February 2009 Archives
There's a pretty awesome entry at the Long Now blog about the Kessler Syndrome, defined by Wikipedia as "a scenario, proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in a 1978 publication, where the volume of space debris in Low Earth orbit is so high that objects in orbit are frequently struck by debris, creating even more debris and a greater risk of further impacts."
Apparently there's a lot of trash floating around in space, crashing into other trash, creating more trash. Here's a video model of what happens and photos of hyper velocity impacts.
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Tags: science, space
Ana hits on something that's been bothering me for awhile: All these graphs about social media influence that show a bunch of concentric circles are wrong. She wrote: "Aside of the fact that this kind of thinking is oversimplified and wrong for the obvious reason (a person who's a flickr follower is also a twitter follower is also a facebook friend, so these circles are hardly ever concentric), there is a more important one. Interpersonal influence is not broadcast. Simply put: how influential you are going to be does not only depend on you, it depends on how influential your friends are. That is, your influence is the outcome of their network even more so than yours. That applies to plain scale (how many people are in their network), but also on scope (who they are). So, hard as it may be on the ego, you are not at the center." (I added in the comments that the subject matter of the communication had a lot to do with influence as well.)
I wrote a bit about this back in 2006, specifically pointing the confusion in these types of graphs between reach and influence.
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Tags: influence, socialmedia, visualization
Everyone has different criteria for rating, friending, following ...
Rating systems are something I find myself discussing fairly frequently. Partly because the idea shows up in a lot of projects and partly because I usually end up relating it to the rules people set for themselves within different social networks.
Let me explain. First off, this is all inspired by something Tyler Cowen wrote recently about rating systems:
The old rating system granted up to five stars but now the maximum number of stars is ten. This signals that they wish to start exaggerating the quality of the product. When there are only five stars you know that they are laying their reputation on the line when they grant five stars to a new CD. (Michelin of course won't give a restaurant more than three stars. They don't calculate out to the fourth decimal place along a scale of one thousand.) If the music isn't good you can decide to stop trusting them. But say they give a new release eight, nine, or who knows maybe eight and a half stars? What exactly are they trying to say? Yes they are putting their reputation on the line when they give ten stars, but this will happen so infrequently that it will be harder to judge their overall trustworthiness.
His point is a good one, but one that is made much easier within a single publication. There is no reason that as part of the change Spin couldn't provide a key to go along with the system, one where they lay out what a 10 really means in terms of past album reviews.
With that said, I don't really want to talk about Spin's rating system, I want to talk about mine. When I rate things within iTunes there are specific rules in my head. If something gets one star, it's pretty damn awesome. That's because only songs that I really like get a star. Therefore, a five star song is my very favorite ever (I don't think I currently have it in rotation, but November Rain might get it). Now I'm sure you have some other way of rating things. Maybe 0 stars is the worst song you've ever heard and you work from there. Whatever it is, the point is, it's probably different than mine. This isn't a big deal when we're the ones consuming our music, after all it's pretty easy to keep track of our own criteria, however, it becomes a lot more confusing when more and more folks are exposed to it.
But exposing folks isn't half the problem, the real trouble starts when we start to build systems that aggregate ratings. At that point, everyone's criteria is thrown into a big bucket, stirred around and then shown off to the world in a way that ultimately means very little. What's a five star video on YouTube? Who the hell knows. For me, the only time I ever rate anything I give it five stars. (For whatever that's worth.)
I'm not sure there's a real point to all this, but I'm going to try and get there. First off, it speaks to implicit rating systems. Knowing the stuff people are actually paying attention to (a la last.fm) is a whole lot more effective than asking people their favorite things. People are generally not that good at telling you what they really like or pay attention to. (I don't have anything to back that up, but it's probably true.)
Also, and this is where things get really tangential, I think this relates to the criteria people have for "friending" on different social networks. Who do you connect with on Facebook? How about LinkedIn? How about Twitter? You probably have thought these things through and answered them for yourself. Equally likely is that my answer is different. We all have different criteria for the decisions we make in these places.
Now none of this really matters and we could all go along happily, except people forget that and get upset when they're not friended, followed or connected with. I get a kick when I read things like this from David Pogue on his adoption of Twitter: "One guy took me to task for asking 'dopey questions.' Others criticized me for various infractions, like not following enough other people, writing too much about nontech topics or sending too many or too few messages." That's insane. (Something Evan Williams acknowledges in the article.) The truth with all this stuff is there are no rules. Or, more accurately, there are an infinite number of them.
So yeah, there's that.
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One thing from Nate Silver's Oscar liveblog really stuck with me. At 8:28 he wrote this: "Discuss: the reason why Dark Knight and WALL-E weren't nominated for Best Picture is because everyone who was going to see them has already seen them anyway."
While I wasn't able to confirm his theory, I did run across some interesting stats over at Box Office Mojo. This year the nominated films made an additional $104.4 million after nomination (or 35.6% of their total take). That is the second highest percent gain (only behind 1988's 38.2%). The Reader pulled in 64.2% of it's total revenue post nomination while Slumdog pulled 53.9% (and sure to grab more).
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Tags: movies, oscars
The original intent of My First Tweet was to collect people's first words on Twitter and then mine the data for interesting patterns. I achieved the first part, collecting over 10,000 tweets in the proecess, but I hadn't gotten real far on the mining piece. That is until now. Thanks to my buddy/coworker Doug (creator of Rappers on Twitter and all around internet ninja) here's a breakdown of the things people say in their first tweets. It uses a thing called the Porter Stemming Algorithm which "process reduces words to a common roots, allowing us to identify similar words like 'fishing', 'fished', 'fish', and 'fisher'."
Check it out over at My Twitter Weighs a Ton (of course you can also still find your first tweet at My First Tweet or analyze your own latest word breakdown at My Twitter Weighs a Ton).
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Tags: me, twitter
Nicholas Felton, creator of the Feltron Annual Report and founder of Daytum had a pretty interesting interview over at the SVA Interaction Design blog where he talks about his projects and general outlook on collecting data. One thing he said in particular stood out to me, as it paralells something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
"The first step -- and the one we're concentrating on -- is empowering people to collect information about their lives that tends to go uncollected. Our electronic footprints are everywhere, but I don't believe they're necessarily the most interesting or comprehensive records. Once we've made the gathering as easy and detailed as it can be, some interesting things might start happening. I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?"
This ability of this aggregate data view to change behavior is something I'm totally fascinated by.
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Tags: data, design, internet
In November of 2007 I wrote this: "I've started playing with Tumblr. No idea if I'll maintain it, but I've put up a site at heyitsnoah.tumblr.com. To be honest, it could end up being a lot like these random link posts . . ." Well, I'm at it again. This time in large part because of two things I read (a post post from Rick talking about reading Tumblrs via RSS and a post from Scott on following as RSS).
What I realized, which I suspect most of those using Tumblr have recognized for sometime is that there's a bunch of people who are using their Dashboard in the exact same way many of us use our feedreaders (not that folks don't have both). Since I don't care at all where people read what I have to say (I don't sell ads after all), I decided it was worth resurrecting my Tumblr at least to pull the feed from this site. Though, like everyone else, I imagine I'll end up using it for all the other stuff that doesn't make the cut here. (While we're on the topic, I've also decided to start a Twitter feed for NoahBrier.com. Even though I generally think those feeds with just links are useless, if that's how people want to read their stuff who am I to not at least offer up my content?)
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Tags: tumblr, twitter
The more I think about this Hulu/Boxee thing, the more one thing keeps bugging me: At the end of the day isn't Boxee just another browser? I mean sure you can use it on your TV, but you could use any browser on your TV (as long as you hooked your computer up to it). Basically, what I'm thinking is that Boxee is just an alternate interface for viewing web content, no different than Firefox, Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. And while Hulu (or any site for that matter) has no responsibility to support any browser, I've never heard of blocking one (though a quick Google search did turn up Paypal considering blocking browsers that weren't tough enough on phishing).
I don't actually think this has wider implications for the web, but for fun let's imagine it did. Google blocking non-Chrome users from accessing Google.com or Microsoft saying no Hotmail for Firefox folks would put people up in arms (and I'm sure spurn some anti-competitive lawsuits). Now I'm sure some lawyer (or Hulu's TOS) could easily tear this apart, but how come this is different?
(And while on the topic of Hulu, CBS is saying they can embed the player on TV.com.)
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Tags: hulu, television
I like facts. So this list of the 20 greatest questions of all time was bound to grab my attention (though I think maybe it's a bit of an oversell to call them the greatest questions of all time). Anyway, some highlights: Humans are getting taller, people think OK comes from "oll korrect", fingers and toes get wrinkled in water because the waterproof coating gets rubbed off, some plants can live forever and chewing gum does not stay in your system for years.
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Tags: facts
My friend Jared has a really interesting post up at the Naked New York blog. He specifically talks about the issue with only 10 percent of shows making it past season one: "Technology and music reward early adoption, but television does not. Why should any viewer invest time and energy in a new program when it's almost certain that it'll be taken away before it can get serious? It's like falling in love with someone who you know is destined to break your heart, right?"
He also pointed to this AdAge piece about a new CBS show slated for the summer and only 13 episodes. As the article explains, "When CBS tested the program with audiences, Mr. Turteltaub said, the network discovered that people grew more enthusiastic about watching it when they realized it had a definite end in sight and wasn't going to push along for several seasons."
Taken with the cheesy future of television I just wrote about, I got to thinking about the idea that what we were seeing was a splitting of television into multiple media, one the live version we're used to and the other time (and maybe device) shifted. If that's true, and we can really consider a TV with a DVR (or internet connection) a new medium, than it makes perfect sense that the content would need to adapt to match it. Just a thought, will need to consider the implications a little more.
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Tags: media, television
There's a pretty good Atlantic article about why the networks are turning program over from serialized to live/cheap programming. The article opens with a quote from Tim Kring, creator of the NBC show Heroes: "The engine that drove [serialized TV] was you had to be in front of the TV [when it aired] ... Now you can watch it when you want, where you want, how you want to watch it, and almost all of those ways are superior to watching it on-air. So [watching it] on-air is related to the saps and the dipshits who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way."
Not so nice, but hard to argue with. None of the networks have any idea how to measure this stuff and therefore things with large audiences might otherwise go unnoticed. (Related to Boxee/Hulu?)
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Tags: television
Growing up in Connecticut, "the city" was always New York. Of course, if you go somewhere else, though, "the city" changes. With that in mind I've always wanted to build something that found the footprint of different cities around the country. How far into New Jersey can you go until they start calling Philly "the city"? If you're in the middle of the nowhere is the city the next town over with 2,000 people?
I still don't know the answer and still very much want to build the tool/map out, but in the meantime CommonCensus is the closest thing I've seen to an answer. It draws a map based on responses to "On the level of North America as a whole, what major city do you feel has the most cultural and economic influence on your area overall?" I don't think it's perfect, but it's still pretty interesting. Notice, for instance, the influence of Salt Lake City or Denver (both surrounded by not so much) as opposed to New York or Philly (where cities are more clumped together). Good stuff.
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Tags: culture, maps
My buddy Greg posted a really great presentation full of awesome iPhone app usage analytics over at the Pinch Media blog (go full screen for some of the graphs). The data comes from the Pinch Media analytics platform and is based on the first 30 million downloads.
A few highlights: 1) You need almost twice as many downloads as a free app to hit the top 25 list today (20k) as you did three months ago (11k). 2) Long term audiences are generally 1% of total downloads (the usage dropoff rates for both paid and unpaid apps are pretty astounding). 3) "Only a few (<5%) high-performing applications are suitable for advertising right now, and you don't know if you've got one until after launch."
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Tags: analytics, iphone
It's funny, about 20 minutes ago I was watching Jon Stewart on Boxee and thinking how amazing it was. (I was also thinking about how annoying it was that advertising hadn't caught up with online video yet and I had to sit through the same annoying trailer six times while watching the show.) Then I read that Hulu is forcing Boxee to stop including it. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar wrote an apologetic post about it, blaming their content providers (to which Boxee responded).
In addition to Boxee, Hulu also pulled all its content from CBS's TV.com. AdAge has another side of the story, suggesting that the reason Hulu is actually protecting it's own turf, because "the exclusive part of that NBC-News Corp. deal lasts only two years, and Hulu knows all too well that the scarcity that helped it establish an audience (and brand) is going away soon." While this all seems like bad news at the moment, I have to think that the competition is a good thing. As Learmonth closes the article, "It didn't take long for Hulu to build an audience, and a brand, but going forward, the question is whether it can defend what it has built." (It's always good to be reminded of how fast one site can rise and another can fall on the web.)
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Tags: brand, hulu, television
Daily Beast has a little piece on the will he, won't he back-and-forth going on around Mickey Rourke and Wrestlemania. In reponse to why he wouldn't just do it, Mike Edison writes, "Perceived wisdom has it that the liberal elite at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are eager to promote acting and filmmaking as some sort of noble profession, and do not want to be cast as an unwitting PR machine for the WWE and its sideshow of monsters and muscle-bound freaks. Doing his best not to piss in the Academy's punchbowl before the awards ceremony, Rourke has done a quick 180 toward industry respectability." Who cares if he wrestles? What difference does it make?
Anyway, while I'm on the movie topic, I was out a few weeks ago with some folks and there were some interesting points made about movies and Oscars that I hadn't thought about before. 1) The Oscars is the opportunity for the industry to present it's idealized vision of itself. (That was a justification for Benjamin Button getting so many nominations.) 2) Movies that employ lots of folks win Oscars. There was a third point too, but I don't remember that one.
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Tags: movies, wrestling
One paragraph of this ode to the 747 blew me away: "Even then, and despite the 747's formidable technical specification, it has always seemed a wonder that such a massive machine can actually get off the ground, let alone fly so fast - the plane cruises at Mach 0.85-0.88, not far below the speed of sound - and so very well. No one knows if a 747 will barrel-roll or loop-the-loop because no pilot has been mad enough to try. Boeing engineers think both manoeuvres might be possible, although 400 passengers tucking in to chicken-or-fish and red-or-white wine might never forgive a pilot willing to have a go."
A barrel-roll? WTF? Anyway, I poked around a bit more and it sounds like it'd be possible, though as The Straight Dope points out, "The problem is not so much with the strength of the wings, which are designed to stand much greater pressures, as with the skill of the pilot." Oh, and some guy actually rolled a 707 in a display flight.
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Tags: airplanes
Clive Thompson points out a fairly disturbing fact about museums: Many have set up dog skeletons incorrectly, showing them walking with two legs off the ground at one time rather than one. What's more, museums are not alone (though most bothering in my book), "Museums screwed things up a stunning 41% of the time. Taxidermy catalogues got it wrong 43% of the time, toys 50% of the time, and animal-anatomy catalogues were the worst, with 63.6% errors."
The obvious question in my mind is if they can't get that right, why would we believe they've gotten any of the stuff they can't actually observe right? Kind of reminds me of this CollegeHumor video: Antiques Roadshow 2550.
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Tags: museums, science
Over at Seed there is an amazing narrated slideshow with photos from the storage areas of the Natural History Museum. It's really amazing stuff, from elephant skulls in a attic to drawers full of butterflies and birds.
To go along with the photos, there is an article from Carl Zimmer about the first time he found himself behind the displays. He explains his amazement with what he say: "'You've never been back here?' Kellner asked. The answer was obvious; I was staring like a gob-smacked tourist at the rows of storage cabinets, which loomed overhead like wardrobes for giants. I knew that natural history museums kept fossils and other objects in storage, but I assumed that most of their material was on display, back in the other world."
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Tags: history, photography, science
Just a few thoughts on the hubbub around some of the big rebrandings of late.
The Tropicana and Pepsi rebranding has created lots of buzz around the old blogosphere, mostly with people hating on the new logos and accompanying materials. As I have both read and had conversations about both over the last few days, I thought maybe it was worth getting all my thoughts down here.
To start, I mostly think debating logos is a dumb exercise. I mean, it's fine, but logos and brands do not exist in a vacuum. No one is seeing the Pepsi logo without any other context (they are in a store, reading about it in a newspaper, seeing it on a billboard, etc.). It's never ONLY about the logo.1
So why, then, is there so much hubbub around them? Well, I've got a few thoughts on that as well (some hypotheses and others from actually working with clients on logos). First off, I think the biggest reason companies rebrand themselves is that they actually want to prove something to themselves. They, as a company, are feeling like they've fallen out of touch and a rebranding is seen as just the solution to rally the troops and get them feeling like the company is really committed to the change they're all hoping for. Honestly, does anyone really think that consumers are walking away from the new Pepsi brand and advertising coming out of it that Pepsi all of a sudden is anything more than sugar water? (Doubtful.)
What's more, the hubbub is pushed along by the large media buys and PR pushes that happen in parallel (after all, what's a rebranding that no one knows about?) All of a sudden the new logo is in your face all the time and people start to comment on it. Do I think any of this has any real impact on the sales of the product? Not really. I mean, I think blanketing the world with advertising does, of course, but whether someone likes your logo or not doesn't.
At the end of the day I think the biggest thing a logo does is help consumers categorize your brand/product. Is it cheap or expensive? Is it trustworthy or not? Of all the examples in Brand New's worst logos of 2008 the one that sticks out the most is WGN's redesign. To me at least, that logo looks like something that comes from a half-assed television network. Can you imagine NBC or CBS ever having a logo that looked that amateur? No. The logo informs your opinion of the brand (at least if you have no other information about it). Do I think Xerox's redesign actually changes much? Not really. Most of the world already has a perception of Xerox and that won't change a great deal from a little bit of extra round on the edges.
Finally, I leave you with a point I made about the Tropicana redesign. In rebranding themselves they managed to make their packaging look more generic. While the design community freaks their collective shit about this, it may be a great thing for the brand with the economy the way it is. Think about it: If people pick it up, thinking it's the store brand, and then get to the front of the store, they're pretty likely to buy it. Who knows if this will work or not, but the point is that you can't disconnect the business from the design. After all, nobody would ever approve the cost of rebranding (think about all the stuff that needs replacing) if you don't think there's going to be some return on your investment.
1 Just to give a quick anecdote, I had a bunch of people ask me to add a logo for their either yet-to-be-formed or relatively obscure company to Brand Tags. My answer was always no for a simple reason: Brand Tags is measuring brand perception, people need to know about you to have a perception. If they are just looking at some logo they've never seen before their honest reaction would be to blow it off because they've never seen it before (the majority) or be curious to find more (the minority). Of course, in a context like Brand Tags it would actually be a different option, people would comment on some portion of the logo. They'd say something about the color, the shape or even whether they liked it or not. The thing is: This is completely useless information. No consumer will ever be asked to judge a logo. That just doesn't happen.
Update (2/11/09): In response to a comment (and to clear it up), I wanted to add this: "I was definitely not implying design doesn't matter (or even that branding doesn't matter). Just that you can't look at either in a vacuum."
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I don't always agree with (or even like) what Dave Winer has to say (which I assume he'd actually appreciate), but I did like his post how he made over $2 million with his blog. His big point is this: "Blogs don't make money. But people with blogs can." Which just happens to be something I've been saying for years.
Here are a few things that have happened to me as an indirect result of my blog: I met my girlfriend (NoahBrier.com -> Piers -> likemind -> Russell -> Johanna -> Naked Communications -> Leila), I got an awesome job (path to Naked Communications -> Benjamin -> Barbarian Group), built a fairly successful site (the audience on this blog is wholly responsible for jumpstarting the traffic), I've gotten to speak to two classes at the University of Montana and I've met a ridiculous amount of good friends (and honestly, those five things are just scratching the surface). Needless to say, I'm quite happy with the ROI on NoahBrier.com.
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Tags: blogs
Domainr is a pretty awesome tool by a few guys I met this afternoon. Basically you put in your domain idea, and it shows you all sorts of variations based on different domain name endings (.com and .net along with all the foreign endings). In addition it will show you variations that are close to what you have (which is super helpful since so many .coms are taken).
As a side note (mostly because I'm not sure whether I've ever written it here), here is my philosophy on buying domains (aka how I justify spending $1000 a year on them): Whenever I have an idea that I think is even kind of good I buy a domain name for it. This a) names it, giving it some legitimacy and b) gives me a tiny kick in the ass (while $10 isn't a lot of money, it's enough to at least push me to get started). Then I just need to build one thing a year that is worth $1000 to justify the expense (of course how I calculate that value is completely made up -- but I figure I built about four sites worth that this year).
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Tags: domains, internet
This is one of the coolest iPhone app ideas I've seen in awhile. WhatTheFont takes a photo and then identifies the font in that photo within seconds. Plus it's free.
Speaking of iPhone apps, here are a few of my other recent favorites: Boomshine (a port of the game I mentioned last month), TwitterFon (the best Twitter client I've used yet for the iPhone) and Amazon's iPhone app (I mentioned the drunk purchasing the other day).
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Tags: fonts, iphone
Anecdotally I'd say the answer is yes. But I'm specifically asking because of this question on Snarkmarket: "I wonder what else Google might have taught us. Has the nature of our Google queries changed over time? Do we type fewer words? More? How does our use of Google compare to the first generation of search engines?"
A quick search around turned up a few things. First off, in 2008 the average query length jumped from three to four words-per-search. Also, 25% of queries are unique to the last month (which seems like it would favor more specific searches). Anyone have any more data on the topic?
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Tags: culture, search
Not in a bad way. Last night Obama chose a Huffington Post reporter for a question (specifically Sam Stein). Just to give it some context, here's a few publications who didn't get to ask any questions: The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Time and Newsweek.
Made me think about this little bit of original reporting I just ran across from Simon Owens. Simon looked at the top 10 blogs from Technorati to calculated how much of their content was "data that wasn't already freely available on the web." His findings: On average 13% of the top 10's content was original, with Techcrunch leading with 37%.
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Tags: journalism, media
Hey, are you around San Francisco tomorrow evening? Do you want to come have some drinks? I'm in town for a few days and figured I'd get some folks together.
Here are the details:
Date/Time: Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 6:30pm - 10:30pm (or thereabouts)
Location: Club Waziema, 543 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, CA
Awesome. Hopefully I'll see some of you Tuesday. (And I promise it's back to real posts starting now.)
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Tags: me, sf
Please forgive a bit of navel gazing, but I'm pretty excited about this one (I'll make it quick, I promise).
Anyway, BusinessWeek is running it's innovators issue and as part of it they've chosen a few people for the social media category. I made the cut as "toolmaster," defined as, "Imaginative techies whose schemes and applications open new doors and lead to insights." So along with the Innovators in Social Media introduction (including a video where I ramble a bit about influence), is a small profile of just me. Anyway, I'm pretty excited about it. No idea if it's in print, but that would be awesome as well (if not I'll just have to print it out for my Grandma).
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Tags: me
This 2007 Antlantic article on multitasking doesn't have a ton of stuff you haven't read before (our brains really can't handle it, it wastes more time than it adds, etc.). However, there's one paragraph in particular that played off something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I've argued in the past that one of the great things about the internet is that it offers us an amazing metaphor for how the brain functions. Lately, however, I've been thinking about whether that's actually true or we just want to believe it's true. Every generation has found a new and "better" metaphor for the brain, mostly based on the most prevalent and power technology available.
The author offers this up: "And before the age of modern technology, theology. Further back than that, it's hard to voyage, since there was a period, common sense suggests, when we didn't even know we had brains. Or minds. Or spirits. Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you're interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you're discussing in the blog entry you're posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call."
As usual, not sure where I fall on this one quite yet, but it's fun to think about.
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Tags: brain, history
I'm sure many of you saw the adorable pictures of a koala in bucket full of water from last week. Not surprisingly, the blog Fuck You, Penguin is none-to-pleased with the incident calling the perpetrator "the John Wayne Gacy of the new millennium" and breaking the incident down photo, by adorable photo: "At this point, this koala already knows it's in the bag: he's going to get all the eucalyptus leaves he wants for the rest of his godforsaken life. HOW DARE HE USE THAT TONGUE IN FRONT OF A CHILD, SHE COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED."
The internet makes me very happy sometimes.
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Tags: funny, koala
There is a great piece in this week's New Yorker about how the economy has hit Florida especially hard (the full text is unfortunately only available through that stupid New Yorker reader thingy, though there is a little video explaining it). Florida, Packer explains, is an economy built almost exclusively on housing. The title of the article actually comes from a quote by a Florida professor: "Florida, in some ways, resembles a modern Ponzi scheme. Everything is fine for me if a thousand newcomers come tomorrow. The problem is, except for a few road bumps -- '72 and '90, and they were really minor -- no one knew what would happen if they stopped coming." (Which, of course, they have now.)
The other great quote comes later on, as Packer explains just how deep Florida's housing fascination went: "People who drew modest salaries at their jobs not only owned a house but bought other houses as speculators, the way average Americans elsewhere dabble in day trading." He goes on to quote a real estate reporter who says, "There were secretaries with five to ten investment homes -- a thirty-five-thousand-dollar salary and a million dollars in investments."
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Tags: economy, florida, housing
A really interesting piece over at Mobile Industry Review about Google Latitude and the business (or lack thereof) of letting you know where your friends are by Andrew Scott. (Dennis from Dodgeball posted a few of his thoughts on Latitude the other day.)
I'm not really sure where I fall on this one (mostly because I haven't given it a ton of thought). I was never a heavy Dodgeball user, but I know a lot of smart people who were. (I suspect the truth is it will work for some people much better than it will work for others and could be a viable business on a smaller scale, probably never mainstream.)
Really, though, my favorite part of the article was just generally about social networking: "Many of us have been waiting for location-based services to come of age for YEARS! but in reality we're still in the early adopter curve. In fact, I'd go even further than that. At BeingDigital in 2008 I stated on stage to a deluge of ridicule, that Social Networking wasn't yet main stream. The laughing continued until I asked how many parents AND siblings of delegates had email? The answer was predictable: virtually everyone. Then I asked how many parents and siblings were also on a social network; over 75% of the hands dropped." Very interesting.
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Tags: mobile, socialnetworking
So it despite the tough economic environment, Amazon.com's business is doing quite well (holiday sales were up 9% from last year). I've been kind of amazed by Amazon over the last year. As a website, they have figured out every way to make the process so easy for me that I don't really care whether it's a few dollars more somewhere else. The Slate article specifically points out Amazon Prime
($79 for a year of free 2-day shipping), perfectly explaining my own feeling about the service: "Be warned, though, that Prime membership will alter how you think about shopping. These days, whenever I become cognizant of some need that would ordinarily require an unplanned trip to the store--when I want a bathroom hook, a shelving system for my closet, a new wireless router, or a discount pack of kitchen sponges--I check Amazon first. It's usually faster to order the item there and get it shipped for free than to add the thing to my shopping list. With Prime, you don't really need a shopping list."
What's more, since downloading the iPhone app I've had a few funny Tuesday evenings where I'll come and be surprised by a UPS box from Amazon, only to find out that I had ordered something late Saturday night at a bar and forgotten all about it. Good stuff.
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Tags: amazon, business
The most interesting thing to me about this Inside Facebook story on Facebook surpassing Myspace in US Google searches was the accompanying graph. While it's big news in an of itself, a closer look at the search versus news coverage tells an interesting story. Starting in the middle of 2007 Facebook began to overtake Myspace in media mentions. At the same time Myspace was roughly four times more popular as a US search term. While that gap slowly closed over the last two years, the media coverage for Facebook was consistently at or above Myspace.
Now I mention this because if you were to follow just media mentions (which many do), you would be falsely led to believe that Facebook was far more popular than Myspace. This isn't a particularly revolutionary idea, but comparing searches (intentions) versus news mentions on Google trends gives a nice way to compare these things in a simple way.
Got any more of these trends that show the media over-representing? (For the record, I'm not sure the media is doing anything wrong here. Facebook was the property who's interest was growing. With that said, it's impossible to say what that growth would have looked like without the aggressive coverage.)
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Tags: facebook, media
Lots of people are asking about why Tropicana redesigned it's packaging like it did. I was in total agreement until a few weeks ago when I was having a discussion with Leila about it and she mentioned the theory that maybe they redesigned to look more like the store brands. Especially with the economic downturn, the worst thing for a brand is to seem like the premium option in a commodity category (and come on, how different does any of the OJ really taste?). No idea if there's any truth to it, but store brands are increasingly popular (according to the Private Label Manufacturer's Association, they "now account for one of every five items sold in U.S. supermarkets, drug chains and mass merchandisers"). Stuart Elliot dances around the idea a bit in his article covering the redesign, writing, "Those [rebranding] initiatives are indicative of the renewed attention that prosaic food brands are getting as the recession continues. To save money, consumers are eating more meals at home and fewer meals at restaurants."
Oh, and this BrandWeek article makes a good point as well, "While much of the new packaging is still hitting shelves, the media has taken note, said Arnell. 'No one would ever write an article about Tropicana. Then you get rid of the orange and the straw and the whole world pays attention.'" (There's no such thing as bad publicity??)
No idea what the answer is, but I do know for a fact that sometimes when the design community celebrates a rebranding the public doesn't (and vice versa I'd imagine).
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Tags: branding, marketing
Just having some fun thinking about being a kid.
Running across this online version of Oregon Trail made me think about generational touchpoints (as just about every American of a certain age holds a special place in their heart for this game, particularly the hunting part). Anyway, after seeing this my mind immediately jumped to a few other references that seemed worth talking about (if for no other reason than they're fun to Google).
UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A
Everyone knows this one best as the Contra Code (or Konami Code, which I guess is it's official name). I actually remember it having an extra B-A and ending in SELECT + START (the Wikipedia entry notes, "The exact sequence varies from game to game, and has been adapted to fit the button layouts of different video game consoles."). (As a total sidenote, it's worth saying how amazing Wikipedia is for stuff like this. While it may be lacking in some other, more serious, areas, when it comes to 1980s videogames, the information flows). You can now buy t-shirts that reference the code and even use it in Google Reader. (I, personally, have always wanted to use it in a piece of marketing work. No other reference, just the code.)
Hoverboards!
Anyone who remembers Back to the Future Part II likely has one memory that sticks out most of all: Marty's hoverboard. Clearly, every kid wanted one, and, according to Snopes eventually the director, Robert Zimeckis, grew tired of people asking him about how they had done the scenes and started saying it was real. The part I remember best is also covered in the Snopes piece: "A very prevalent legend that circulated around the schools when this movie came out was that some toy company had actually developed a working hoverboard, and were planning to release it as soon as the movie was out of theaters. The release of the board not occuring, the rumor was appended to be such that someone had been killed/severely injured in the playtesting of the hoverboard, and the resulting suit from the child's parents kept the hoverboard from being ever put into production." Man, we totally bought this. (Once again, Wikipedia has some more great info.)
Those are pretty much the three that pop into my head. There are a few others that I would consider in the running, but didn't quite make the cut: Drugwars (which appears to now have been recreated in an opensource version) and Bo Jackson baseball/football poster (which I'm pretty sure Nick still has on his wall).
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About three years ago I remember smelling an oddly sweet aroma as I was walking around the west side of Manhattan. A few additional sniffs revealed it smelled exactly like maple syrup and thus the Manhattan Maple Mystery was born (I made that up just now). The New York Times opened their article in 2005 like this: "An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome." The funniest thing I remember hearing was that people thought it was a terrorist attack (which isn't really funny, but funny to think that we had been attacked with maple syrup).
Now, about three-and-a-half years later, the mystery has been solved. The New York Times reports today, "The city revealed on Thursday that the culprit was the seeds of fenugreek, a cloverlike plant, which are used to produce fragrances at a factory across the Hudson River in North Bergen, N.J. It turned out that the city had never given up trying to determine the aroma's origin. It had quietly created a crack maple-syrup team that remained on the case." So that's that.
Update (2/6/09): Whoa, maybe that's not that. Dan pointed out in the comments that there are still some questions surrounding the smell. Mystery (maybe) NOT solved!
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Tags: nyc
Just a bit of a brain dump on the topic.
It might be selective, but it seems to me like online display advertising is a hot topic at the moment. I've got a whole big post in my head about the whole thing, but instead of writing it now I'm just going to throw a few interesting points from other folks your way.
First off, Brian Morrissey writes: "Advertisers, I think, are questioning the entire notion of buying bits of real estate on the periphery of content. It's just not that enticing - and with good reason. Despite all the studies showing banner ads increase search conversions and do some to lift brand metrics, consumers don't seem to care."
I think Brian is right on here. The economy is a good excuse for what's happening, but it's not the root cause. Who wants to live on the periphery of content when you can make yourself part of it? Back in November I wrote, "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?"
So that's one thing agencies can do, but Brian also ends the post with a good point from Harvard Business about publishers: They "need to think more like marketers and, like it or not, mesh advertising with their content." Precisely.
Okay, onto the next point, this one from Terry Heaton, "There's no incentive to change. When your life is based on broadcast and print CPMs, the only ad model you see is, well, CPMs." This is on both sides of the coin (both publisher and agency). Things are still all about scale (even more than ever now that media agencies are increasingly moving away from models based on taking a cut of spend). I've said it once and I'll say it again, the web works best when it's not used as a scale medium. Sure, it works sometimes (Barbarian Group is responsible for one of the more famous successes), but the more consistent and long term solution is to build great experiences for a very specific group of people, plain and simple (and scalable, actually, just not scalable in the same way a television buy is). [As a side note, scale is a problematic word since it's thrown around as a hard number (does it scale?) but has very different meanings to everyone. For whatever that's worth.]
Speaking of scale, there's a flip side to this situation. In January Fred Wilson wrote about super cheap CPMs. His prediction for 2009 was that "display advertising will get so cheap and the tools to target it will get so good that it will be shown that it can outperform search." It's an interesting one. When the media space gets cheap enough, it doesn't really matter what the click-through rate or anything else is. That's why spam works after all (some incredibly small fraction of those spammed has to actually act on it for the ROI to work out). Of course this kind of flies in the face of everything I said before, but hey, who's counting? The issue of course with super low CPMs is that it's hard to make a lot of money off them if you're a publisher (well that and really crappy banner ads hurt your brand as a publisher). But anyway, it's a different way of thinking about online advertising. (And honestly, the biggest thing that needs to happen is we need to stop thinking of it as advertising altogether. It's so different than print and television. But again, I am not here to talk about semantics.)
And yes, I understand that there is more to online display than click-throughs. But again, the branding stuff requires people noticing your creative, which gets me back to my earlier point about doing stuff that looks more like it belongs on the page.
I think that's pretty much it for now. Sorry about the random nature of this post, just had a bunch of different stuff I wanted to get out there.
For good measure here are two more things to read on the topic: One from Adweek.com and the other my friend Clay explainig the similarities between birth control and online advertising.
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A few months ago I responded to a post about Apple's Bean Counter ad over at PSFK with this, "It's kind of funny, but it's also pretty much bullshit. I mean Apple puts a whole lot of money in advertising as well and they also have a whole lot of issues with their hardware (more so than their software) which could probably be fixed with the money they spend elsewhere. I'd love to see a comparison of revenue vs. ad spending for the two companies. Imagine they're not that far off."
Well, The New York Times ran a story today about Apple's TV advertising that happened to include Apple and Microsoft's ad spending ($133 and $191 million respectively). Anyway, when you compare those numbers to 2008 revenues ($32.5 and $60.4 billion respectively) you end with Apple spending .004 cents on advertising per dollar of revenue and Microsoft spending .003. While this might not seem like much difference, consider if Microsoft had spent the extra .001 cents on the dollar, they would have spent $241.6 million instead of $191. Not a small difference.
All of this is a super long winded way of saying two things: First, if it's good enough for Apple, there must be something to television advertising. Second, marketers who talk about their success without mentioning their advertising spend are missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle.
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Tags: advertising, television
Sometimes I think I should just repost everything Jonah Lehrer writes because it's all awesome and insightful. (Just subscribe to his blog, that's probably easier.)
Anyhow, he had a good piece in the Dallas Morning News about what's going on in your brain when you buy stuff. Though I'm generally pretty skeptical of any kind of neuromarketing stuff, I like what he has to say, especially this bit: "When times are tough, the emotional tug-of-war inside the brain is thrown out of whack, and consumers act like everything is overpriced. We're so worried about the dismal economy that the reward areas of the brain are stifled."
Crazy, huh? Basically the recession leaves us ill (or well, depending on who you ask), immune to the tricks of consumerism.
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Tags: brain, economics
Christoph Niemann has a collection of fun little photos of New York stuff made of legos. Gowanus Canal: CHECK. Facades of the Flatiron Building: CHECK. Man stepping in poo: CHECK.
I don't know, it made me smile.
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Tags: fun, nyc
A few weeks ago Mark Cuban suggested it was time that professional sports league pay for local beatwriters.
It's actually one of the more interesting reads in the category of "people coming up with crazy ideas to save the newspaper industry" (in part because Cuban actually owns a pro sports team and theoretically has the influence to help make something like this happen). Anyway, Cuban basically argues that pro sports can't afford to lost newspapers because it's the only inexpensive way to reach the casual fan. "The cost to reach those fans in a newspaperless world over the next 5to 7 years will cost us far more than working with newspapers today to try to help them," he explains. (Not quite MediaisThriving material, but still nice to see new ideas.)
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Tags: journalism, sports
Wherever you stand in the Twitter debate (love or hate), I have contested for some time that you at least have to find it interesting that so many people are into communicating in this new way. Anyway, I quite enjoyed this story of how Twitter came to be from @Dom. (The original nugget was super simple: "a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing".)
As a side note, my (kinda) bold prediction for 2009 is that Facebook will buy Twitter and Microsoft will buy Facebook (or at least put the wheels in motion). While I think both can be profitable services, I don't think either will ever be massively so (especially if they rely on business models that are about interpersonal interactions). At the end of the day, I'm not sure how either will live up to the large investments they already have (and rumor has it both are looking to add to, Twitter with $20 million). Sure, I understand Fred's point about looking at costs when thinking about revenues, but surely all the investors in these two companies are going to want to see returns that match the scale of their investments, right? (Just my two cents.)
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Tags: business, facebook, history, twitter
I was having trouble articulating why I wanted the Cardinals to lost the Super Bowl so bad and then Jeff summed it up for me: "If the Arizona Cardinals were to win the Super Bowl on Sunday...then what becomes of the beloved Super Bowl? Some teams simply don't belong as the last ones standing. The Cardinals are one. So are the Detroit Lions. The Los Angeles Clippers. The New York University men's basketball team. Me playing Golden Tee. Some folks do the game more justice by continuing to lose. It keeps the universe in balance. Keeps the vocals in harmony."
Let's go Steelers. (Oh, and here's to a Chicago Bears Super Bowl in 2010.)
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Tags: football, sports
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