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What I've Been Thinking About

Four things that have taken up some of my headspace over the last few weeks.

April 21, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 8 COMMENTS

Some of these might turn into full posts later, but this is just a quick rundown of some things I've been thinking about lately.

Counterintuitive

This morning I was thinking about two things I've posted lately, about anti-drug messages and spammers building better artificial intelligence, and realized that as a category the things I find the most interesting are the counterintuitive. Not sure why this is important, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

Remind Me

I think I'm going to write an article/entry about this, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the how everything you can buy that's not out yet should have an easy email reminder service. For instance, today I heard about a new St. Vincent album coming out in like two weeks. I went over to the site to see if I could pre-order (which I couldn't find) and I also couldn't find a giant box to put my email in so they could remind me when it's actually released. All I got was the regular mailing list (which I signed up for). Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if the album was available for download on file sharing sites, and of course it was. It should not be easier to download an album for free two weeks before it comes out than to get reminded the day it comes out (and hopefully have a link in the email to go direct to the place to buy it). It's simple and I think you can apply the principle across the board. (As a side note, NPR is streaming the album, but it's still not easy enough!)

Trolls

Alan wrote a piece about trolls in the advertising industry and specifically mentioned some comments in a piece I was interviewed for in Adweek. While I appreciate the support, I generally think that there are trolls everywhere and the very worst thing to do about them is to let them bother you (especially if they don't even comment with their real name). I also thought a bit about the way this frames the problem of trolls. The fact is for me, the vast majority of the comments I receive are good and thoughtful (thanks guys) and I don't really like the idea of the world thinking otherwise. Just like telling kids to not do drugs by making them think all their peers are doing it, talking about people being nicer to one another by making them think all their peers are going around making terrible comments anonymously is probably the wrong way to go. (Just as a side note, I haven't discussed this with Alan and don't mean to single him out, it's just been top of mind. Hope I cause no offense Alan, I appreciate what you were doing.)

Disappeared

I was having a conversation over beers the other night with Ryan and we started talking about the amount of stuff that actually disappears on the web. While the popular trope is that "everything on the internet lives forever" the reality of the situation is probably the opposite: Since we're creating more data today than at any other time in history it would make sense that we're also losing more data than ever before. Now most of this stuff doesn't matter (I wrote about this a little in a post over at GE Adventure), but still, The Internet Archive can't possibly save everything.


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COMMENTS

1Alan Wolk

Last time I defend you, Brier ;)

Seriously, no offense taken. But I do disagree with your take in this particular instance. Overall, I agree wholeheartedly that the best way to get people to change behavior is not to make them think everyone else is engaging in bad behavior and then tell them that they need to be the good guys.

BUT... I think things had gotten so out of control that someone just needed to say "Hey, this is just crazy. Not every banal news story in Adweek needs to be accompanied by 50 negative anonymous comments, each one nastier and more personal than the last. Stop and think how bad this makes you look." On top of that, "SuperSpy" and I were wondering where all that anger came from, if any of the people responsible for it could put it into words for us.

That said, even I was blown away that the post garnered 101 comments within 48 hours. (To frame that, most AgencySpy posts don't get any comments -- they use Disqus, which makes anonymous posting there more of a chore.) So clearly the message resonated somewhere. And bear in mind that the audience you're discussing is nowhere near as sophisticated as Noah Brier is in terms of the overall gestalt of the interwebs and so have a very different POV of what's "normal" and what isn't.

What I found more fascinating was the difference in tone (and likely job function) between those who commented anonymously or via a pseudonym and those who used their own names- there was about a 50/50 split. Would be very interesting to do a more detailed analysis of that.

April 21, 2009

2Wesley

Re: Remind Me >>> ABSOLUTELY true! As a fellow disgruntled customer I therefor decided that as soon as I receive a mastered album that I'm releasing, it goes right online and for sale, and a pre-order option for physical. I feel ease of use is a much underestimated aspect of the discussion on piracy. It was still even easier to illegally download In Rainbows even than to get it for free from Radiohead's site.

April 21, 2009

3Mayo

RE: Disappeared
The way I see it, nothing online can be 100% relied upon to still be there (whether existent or accessible) when you need it, tomorrow or years later. Conversely, once something is online, some remnant of it will always (?) exist and cannot be erased, and that remnant will be findable, whether you like it or not. Makes for a strange combination: never relying, always paranoid.

April 21, 2009

4Perry Hewitt

Re: Remind me, I hear you. The fact that Amazon manages the pre-order and related updates so well makes you realize so few others do it at all.

Re: Disappeared, check out the Dataverse Project (http://thedata.org/). The PI is Gary King, one of the founders of Crimson Hexagon, and it attempts to solve the problem of disappearing data sets for academic research.

April 22, 2009

5Andy

re: your quote,

"Since we're creating more data today than at any other time in history it would make sense that we're also losing more data than ever before"

I don't see the causal relationship between generating more data and losing it.

April 23, 2009

6Noah Brier

@Andy: I have nothing to back it up, but if we lose 5 percent of all data and we are making an extra terebyte a day (on top of the base) then we are losing 50 gigs more every day. Just a hypothesis.

April 23, 2009

7stephanie gerson

you simply cannot consider these folks trolls, can you? I found it rather adorable:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3490/3469482708_851f148a0f_m.jpg

[from Palmer's AdWeek article, you might need to zoom in: http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3i965b4d32129d971f25ae1d77d0894617?pn=2]

April 23, 2009

8Michael Kaplan

Dear Noah,
You're absolutely right about the most interesting things being counterintuitive, and I believe there's a deep reason behind it.

"Things," in general, tend to be the result of random processes - like the weather – but intuition works by generating local, individual certainties. We believe we know how the whole world works, but only because we've sussed out our own little corner of it. We assume things will have deterministic results, when all we have a right to expect are probabilities.

Big, unconstrained, non rule-based forces, however - like spam, or the drug trade - confront us with the power of randomness, where clearly no-one knows how it all works and intuition serves little purpose. These are the few times we're actually forced to think like scientists, probabilistically, gauging the unknown. The rest of the time we revert to default as Bozo sapiens, the wise fool: sure we know everything, when all we know is our back yard.

April 27, 2009