January 2009 Archives
File this under "how did I miss that?" Looks like Gmail finally released an offline version this week (with Docs and Reader working offline it's hard to believe it took so long -- except, of course, it must be way more complex with the massive amount of email some people have). Anyhow, as the Gmail team explains: "Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network."
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Tags: gmail, google
While there are still lots of question about the journalistic merit of blogs, they do allow for coverage that could otherwise not exist. Such is the case with nytpicker, whose mission is to report "the goings-on inside the New York Times -- the newspaper and the institution itself."
It's a pretty cool look inside what's still the most important media outlet in America.
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Tags: journalism, media, nytimes
I generally like articles that are short and to the point. This Wall Street Journal blog article fits the bill. It simply and precisely goes through three of the reasons many online communities built for businesses fail: 1) "They have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology", 2) "Most ... put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites" and 3) "Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site."
Yup, that about sums it up in my mind. Well that and no one cares about their brand.
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Tags: business, communities, marketing
Since there's nothing like being a little contrarian, Rick and I have decided to start The Media is Thriving in response to the ever so popular The Media is Dying. Instead of tracking the death of the media industry, we plan to track it's success. As Rick explained in his introductory blog post, "I also think that a LOT of internet people have no concept of just how much money goes through the media companies. Time warner collected THIRTY FIVE BILLION DOLLARS last year. Even if you take out their insanely large, profitable, growing cable division, their revenues are still 4 times Google's. It's madness."
So there you go. Follow The Media is Thriving on Twitter and if you've got any tips, email, comment or @ us.
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Tags: media, twitter
The Times had an interesting article Discovery Communications' web video strategy. Essentially they're going back in their vault and cutting up as much of it as possible into clips that are under five minutes long.
I've said to a few clients in the past that the reason to do something is that there's no reason not to. That doesn't always go over so well, but I think this is a particularly good example of that strategy. The cost of employing a few people to cut and upload video is lower than the ad revenue on the video they throw up. Even if they don't get rich off it, $1 is more than $0. (Though the article also points out that Discovery is a bit unique in that it has global rights to the content it broadcasts.)
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Tags: business, internet, video
The St. Petersburg Times is up to something pretty cool with Obameter. As they explain, "PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken." It's got an RSS feed and everything so you can keep score at home.
I think this is great. He ran on change and now he's being held accountable (so far he's doing pretty well). Let's hope he can live up to his promises.
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Tags: obama, politics
This is too cool. "Snow rollers form when the snow has just the right combination of sticky snow that is light enough to be moved by wind. If the wind is strong enough, it picks up snow crystals and begins to tumble them over across 'downstream' snow cover. Soon a little mini snowball forms. As it grows and increases surface area, the wind gusts push sheets of snow along."
There are some more photos of snow rollers over at Flickr.
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Tags: nature, weather
Over the last week I've heard of not one, but two atrocities that are a direct result of a piece of software called Microsoft Bob (named one of the 25 worst tech products by PC World).
First off, there's Clippy, the awful Microsoft Office assistant. As James Fallows pointed out in his blog, "Clippy suffered the dreaded 'optimization for first time use' problem. That is, the very first time you were composing a letter with Word, you might possibly be grateful for advice about how to use various letter-formatting features. The next billion times you typed 'Dear ...' and saw Clippy pop up, you wanted to scream."
Next, there's Comic Sans, easily the most misused font in the universe (I'm assuming if other planets have invented fonts they haven't had one spiral out of control as badly as this one). It turns out that the face was designed for Microsoft Bob after Vincent Connare, the typographer responsible, saw an animated dog speaking in Times New Roman and thought it was all wrong (he spoke at ROFLthing yesterday).
On top of all this, guess who was a project manager for a short time on Microsoft Bob? None other than Melinda French, who now goes by the last name Gates and helps run a multi-billion dollar charitable fund. Fun facts abound!
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Tags: microsoft, technology
This Marginal Revolution post from September, 2007 explains an idea I was trying to explain in yesterday's post about networks: "What makes virtual worlds important for economics is that for the first time ever, macro-economists will be able to do experiments. I predict that we will see some very interesting experiments in the near future."
This is true across the board, actually. What makes the web important is that for the first time ever we are all able to do large scale experiments.
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Tags: economics, internet
Just a bunch of stuff that's been floating around in my head lately about the role of networks in our lives.
One idea I've been turning over in my head lately is around the idea of desire lines. These are the unpaved paths people chose to take and eventually trample, turning what was one person's decision to stray from the pavement into an all-but-official route. I love desire lines as a metaphor because they expose the network of collective decision-making that tends to otherwise go unnoticed in the physical world.
On the internet, of course, things are very different. Every day we encounter the fruits of collective decision-making and most of the time are quite aware of the role we play in it. As I wrote in 2006, "I think the most important effect of the internet thus far is that it's exposed the network. For the first time everyone can understand what a network is and how it works. Now that we do, we're beginning to take that knowledge and exploit it." (By the way, I have trouble how much I love the fact that I can pull up forgotten thoughts from 2006 in an instant. It's an amazing power to possess.) This knowledge, of course, is what leads to people gaming the system, whether it be shady search engine optimization or manipulating Digg. Ethical issues notwithstanding, though, it's pretty amazing to think that so many people understand the core functionality of networks (even if they don't understand that they understand).
What's at the heart of this all is data: Before the web there was no real way to fully comprehend how networks functioned because the datasets were so small. In fact, I'd argue, that was true for most things. The web affords us the opportunity to play the role of amateur social scientist, looking at datasets that social scientists would have only dreamed of 30 years ago. As James Fowler explains in this Seed Salon with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi:
Well, the great thing about these massive, passive data sets is that we're going to have really deep information about a very, very large number of people. So we won't be forced anymore to make trade-offs between depth and breadth. But then the question becomes: What kind of preparation are we going to give our students? We've had a revolution in game theory in the past 30 years, so that a good number of political scientists all across the country work only on mathematical, closedform models. We've also had a revolution in the application of statistics.
But both of these revolutions have been built on this atomistic view of human beings. Statisticians make the assumption that all the observations are independent in order to be able to calculate statistical significance. Game theorists make it because, as you know, getting anything to work out in a closed-form model is nearly impossible if you assume that people are taking into account the preferences of other people.
We need not only to ramp up the amount of methodological training that people in social sciences have, but also to shift their perception into realizing that the relationships between people are important.
This is not constrained to social science, or even just academia, as people we all need to ramp up our understanding of the interconnection between individuals and their decisions. In fact, I think laymen may be ahead of the scientists in this respect. Social scientists (especially economists) have a lot invested in the individual view of human beings, the idea that we are rational actors generally unaffected by the world around us. This, of course, is wrong and behavioral economists are doing a great job of throwing a few wrenches into the field (of course the world economy collapsing isn't helping either).
Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling and have lost focus a bit. Partly that's because I don't really know where to go here. I know this is important, but there's a bit of a "what next" feeling left with me. What does a world look like where people understand the fundamentals of network science? How does the observation of group behavior in real time move us in directions we might not have expected? What does it mean for an individual to recognize their role within the mass?
Obviously, I'm not entirely sure how to answer those questions at the moment, but I'll keep thinking about it (and would love any thoughts you have).
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I really like this Newsweek interview with Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E (which missed out on the Oscar nomination for best picture).
Anyway, in the interview he talks about lots of stuff, but I especially liked his explanation of how the story ended up the way it did: "I wanted to wallow in that innocent wonder and joy that you could get out of a love story in a '50s musical, but I felt there's no way the world would accept that in today's society. Unless you disguise it in a dystopian, sci-fi love story with two machines. Then, suddenly everybody's willing to take down their shields and just indulge. And maybe realize how much they miss being fulfilled that way -- with unadulterated joy."
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Tags: culture, movies
Learned an interesting tidbit yesterday: Turns out that there's a big debate in the vegan community over whether honey is okay to eat. The hardcore vegans argue that it's an animal product and that even though it's an excretion, the bees are imprisoned. The honey-eaters, on the other hand, argue that if you avoid honey you have to consider everything bees are used for: "Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops."
Also, following some links off the article I was reading a bit about pearls (which also aren't vegan). The suggestion is that vegans who really want them should wear fake ones, which brings up a whole other interesting issue: Other people don't know you're wearing fakes and you're therefore elevating the pearl in society (and thus the killing of oysters for them). (The same could be said about people who buy fake diamonds because they are against the diamond industry.)
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Tags: ethics, vegan
Wow, this is pretty crazy, The Guardian points out that Google, Flickr and Last.fm saw significant drops in their traffic during the inauguration speech. As The Official Google Blog explains, "the overall query volume of Google searches dropped in the U.S. from the time President Obama took the oath of office until the end of his inaugural speech, demonstrating that all eyes were on today's festivities."
Update (1/21/09): Looks like everyone was just over at CNN.com: "Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama's speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected."
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Tags: internet, obama
I've said this in the past (a little here, a bit more here), but I generally think the best approach to web success is lots of little ideas which you see through. In my mind this fits perfectly with both the ideas that most stuff is random and that everything is relative.
Anyway, Kevin Allison has a nice piece in the FT about businesses using this approach as their primary strategy. He explains, "some entrepreneurs factor the unexpected into their business models, eschewing business plans that rely on a single big idea. Instead, they set up companies in which small teams of engineers work on several ideas simultaneously. The hope is that one or two will take off - a 'shotgun' rather than a 'sniper' strategy.
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Tags: ideas, internet
Consumerist points to a brilliant little tool called, creatively, Verify Email Address. Basically it pings an email server to check whether the address is actually there.
This is especially good for EECBs (executive email carpet bombs -- a new acronym initialism I learned from Consumerist).
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Tags: email, internet, tools
Generally I like this article about teaching kids probability because I agree that it's a concept more people need to understand. (Plus I think it's funny that I ran across two unrelated quotes -- the other from a commencement speech -- about the importance of probability in a week.) With that said, one quote from the article in particular stood out: "One must think all the time of what is not being reported - the dog that didn't bark. When we see a hole-in-one video on YouTube we are sensible enough to know that this has been selected out of millions of shots that missed. We need to think the same way every time we hear of someone claiming that some new treatment has cured them."
I'm not sure any of us take this into account often enough. I was actually just thinking about this the other day when chatting with a friend about Whopper Sacrifice. While I think it was a funny and kind of interesting idea, it gives people a kind of false hope that it's easy to do this sort of stuff: That every Facebook campaign will come with the kind of buzz this one received. How many campaigns just like this fell on their face, never getting enough people to even notice their failure? But we don't think or talk about that, rather we focus on the single success (wow, this is starting to sound a little like The Black Swan
).
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Tags: economics, psychology
I've always kind of wondered what the method of organizing is for the following icons on your Twitter page. The photos are clearly not in alphabetical order and they're also not in organized by when you started following the person (as opposed to when you hit view all). Anyway, as I was looking at it tonight, I started to realize the order pretty closely reflected the MyFirstTweet oldest tweets list (which is worth checking out, I'm still the second oldest user on the list whose first tweet was not "just setting up my twttr"). So, after a little more digging, it looks like that's the case: The icons are ordered by when the person joined Twitter.
None of this matters, really, I just thought it was interesting. Of course, not two hours after I cracked the code I ran across Matt's post from last week with the same discovery.
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Tags: twitter
Over the last few months Benjamin and I have been having funny conversations comparing the different levels of exposure/knowledge in the age of blogs. To aid in the process we've come up with this handy glossary:
I READ THAT: I actually read that.
I READ ABOUT THAT: I read a blog synopsis, article about a subject, or article about an article.
I KNOW ABOUT THAT: I have read several different opinions/reviews/synopsis to the point where I not only know the basic content of the original article but also the cultural impact it has made, yet I have not read the original piece.
I HEARD ABOUT THAT: I saw a bunch of headlines about that thing, leading me to believe it was important, but read nothing in depth.
I'VE BEEN REALLY INTO THAT: I read the original, and then have followed up on various other people's opinions and reviews and synopsis
I'VE BEEN DISCUSSING THAT: I read about it, then posted something and am now commenting, discussing, etc.
Anything to add?
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Tags: culture, internet
Finally getting to a week's worth of internet reading. Glad to see things keep moving while I'm gone.
Alrighty, so I pretty much spent the whole week away from the internet and I've been using my Friday night to make up for lost time. What that means for you is that I've got a whole bunch of links/thoughts and I figured I'd just drop them all into a post. So here it goes ...
- Lots of data on adult social networking site usage (that's adult as in people who are not young, not like porn). (Via Mike)
- Good quote from Robert Rubin's 2001 Harvard Commencement: "From the guidance of this gentle professor, and from all my other experience at Harvard, I developed in the core of my being the view that there are no provable absolutes, and that, with the absence of provable certainty, all decisions are about probabilities - that is, all decisions are about the respective probabilities, of each of a number of possible outcomes actually occurring. Moreover, recognizing that all decisions are about probabilities rather than certainties should lead us to uncover and engage with the full array of complexities around making the best decisions." (Via Kareem)
- I totally missed doing a year end wrap up thing, sending out a New Years email and doing anything else like that. Think it's too late? Can I still do it? Is there a statute of limitations on that kind of stuff?
- David Brooks embraces behavioral economics in one fell swoop.
- This is totally crazy: A 13 year old girl was suspected of carrying prescription strength ibuprofen so the school strip searched her. The case is going to the Supreme Court. (Via Metafilter)
- YouTube is going to do video downloads.
- As part of it's v5 release, Tumblr launched a Trends site similar to Google Trends.
- Back in August it was announced that Alex Bogusky, of CP+B fame (agency behind Burger King and Dominos) was going to write a diet book called The 9-Inch Diet
. Anyway, apparently the book was covered in a recent issue of people magazine featuring none other than photos from McDonalds (Burger King's chief rival) as well as Starbucks and 7-11 (which it looks like are just photos from the book). Interesting, very interesting.
- Awesome New York Times visualization/animation showing what happened with the plane that crashed into the Hudson.
- I've been thinking about going into my folder of half-finished blog entries and posting them a few at a time. Is that interesting to anyone? Are you still reading even?
- I was interested in this story of Federated Media shifting money from display advertising as I've been working on a story about the tough times ahead for the format in my head for awhile. Chief Revenue Office Chas Edwards explains, "As an ad network, FM is a failure. We're not organized to sell a lot of broad-based banner campaigns across zillions of sites. The approach we take is more of a publisher with a portfolio." I can't say I blame them. Display just kind of sucks. (More to come on this as soon as I get some more time to properly put my thoughts down. I made a few of my points back in November.)
- I so wish I came up with this idea. (It's the one where Ben and Russell take a bunch of blog posts and turn it into a newspaper.)
- A kind of surprising list of the most popular Google subdomains.
- Finally, a quote from me in an article about Karl Rove's Twitter account: "Does Karl Rove really have a tarnished brand? I mean I guess it depends on who you're talking to. I think for a lot of people on the left he's seen as an evil genius--genius being an important word--and for people on the right he's the dude who got Bush elected." (I was also referred to as "fellow web pioneer", which made me blush a bit, especially since Kottke was the guy quoted before me.)
- Oh, and Rex put up his always awesome year end most notable blogs list. Always worth a read.
Well, that's it. I'm off to bed. It's been a pleasure (and very nice to get something up on this site for the first time in quite a while). I've felt like I haven't had anything productive to say for quite some time, so maybe this is a return to reasonable levels of brain activity ...
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How about a little nuclear holocaust discussion to brighten your day? Really interesting piece over at Slate by Ron Rosenbaum (who I mentioned in my Hitler piece) all about the "letter of last resort" and response to nuclear annihilation. That letter sits inside a safe which sits inside a safe inside a British nuclear submarine and contains directions from the Prime Minister on whether to fire back after Britain has been almost entirely destroyed.
Rosenbaum explores the topic in detail, specifically focusing on the ethical implications of retaliating with the full force of a nuclear arsenal once you know that you and everyone else around you has been killed.
How's that for upbeat?
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Tags: ethics, nuclear, war
A few thoughts on Obama's web organization and plans to fix the country.
This post over at Crooked Timber about the possibility of Obama's internet crowd turning against him articulates quite nicely one of the major issues I have with people who talk about the success of web communities (like Obama's) as this amazing democratic victory.
"This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives - and the 'open' architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this."
As usual, the answer is neither top down nor bottom up: It's somewhere in the middle. The reality of the situation is that both sides will likely push back on each other creating what hopefully will be a better result (assuming everyone is willing to compromise a bit).
Writing about this also got me thinking about a piece by David Brooks from earlier in the week about Obama's confidence in his approach to public projects which include (nearly) immediately attacking the economy, "broadband projects, special education programs, a new power grid, new scientific research, teacher training projects and new libraries" as well as social security and medicare.
All of this seems like quite a bit and Brooks is worried: "The problem is overload. Four months ago, no one knew how to put together a stimulus package. Now Obama wants to use it to rush through instant special-ed programs and pre-Ks. Repairing the power grid means clearing complex regulatory hurdles. How is he going to do that in time to employ workers in May?"
That's a fair question, though I couldn't help but think about something I just read in Duncan Watts' Six Degrees
. In discussing a student group called OTPOR, which helped in the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, Watts writes:
A traditional social network analysis of the student movement would look at some of the principal players in OTPOR and trace their involvement with each other, their followers, and also outside organizations, and attempt to identify the mechanisms by which they established themselves as central organizing elements. But as we will see ... when it comes to large-scale coordinated social action, hindsight is not 20-20 -- in fact, it can by actively misleading. Rather than leaders determining the events, quite the reverse might have been true, with the particular sequence of events and the peculiarities of their timing determining who it was that emerged as leaders."
Put simply: History tends to write itself in a much more clean and linear narrative than it actually plays out. Let me explain (or at least try to explain) how I see these being connected:
- Obama tries a whole bunch of different stuff.
- People predict and examine it all, trying to figure out what will succeed and what will fail.
- Some stuff succeeds and some stuff fails.
- Obama pays more attention (and money) to the succeeding stuff, letting the failing stuff fall to the wayside (hopefully only for the moment).
- The stuff that's succeeding succeeds more, the stuff that's failing is forgotten.
- We remember that which succeeds and lots of people look back and explain why they knew all along that would work.
Obviously this is a super simplified version, but as I've said in the past: There are way worse strategies than trying a whole bunch of small things, seeing what works and then focusing on that. Now whether or not Obama has the whole small initiatives thing down is yet to be seen, but I generally think trying lots of stuff works better than just trying one thing.
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(YAAFG = Yet Another Addictive Flash Game)
This one involves watching little bubbles floating around a screen and trying to pop them, creating a chain reaction. It's more fun/addictive than it sounds, I promise. I got to 55/60.
Here are the two previous YAAFGs.
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Tags: flash, games
So I'm back from Peru and not surprisingly, the highlight of the trip was a visit to Machu Pichhu (see it on Google Maps). While I had heard it was amazing, I don't know that I was totally prepared. It sits atop a mountain about 7 hours from Cuzco (a drive along the sides of mountains no less).
But I'm not writing this to talk about the experience (you can check out the pictures for that), but rather about the discovery of Machu Picchu, which I knew nothing about. Turns out it was discovered in 1911 by a guy named Hiram Bingham (who later went on to be a senator and then a censured senator). Apparently he was originally looking for something else and just kind of stumbled on this thing after hearing about it from some locals (he also may or may not be the inspiration for Indiana Jones). The original book he wrote chronicilng his discovery is available as a free download on Project Gutenberg and his follow up, Lost City of the Incas
, is $10 over at Amazon.
Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying I'm home and I thought this was pretty awesome. I especially like the recentness of the history here. So often these things are ancient discoveries, but it's exciting to think that just about 100 years ago some explorer stumbled upon this absolutely amazing site.
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Tags: history, peru
Hi, I'm 