a breach of ethics. What's your point of view?
It doesn't really bother me. I'm with you, people are most likely searching for news and this is a piece of news. Anyway, profiting on someone else's misfortune is most certainly not a new phenomena. Newspapers ,and media generally, have been making money off disaster forever. It's funny, actually, just this morning I read this entry from my friend Josh. In it he quotes Gabe from Techmeme explaining that he's alright with the site being gamed because the real world is gamed. Josh goes on to point out something I think most people fail to realize on the web: There's not that much radically new social or cultural interaction going on. More than anything else, it's all be recorded and exposed to the world. To quote Josh directly, "a major feature of the Web is the recording of human behavior in its many forms. To a lesser extent is the creation of truly new behaviors."
I actually have this conversation with a lot of people specifically pertaining to blogs. At their most basic, blogs are far from revolutionary, they're a publishing platform not all that much different than any other. Rather it's the access, frequency, cost and a number of other factors that make the medium unique.
One more story before I finish answering this one. When I was in college there was a sudden trend of killing yourself in the library. Two or three people did it within a few weeks. One of my friends happened to be there and he took a picture. He then sold that picture to the New York Post. Now I'm not condoning the behavior and the paper didn't end up publishing the photo in the end, but it is an illustration of profiting off death.
2. For years, I laughed at the Poulan Weedeater Independence Bowl. But when I needed weeds eaten, I knew of only one brand. Saturday was the Kentucky Derby presented by Yum Brands. I don't really understand this one. Yum owns chains like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and Long John Silver's. Generating greater awareness of the corporate "restaurant system" can't do much for sales. So I guess their target is investors. Is this strategy common? Does it often work? Do you have Yum in your portfolio?
Um . . . I wish I could answer this one. Branding strategies specifically targeting investors is certainly a piece of the puzzle (just ask a big company like IBM or Microsoft). The Yum thing is quite peculiar, though, since in theory if they had named it after Long John Silver's savvy investors would have connected it to the parent brand anyway. I wonder if Yum has some other idea. I could keep pretending I have an answer to this question if you want . . .
3. I loved the way Roger Clemens announced he was coming back to the Yankees. Reminiscent of the 1987 Piper's Pit when Andre The Giant turned heel and tore off Hulk Hogan's shirt. In what other ways could the major professional sports use mid-1980s WWF gimmicks to increase excitement?
- Sparks and fire as NFL teams enter the field.
- John Madden gets hit by a strategically placed folding chair.
- Funny signs are handed out as fans enter the stadium.
- MLB Kilt Day ala Rowdy Roddy Piper.
- Pay-per-view Superbowl.
That's about all I got . . . anyone else have any thoughts on these?
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Got a bunch of little things to talk about so I figured I'd throw them all in one entry.
I'm just going to jump right into this one . . .
- First off a shout out to PSFK London. It's going on next week (Friday June 1), there's a ton of great people speaking (including two Naked folks and friends Tamara, Johnny, Russell and Amelia). I went to the New York one and it was honestly one of the best conferences I've been to. Instead of the normally boring chatter and useless stuff, there was genuine interestingness.
- Speaking of recommendations, went back to Hangawi on 32nd Street between 5th and Madison last night. It's a Korean vegetarian restaurant that's absolutely amazing. I'm definitely not vegetarian (far from it), but this place is absolutely amazing. If you go make sure to order the Emperor Rolls as an appetizer.
- Google hot trends came out in the last few days and its pretty amazing. It appears to give you a snapshot of what search trends are hot for the day, including a deeper page that shows you related searches, news, pages, etc. It's really a pretty amazing system and a serious clue in to how search starts to look a lot like intelligence when you aggregate enough people together. (Though, as Wendy kindly enough point out to me, these lists are often edited.)
- Real Costs is a very cool Firefox extension that shows you the emissions data when you're on sites like Orbitz. Pretty cool stuff.
- Chris Anderson has been kind enough to post his top five business books. Normally business books are boring and fairly useless after the first few chapters, but I may have to give his a try.
Last I'll leave you with a great video from Good Magazine (via Greg). Check out the Good channel on Yahoo! for lots more stuff, or for a racier one check out their video on internet porn (probably NSFW, though there's no actual nudity -- it's lots of skin).
Anyway, I leave you with "what advertisers are paying for your attention" . . . .
Have a nice day.
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Why refocusing on edge cases might be the best way to go.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with a few friends, one of whom works for the city of New York. She was talking about the smoking and trans fat bans here in New York and how a big part of the reason they exist is to be preventative. Health care follows a power curve: A small portion of the population drains the vast majority of the resources.
The idea of New York City's bans, then, is to turn around that situation and forcibly remove the most unhealthy aspects from the lives of the perpetually sick. It's an interesting strategy and I think it's a fundamental shift in thinking. As a society we have a tendency to treat symptoms, not causes. Just think about it: We have gum for bad breath, tylenol for headaches and, one of my pet peeves, fad diets. In the case of the last one, I was always seriously bothered by Atkins, for instance, because it didn't seem to teach people about calories (I've never read it and may be wrong). So rather than understanding the single most important factor in weight loss, people were eating a lot of cheese and then surprised when they gained weight again. (Just for the record since most of you probably don't know this, about four years ago I lost eighty pounds. I think this gives me some authority to speak on weight loss.)
Anyway, the point of all this is I've been feeling like all this stuff relates back to networks and Paretian distributions. My basic hypothesis (and this is very rough at the moment) is that we've spent the vast majority of time treating symptoms because we understood the world to be a bell curve where there was some giant average that most people fell in to. In that world, treating symptoms makes more sense because most of the people are kind of sick on occasion and just need a little Tylenol to get them through today because they'll be fine tomorrow. The thing is, that's not the world we live in. Rather, the vast majority of us are basically never sick and there are a few people who are constantly sick and draining resources. Rather than trying to treat the middle, then, organizations need to solve for the extreme.
In the article "Million-Dollar Murray" (which I just rediscovered . . . I knew I had read this someplace), Gladwell writes about abusive cops in LA. When the department charted out the complaints against cops they didn't get a bell curve with some average number of complains in the middle, rather they got a power curve: Most cops had 1 or 2 complains and a few of them had the majority of the rest. In the article Gladwell writes:
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren't working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department's troubles fell into a normal distribution, you'd propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middleâ€â€like better training or better hiringâ€â€when the middle didn't need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn't be nearly strong enough.
"The middle didn't need help," that's a fairly fundamental departure. Turns out homelessness works the same way, the vast majority of homeless people are only without a place to stay for a short period. It's only about 10 percent who are "the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problemâ€â€the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridgesâ€â€it's this group that we have in mind." In addition these people are taking up a disproportionate amount of resources. It's estimated New York City spends 62 million on about 2,500 perpetually homeless people.
So what do we do? We don't throw them on the streets, but we can reassess how we spend money. Just thinking about the homeless case, when you understand that you're spending 62 million on 2,500 people you start to wonder if there might be better ways to spend the money. By focusing time and resources on edge cases and extreme conditions we may find ourselves far more successful in dealing with the problems we face in a connected world.
I don't think that's a particularly useful conclusion, but I just needed to get some of this down. I've been thinking about how to apply this stuff non-stop lately and I'm sure you'll see more. If you have any thoughts or additions please leave them in the comments as usual.
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likemind is this Friday. Otherwise life is simply nuts.
Hey everyone, life has hit a crazy patch. Between working my ass off and trying to wake up at 6am to go the gym, there hasn't been a whole lot of time for anything else. Hopefully it will subside slightly by the middle of next week. Until then I apologize for the lack of updates.
With all that said, likemind is this Friday, May 18th and we're in 25 cities around the world (which is pretty insane). New ones include Beijing, Missoula (Montana) and Istanbul. You can check out all the cities at likemind.
In case you've never been/heard of it, likemind is a little thing Piers and I started about a year ago. Essentially you turn up at a coffee shop in the morning and chat with other interesting folks while enjoying some free coffee courtesy of Anomaly. It's good fun. If you show up at the NYC one and we haven't met before, please make sure to say hi. My picture is on the upper-right corner of my home page (in case you're an RSS reader).
That's about it. If you ever come here and are bothered by the fact that there's no new content, you can always check out my currently-in-production blogroll (or my very out of date one).
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Three interesting conversations from a Thursday in May.
On Thursday I had three great (separate) great conversations with Sara, Johnny and Charlton. I thought it might be great to capture some insights from each of them.
On Authenticity
Sara had recently met Drew and the topic of marketing for good had come up (not entirely surprising). Sara, like many of us, had wondered whether it was still meaningful for a company to do good if it wasn't for authentic reasons. Drew's answer, which had stuck with Sara, was who cares. Authenticity or not, good is good. What's the difference if Wal-Mart is giving away generic prescription drugs for next to nothing in order to beat the competition? Sure there are issues with this attitude, and nothing exists in a vacuum, but it's an interesting point of view.
On Consumption
Funny enough later that day I had a conversation with Johnny, who just happens to be on a very similar good in marketing crusade. He recently spoke at Wildfire and walked me through his deck, which was all about doing what's right (which included not thinking about 'the target' but rather about your mom or your best friend, since that's really who you're talking to). Anyhow, Johnny and I got onto the topic of groupthink (after briefly discussing Paul Graham's excellent "What You Can't Say" essay). The question posed was "is capitalism groupthink?" We didn't settle on an answer (not a huge surprise), but we did begin discussing the possible effects of digital technology on consumption.
Will our digital consumption habits effect our physical ones? When you consume in the digital world it takes up no space, there's nothing to touch. You can download and download to your heart's content (within reason) and acquire unthinkable amounts of stuff (I have 4,508 songs in iTunes). For a while people were buying bigger and bigger iPods to store all this stuff: Everyone wanted everything all the time. But I feel like we're turning a corner (a shift that will intensify with the release of the iPhone). People seem to be buying fewer giant iPods and instead going for shuffles. As anyone who has a giant iPod can attest to, you never actually listen to all that stuff.
The question, then, is whether this behavior will manifest itself in the physical realm. When mass consumption becomes easy as pressing a button will it eventually make us immune to the satisfaction of consumption in general?
On Being Offended
So the day ended with drinks/dinner in front of a wide open window in the East Village. Charlton and I discussed lots of stuff, but especially notable was what he said about being offended. Just as background, Charlton is a professor at NYU and a leading thinker on race (check out his Race Project and accompanying blog This Week in Race). Anyhow, somehow Charlton and I got onto the topic of offending people. He lived in the south for a long time and he told me people often ask him how he dealt with it. His answer is always that it was a lot easier. When someone had something to say to him (about his race or anything else), they said it. Being offended was a good thing, it allowed him to immediately assess the situation. There's not grey area when you're offended, you don't need to make a decision about whether someone likes you or not.
It made me think about driving in New York. One of the wonderful things about driving here is that you expect everyone will cut you off, so you're always on the defensive. It's a whole lot more dangerous when you're driving in some other place and you don't know what they're going to do. You can be lulled into a sense of security only to get cut off at a moment you weren't prepared. I am actually constantly amazed at how few accidents I see in New York and I think it's for this very reason.
Anyhow, that was my Thursday. Hope there's some interesting nuggets in there.
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Bottom line: To understand the world you need to understand networks.
If you happen to have checked out my presentation from University of Montana you will have read lots about my thoughts on the importance of understanding networks.
And since we're on the topic I thought I'd point everyone to a few more network discussions of recent note.
The first comes in the most recent Forbes Magazine issue which just happens to be all about Networks. It's actually a pretty spectacular issue (as evidenced by Chris Anderson's envy). Anyway, the issue includes essays by some amazing folks including Metcalfe (of Metcalfe's law fame), Murdoch, Hurley (YouTube) and DeWolfe (Myspace) -- to name a few. I actually suggest buying the issue as its quite nice to have the whole thing packaged together (something you probably don't hear that often on this site).
Anyway, the point of the issue is that networks are impossible to ignore. As more and more devices are connected, more and more networks will pop up. As more and more networks pop up, more and more power laws will emerge.
John Hagel explains in his must-read "The Power of Power Laws":
Gaussian distributions tend to prevail when events are completely independent of each other. As soon as you introduce the assumption of interdependence across events, Paretian distributions tend to surface because positive feedback loops tend to amplify small initial events. For example, the fact that a website has a lot of links increases the likelihood that others will also link to this website.
McKelvey and Andriani suggest that Gaussian distributions can morph into Paretian distributions under two conditions – when tension increases and when the cost of connections decreases. In our globalizing economy, tension rises as competitive intensity increases and as business landscapes evolve faster than the capacity of most organizations to adapt. At the same time, costs of connections are rapidly decreasing as public policy shifts towards freer movement of goods, money and ideas and rapid improvements in the price-performance of IT infrastructures dramatically reduce the cost of information transmission. Bottom line: Paretian distributions become even more prevalent.
Power laws are a fundamental departure from how we have come to understand the world. The fact that they will only show up more often means no matter what we do, we need to understand how they work and what causes them.
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My mom has started a blog.
It's not every day that I get to say the person 50% responsible for me started a blog. This happens to be one of those days. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce brblearning, written by none other than Barbara Rubin Brier, also know as my mom.
She is an educational change consultant and I expect her blog will talk quite a bit about the intersection of education, change and technology. She's an incredibly smart lady and I highly recommend people pop over, give it a read and say hi (the site was designed by me as well).
For those loyal readers, you may have caught some of her writing on this site. If not, you can go back and read it.
Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know and say congratulations mom, I know you'll do great.
And for a little Google help, her name is Barbara Brier or Barbara Rubin Brier.
Alrighty, I'm off to Dublin for the weekend. If you're in the neighborhood and fancy a pint, drop me a line. Until then, everybody have a great weekend.
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All the links I mentioned during my many hours of speaking in Montana.
Anyone who's met me knows that I have a tendency to throw out a fair amount of links in the course of conversation. Well, give me a few hours and that number starts to add up pretty quickly. About halfway through I started keeping a list and I promised to post it when I was done. Anyway, I've finally gotten around to it.
Many of you have probably seen a lot of these links, sorry for any overlap. Also, I promise I will write real entries again some time soon.
- Naked Communications: The place I work
- Designs for Working: Gladwell article on office design and the different roles people play within that environment.
- Digg: Social (mostly tech) news site where people vote for their favorite stories (which then appear on the homepage)
- Flickr: The best photo site on the planet (now owned by big Y!)
- Little Snitch: Program for Mac OS X that tells you when other programs are connecting to the internet.
- StumbleUpon: Browse the web and see what other people think along the way/find new sites. (I've never used it, so if that's a shitty description someone please correct it.)
- PSFK: Best place for trends.
- Threadless: Very cool T-Shirt site where people submit designs and others vote for their favorite which is then produced (and a prize is awarded to the winner).
- Twitter: Basically it's short form blogging from your mobile phone or instant messenger.
- Dodgeball: Text Dodgeball, tell them what bar you're at, all your friends find out.
- del.icio.us: Awesome site for saving your bookmarks in public. Allows you to tag and easily search them.
- Fundamental Unit of the Web: Kottke.org article from two years ago that I constantly quote.
- The Blog Sits at the: Grant McCracken's blog. An anthropologist by trade, he's one of the smartest guys out there on the topic of brands, marketing and culture.
- Convergence Culture: Book by MIT professor Henry Jenkins about the current state of the media world.
- Confessions of an Aca-Fan: Henry Jenkins awesome blog.
- Dick in a Box: SNL music video featuring Justin Timberlake that NBC used an interesting strategy to spread. Along with the regular version that ran on TV they released an explicit version just for the web on their site only (originally at least . . . I believe). As a side note, Ikea dick in the box instructions.
- Operators are Standing By: The story of New York City's 311 service.
- Google Mobile: Lots of good apps for your mobile phone including Gmail and Maps
- Creating Passionate Users: An excellent blog by Kathy Sierra all about, well . . . creating passionate users.
- The Long Tail: Original article by Chris Anderson that appeared in Wired in October of 2004.
- Marketing 2.0: Blog entry I wrote in November of 2005
- Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab: Very smart blog on the economics of new media. Doesn't get updated much anymore unfortunately.
- AttentionMax: Blog written by Max Kalehoff of Buzzmetrics on just about everything having to do with marketing, media and life (at least that's what it says in his header).
- Is Justin Timberlake the Product of Cumulative Advantage: Interesting article from the New York Times wondering just how good we are at predicting hits.
- The Machine is Us/ing Us: Great video explaining Web 2.0
I think that's about it. For those of you that were there, did I miss anything?
Update (5/3/07): Added link to Machine is Us/ing Us video. Thanks Rick!
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Hi, I'm 