November 2008 Archives
What started out as a link to an article about people's desire to dehumanize Hitler turns to a long entry on what makes people evil.
Over the last few weeks you may have run across the story that Hitler only had one testicle. Anyway, Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (which I haven't read), had a really interesting article on Slate which basically suggested that people's fascination with Hitler's sexuality is little more than an attempt to explain him as something other than a normal human being who performed unbelievable atrocities.
As Rosenbaum puts it, "Isn't it obvious by now what this is about? Our need to prove that Hitler was not 'normal,' thus not like us, normal human nature thereby exculpated from producing a Hitler. It fills a need to reassure ourselves there is no Hitler potential in human potential. We're off the hook."
Anyway, I got to thinking about Hitler and the capacity for evil in people. As The Stanford Prison Experiment showed, even regular folks can turn to the dark side quite quickly. Of course whenever we talk about someone who's done terrible things, we talk about their past and the thing that "screwed them up." But who's to say that's what turned them? As I wrote in a post on predictions that "A clue is only a clue if it helps solve a mystery, afterwards it becomes explanation, equally important (for our psyche) but a very different beast."
Who is to say that we don't post-rationalize these people's past as the reason they did what they did in order to satiate our own need for them to be "different"? I actually just got finished watching Phillip Zimbardo's TED talk on what he calls The Lucifer Effect (which is essentially how good people go bad). Zimbardo is most famous for The Stanford Prison Experiment which took regular college kids and split them into prisoners and guards, turning the basement of the psychology building into a makeshift prison. What happened over the next few days was horrifying as these kids who had been chosen for their stability began to abuse the "prisoners". The two-week experiment was stopped after 6 days because of how crazy things had gotten. (The whole documentary is up on Google video, though I haven't watched it yet.)
Anyway, Zimbardo makes a bunch of interesting points in his talk which revolves around both the experiment and what went on at Abu Ghraib. He begins by explaining what drove him into his area of study, "That line between good and evil, which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side and the others on the bad side, I knew that line was movable and it was permeable." That, ultimately is the point (and his big one). People aren't evil or good, they're put in situations and they act and eventually their behavior is judged as one or the other.
Zimbardo sums up the point with this excellent New Yorker cartoon, which features two men in a police interrogation room and the caption, "I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on circumstances."
Also included in his talk is reference to the other famous experiment that points to people's ability to do evil, Stanley Milgram's shock studies of the 1960s, which the New York Times describes as "a series of about 20 experiments, [in which] hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The 'learner' was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped." While the same article points out it's hard to extrapolate the findings of these studies to either the Holocaust or Abu Ghraib, it also points out the enduring interest in the studies as a barometer for their importance.
In discussing them, Zimbardo makes a few key points, the most important of which was that "all evil starts at 15 volts" (the machines went all the way to 450 volts, which only 1/3 of participants refused to push). In other words, thinking of these transformations as immediate are wrong. People are not like Clark Kent, jumping into a phone booth to turn into Superman at the sight of evil. Rather they're more like the drunk guy dancing around the bar, mild-mannered when he arrived, slightly slurring an hour later, visibly drunk after two and making a complete fool of himself after four. It's a slow process which is dependent on a number of circumstances, most important of which is lack of intervention.
That intervention, Zimbardo points out, is actually what makes a hero. A hero, he explains, is the person who does what nothing else would do. In fact, he points out, heroes are deviants since they're acting against the will of the group.
All of this has become a fairly long-winded way of saying that I think it's a better thing for the future of humanity that people accept and acknowledge that anyone can be evil instead of trying to find the fatal flaw that "turned someone." As Dostoevsky wrote (at least according to Zimbardo), "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him." Maybe in understanding we can be a bit more self aware and hopefully be able to catch ourselves when we're caught up in a mob.
Update (12/1/08): After having a conversation with my mom this morning, I wanted to clarify something: There are genuinely crazy people who kill folks and do terrible things. Schizophrenia and other psychological problems are very real and can cause people to do totally crazy things. There are also folks who join the herd, like the trampling at WalMart or even the Germans who followed Hitler. These are people who get caught up in the moment/follow instructions and this is what most of the research from Zimbardo and Milgram is about. Then there are people like Hitler. By all accounts he was neither clinically crazy nor following anyone else's lead. He was a person who hated a group of people and wanted them dead. Of course he probably got caught up in his own power, but the bottom line (and the point I was trying to make) was that he seems to have been a regular person other than that. That's important to understand and acknowledge because it forces us all to acknowledge the capacity for extreme hatred in us.
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Awesome collection of photos of product packaging photos versus what the food actually looks like. Unfortunately it's all in German, but you can still click around and get the drift.
Not for nothing, but someone should either a) turn this into a blog or b) turn this into a book.
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Tags: food, marketing, packaging
So I've got this theory that because Bloomberg had his congestion tax shot down he's decided to make New York as uninhabitable as possible for drivers. This includes turning busy intersections into parks and turning one of two lanes on the incredibly busy Broadway into a bus only lane. As an inhabitant of Soho (roughly), I've been particularly interested in the bus thing as I've both watched countless people get ticketed while walking to work and been annoyed while in a cab that they wouldn't just pull into the right lane and speed past traffic (because they were afraid of said tickets).
Anyway, I was writing all this because I just saw this New York Times breakdown on parking tickets given and discovered that 10,997 tickets were given on that stretch of one-lane Broadway, but then I realized that parking tickets and traffic tickets were different. Even so, it's a lot of tickets and in total, there were 9,955,441 parking tickets given out in New York City between July 2007 to June 2008 (which is a Holy Crap Fact I believe).
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Tags: nyc
Some thoughts on viral ideas that spread without the consent of their hosts.
The "viral is a dumb name for media that spreads" is hardly a new conversation, but Faris summed it up quite nicely the other day, explaining that viruses spread without the consent of the host. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is different. "LOTS OF PEOPLE CHOOSE TO PROPAGATE IT. It requires people to do something. Voluntarily. For their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they pull."
But then I read something about the Sarah Palin turkey murder interview and got to thinking. New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog wrote that the cameraman told Palin and her aides of what was going on in the background and they said, "no worries." As the Daily Intel wrote, "It’s been speculated that Palin would have trouble staying in the national spotlight until 2012 while holed away up in Alaska, where news travels by sled dog and darkness shrouds the land for months at a time. But this video proves that Palin knows exactly how to continue to attract attention: Take a normally mundane gubernatorial event like a turkey pardon, Palin it up with something irresistible to the elite east-coast liberal media, and watch the coverage follow."
This, I'd argue, is actually closer to the way viruses spread. People and media are sharing this video not because they like the message, but because they're so amazed by what's going on. It's almost like they're doing it against their will. (As my sister put it, it's kind of like watching a car crash.) Think of political combat generally and this is how things work. When the republicans started the Bill Ayers thing, for instance, the hope was that they'd get everyone talking about it. Even the people who were saying how terrible it was to try and connect Obama and Ayers were actually pushing forward the republican cause, further cementing a connection between terrorism and Obama.
I recently watched Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story and this is precisely the kind of politics he created. One of the more famous moves was in making Willie Horton a household name (here's a clip from Boogie Man about it). While the world argued about the ad, the final outcome was that, as Atwater had apparently predicted, the country knew Horton's name (and presumably connected it with Dukakis) by the end of the campaign. The Obama/Muslim connection was similar in that even when people on the left argued how ridiculous it was they were still spreading the idea.
Basically the best way to fight this kind of behavior is to not talk about it. But most people can't help themselves. To give one more political example, remember September when everybody could talk about nothing but Sarah Palin? While democrats were panning her as an inexperienced choice they were still pushing her further into the collective consciousness (and I would guess making her seem more experienced: After all, how could you be famous and inexperienced?)
In a non-political sphere, think about Wired's blogging is dead article and the firestorm it created. Most of what I read was disagreeing with the idea, but in the process they were also strengthening the meme (both from a pagerank and collective consciousness perspective). While lots of people opened their posts with something to the effect of "I don't even want to respond to this," they followed it with a response, thus justifying it as a worthwhile bit of thinking (inasmuch as it made them feel compelled to write a retort).
Anyway, all of this is to make the point that while I do think viral is overused in marketing terms, I also think there are viral ideas that spread despite their hosts best effort not to push forward the idea.
Oh, and happy thanksgiving.
Update (11/29/08): My buddy Eric wrote a very interesting response to this post over at his blog. It's specifically about how even if you disagree with something you may be accepting the framing of the issue and thus pushing forward the idea. Well worth a read.
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Some thoughts on APIs and the different ways to view the same data.
As I've said in the past, I really love making stuff on the internet as much for the thing that's created as watching and learning from the reactions to it. This was most certainly the case with My First Tweet (which is still alive and well, by the way, with 5,370 first tweets in the DB so far). There's one response in particular I want to highlight today, though, because I think it's particularly interesting.
A few days after launching I got an email from someone telling me I must take down their first tweet. It wasn't offensive or anything like that, rather, they just didn't like the idea that they hadn't said it was okay for it to be on the site. While I didn't really understand it, I figured it seemed like a reasonable request and would only take a minute of my time. So I took it down. When they went back to check that I had done what I said, they found their first tweet again. Once again, I took it down.
Then I realized what the problem is. You see, the site is built so that if the user's first tweet isn't already in the database, it queries Twitter's API and grabs it. That means that every time they went back to check if I had been honest, they were actually responsible for their first tweet being in the database.
That, I thought, is a really interesting problem. I went over to read Twitter's terms of service and indeed you the user own everything you create. In addition, they "encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms." However, from a technology perspective there are only two states for Twitter: Public and private.
Let me step back for one second and explain the act of querying Twitter's API for one second. Basically, when someone puts their username into the site, I send a message to Twitter saying, "hey, can I have the information for the user XYZ?" Twitter then sends me back one of two different messages, most often they say, "sure, here's the info you requested," but sometimes they say, "sorry, we can't give you that info because the user you requested have made themselves private." (When you try to look at the tweets of a user that is private on twitter.com you get a little lock icon and a message that says you can only see this person's tweets if they give you permission.)
So basically Twitter is a binary system, you are either public or you are private. If you're private I can't grab your first tweet. However, if you're public, I can, whether you want me to or not.
This is particularly interesting to me for a few reasons. First, it's a good way to explain how outdated the idea of webpages really are. Most people think of them as these hard coded things, like pages in a magazine or something. However, many of the webpages you look at are not created until the moment you look at the site. Brand Tags, for instance, really only consists of about a dozen files. Even though there are 800 brands in the system, all the tag clouds are generated by the same few lines of code which queries the database and returns the formatted results. When I was getting the request to take down the first tweet, I was complying, however, it didn't really matter because it never existed as anything but a database entry in the first place.
What's so interesting about this is that that's actually how Twitter works as well (I believe). The results that the Twitter API returns are remarkably similar to the way the pages are formatted (down to the fact that you can only get to page 160 on both Twitter.com and from their API). That means that the site isn't so much a site as it is a view for the data (of which My First Tweet is one, search.twitter.com is another and Twitter Grader is a third).
Twitter isn't alone in working this way, either. Most sites these days are just skins for the underlying data, which is increasingly being shared with others who are making new skins for it. This isn't new news to those who build things on the web, but I think it is a fundamentally different functionality than the average user understands. Just something to think about.
The second point I wanted to make is around this public/private thing. In a world where everything is just skins for the underlying data, you have fewer and fewer controls over how that data is displayed when you sign up to use a service. Some services (like Flickr) allow you to specify a licensing for your work (full copyright, creative commons, etc.) and they report that to those people who want to work with the data, but even then, the API user can chose to ignore the licensing entirely and just take the photo unless the user has specified that this CAN NOT be used (either because it's private or there is no access to full size).
As someone developing using APIs this kind of flexibility is pretty awesome. I can get access to pretty much anything I want (which is rad). But for some users, clearly this is worrying. I don't know that more safeguards need to be put in place, but I do think that this wholesale data access needs to be better explained (there's a tendency to live in a world where we assume people know what an API is1).
As usual, no hard answers here, just some stuff to think about.
1 While I'm no technician, I do think it's worth trying to explain what an API is, since it's thrown around quite a bit these days. Essentially an API is just wholesale access to the data/functionality from a web service. If you're Google Maps that can manifest itself in letting people send you an address and returning the latitude and longitude or if you're Flickr that can mean returning the URLs for photos tagged with noah. Developers then can find lots of different ways to use the data/functionality. Essentially, with access to the raw data the sky is the limit. In some ways, RSS feeds are kind of like APIs for websites. They provide people with some access to the underlying data (which is separated from the presentation layer that you see when you visit NoahBrier.com for instance). (I don't know if this definition is helpful at all. If anyone wants I can take another shot, or maybe someone else can try to give a better definition in the comments.)
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Schneier makes some interesting points about digital communication (and specifically ephemeral conversation). Basically he says that in a world where everything is recorded and (most often) permanently stored, what happens to the ephemeral conversation that once passed into the ether after it was uttered? As he puts it, "Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed."
Anyway, it's a good read, Shneier as always makes some good points and asks whether we should be making more efforts to protect this type of conversation so that everyone doesn't turn into politicians who are forced to watch every word and give away their BlackBerrys (or at least not as extreme as politicians are).
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Tags: communication, culture, technology
It's not every day that you see a massive change to the way Google results look, but if you've got a Google account you've no doubt noticed it. Basically you search for something when you're signed in and next to every result is an up arrow, down arrow and little x with a speech bubble after the result. Basically Google is asking for your feedback, though apparently your pumping things up and down only effect your own results (for now). The comments, however, will be public to all and you'll be identified with your username (which Google reminds you of when you first use it).
This is all kind of crazy, mostly because I seemed to have missed hearing about it all together. Apparently it only came online today. Clearly search engines are inherently social (rankings like PageRank rely on people linking to one another to work), but this is an interesting and opaquely social development. I'll be fascinated to see how they keep this from devolving into a giant spam-filled game of FIRST!. (BTW, looks like Google just posted something.)
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Tags: google, search
I've been thinking quite a bit lately about advertising on the internet. More specifically about how the economic downturn could signal a breaking point for banner advertising. So we know about banner blindness and dismal clickthrough/interaction rates, yet people keep buying up the stuff. Mainly it's because it's the closest thing the web has to do with scale. There are no other good ways to get your message in front of a lot of people (whether or not they look at it) that doesn't take a lot more work (like PR/outreach).
With that said, I had another thought the other day: Maybe the answer is that advertisers need more variations on their creative. What I mean is, I think part of the banner blindness problem (and this is all speculation without any data behind it so take it with a grain of salt) is that we're all trained to recognize when something doesn't belong and, in the case of the web, to ignore it. Banners tend to be a different color, font and they move all around, add in the fact that they sit along the edges and they're just too easy to quickly spot and dismiss. But once in awhile someone like Apple comes along and does some fancy custom unit where they pay attention to everything including getting the NYTimes.com typeface right. That kind of stuff must make more of an impact than your run of the mill banner, no matter how cool it might be. Right?
Of course, doing a whole bunch of custom units that match to both the look/feel of the site and the audiences mindset is a whole lot more expensive from a creative development perspective. But isn't that kind of targeting what the web does best? If advertisers are so desperate for people to pay attention, maybe they should try a little harder.
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Tags: advertising, marketing
It seems to be a good week for animals helping us understand the world. Not only has metacognition been found in rats but also, specialist ants were not found to be any more efficient than non-specialists. (Yay generalists!)
Anyways, I'm always amazed by the amount we can learn from nature (if you haven't read Emergence, do so). I'm more and more convinced that the answers to most questions lie in basic human/animal tendencies and are just post-rationalized to be more complex (both by ourselves and outside observers). For whatever that's worth ...
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Tags: animals, science
So we're all in agreement that the internet is awesome but links like these make you pause and realize just how awesome it is. Where else could you read an exchange between a guy who owes money and the person trying to collect (via Charles of RD4T) where the guys offers a drawing of a spider in exchange? (While I doubt it's true, it's amazingly funny.) Or, where else would you find out about the unlikely economic indicator of gifts to mistresses? "The current economic conditions have caused 82% of the men surveyed to cut back on allowances and gifts to their mistresses." (Women, it turns out have increased gifts and there are some theories on why that might be in the piece.)
I love this thing.
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Tags: economics, funny, internet
I was in the middle of reading yet another article on the auto industry bailout when I realized something really interesting: I genuinely haven't made up my mind yet. It seems like such a quaint idea that I was actually reading all this stuff and getting swayed from one side to the other, still unable to make up my mind on what move I think is right. On one side you've got folks arguing that whether you believe in what they've been up to or not, the eventual net effect on the economy of not bailing them out will be greater than the cost. Further supporting just how far this ripple effect could go, when I picked up AdAge from my mailbox this evening the cover page outlines just what roll Detroit plays in the ad industry: 3.3% of total US measured spending, 5.9% of US network TV spending, etc. (For the record, the most interesting and compelling argument I've read so far comes on this side as Jonathan Cohn argues in the New Republic that a) they may be forced into Chapter 7 not Chapter 11 and b) that the auto industry has actually already begun going down the right path and they just need some more time to get there.)
On the other side you've got people saying that they must be allowed to fail and that, "if GM is going to be a welfare agency, it’s hard to also expect it to be a viable company that will rapidly get off the federal teat."
Anyway, I still haven't come to a conclusion, but I'm having a lot of fun being one of those undecideds so many of us spent the last year debating about.
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Tags: bailout, cars, economics
This video of Bjork explaining how television works is well worth three minutes of your life (plus you'll understand where the title of this post comes from). Really makes me think someone should give Bjork a web show where she dispatches pieces of absurd advice and explanation. It would be kind of like David Lynch's daily weather report.
Maybe this is a new genre. Other examples?
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Tags: funny, video
There's a lot of chatter out there, how do you know when to listen and when not to?
This one's been germinating for awhile now. About a month ago I was having drinks with my friend Matt and he made a point I hadn't heard before about the election: "Sarah Palin's handlers let the chatter get to them." Basically what he was saying is that if they had really been good at their jobs they never would have let her go on with Katie Couric and that the only reason they did is because everyone (media talking heads, DC folks) was saying that you can't have a VP candidate that doesn't do any interviews. But who says so? Who makes the rules?
Now I don't know whether I agree with the hypothesis or not, but I think it nicely frames an issue which seems to be coming up more and more lately (thought its really not new). In some ways its related to Alan's Nascar Blindness (the ad industry's tendency to miss out on that which they can't see) but in the opposite direction. This is actually about paying too much attention to the chatter and losing site of your goals. In the case of Sarah Palin, it seems safe to say that her role was to sure up the base of the party (I don't even think that's a controversial statement at this point). So if that's the case, what do you get out of putting her on with Katie Couric other than the potential for harm?
Take another example, those Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads (video for those that missed it). Immediately, online folks started ripping at the flesh of Microsoft and their agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky. (The most ridiculous thing I read was from Information Week and suggested "The effectiveness of brand-driven advertising died about the same time Seinfeld hit syndication." That's so dumb I'm not even going to bother with it.) Now, according to Gizmodo, "there's even more of an indication now that Microsoft aggressively cut the Gates/Seinfeld spot production short, canceling the shoot for a fourth spot just three days into production. The spots were intended to be part of a running series with up to 12 planned spots conceptualized. Now it's unclear whether or not we'll even see the last spot air, let alone Seinfeld come back for a reprisal."
But why? It couldn't have been because the ads didn't get attention: As AdAge pointed out, the Seinfeld/Gates ads were getting 14x as many views per day as the new "I'm a PC" spots. What's more, that same article points out that much of this came from all the chatter online and "The Seinfeld/Gates ads had more adjectives in them, while comments in PC ads had more nouns, suggesting a more emotional response to Seinfeld/Gates ads." Now my argument from the start is that the goal of Microsoft advertising right now is to reposition/humanize the company. From my original Seinfeld/Gates post:
Anyway, let me get to my point. I think there are a lot of problems at Microsoft, most of which can't be solved with advertising. For one, it won't solve the fact they put out a dud in Vista is something they're not going to fix with an ad campaign (OS 9 ring a bell??). However, what it can start to do is make people think about Microsoft in a slightly different way. It starts to soften the company around the edges. As I wrote in an IM to Alan earlier today, you can't just jump from super-nerd (Microsoft's perception) to cool guy (Apple) without at first rolling up your sleeves. The ad humanizes Microsoft by making one of the world's richest men seem like an every day guy.
It's precisely those emotional comments that the ads should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didin't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... the people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.
In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback. As a small example, I've been asked a ton of times to add logos to brand tags for companies that have just started/don't exist yet. Every time I've declined because I've explained that the site is about measuring brand perception and that if you don't exist yet, you don't have a brand perception. What these people want is for consumers to give them feedback on their logos and I basically just think that's useless. What are people going to tell you? That your logo is too blue? The reality of the situation is that logos, like brands, don't exist in vacuums and people's feedback on your logo without holding your product or seeing it on the shelf is pretty much 100 percent useless (unless you're missing some giant thing like you're selling mens deodorant and your logo is pink with flowers, but some basic testing/a decent design firm should clear that up).
Commercials are different that products. If your product is hurting someone you've got to do something about it immediately, if your commercial is offending their sensibilities think carefully whether anything really needs to be done. Brands need to ask themselves, is this the a vocal minority speaking or are they actually a reflection of our target?
Sometimes too much listening is a bad thing.
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This is as much a lazyweb request as it is thinking out loud: Looking at the way Verizon has spread FIOS seems to me like a classic case of old-school advertising working just as its supposed. They've bought tons of TV, used claim-based messaging ("X times faster than cable/DSL") and every one and their mother knows about them. I haven't seen a Facebook page, heard about blogger outreach or anything else of that ilk (though they certainly may be doing all of it). Anyway, I guess my point is that you can still build a brand the old-fashioned way: By buying a whole lot of television ads. Think about it, where did you hear about FIOS?
(Usual caveats apply: I don't think this is the only answer, I know you need lots of different stuff and every brand is different. Just wanted to make the point.)
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Tags: marketing
Michael Lewis has a really good portfolio piece outlining the financial crisis and specifically telling the story of Steve Eisman whose firm FrontPoint Partners put their money where their mouth was and shorted just about everything mortgage related.
Anyway, the article is a well written narrative through Eisman's eyes as he uncovered just how bad each level of the mortgage crisis actually was. The kicker quote to me, though, came as part of a conversation with John Gutfreund, former boss of Solomon Brothers who brought the company public (also prominently featured in Lewis's Liar's Poker).
Anyway, here's what Lewis wrote: "He thought the cause of the financial crisis was 'simple. Greed on both sides—greed of investors and the greed of the bankers.' I thought it was more complicated. Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed." This is actually something I've thought a great deal about as I've seen people blame greed for the crisis. Whoever sets regulations needs to understand that people will be greedy and deal with it accordingly. The fact that incentives for greed were put in place, which Lewis outlines, is the fault of the government. Or, as Eisman puts it in one of the turning points of the story when he realizes that the investment banks were actually creating more crappy bonds with his short money, "This is allowed?"
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Tags: economics, finance
The Times points out that products like Spam are doing better than ever with the economy on the decline: "Even as consumers are cutting back on all sorts of goods, Spam is among a select group of thrifty grocery items that are selling steadily. Pancake mixes and instant potatoes are booming. So are vitamins, fruit and vegetable preservatives and beer, according to data from October compiled by Information Resources, a market research firm." (Paper towels, socks, shoe polish and women's fragrance are examples of things on the decline.)
Apparently, all of these fit into the category of inferior goods, which "is a good that decreases in demand when consumer income rises, unlike normal goods, for which the opposite is observed. Inferiority, in this sense, is an observable fact relating to affordability rather than a statement about the quality of the good." The thing I don't get about the Times list, though, is why vitamins are in there? What about vitamins would make people buy more of them when things go sour? Seems like an example of a luxury (after all, you can easily get vitamins from food). Sure it could be because people are eating less healthy foods and so they're trying to make up for it, but that would put a lot of faith in the healthiness of the American public that I don't have ...
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Tags: economics
What a great way to explain people's need to find order in everything (including the stock market):
Look, for example, at this elegant little experiment. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze with a few morsels of food placed on either the far right or left side of the enclosure. The placement of the food is randomly determined, but the dice is rigged: over the long run, the food was placed on the left side sixty per cent of the time. How did the rat respond? It quickly realized that the left side was more rewarding. As a result, it always went to the left, which resulted in a sixty percent success rate. The rat didn't strive for perfection. It didn't search for a Unified Theory of the T-shaped maze, or try to decipher the disorder. Instead, it accepted the inherent uncertainty of the reward and learned to settle for the best possible alternative.
The experiment was then repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike the rat, their swollen brains stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions and then tried to learn from their prediction errors. The problem was that there was nothing to predict: the randomness was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate. Although most of the students were convinced they were making progress towards identifying the underlying algorithm, they were actually being outsmarted by a rat.
From the always brilliant Jonah Lerer.
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Tags: economics, psychology
Nick Denton's latest forecast for internet businesses is a dark eye opener (though he does admit that it's in his best interest to throw competitors off the trail). Denton suggests that, "From conglomerates to internet ventures, executives should be planning now on a decline of up to 40% in advertising spending during this cycle." It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are a few key things he nails.
First off, everyone's first response to why the web is going to be okay in a downturn is that it's more measurable. While that's all well and good for online direct response businesses, for the big brands (who spend the vast majority of the money on marketing/advertising), it's simply not. As Denton points out, "it's still only television advertising that can demonstrate a correlation between spending and a boost to a marketer's sales." That's true (except direct response of course). Clients, of course, are judged by their boss on the sales numbers, not click numbers, so they're more inclined towards television whether or not you think the correlations are bullshit.
Second, Denton talks about unit types: "Internet publishers have forced marketers into a straightjacket of standard ad units too small for brands to breathe. If the sector is to capture a larger share of brand advertising from magazines and television, the creative needs to have more impact." While I agree with him, I'm not sure swing the pendulum to unstandardizing is the answer either. At that point you'd just see production costs skyrocket as brands needed to do 200 versions of a banner ad.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I'm kind of thinking that 2009 is going to be the year that there's finally a banner advertising shakeout and people start to look for other ways of monetizing audiences.
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Tags: advertising, internet
Just a bunch of links and random thoughts.
Over the last few weeks I feel like I've been running into way more interesting stuff than I could post over in the sidenotes. So, I figured maybe it was time for one of those wonderful link drop posts ...
- To get things started, Google's got a new site that analyzes flu-related searches to help alert people of the bug in their area. The Times reported that tests of the site "suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
- Another quote from that same article makes me think of an idea I've had for awhile: "But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes." Why couldn't Google create some kind of fund that bought and sold stock based on people's searches? Seems like there must be some collective intelligence in the data, right? Would that be legal?
- Yet another New York Times story (I feel like all I read is the Times these days) is about the guy behind the rumor that Palin thought Africa was a country not a contient and how he pulled it off. Reading the article I kind of felt like the guys who did this are culture hackers: Recognizing a vulnerability in the system and letting the world know by cutting it open for all to see.
- Great XKCD comic that speaks perfectly to a project I've been thinking about for awhile: Mapping out "the city." I've always been amazed how if you're in Silicon Valley the city is San Francisco but if you're in Connecticut it's NYC. Would love to poll the country and map "the city" ... Some time, some time ...
- The government owns a lot more land than I thought it did (including 45 percent of California and 84 percent of Nevada).
- Google has a really great SEO starter guide (PDF download here). Who knew?
- "Tumblrs are like bedrooms, and we’re teenagers spending idle hours postering them with pictures and magazine cutouts." - Zach Klein (via Mike)
- Ryanair is going to start £8 flights to Europe soon.
- MIke told an awesome story he heard about the value of lots of ideas: "A ceramics professor comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot."
- Why did 52% of voters who make over $250,000 vote for Obama?
- Facebook's value looks more like $4 billion at the moment (as opposed to the $15 billion valuation Microsoft invested on). I still contend that if the company were to sell it would go for around $10 billion, though, because Google and a bunch of other players would bid it up and Microsoft would finally end up spending more than it wanted to.
- "'Monkey Tennis' is a British pop culture phrase, first used in the late 1990s and popular throughout the 2000s. Originating as a joke in a television sitcom, it has come to be commonly used as an example of the hypothetical lowest common denominator television programme that it is possible to make. Programmes believed to have been poorly-conceived or of particularly low quality, especially within the reality television genre, are sometimes compared with the "Monkey Tennis" idea in media coverage and popular discussion in the UK." Who knew?
- Last but not least, The Smoking Gun has an amazing collection of artist riders. Good for hours of fun.
That's it for now. Off to beersphere.
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Really interesting article in the Times today about the DC school chancellor taking on teacher unions and tenure in a really interesting way. Basically, "Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure." Being that my mother works in educational reform I've been schooled (no pun intended) on the issues that can come along with tenure in the school system and while I agree with some of the quotes that says its not the only problem with schools, it's certainly a huge one. Bad teachers can't get fired unless they break the law. What other industry can you be terrible at your job and keep it (plus keep getting paid more) for as long as you want it?
Just ran across this article by Nicholas Kristof that calls on Obama to focus on education. Towards the end is this paragraph: "There’s still a vigorous debate about how to improve education, but recent empirical research is giving us a much better sense of what works. A study by the Hamilton Project, a public policy group at the Brookings Institution, outlines several steps to boost weak schools: end rigid requirements for teacher certification that impede hiring, make tenure more difficult to get so that ineffective teachers can be weeded out after three years on the job and award hefty bonuses to good teachers willing to teach in low-income areas. If we want outstanding, inspiring teachers in difficult classrooms, we’re going to have to pay much more — and it would be a bargain."
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Tags: education
Faris has promised to buy me free beer if I tell you all about Beersphere going on tonight. To be honest, I was going to post it anyway, but he doesn't need to know that. So, if you're in New York (or one of the eight other cities it's happening), come over and have a drink (I'll be there).
Here are the details for NYC: Obivia, 201 Lafayette Street from 6pm. [Happy hour runs until 8pm and there should be some free Ketel One splashing about too.]
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Tags: nyc
Been running across a bunch of interesting post-election charts that I thought were worth sharing. First off from the New York Times article on the role of the South in presidential politics comes a chart breaking down the demographics of different counties by the percentage increase each part received from 2004 (there's also an interactive version but I don't like it as much). Next up is a whole bunch of different maps showing what the country would look like if specific groups were the only voters. The most interesting map to me was "voters earning over $50,000 a year" which has Obama winning 271 to McCain's 267. Last, but not least, is this chart showing the ebbs and flows in coverage for both candidates (it's about 3/4 down the page). Up until September 1st, Obama was about 20 percent ahead in coverage (I believe Palin was announced on the 29th). After that they're neck and neck until the end.
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Tags: charts, data, politics
So you remember last week when I asked where the good reporting had gone? Well, looks like Newsweek has been doing a bit of it. Their "How He Did It?" behind-the-election expose is just amazing. It's a 50,000 word trip through the last two years of the candidates lives. Do your a favor and go buy a copy of the magazine, easily the best article (if you can even call it that) I've read this year.
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Tags: journalism, politics
Really interesting Foreign Policy article on the possibility of legalizing prediction markets in the US. Generally it's chock full of interesting stuff about how prediction markets work and why they should be legal, but this idea really blew me away: "If the CFTC rule change goes through, client companies could buy contracts to hedge against unforeseen events that could damage their business, be it the collapse of the Bolivian government or a renewed outbreak of war in Georgia." Pretty nuts, huh?
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Tags: economics, markets
Just posted this to HolyCrapFacts as well, but thought it interesting enough to post here: According to the Technorati 2008 State of the Blogosphere, of the 133 million blogs the site tracks only 7.4 million have been updated in the last 120 days. (For those that don't feel like doing the math, that's 125.6 million abandoned or at least unloved blogs.)
Nick Carr offers up an explanation: Blogging is the new amateur radio. Basically he argues that while the long-term impact of amateurs will be remembered, the big players will continue to get sucked in to larger sites or turn into businesses.
I don't think I agree, but I haven't quite figured out why.
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Tags: blogs
Amid all the excitement yesterday, the Dow Jones lost 486 points. As the New York Times points out, "For those curious about the connection between stock markets and presidential elections, Wednesday’s declines fit in with historical precedent. Since 1888, on average, stocks fell 0.5 percent from Monday to Wednesday of a presidential election week when the Democrats took the White House, according to Jeremy J. Siegel, a professor at the Wharton School. (A Republican victory brought an average return of 0.7 percent.) This week, stocks fell about 1.5 percent over the same period."
The Economist offers another possibility for yesterdays decline, "One reason may be that markets already reflected the outcome; after all, it was not exactly unanticipated" (which makes sense to me, since prediction markets had Obama way up). (On the topic, you should also read the 2003 piece by Hal Varian the Economist links to which party means better market returns.)
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Tags: economy, politics
On the sad state of journalism.
Okay, so first off, this is not about politics, but rather about media. However, I need to use a political example to get the ball rolling. So, for those of you sick of this stuff, I'll be quick.
------ BEGIN POLITICAL TRANSMISSION ------
Throughout the run up to the election I had lots of conversations/arguments with lots of folks about things like polls. My argument tended to be something along the lines of, "sure, that poll is probably wrong in that way, but it's also probably wrong in 200 other ways and until you show me the data I don't believe any of it." (Again, not those exact words, but close.)
I had the same arguments around people talking about Palin supporters, especially those who lectured New Yorkers that they didn't understand. Now I happen to agree that most New Yorkers have no sense of what it's like to live somewhere else and do suffer from a bit of NASCAR blindness as Alan likes to call it, however, I also think most of what I read or heard about Palin supporters from those same people was equally reductionist but in a different direction.
------ END POLITICAL TRANSMISSION ------
What I've come to realize is that what I was hungering for was journalism/reporting. Not just calling up experts and getting their opinions on things, but actually going out and talking to real folks in real places or digging in some real research and sharing some hard numbers. The best article I read over the last few months was a New Yorker piece by George Packer about his time in Ohio speaking to undecided voters.
Unfortunately this kind of reporting comes few and far-between, with journalists instead opting to the regulars. In thinking about it the other day, I started to feel like maybe this was a reaction to bloggers. Clearly blogs play a big role in the mind of journalists (even though they likely play a smaller role in the life of most Americans). Blogs (including this one) are almost all conjecture. Few bloggers conduct original interviews, research or reporting. Mostly they just write about things they find interesting. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but I personally often find myself wanting more (which I think is probably part of why FiveThirtyEight was so popular).
So I guess my question is two-fold: A) Am I just missing something, or does it really seem like there's less good reporting/research coming out of the media these days? B) If not, why? Is it just because that stuff is more expensive than just calling an expert?
At the end of the day, I still very much appreciate what's out there and think there are some outlets doing a fine job delivering interesting stories with in-depth reporting frequently (the New Yorker comes to mind first). But what's up with the rest? How did this happen?
Oh, and this is all conjecture without any research or data to back it up. So (like you should with everything else you read) take it with a grain of salt.
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The sad story of yesterday's election seems like it's going to be California voting for Proposition 8, declaring that marriage is between a man and a woman, thus striking down the state's Supreme Court ruling. This to me seems like obvious discrimination and I couldn't be more against it. I just read a great piece that put it into perfect perspective for me (via techno.blog("Dion")). The basic thesis is that if you can't find anyone within the group a piece of legislation is effecting that's in favor of it, it's discriminatory.
The entry gives three examples: "I have met many women who are pro-life. They've traded one value (personal choice) in favor of another (sanctity of life). ... I'm in favor of women having voting rights, even though I'm a man. ... There are Silicon Valley zillionaires who are voting for Obama. If Obama is elected, they will pay more in income and capital gains tax as a result."
While I expect there may be holes in this theory, and that you'd have to specify the type of legislation it works for (like specifically "values" legislation), what struck me was it's similarity to Karl Popper's definition of science (which I wrote about in January): "Philosopher Karl Popper has argued for decades that the primary criterion of science is the falsifiability of its theories. We can never prove absolutely, but we can falsify. A set of ideas that cannot, in principle, be falsified is not science."
I haven't put this through the ringers yet, but it seems to me like this statement is scientific: Legislation that can not be supported by anyone in the effected group is not values, it's discrimination. Now let's try and throw things against it that prove it wrong. The first thing I think of is laws that punish criminals, which theoretically they would be against. However, those same laws also protect criminals as citizens from other criminals. Anyone else?
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Tags: gayrights, politics
For the first time in a while, I feel good the Wednesday after Election Day.
It's probably not a huge surprise that I'm pretty excited this morning. I don't know that I have a ton to add to the conversation, but I can't resist the opportunity to throw a few things into the commons.
I spent a bit of time this morning reading reactions from the 2004 election. One thing in particular struck me: Positivity. Not just the positivity of the people who are happy that their candidate won, but the general positivity that came from Barack Obama's campaign.
In response to the 2004 results, Jon Stewart wrote, "Oddly, there seems to be more anger and disenfranchisement in the enfranchised. I don't think I've ever seen a time when the party that controlled the Senate, the House, the White House and the Supreme Court was so out of sorts about how little respect they get. At a certain point you want to say, 'OK, Goliath. Stop pretending.'" At times during this election I felt that same way. The Republicans played it angry: They tried to convince the country that despite the fact they'd controlled the White House for the last eight years, they were the underdog.
But the Obama campaign didn't take the bait. They just kept on keeping on. They were focused on hope and change, letting Obama have his own personality, unlike Kerry's reactionary personality of 2004.
And that hope and personality seems to be real. I went back and read Obama's 2004 DNC speech, which by all accounts was his coming out party and the official start of his campaign (though I don't think he expected that campaign to start until 2012). In that speech he said, "My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or 'blessed,' believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success." That's not rhetoric, that's truth. He continued, "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Finally he hit on a theme in that speech that he repeated last night: "Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America. ... In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?" Last night he repeated, "It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America."
The way he chose to tell that story was through the eyes of 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper. It was a beautiful way to illustrate that our history and successes are not remembered as belonging to a party, but rather to all of us: They're the things that make all of us proud to live in America.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:
Yes We Can.
Enjoy your day.
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Interesting idea from Salon blogger Andrew Leonard that compare peer review to the current state of the web/blogosphere. In response to the idea that The Fed is not subject to peer review, Leonard writes: "Every move Bernanke makes is subject to immediate criticism, online, by scores of top-notch economists who incorporate it into their ongoing blogospheric dialogue about how to understand and manage the economy. This is not peer review as formally understood in an academic sense, but I think you can make the case that it is rapidly evolving into a potent public force."
But the closing line is the real kicker, "Perhaps what Alan Greenspan needed, back in the day, was a livelier Internet."
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Tags: blogs, economics
No matter what side you fall on for Tuesday's election you likely heard about Obama's 30-minute prime-time special last week. I'm not interested in debating the quality or effectiveness (from a creative perspective) of the program, but rather the choice of medium. If you work in the advertising industry you've been hearing for awhile about the death of television as a marketing channel. Everyone loves to talk about the two-wayness of the web and how our future lies there. While I certainly agree that the web is where it's at (I work at a company that makes stuff for brands on the internet after all), I also think TV is far from dead. I've argued this with many folks in the past, but there's still a bunch of stuff that TV can do that the web can't (or at least can't with any efficiency). That is mostly drive awareness for reasonable sums.
Take Obama's special, for instance, Wired calculated that Obama paid .21 cents a viewer ("The primetime show attracted more than 33 million viewers for a rumored/reported cost of somewhere between $3 million and $7 million. CBS, NBC and Fox were rumored to get a million bucks each for the half-hour of air time. Let's assume, liberally, that Obama paid similar sums to the other networks (BET, MSNBC, TV One and Univision) -- if that's the case, he paid roughly 21 cents per viewer.") That's pretty freaking cheap. Sure the web can offer a better return, but that would come without the guarantees. Plus, and this is one of those things that lots of people don't remember, only 55% of US households has broadband. As Shelly Palmer put it, "That leaves a significant amount of voters offline, including the Joe the Plumbers and Tito the Builders of the world and other people who simply haven’t adapted to modern technology. What’s the best way to reach them? It certainly isn’t by Blackberry messenger or their Facebook wall."
Now I'm by no means arguing that TV is the be-all-and-end-all of the advertising world, just saying that it's not throwaway. The fact is, for a lot of companies, especially those small ones, if they could afford to run some TV ads it would probably be the best way to spend their money (after all, for many the biggest obstacle they have is awareness, the thing TV is actually best at).
Update (11/3/08): I'm having a few second thoughts on this post. My big question is what was the actual objective for this? One must assume it was to a) reach swing voters and b) galvanize the base and get them to encourage others (the latter seems much less likely than the former). Still need to think on it.
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Tags: advertising, television
There's an awesome clip from CNN featuring Paul Krugman explaining his Nobel Prize winning trade theory.
Basically Krugman's theory explained why countries were trading the same kinds of goods. Traditionally trade theory had focused on countries regional advantages in producing, and therefore trading goods. The example he uses is the south sending bananas to the north and the north sending wheat to the south.
Without going into too much detail (both because I am not sure I have my head wrapped around and because you can watch the video for that). A few things are especially interesting about what Krugman says. First, he says that it all seems obvious now. It's amazing to me how everyone can miss something in the moment that seems so obvious in retrospect. Second, his trade theory is all about scale, it's focused around the collection of efficiency that comes with the production/sale of more goods (scale, of course, is a fundamental part of network theory as well). Third, it's when Krugman says that everyone was focused on why countries were producing the things they were producing and it didn't really matter. Again, like the retrospect example, I like stories of everyone missing something because they were staring the wrong direction.
Think I might work on a longer entry about this Krugman stuff, but this will do for now.
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Tags: economics, video
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