April 2008 Archives
Iain took part in Adbusters' Mental Detox Week and now he's gone ahead and written up what he learned from the experience. Some real nuggets in there, I especially liked what he had to say about the "fractalisation of stuff": "The web allows you to fractalise everything. I read a few different books. But instead of doing what I’d normally do and keep leaving the book to go and look something up. I made little notes and just kept on reading."
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Tags: analog, culture, technology
A group of economists in England used a football betting market to help them understand the speed markets digest information. They found it to be efficient, with betters reacting to goals immediately (which they showed by looking at bets after goals that happen right before before halftime and the resulting movement, or lack thereof, during the break). While they admit it's not a perfect test, "Still, the old adage that one should buy on the rumour and sell on the news seems vindicated; new information is incorporated into prices too quickly to allow most traders the opportunity to profit."
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Tags: economics, sports
Marc Andreessen asked some of his friends who do this type of stuff to explain exactly how a Microsoft/Yahoo! hostile takeover attempt might play out. It's a great and detailed explanation of how things might play out over the next few months.
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Tags: business, finance, microsoft, yahoo
Wall Street Journal story on Miller's Brew Blog, which is written by an ex-AdAge staffer and writes about the beer industry. The site is apparently not afraid of going on the offensive towards Anheuser-Busch and has scooped a few stories to date (which have been spun quite favorably in Miller's direction). The site is completely transparent (says "brought to you by the Miller Brewing Co." at the top) and has apparently upset the trade press who see it as serious competition (pretty amazing to think of trade press coming from a company involved in the trade).
My favorite quote from the WSJ piece: '"They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers' in newsrooms and the trade press, says Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University. 'It's something you couldn't do five years ago," before the proliferation of blogs.'"
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Tags: beer, blogs, business, media
Looks like last week all three presidential candidates were on WWE Monday Night Raw. How crazy is that? From the article (which has accompanying video of each candidates message): "Each candidate taped a special message for last Monday’s episode of 'W.W.E. Raw,' ... In their best mock-wrestler voices, Hillary Rodham Clinton renamed herself Hill-Rod, John McCain renamed his fans the McCainiacs, and Barack Obama played off the familiar tag line of a W.W.E. star, the Rock: 'Do you smell what Barack is cooking?'"
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Tags: culture, politics, television
There are a number of gems is this speech from Clay Shirky (in essay form). Two "aha" moments for me:
"No one who works in TV gets to ask that question [where do people find the time to edit Wikipedia]. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." (People watching a little less TV leaves a whole lot of time.)
"This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now." (This is one of those things I'm pretty sure is hugely important but can't yet articulate.)
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Tags: culture, internet
Outstanding Washington Post article about New Jersey guidos from 2003 featuring none other than the guy who runs NJGuido.com. This sums it all up pretty nicely: "The guido ethos is showy, it bumps shoulders and yells. It is a hey-baby culture, in which the men are macho and the women wear spandex. When cruising in cars -- a popular pastime -- guidos like loud dance music and loud-looking girls. When they walk, they thrust their shoulders back and take over sidewalks."
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Tags: culture, guido, newjersey
A few basics I've picked up in the last few months of building websites.
I've been spending a lot of time learning PHP/MySQL lately (which is part of the reason I haven't been blogging all that much). I've managed to teach myself to be somewhat proficient with the stuff fairly quickly and I thought maybe it would be fun to share a few tips to getting started. I'm sure many aren't that interested in learning this stuff, but for those that are, I hope these will help get you over the hump and give it a try.
So, here are a few things you need to know/understand (and if you understand this stuff better than I do, please feel free to correct me).
Databases
They're basically just big excel spreadsheets. Each table is the equivalent of a sheet in excel. Your goal with a database is to not have a lot of empty cells, so it's important to separate related data into different tables. For instance, on a blogging platform, you need to separate out comments and entries into different tables. That's because different entries can and likely will have different amounts of comments. Therefore, if one gets 100 comments and another gets 3, you'd still need to have 100 columns for comments and on the second entry you'd have 97 empty spaces. Make sense?
GET/POST
This is basically how you pass stuff from one webpage to another. When you click a submit button on a form it is likely doing one of these two actions (I actually don't think it can do anything else). They're both fairly simple: GET puts whatever you filled in the form in the URL (do a google search and take a look at the location bar) and POST passes the variables invisibly (and according to this page should be used if you're doing something like inserting the variables into a database or sending an email because GET is easy to mess with).
Moving Stuff to and From Databases
To do pretty much everything I've needed to do thus far I've only needed a handful of database commands. SELECT grabs stuff from your database. INSERT puts stuff in your database. DELETE (which I've used far less frequently), delete's from the database (surprising huh?). Within those commands you just use WHERE to define the parameters for what row or rows you want to grab (for instance, grab the first name and email for the user with the last name "Brier").
APIs
This is one of those things lots of people talk about, but few actually understand how they actually work (and I can't claim to be an expert by any means). Most APIs work by passing them a URL with the data you want in the syntax they've defined. They then give you back whatever data you requested (most of the time in XML which you then need to parse). Using Google Maps as an example, they make it super simple to get the latitude and longitude for an address (and you can actually try this without knowing any code at all by signing up for a Google Maps API key for free.
So essentially you need to construct a URL with the address and your API key. It works something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=INSERT ADDRESS HERE WITH +'s INSTEAD OF SPACES&output=DEFINE OUTPUT, IN MY CASE I'M USING CSV (COMMA SEPERATED VALUES)&key=YOUR UNIQUE API KEY. They then return a CSV file with 4 values, the latitude, longitude and two other things I can't remember (I think zip is one of them). With varying degrees of complexity that's basically how all the APIs I've experiences work.
So, I hope this is somewhat useful/interesting. Part of what inspired me to write this was a quote I read last night in a little book from Electric Artists (who celebrated their 10th anniversary last night): "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." That nugget comes from Albert Einstein and I couldn't agree more. Obviously there's lots more to it (I haven't really even touched on PHP), but these are a few mental hurdles I had before I got started. Hopefully it inspires a few people to give PHP (or some other web language) a shot. It's really good fun.
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I'm always up for supporting a friend's project (especially when it involves beer). With that said, check out Eric's long-awaited Beer Menus, already sporting 164 NYC beer menus and 1,210 total beers. The idea is pretty simple: You choose an area or a beer and it tells you where to find it. Here's my personal favorite (though not really because of the beer).
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Tags: beer, nyc
Nice to know I'm not the only one drooling over what Amazon's up to. Wired has a nice profile of the company in this month's issue. My favorite quote comes from Bezos commenting on getting into a commodity business like cloud computing: "Commodity businesses don't scare us ... We're experts at them. We've never had 35 or 40 percent margins like most tech companies."
As a side note, I bought my first thing with Textbuyit and it was awesome. All stores are now just large Amazon showrooms.
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Tags: amazon, cloudcomputing
This is just plain weird: Marzipan babies. Reminds me of Ron Mueck's work. (While I'm on the food art tip, here are some photos of food that takes on the shape of its packaging.)
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Tags: art, food
Wired tackles the age old question of why New York pizza is so much better than all other. Turns out it's more than just the water (which has always been the explanation I've heard for NYC bagel supremacy), but also the aging of the oven. As the article explains, "Over time ... more particles join the mix and mingle with the savory soot from burned wood or coal — the only fuels worth using — to create a flavor that you can't grow in a garden." Fascinating. Guess this is probably true for bagels as well.
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Tags: food
Piers has started posting some outtakes from the conference. Here's me making a relatively sensible point (which I pretty much stole from Faris) about the need for brands to act more like people.
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Tags: marketing, me, video
This has been one of my open tabs for a while now and I finally got around to reading it. It's a research study on how to best board airline passengers. Despite popular wisdom, back to front is not all the much faster than front to back (even though probably 50% of airlines go for some variation on this method). The key time consumer, as the paper explains, is the amount of time it takes for passengers to load their luggage. Therefore, back to front gets clogged with people waiting to put luggage away. The paper suggests the key is to properly space people so the most people are loading luggage at the same time. Very interesting.
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Tags: airlines, math, travel
Video explaining Jonathan Harris's new project showing at Design and the Elastic Mind at MOMA (which I still haven't been to yet). It's a look at online dating, which, as usual, humanizes the data in a way only harris could.
(As a side note, this is the first time I've noticed the YouTube icons to allow you to raise the quality. It's cute, they use an old looking TV for regular and a flatscreen looking thing for the higher quality version).
In unrelated YouTube diversions: Stefan from theAPT explains the impact of smurfs on architecture and Charlie Rose on Charlie Rose (via Fimoculous).
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Tags: art, video, visualization
New York Magazine has an interesting article about NYU's decision to open a fully accredited Abu Dhabi branch. This is interesting to me for a few reasons: First, I'm an NYU grad. Second "Homosexual activity is illegal in the United Arab Emirates, and those found guilty of drug use, prostitution, or adultery can be sentenced to flogging," quite a departure from life around Washington Square Park. Third, Abu Dhabi is turning a desert island into "the most highbrow cultural theme park on Earth," complete with Zaha Hadid designed performing arts center (that may be associated with Lincoln Center), Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim and Jean Nouvel designed Louvre (along with NYU's campus of course). Needless to say many New York-based faculty members are up in arms.
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Tags: education, nyc, nyu
Love this: "The physical theory that the creators of neoclassical economics used as a template was conceived in response to the inability of Newtonian physics to account for the phenomena of heat, light and electricity. In 1847 German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the conservation of energy principle and postulated the existence of a field of conserved energy that fills all space and unifies these phenomena. Later in the century James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and other physicists devised better explanations for electromagnetism and thermodynamics, but in the meantime, the economists had borrowed and altered Helmholtz’s equations."
Oops. It's no wonder behavioral economics is on the rise.
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Tags: marketing, me, video
I did this once before and it seemed useful. So here's the unread tabs I have going at the moment: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, Attention Shoppers!, Optimal boarding method for airline passengers, How to Think, Ars Book Review: "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky, The New Math, Nikolay Saveliev’s Diplomatic Designs, Monocle: design notes, He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) , Why fashion banished the bosom, Google and the Wisdom of Clouds and Kids' Book on Plastic Surgery.
Got anything good open you haven't read yet?
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Tags: tabs, toread
I got two emails from friends who are looking to hire. First there's Electric Artists in New York run by Marc Schiller (of Wooster Collective fame) who are looking to "expand the team of brand strategists and project managers on some new high profile accounts ... Need to be able to handle client workflow and participate in the strategy sessions." Then there's Butler Shine Stern and Partners who are "looking for a planner with 5 years experience who is ready to leave nyc for greener pastures [aka Sausalito, CA]." At Butler Shine you'd be working for the brilliant Ed Cotton of Influxinsights fame.
So there you go. Leave a comment or drop me a line if you're interested and I'll get you in touch with either Marc or Ed.
Update (4/16/08): One more job from my friend Tamara for your consideration: "OZOlife.com is looking for a new Editor-in-Chief. OZOlife is an online resource and daily guide to the best of sustainable living." This should be the end of NoahBrier.com as job board, now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
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Tags: jobs, marketing
Reprinting an interview I recently did on the role of identity in the internet age.
The people at Trendbüro in Germany asked if I could asnswer some questions on identity in advance of a workshop they're doing. I said I'd be happy as long as I could print it on my site as well. Since they've now published the interview (in German), I think it's fair to publish it here. This was done over two emails, so may not flow perfectly.
Your blog has landed no. 29 in Wikio's most influential blogs ranking. This is sure great for your reputation. How important do you think is reputation to the process of building one's identity?
Well, first off let me say that I don't really believe that Wikio ranking. While I am quite honored to be on the list, I don't quite understand how my site landed there.
As for how important reputation is in building one's identity, I think I would argue that reputation is just an external measure of identity: It's how other's see you and what they think of you.. With that said, I don't think you can actually have an external identity without a reputation: In the same way a brand doesn't exist if no one knows about it, your external identity is non-existent if you aren't interacting with anyone. And by interacting you develop a reputation, people think things about you, say things about it, etc.
Noah, in your blog you argue that people just like brands need to manage their identity. That's why we interact with others in order to gain recognition, which is vital to building our identity. How, do you think, will this new approach to identity building change the branding of the future?
I don't know that I argue people need to manage their identity, more be aware of it's existence. I guess with awareness comes some sort of management, but just as with brands the more considered one's identity seems to be, the less authentic.
I also don't know if I agree that "we interact with others in order to gain recognition". We interact with others first and foremost because as humans we are programmed to do so. We are social creatures, people always trot out the fact that if left untouched a baby will die, but that's a pretty incredible thing. We require human touch to survive. (I couldn't find a reference for this, so maybe it's not true. But I'm pretty sure it is.)
So now that I've said all that, I'm not sure I can answer the question . . . Sorry. I don't quite understand how this is a new approach to identity building.
With the marketplace becoming increasingly fragmented, more and more brands have to exist in niches. As a consequence, brands reach less people and hence less people know and talk about them. It is becoming harder to develop a reputation. What challenge does this pose for managing brand identity?
I'm not sure I completely understand or agree with this one, but let me give a couple (hopefully related) thoughts. Success, I believe, is a relative measure. Any absolute number has been artificially placed on the market (take platinum or gold in the record industry for instance). I think what we're seeing more is companies who are creating their own success measures. Again, looking at the music industry, if you create a record for $1,000 you don't need to sell that many copies to be "successful" (at least from a fiscal perspective).
As for managing brand identity, I expect what we'll see is more and more companies "play the field" and try a bunch of different stuff. Why not create competitive products? Big CPG (FMCG in Europe) companies get this and I think it will continue to spread.
In your blog you stress the importance for brands to manage their identity. With reputation being the external measure of identity, how and to what extent can brands influence what people think and say about them? What role does customer relationship managment play?
Well, I think brands need to start by being aware of their identity existing throughout every consumer touchpoint (whether it's packaging, advertising or customer service). It's not good enough to just say what you are, you've got to live it (not that I think this is a terribly revolutionary idea). As for customer relationship management, I certainly think this can be an important part, but it depends on both how you define it and what business you're in. I don't know how important it is for Coca-Cola, for instance, but for a company like Dell, on the other hand, it's huge.
You are one of the initiators of likemind, a networking event held regularly in cities around the globe. Richard Florida claims that some cities are becoming creative hubs where innovative people cluster together. From your perspective, how does the interaction between likeminded (creative) people influence their identity?
Well, again, I think as humans we need interaction and naturally are drawn to those who are likeminded (whatever that likemindedness may be grounded in). Clearly your community influences your identity: How you dress, the words you use, the books you read, the music you listen to, etc. I think what's new here is that more likeminded (creative) people are able to find each other. I just started reading Clay Shirky's new book and he talks about the expense (in the economic sense) of organizing groups pre-web. That's gone. We started likemind on a whim and now it's in around 50 cities around the world. We never promoted it other than occasional announcements on our blogs, yet tens-of-thousands have attended over the year-and-a-half it's existed. I expect a decade ago this would have been incredibly hard to make happen (but not impossible). While I can't say for sure, the picture I have in my head is of a much different era where creative people were the exception (or at least they thought they were): The odd-man-out in their company or community. Now, however, we're all hyper-connected. I meet new people every day from all around the world who I consider likeminded and I think that's an amazing and exciting thing.
I'm not sure I really answered the question . . . Sorry . . .
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Jeff Jarvis has a very well written entry explaining how much his blog is worth. As expected, he doesn't make much direct revenue, but indirectly it has allowed him to both teach and make a good living consulting. A good link to send people who ask if you make money off your blog.
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Tags: blogs
Love this quote from Bertrand Russell (via Russell): "The secret to happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and personas that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile"
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Tags: happiness, quotes
Len (who is brilliant) wrote something that really struck me: "Both leftist and elitist critiques of “consumer culture” have assumed a passive, powerless and easily manipulated consumer but that was never true." It was a point I was trying to make on my panel about social media at PSFK. To assume that until now consumers haven't been able to share media or it hasn't been social is ridiculous (and even worse, elitist). Media has been social for all of time. I don't even know if I'd say media is any easier to share now, after all, how hard was it to talk to a friend about that book you read?
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Tags: attention, socialmedia
This is heartwarming. For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere turned a little league baseball game into a major league event. Complete with shirtless fans, programs, jumbotron and some other treats. If you don't know Improv Everywhere check out frozen grand central and shirtless Abercrombie & Fitch.
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Tags: funny, video
Lately I've been noticing myself emailing a lot more from outside Gmail (or Apple mail). Mainly, I've been sending lots of stuff out via Google Reader. Since they added functionality that syncs your account up with your Gmail address book, it's easy to just send a friend a link (or whatever else) you think they'd find interesting. I'd say on average over the last few weeks I've sent out three a day.
This is interesting to me for a few reasons: One, it's a great way to add value to a service with features from another within the suite. Two, the idea of communicating explicitly with content makes a lot of sense: It feels like it eliminates a step in the process.
Anyone else find themselves sending a lot of links this way?
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Tags: email, rss
I've been trying to come up with a cool idea for Amazon's Mechanical Turk a while now (to no avail). This is one I wish I had thought of: Ten Thousand Cents paid 10,000 people 1 cent each to draw a picture of 1/10,000th of a $100 bill (lots of numbers in that sentence). The final product is for sale and they've got some making of videos as well.
As a side note, I think some of what Amazon's up to is so insanely smart: Mechanical Turk, EC2, Fulfillment Web Service and TextBuyIt to name a few.
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Tags: ai, amazon, art
Was just reading Elements of Style and ran across this explanation of "insightful" in the "Words and Expressions Commonly Misused" section: "Insightful. The word is a suspicious overstatement for 'perceptive.' If it is to be used at all, it should be used for instances of remarkably penetrating vision. Usually, it crops up merely to inflate the commonplace."
Amen.
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Tags: insight, language, marketing
Kevin Kelly's short essay on the impact of being Turing'd has been percolating for a while now and keeps coming up. The gist of it is, "the types of pros who are most eager to employ the latest technology are those fields which have already been Turing'd."
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Tags: ai, business, insight
To help celebrate all the awful April fools jokes that pop up around the internet every year I introduce to you THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE.
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Tags: aprilfools, me
Hi, I'm 