March 2008 Archives
Love the closing paragraph to this weekend's Times story on the dangers of a new particle collider creating a black hole that could eventually eat the earth: "Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, 'Neither has any merit.' He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, 'the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.'"
Interestingly enough, David Schatsky pointed to it on the merits of its opening sentences ("More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice."), which referenced the other front page stories of the day.
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Tags: physics, science
This is a great little design idea for remembering the name of that tasty wine you were drinking.
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Tags: design, wine
A couple different things that have been floating around in my brain.
Have had a bunch of different ideas floating around in my head for the last few weeks and rather than trying to develop them into fully-fledged ideas, I figured I might as well write them all up. I'm not sure what to do with any of them really, so it's more just ideas without conclusions.
You Are What You Say You're Not
This is really simple. If you feel the need to say you aren't something, that's probably what you are. I mainly started thinking about this in reference to agencies who say they're not agencies, but I think it's bigger than that. Needing to defend yourself in this way is generally because that's the perception and in most cases perception is reality (like brands).
Meaningless Location
Shelly Palmer recently wrote a great article about Antigua's copyright threat. While the whole thing was quite good, one quote in particular stood out. Palmer quotes a conversation with Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale who said “in a few years telling someone you’re from China will have about as much meaning as telling them your astrological sign.” (Palmer also explains that "even Philip agreed that that might be hyperbole, he was pretty sure that where you live in the physical world is starting to have less meaning with respect to your ability to function online.") I agree that the timing isn't perfect, but it immediately made me think of how meaningless area code has become. With free long distance and cell phones, people are now moving around the country with numbers from wherever they first lived (or rather first bought a phone).
Unmalleable Surfaces
Yesterday at the PSFK conference my favorite insight came from Etsy founder Rob Kalin who said that cars can't make conciliatory gestures and that's why road rage happens. As he explained more eloquently than I will, when you bump into someone in a hallway or sidewalk you nod or say you're sorry, but in a car when you cut someone off you tend to do nothing (maybe put your hand out the window at most). This lack of feedback gets people really angry. It made me wonder whether you could figure out a way to make these surfaces malleable in some way to reflect our own movements.
If You Can't Do it Best, Why Do It?
I had breakfast with Eric Nehrlich a week or two ago and we talked about lots of great stuff as usual. One thing stuck out in my mind, however, and it was when Eric said something to the effect of in a world of APIs it doesn't make that much sense to do something if you're not the best at it. Now he wasn't suggesting you should just not make things, but rather that it's often worth not reinventing the wheel if someone can do it better already and is letting you use it for free. I had an experience a few weeks ago building a small website that needed a bunch of photos on it. At first I was sticking photos one-by-one in the database and then decided to build a little photo upload functionality. Problem was, I would still need to upload these things one by one. Then I thought, why not just tap into Flickr's API and just upload things there, after all they've already built a great desktop uploader that lets you upload multiple photos at a time. So that's what I did. And it worked great.
There is an incredibly rich array of APIs out there that let you do just about anything. Building a website with incredibly advanced functionality is easier than ever and really basic things that must have been quite difficult at one point (like geocoding an address) are no harder than typing a URL. Amazon's recent announcement of their fulfillment web service takes things in this space even further. Basically Amazon will store, pack and ship anything for you. It's absolutely amazing and further evidence that concentrating on your core competencies is a pretty good strategy.
Alright, that's it for now. Have a great weekend.
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Ricky Van Veen from College Humor closed yesterday's PSFK Conference. He had some good stuff to say, but the highlights were the two videos he showed that I hadn't seen: Osama Teen Hunger Force (a peak into the mind of the terrorists who could have been behind the Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb plot) and Minesweeper: The Movie (an homage to everyone's favorite time waster).
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Tags: funny, video
Great little story from the Washington Post about the guy who owns donotreply.com and therefore receives tons of emails replies from people meant to go to companies (who use the @donotreply.com on outgoing mail they don't want people to reply to directly or at all). On his blog he documents some of the worst offenders from a privacy perspective (including banks and the government) and asks for donations (though does not require them) to remove the post.
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Tags: email, privacy, spam
Not sure how long this has been out, but New York Magazine has a mobile service which allows you to text your location and what you're looking for (bar, restaurant, etc.) and get back suggestions from their content. It's interesting to watch New York Magazine experiment with lots of new stuff as they try to find a way to stay on top.
Haven't tried it yet . . . have you?
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Tags: magazines, mobile, newyork
WARNING: YAAFG (yet another addictive flash game)
Ran into this over the weekend. The original Portal is a game by the people who made Half-Life. Basically there are a bunch of different rooms you need to get through and the only weapon you have is a little gun that can shoot a portal on to certain surfaces. Anyway, the real version looks awesome, but for those of you looking to waste a bit of time at work, the people from We Create Stuff. have built a Flash version that's pretty awesome.
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Tags: flash, videogames
I first heard about desire lines from a great Peter Merholz article, they are the unpaved paths that get worn down from so many people walking on them. I've loved the idea for a while and now it looks like there's a Flickr pool devoted to photos of them.
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Tags: design, desirelines
An invitation to get some drinks next Wednesday, March 26.
Since lots of folks are in town for Thursday's PSFK conference (and it's nice to have an excuse to get together), Faris and I have taken the bull by the horns and decided to plan a little happy hour for the evening before.
As usual, everyone is invited (whether you're going to the conference or not). It should be good fun. Feel free to bring friends, coworkers and casual acquaintances. Here are the details:
Where: Sweet & Vicious, 5 Spring Street (btwn Elizabeth and Bowery)
When: Wednesday, March 26, 7pm - whenever
Feel free to pass this along, cross-post it or whatever else. Hope to see some of you there.
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I remember watching this segment about how crayons are made on Sesame Street when I was a kid. So glad to see it again.
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Tags: colors, sesamestreet, video
Last night I was making a point about how I think marketing is about everything except marketing and how I think trade shows for industries you know nothing about are probably better than most marketing conferences. I used garbage bags as an example and decided to poke around to see if there really was a garbage bag expo or conference. Not surprisingly, SPI (The Society of the Plastics Industry) puts on Film and Bag Federation conferences and even have some of last years presentation up on the site in PDF form. Topics include: "What In The World? World Film and Bag Update" (overview of the industry), "In Defense of Plastic Shopping Bags" (the other side of a story that has been in the news quite a bit lately) and "Are Biodegradable Bags the Answer?"
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Tags: business, plastics
It's always fun when chartreuse decides to open the laptop and write a few words down. His latest is well worth a read as I think he hits on a really important point: The biggest motivator for people is seeing their own name/face somewhere. Whether we like it or not, we're all about that stuff, we've got ego feed (how I found his entry), search through lists for our name and still get real excited when we see our face on TV (or in print). Getting people involved in something (whether it be a blog or a movement) is not about the something, it's about the people.
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Tags: culture, internet, psychology
After a Financial Times article saying as much, rumors of Apple negotiating a deal for all-you-can-eat music are flying. What's most amazing to me is the price point the article mentions: While competitors like Nokia are offering $80-per-device to the music industry, Apple is offering $20 (unlimited DRM downloads over the life of the device).
Immediately made me think of Wired's profile of Doug Morris which explained Apple's dominance quite well (and the resentment the music industry has towards them): "This lack of interoperability, combined with the iPod's overwhelming dominance, gave Apple a stranglehold on the digital music marketplace. And Jobs got to be the good guy with consumers, blaming the mess on the music industry's pigheaded insistence on DRM."
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Tags: apple, business, music
The most amazing part about this article on phonebooks is according to the Yellow Pages Association "the phone directory market continues to slowly grow, with a value this year of about $17 billion." Sometimes it boggles my mind how much money exists in the world . . . Also just goes to show you the market opportunity for local search.
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Tags: advertising, business
An interesting take on how credit card companies will manage to keep themselves afloat in a recession and possible credit crisis: "There is a whole other category of credit card users who are likely to become profitable for credit card issuers: those who usually pay off their balances every month, but because of the recession find themselves needing to go into debt. That ability to do so may be costly, and surely will breed resentment, but it will also wind up saving the credit card companies. Heads you lose, tails they win."
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Tags: creditcards, culture, finance
How brands tap into exponential growth.
When I uploaded my Brand vs. Utility presentation to SlideShare last week one of the related slideshows, The Brand Gap caught my eye and I clicked on over. Within a few slides I had stumbled upon the image below, which really got my brain pumping.
Based on Interbrand's current brand value calculations (from 2007) Coca-Cola's brand is work $65.3 billion (down from $67 billion in 2006) while their market cap is $134 billion (as of 3/17/08). Subtract brand value from market cap and you're left with $68.7 billion, meaning that roughly half of the company's value is derived from their brand. (If you're interested, BusinessWeek has a bit more info on how Interbrand calculates value and for those interested, Millward Brown has their own rankings which most notably place Google first instead of 20th.)
To understand how this is possible, I think it's important to understand why brands exist (which luckily I ran across today on The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics). We all know more or less that it's a trust thing, but the article did a good job of adding a bit of nuance to the explanation. As it explains, brands exist because consumers have incomplete information and brands provide a way for consumers "to protect themselves without having to devote huge amounts of time to learning all the details about each company's product." By providing this value, brands are able to charge consumers more for their products. In return, what consumers receive is increased reliability as a brand's reputation increases. As clearly explained by the following two stories, the more valuable a brand becomes the less it can afford to screw up.
Consider, for example, the cost imposed upon Perrier in 1990 when it was discovered that the benzene used to clean its bottling machinery had contaminated some of its product. Perrier experienced a significant decrease in demand and had to spend large amounts of money on increased advertising, free samples, and other marketing and promotional expenditures in an attempt to recover its market share. Another recent newsworthy example was the image damage, lost sales, and greatly reduced profits suffered by Beech-Nut, the baby food company, when it was discovered in 1982 that its "apple juice" consisted of water, sugar, and flavoring. If brand names were not present in these cases, the large economic punishment imposed on the nonperforming companies would have been lost.
What's so interesting about brand value to me, though, is that it's scalable: Small investment can provide exponential returns (hat tip Nassim Nicholas Taleb on this definition). Invest a dollar in your brand and you might receive $100 back or you might receive $10,000, there's no direct correlation between investment and return (which is why Google can devote less than 10% of its revenue on sales and marketing while competitors devote 20-plus-percent (as I mentioned in my Brand vs. Utility presentation, however, defining marketing activities for a company like Google can be a bit problematic).
All of this got me thinking about two very different things: First, most advertising agencies are incredibly short-sighted in not investing in their brand. After all, their business is not a scalable one (to make more money you need to spend more time/hire more people), therefore it would make sense to spend on the one thing that is scalable: Their brand. The second thing I thought about was how this relates to direct vs. brand marketing (or more specifically how to answer the question "how much is this going to boost my sales"). Unfortunately I don't have some kind of holy grail answer, but clearly the opportunity to tap into exponential growth is what's at stake (something pay-per-click pretty much by definition can't deliver).
As usual, this is where I peter out . . . So I'll leave things here. I think some of what John Batelle is talking about (thanks for the link James) relates, but I don't have the energy to go into at the moment. Thoughts?
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Wow.
Take time out of your day and watch this video of neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor telling the story of her own stroke. As a scientist she is able to explain it in a way I can't even begin to image. It's just an incredible video.
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Tags: brain, health, science, video
Wow, it's been a big few days for Google. First they close the DoubleClick deal and announce they will be laying some people off, then they open up YouTube with a new set of APIs (full documentation) and now they've announced an ad serving platform for small-to-medium sized publishers. So basically you could build your own video service and sell ads for it no matter how big it gets all without leaving Google's servers.
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Tags: google
A blog filled entirely with bad photoshopping (three arms seems to be the biggest problem). As a side note, there seems to be a trend of these blogs devoted to single narrow subjects.
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Tags: culture, media, photoshop
This is why I love the internet: Where else could I see a walrus dance to Michael Jackson?
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Tags: animals, funny, video
A presentation on brand versus utility that I gave a few weeks ago.
I've been meaning to upload this presentation I gave a few weeks ago for a while now and just finally got around to it. I've also been meaning to write something to go along with it, but I haven't gotten around to that. So instead I'll include the notes below and hopefully get around to writing some more of my thoughts at some point soon.
And the notes . . .
- When I �rst started thinking about this topic I had no idea where to go. So �nally I started to try to de�ne out the terms ...
- A brand, if you ask me, is the sum of all parts in a consumer's mind. It's the total of everything they think/feel about your company, products, experience and everything else.
- Utility, on the other hand . . .
- Is a measure of the relative satisfaction from consumption of goods.
- In other words, utility is an emotion, not a hard measure. As satisfaction goes up, so does utility.
- And what is satisfaction? Well, it turns out it's just the ful�llment of one's expectations or needs. (Both of which weʼll be coming back to.)
- So going with a bit of 7th grade math, the transitive property tells us that if expectations decide satisfaction and satisfaction decides utility, then to understand how to maximize utility we need to better understand expectations.
- Expectations are subjective: If I expect a lot out of it and you expect a little out of it our utility can be different.
- For instance, some people expect performance out of Nike.
- While others expect fashion.
- So the question, then, is where those expectations come from?
- Really they can come from anywhere: Competition, culture, the consumer themselves or your own communication (to name a few places).
- And what are those expectations? Those, my friends, are your brand.
- So, it's clear that the question can't possibly be brand vs. utility, since they're interdependent.
- If thatʼs not the question, then what is it? Well, I think �rst we need to change the word utility, to function (still not a perfect word, but it gets us closer).
- So the question is: Online is it more important to set expectations (brand) or deliver results (function) is more or less the question I believe.
- To answer that we need to look at the differences between online and offline. Let's start with interaction costs: Online they're basically 0. All it takes is a click to try something new.
- Offline they're much higher, to try something I actually have to buy it (or at least sample it, which is why so many brands are so into sampling/experiential stuff -it lowers interaction costs).
- The role of a brand and communications in an offline space is to set the expectations/needs so that people overcome the interaction cost barrier and actually purchase.
- As I said, though, online is a lot different: There is no barrier. So the role of brand becomes expectation setter. When you look at craigslist, what kind of expectations do you have? (Probably not much by the look of things.)
- In the same vein, thereʼs Google.
- Now of course we all know both those brands well at this point, so it's not entirely fair. However, neither of them look like much and therefore, I would argue, initially it created much lower expectations in people: Expectations which they overcame by leaps and bounds thanks to amazing functionality. Those exceeded expectations lead to extreme advocacy.
- Think about this for one minute, in the past you had to set expectations high to get people to purchase. It was hard to exceed those expectations. Online thatʼs different.
- So let's step back again from this for a minute and talk a bit about why this whole conversation is even happening. Essentially I think it all stems from Google and what I'll call the Google myth.
- The Google myth goes something like "Google has gotten as far as they have based entirely on the quality of their product."
- Or it goes "Google worries only about it's function not about it's brand.
- Or that Google does no marketing.
- Now let's talk about why these are all wrong. First, nothing happens in a vacuum. Larry & Sergey were two Stanford grad students (Stanford being the center of Silicon Valley) during the internet boom and knew some pretty powerful
- Anyone know who these two guys are?
- On the left is David Filo, Founder of Yahoo!, one of the �rst people they talked to about Google. And on the right is Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, who was also Googleʼs �rst investor. "We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member's home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, 'Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?' It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000."
- Who is to say that Google would be where it is today without people like this to help spread the word? The Google founders, Larry and Sergey, were in the middle of Silicon Valley, which was the middle of the internet world during the middle of the boom.
- Now onto the second myth, that Google only worries about it's function. This is ridiculous. The beauty of Google is that functionality and form are aligned. The decision to not bog down the homepage with additional messages is a form decision.
- Last, "Google does no marketing" is just untrue. Can we agree that advertising is a form of marketing?
- Well this is a billboard they did in Seattle (with the help of an advertising agency).
- And they have 100 of�cial blogs from all around the world, clearly that's a form of marketing (really it's a combination of a bunch of different disciplines: CRM, media outreach, branding, etc.).
- What's more, the biggest of the blogs, The Of�cial Google Blog, has 641 thousand subscribers.
- Think about that. That would put Google at number 14 on the largest circulating newspapers in America. Right behind The Post, Detroit Free Press and Dallas Morning news and ahead of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Boston Globe. This actually brings me to another point, though in a slightly roundabout way: Think about this for a minute. Google is competing with some of the biggest newspapers in the world for attention. Now clearly circulation numbers are for the print publication, but this is still fairly monumental: Itʼs a non-media company with the reach only media companies dreamed of in the past.
- Whatʼs so interesting about this to me is that Google, or any other hybrid media-owner/creator is competing in the space with no care for the business model. Think about it: All those newspapers have a few things in common, the biggest being they canʼt exist if no oneʼs buying ads. Google, on the other hand, can and does, create content and compete in the space with no ads: All 100 blogs are just a minor marketing expense. Probably costs them less than snacks.
- Iʼm sure some of you have heard of BabyCenter.
- BabyCenter is the biggest baby site on the web by far, and you know who owns it?
- Johnson & Johnson: The largest manufacturer of baby products.
- What fascinates me about this relationship is that while the site is still quite successful on itʼs own, clearly it doesnʼt live and die by itʼs advertising. BabyCenter doesnʼt really need to care about the business model of online media properties because ultimately itʼs serving another master. Even if the advertising economy crashes, BabyCenter will likely still happily skip along, paid for by the people at J&J who want to see people continue to take the best care of their babies as humanly possible (which of course means buying lots of stuff).
- For lack of a better name Iʼve been calling this crazy guy in the room syndrome. Media companies, long used to only competing against each other, now have to compete with companies like Johnson & Johnson who have a completely different goal. They donʼt care about the old business model, they just care about selling more shampoo and diapers. You guys are all �ghting the crazy guy, and thatʼs always dangerous because heʼs got nothing to lose. J&J bought BabyCenter in 2001 for $10 million dollars. In the �rst half of last year they spent $726 million on advertising (or roughly 72 times the amount they bought the site for).
- What does all this mean? Well, I think it's a few things. Right now most brands aren't very going at getting attention online. The only way they really know how to do it is to buy it.
- But that's might change. For the most part, brands still think of their websites as an advertisement, as paid for media. But that it is beginning to change. Brands are beginning to think of themselves as media owners, which is actually what they always have been (when they purchase an ad placement they were media owners, competing with the page before it and the page after it, they just never thought of themselves that way). But being a media owner is very valuable (as you guys all know): Engaged audience = dollars. (These images come from a fabulous New Yorker issue that Target bought out entirely and then worked with New Yorker artists to design ads that incorporate their distinct target. This is the only issue of the New Yorker Iʼve ever kept.)
- Now as more and more brands come to this conclusion they are seeking to build properties that are more than just interstitial advertisements, but instead are destination media properties. Most havenʼt �gured this out yet, but some smart ones, like J&J have cracked the code. And they're going to be playing by different rules than you are. (I realize MLB is a monopoly as well as a brand, but I still think theyʼve done a damn good job.)
That's it for now. Would love thoughts and feedback. Hope you enjoyed.
Update (3/13/08): Per Piers' recommendation, here is a little disclaimer: Johnson & Johnson is a client of Naked and owns BabyCenter.com. All opinions expressed here are completely my own and in no way reflect on Naked. For the record, I had these thoughts about BabyCenter.com before J&J even became a client of Naked. That is all.
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While I'm quite flattered, I'm a bit confused as to how I landed at 29 in Wikio's most influential blogs. According to their rankings NoahBrier.com is more influential than Consumerist (34), Google Blog (35), Scripting News (46), kottke (51), xkcd.com (63) and Gothamist (77), amongst many others. I didn't think much of it until I saw that The Observer's 50 most powerful blogs references a Wikio ranking in its writeup of Basic Thinking.
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Tags: blogs, me
So I just made a really bad spam joke: When someone asked me how to spell Cialis I said, "c, number one, at sign . . . " Anyway, when no one laughed I quickly looked for cover on the web and rediscovered this guy who had figured out how many ways you could spell viagra in spam (it's in the sextillions). While I was searching I ran across my friend Phil's site (which he's sadly stopped updating) called spamosphere. He was categorizing all the image spam he got with brilliant labels like demonic font fax, confetti fax and faded blabber. Finally, I ran across these hand-lettered spam headlines again.
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Tags: spam
Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule has raised over $80,000 by asking for donations. She offered 12 different levels from "unpolished rock" ($10 donation) which included a free download of the album when it's released to "Weapons-Grade Plutonium Level" ($10,000) which entitles the donor to sing on the album. Cool stuff.
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Tags: business, music
Jeremiah Palecek paints internet memes. His latest is an interpretation of the Technoviking (a brilliant video itself). He sells his stuff on Etsy and while the Technoviking is sold out, you can still buy his version of the Tom Cruise indoctrination video.
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Tags: art, internet, meme
Interesting article from The Times yesterday about the (tenuous) connection between income and happiness: Survey's have found that "when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income."
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Tags: culture, economics, happiness
Advertising agency, Modernista has a fascinating new site design: Rather than hosting anything on their own, they just do a nav overlay and drive you around what (at least looks like) the rest of the web. It's a bit jarring at first, but really quite a cool idea.
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Tags: agency, design, marketing
One last plug for my little sister's Why You Blog project. She is looking to gather some common questions bloggers get. If you could take a few minutes and help her out both she and I would really appreciate it.
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Tags: art, internet, meme
I hate microsites. So does this guy: "Most microsites are usually advanced brochureware by clients trying to get around their internal process, and the hallmark of an agency that does not get it -- or worse -- a client that doesn't. The results are usually paltry, at best, in moving your brand, and the level of development time and money required for the payoff is almost never worth it."
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Tags: marketing, microsites
Shepard Fairey's Obama poster has gotten a lot of play and now the man himself has written a letter thanking Fairey. It's pretty ballsy for a presidential candidate to write a letter to a graffiti artist thanking him. Obama (or whoever wrote the letter) evens points out that "Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign."
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Tags: graffiti, politics
This was a Holy Crap Fact yesterday, but check out these stats from The New York Times: "The U.S. now has more choreographers (16,340) than metal-casters (14,880), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More people make their livings shuffling and dealing cards in casinos (82,960) than running lathes (65,840), and there are almost three times as many security guards (1,004,130) as machinists (385,690)."
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Tags: economics, statistics
So I knew about Google Trends, but I just found out they now show the top 100 search trends of the last hour (and even have an RSS feed). The wheels start spinning immediately with cool things I could make with it.
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Tags: google, search, trends
A bunch of quotes roughly about non-linearity presented linearly.
To be honest I have no idea what this is about as I start writing, all I know is that over the last half hour I have had a wonderfully serendipitous reading exploration that I felt like sharing. There may be conclusions to draw, there may not, I won't really know until I'm done writing.
It started with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the world wide web. In discussing why he was doing this, Berners-Lee explains that the storage system for ideas must mirror the ideas themselves. As he wrote:
In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything.
This reminded me of a quote from Black Swan that I emailed my Mom recently:
These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitos in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand. Yesterday afternoon I tried to take a fresh look around me to catalog what I could see during my day that was linear. I could not find anything, no more than someone hunting for squares or triangles could find them in the rain forest...
In other words, the internet and it's non-linear foundation is much more "normal" than the command and control hierarchy that was previously imposed on information.
So, next I read a Wired interview about memes with Dr. Susan Blackmore. She explains that "Memes are using human brains as their copying machinery" and goes on to say:
Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied -- photocopiers, printing presses -- but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It's all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There's a shift to the machines doing all of that.
I don't even know if I'm ready to tackle that one. It's just one of those things I know is important. I also find it interesting in the face of the next quote I read from Anil Dash who wrote: "I've been obsessing lately over what it takes to make change happen, in both culture an technology. And the answer to me seems to increasingly be the embrace of iteration." In reality, this is also what makes life. Evolvution is not anything if it isn't the embrace of iteration. So what is the impact of machines that evolve? What can we learn about our own behavior and evolution? (These are all questions Blackmore addresses in the interview).
Continuing on I came to Zeus Jones writing about the advantages of just the kind of iteration Dash was discussing: "... because of the fact that it's very difficult to research services in the abstract - our research methodology has typically been: build, test and learn. Rather than spending lots of money in researching an idea, it's been far more economic to simply build the idea and then research the actual product." I can't help but feel like the reason all of this works better is that it's the natural way of things. The other architecture, as Taleb put it, is the square in the rainforest.
Finally, I turn to politics, and specifically a piece by David Brooks on Obama (via Steven Johnson). Discussing a speech in 2007, Brooks writes:
Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: "And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!"
For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.
Not even sure where to begin with drawing conclusions . . . Need some more thinking time. If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them (about any of the quotes, or anything else for that matter).
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Just went back and read Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the World Wide Web. What I found most interesting was his point that the architecture of the web is made to reflect the way people really think and work. It's this non-linear structure that is "normal", not the hierarchical one that was imposed on information in the past.
A quote: "In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything."
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Tags: history, internet, postmodernism
Interesting interview with Michael Bieruit on Obama's brand identity. Choice quote: "One of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal ... I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control."
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Tags: branding, design, politics
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