November 2009 Archives
I think Aaron Swartz's explanation of how he hires programmers is pretty applicable to hiring anyone. An excerpt:
There are three questions you have when you're hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who's smart but doesn't get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn't smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can't work with, you can't work with.
I think what happens often (at least in the marketing industry) is that people move too far to "can you work with them" side and fail to pay enough attention to the other two buckets.
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Tags: business, management
Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital hits the nail on the head with his latest post about the "viral strategy" of startups:
Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning...and it's harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality. The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry.
A few points on this: First, I'd add that virality is also partly by chance. Second, it drives me crazy when I hear/read about entrepreneurs talking about the product as if it's the only thing that matters. Sure it's important, but if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear ...
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Tags: marketing, startups
Today's Learn Something Every Day intrigued me: "NASCAR driver, Tim Flock is the only driver in motor racing history to have to make a pit stop to remove a monkey from his car."
The full story is over at Tim Flock's official site. The monkey's name was Jocko Flocko and actually drove with him for eight races as a publicity stunt. Flock explains the day he finally had to part ways with his monkey co-pilot:
Back then the cars had a trap door that we could pull open with a chain to check our tire wear. Well, during the Raleigh 300, Jocko got loose from his seat and stuck his head through the trap door, and he went berserk! Listen, it was hard enough to drive those heavy old cars back then under normal circumstances, but with a crazed monkey clawing you at the same time, it becomes nearly impossible! I had to come into the pits to put him out and ended up third. The pit stop cost me second place and a $600.00 difference in my paycheck. Jocko was retired immediately. I had to get that monkey off my back!
Awesome.
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Tags: funny, monkeys, nascar
Just last night I was telling my mom how much I love Google Hot Trends. I get the hourly alerts via RSS and am amazed by the insight and grounding it gives me. It's easy to fall into our world of nerds and forget there are millions of people watching Florida quarterback and wondering why he had Hebrews 12:1-2 painted on his eye black.
Anyway, Danah Boyd makes a similar point in her excellent essay Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media:
Ironically, the one place where I'm finding people are being forced to think outside their box is the Trending Topics on Twitter. Consider a topic that trended two weeks ago: #thingsdarkiessay. Started in South Africa, this topic is fundamentally about language and cultural diversity but, when read in a U.S.-context, it reads as fundamentally racist. Boy did this blow up, forcing a lot of folks to think about language and cultural differences. Why? Because Trending Topics brings a topic that gained traction in a segment of the network to broader awareness. Unfortunately, it's hard to actually get meaningful dialogue going even if trending topics trigger reactions.
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Tags: culture, trends, twitter
Snarkmarket links to a very interesting On Language column and addendum about camel case. In addition to the idea that camel case has been popularized by programming languages (which makes sense), the following insight into the role of spaces between words caught my eye:
In Ireland and England during the seventh and eighth centuries, local priests had so much trouble with Latin that spaces were added to their liturgical texts as a crutch. Clerics discovered that reading became more fluent for everyone, because the eye can recognize separated words as distinctive shapes. Monks were able to copy manuscripts in silence, in accordance with many of their vows, and privacy intensified the experience of devotional reading. The innovation flourished and by the 13th century was standard in Latin everywhere. Angels in manuscript illustrations used to speak into the ears of scribes; now they presented them with books to read for themselves. Clerics tackled more complex texts, in greater numbers, and Saenger argues that silent reading seeded the flowering of medieval theology known as scholasticism.
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Tags: language, writing
Russell Davies offers up an interesting bit of etymology (at least I think it would count as etymology):
Which reminded me of the origins of the word 'cliche' - in the days of movable type it meant a set of letters/words that were used together so frequently that the printer didn't bother dismantling them. Which got me think about the cliches we're building, and about one in particular - the screen.
I enjoyed that one. The rest of the post/presentation is worth reading as well.
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Tags: history, language
I was listening to the radio in the car this afternoon and something struck me: Of the three songs I heard, two of them were in the new Guitar Hero. This isn't overly surprising, as the game is full of some of the most popular songs of the last thirty years, but it got me thinking about all the people who will experience those songs for the first time as part of the game. In a way, they become new, leaving their original hair-band or whatever other context and just become Guitar Hero tracks.
Anyway, all of that is a long way to say Brian Eno's comments on the death of uncool struck me as part of the same trend:
We're living in a stylistic tropics. There's a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don't have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It's all alive, all "now," in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
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Tags: cool, culture, music
I just love this entry from Matt Jones about pareidolia, the phenomena that leads us to see faces in things. As he explains, it actually turns out that there is a reason for what happens, as we respond to faces more quickly than other images. Jones quotes a paper called Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects.:
The tendency to perceive faces in random patterns exhibiting configural properties of faces is an example of pareidolia. Perception of 'real' faces has been associated with a cortical response signal arising at approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset, but what happens when nonface objects are perceived as faces? Using magnetoencephalography, we found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoked an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas common objects did not evoke such activation. An earlier peak at 130 ms was also seen for images of real faces only. Our findings suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late reinterpretation cognitive phenomenon.
He then goes on to wonder how we can use this knowledge to help people comprehend data, showing some of the work they're doing with the idea. Be sure to watch the Chernoff Schools sketch. As a side note, there is a lovely American Express commercial that taps into pareidolia.
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Tags: design, psychology
Interesting article from Inside Higher Ed about how Sarah Palin is changing the way politics is done by manipulating the media in completely new ways:
I'm not sure what Sarah Palin's favorite work of postmodern theory might be (all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean Baudrillard's Seduction. Other political figures use the media as part of what JB calls "production." That is, they generate signs and images meant to create an effect within politics. For the Baudrillardian "seducer," by contrast, the power to create fascination is its own reward.
Watching Palin respond to questions about her book Going Rogue (or not respond to them, often enough) is, from this perspective, no laughing matter. She grows ever more comfortable talking about herself. If no more capable of simulating knowledge of public issues, she is getting her story straight, more or less. And this matters. For now she does not have to be accurate, just coherent. She is consolidating her presence, her "brand." Teams of professional ideologists can feed Palin her lines later.
The article, which is roughly a book review for a collection of Palin-related essays called Going Rouge (which I just bought) is worth a read.
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Tags: media, politics, postmodernism
Doug Pfeffer, my supremely talented colleague at The Barbarian Group, has finally launched his newest creation, which I've been playing with for the last few months. It's called Last Night's Check-ins and it's an elegantly simple idea/execution. Basically, it takes all your Foursquare check-ins from the evening before and emails them to you the next morning for annotation. You simply reply to the email with details below each stop and it stores them in diary form for you.
I think this is super smart for a few reasons: First off, it takes this data that is actually an incredible diary of your life and allows you to add additional metadata to it. Second, and maybe more importantly, it does so with an interface that allows you to sustain interaction. Everyone checks their email every day (or almost every day) and replying to an email couldn't be easier. For years I've wondered why more people don't use email for collecting structured data and I'm super excited that Doug made the jump.
Anyway, go sign up and start remembering what you were up to.
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Tags: foursquare, history, internet
There is a certain beauty to the contradictory nature of sports analysis. Everyone is sure they're right all the time. And thank goodness they are, if not what would they put on the radio during the day?
Anyhow, there's a nice analysis of the analysis from last night's game over at rc3.org. In case you missed it (like me), Bill Belichick decided to go for it on a fourth-and-two from the Patriots 28-yard-line with just over two minutes left in the game. They failed and the Colts scored and won the game 35 to 34. Belichick has been roundly criticized for the decision, which was clearly a gamble. However, as Advanced NFL Stats points out, the numbers work in favor of the decision:
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You'd have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats' 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it's pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.
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Tags: football, sports, statistics
Two articles worth highlighting from the Times this weekend. First, a look at cell phone pricing that's surprisingly full of interesting points. For instance, when Sprint offered the Fair and Flexible plan in 2004 ("300 minutes for $35, and each additional block of 50 minutes for $2.50") it would seem like the sort of thing otherwise overcharged mobile customers would jump on. But they didn't ... Because they didn't like that their bill fluctuated greatly month to month. How crazy is that? Convenience, in this case, was likely worth $20 a month to folks (and calling it convenience is a stretch, after all, autopay is an option).
The second article was a look at Bloomberg (the company, not the dude). They're especially interesting to me because they're a media company who is booming while everyone else is struggling/dying. It speaks to something I think will be increasingly important in the media world in the coming years: Journalism as a non-core business. They didn't buy BusinessWeek to make loads of cash off it (they operate their current magazine at a loss), rather they bought it to extend the brand so that they can build other services that people will actually pay for. Seems to be working so far (the strategy, not the BusinessWeek thing, which just happened).
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Tags: business, media, mobile
File Under: Spammers are really smart (and funny).
So apparently in World of Warcraft you can't spam people with commercial messages or you get kicked off. However, there is a lot of money in selling gold to players and there are a bunch of sites that competing to sell it to you. So their solution, as Seamus at Virtual Economics explains is to arrange a bunch of dead bodies in the game to spell out their URL:
Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you'll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it's quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere - to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars.
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Tags: funny, spam, wow
The always-wise Russell Davies hits the nail on the head with this one: "As a semi-professional prognosticator I'm always tempted by the rhetorical power of statements like The Internet Is Killing X. But, of course, it isn't."
We are all tempted to make statements like this (or at least I know I am). But they're almost always complete oversimplification's of what's really going on, which tends to be that the internet is changing X, maybe to the point where it's unrecognizable, but most certainly not dead. This also is part of a larger thought I've had lately, which is all about us saying things that are wrong because they're easier to say than actually thinking. I don't know what to call this behavior (other than lazy), but I feel it constantly. I feel like yesterday's post about the "changing state of communication" was a perfect example. For all the lip-service we in the marketing industry give to the power of word-of-mouth, when push comes to shove we tend to suggest "blogger outreach" even though we collectively know that if not executed properly it's a fairly useless endeavor. (Okay, this point might be a little different, but I think there is some connective string there.)
I for one have been struggling with this "internet killing" point with my thoughts around serendipity. The easy explanation is that the web is killing serendipity, pointing us to exactly what we want when we want it. But it's certainly not that simple, as I run into more stuff that I wasn't looking for than I could ever imagine without the help of the internet. I guess the problem is that "the internet is subtly changing X" doesn't make for as good a title.
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Tags: internet, serendipity
Maybe I'm late to this game, but in a post describing the design decisions behind the new retweet functionality, Evan Williams articulates the Twitter mission in a way I had never heard before:
This last point [the need to have structured data around retweets] is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow your friends, organizations, public figures, or strangers you find interesting. … The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about--relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you're most interested in--even if you don't follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.
This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, and most obvious, it puts them in direct competition with Google's stated mission of "organizing the world's information." Second, I've been fairly obsessed with the concept of discovery and agree that, at this point, Twitter is just about the best discovery engine (as opposed to search engine) that we've got. With that said, I have some serious worries about Twitter only showing the stuff I care about because it implies that it's only going to show me that which I already care about, which to me kills much of the value of the serendipitous nature of Twitter.
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Tags: discovery, search, serendipity, twitter
George Packer has a good short essay where he tries to unpack people's fascination with Mad Men. I'm not really a fan of the show (I watched the first five episodes or so and was too bored to continue), but I am always interested in the things other people find interesting and Packer does a nice job of offering an explanation:
"Mad Men" shows the last years of a social order in which middle-class American men were little kings--slimy, anxiety-ridden, petulant, lifeless, but kings nonetheless. It's all about to come undone--Peggy is the harbinger of the change--and soon give way to an age of confusion and improvisation, which is the age we still live in. Watching "Mad Men" might be what it was like for Americans of an earlier age, around the time of Lincoln, to see an eighteenth-century European costume drama: this is what the world looked like just before the old order fell. The roles were rigid and constricting, but they had the advantage of being roles, ready-made for men and women to put on and live in. You didn't have to spend your energy inventing a way through the bewildering maze of unfamiliar social relations. It is no longer our world, and a good thing, too--but beneath the makeup and hair, the costumes and masks, this period piece still means us.
Read the whole thing. It's good (and include no spoilers).
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Tags: culture, history, television
In case you ever wanted to read 5000+ words on optimal buffet strategies, I've got just the article for you. It's chock full of such insightful nuggets as:
- "The morning of I would suggest a very small meal containing some sugar in order to get your metabolism up and running."
- "A point to keep in mind is that many establishments will raise their level of air conditioning to make diners uncomfortable, making them want to leave earlier. With this in mind be sure to bring a sweatshirt and dress in layers."
- "There is never a need to eat steamed rice (shrimp fried rice in small amounts is acceptable), dinner rolls or the like, this is completely unacceptable."
Lots more good advice in here.
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Tags: food, strategy
Like I said, I ran across two good Rushkoff insights today. The first was on newspapers and this one is on open source. It comes from Rushkoff's radio show The Media Squat where he talked about the realities of open source, all of which was very nicely summed up by abject learning (who also has the audio for your enjoyment):
He goes on to make a point we have heard elsewhere, though having it coming from a true believer like Rushkoff I find myself thinking on it with added attention. He suggests that open source efforts are hamstrung by the act of replication that is at the heart of its activity. The best open source efforts essentially copy existing artifacts (so Linux mimics Unix, Wikipedia does Britannica, Firefox carries on the paradigm of the web browser). Open source communities do not really yield unique original output, and have trouble accommodating "individualized unique expressions."
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Tags: media, opensource
Ran across two quotes from Rushkoff today that struck me as quite insightful and worth sharing (in two separate posts for length purposes). The first comes from an article he wrote for Daily Beast about the Rupert Murdoch versus Google thing:
By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.
A very interesting point. The web pretty much kills what was always the main source of differentiation between newspapers: Editorial voice, or, as Rushkoff puts it, a newspaper "tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time."
The second quote, on open source is now posted as well.
Update (11/10/09): Rex has posted another interesting insight in this Murdoch/Google debate. This one comes from Jason Calcanis and suggests that publishers "could use their robots.txt as a ransom note, selling it to the highest bidder -- Bing or Google." Interesting.
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Tags: google, media, newspapers
Does tech promote one gender's approach to the world over another?
I was reminded of this post I wrote a month ago (and never posted) when I read at Overcoming Bias that women being more picky than men at speed dating events was the result of the way the event was set up, not some insight into the difference between genders. Here they quote the original Washington Post article:
In almost all speed-dating events, women sit in stationary positions and men rotate to talk with each of them. When Finkel and Eastwick set up a dating event like that, the standard result bore out -- women were more selective. But when they reversed the roles and had women rotate, that was no longer the case. Suddenly, the men became more selective and the women less so.
Anyway, here's the post I wrote about tech and gender, which I don't think is offensive, and certainly isn't meant to be, but if it is I apologize.
Last month [September] I went to a Yankee game with my buddy Jimmy. We went to high school together and hadn't actually hung out in two years or so. While at the game we remarked, as is common, how amazing it was that we could just hang out after so long apart and just feel like we picked up where we left off. We talked a little about how it was easy to feel connected with things like Facebook and email, allowing us to casually check in on each other without actually being in the same place.
Then, as the conversation progressed, we started to talk a little about how this seemed to be an especially male trait. In my personal experience (and I feel like I might be verging on sexism here, so I am going to continue to be quite clear that this is personal experience), it is more difficult to maintain these types of casual relationships with female friends. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but personally I've found those relationships require far more constant contact (not all of them certainly, but many).
Anyhow, I mention all this because of a paragraph I just read offering an "untested anecdotal theory" roughly about the Dunbar Number:
There's a spectrum of 'stable' relationships. There are stable relationships of daily interaction regarding personal and intimate topics. There are stable relationships of regular interaction, and there are stable relationships of irregular (potentially very irregular) interactions. The more stable the basis of a relationship is with another person, the less regularly you need to 'groom' that relationship. I have friends who I've known for a long time, with whom I speak or interact very irregularly, but when we do talk or interact - whether it's been months, or even years since our last conversation - it's like we've been in touch the whole time. I thnk that new social media helps maintain these less regular, more stable relationships over long periods of time. Basically, if a relationship's base is strong or deep enough, then it degrades slowly enough so that even extremely irregular contact, or maybe even just the knowledge that the contact could be made, is enough to counter the degradation.
Which made me remember the conversation and leads me to where that conversation eventually led: Is the new technology driving the current trends in communication inherently male? (Or female, for that matter?) Are we pushing a mode of communication (many loose connections) that is more suited to one sex over the other? I'm not sure we are, though I suspect based on the founding teams that both Facebook and Twitter are a bit male-biased. However, both services, to my knowledge, have a very healthy gender ratio (I know 54 percent of 18-24 year olds on Facebook are female).
Like I said, I don't know the answer, but I do find it quite interesting to think about the possibility of a gender bias in new technology.
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Rob Walker is great at finding pithy ways to sum up problems. In this edition he ruminates on the state of "online dialogue" (which I copy in full because it's such a short post, but go over and subscribe to Rob's blog as it's great):
Yesterday somebody using the Robwalker.net contact form sent a message, and all it said was: "Read my blog." Followed by a link.
I found this depressing. Somehow it seemed to sum up the entire state of online "dialogue" these days -- a blunt demand for attention. But points for honesty, I guess.
It's true and it is kind of depressing. For all the talk about changing the way marketing works and relying on word of mouth and tapping into networks, there is still a whole lot of screaming until somebody listens going on.
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Tags: communication, marketing
My friend Charlton (a professor at NYU who specializes in race) has a nice piece about the diversity of Sesame Street:
Beyond being in sync with the racial realities of young children who have not yet been corrupted by their parents' color-bound politics, Sesame Street modeled the kind of racial idealism we should continually strive for. In Sesame Street's diverse neighborhood, characters always asked questions about why someone looked or acted differently than they did. Their questions were never returned with a north-directed middle finger or someone screaming, "ignorant!" The character was glad to answer the question and tell others about him or herself. I remember Oscar frequently being asked why he was green. Not complaining any more than usual, he was happy to point out that he's not really green, but that he once took a dip in a muddy marsh and hadn't taken a bath since.
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Tags: race, sesamestreet, television
So I travel a lot and have become fairly obsessed with accruing airline miles and getting status. When you're in airports constantly you aren't left with that many other things to think about. With that said, I've never done a milage run, where you take a trip just to bump your milage up for a status reward. Take, for instance, this story from a guy on his 8,000 mile run:
Mileage runs are a blast. They really are. They're relaxing, they're a way to get disconnected, and ultimately they're "profitable." But, if you're like me and do hardcore, eight segment, 36 hour, 8,000 mile domestic mileage runs, only half the journey is fun. Typically I'll start out on a flight out of Tampa at 6AM on a Saturday morning. Can someone remind me why the hell I'd actually want to get up (as opposed to go to bed) at 3:30AM on a Saturday morning?
The scary part is that I've considered it ...
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Tags: airlines, travel
An interesting perspective on what the new Google Music Search really means. (For those that missed the news, "Now, when you enter a music-related query -- like the name of a song, artist or album -- your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala.") Anyway, back to the interesting perspective:
Why should a song file from an "online retailer" come up first in search results instead of the band's own web site? How fair is that? What is this going to do to online strategies for bands? I thought the Internet was supposed to create a level playing field? And, surely Google is going to be serving up ads on these pages. How will the ads appear in the search results and how does that money get split up?
Google continues to run into this "evil" problem as they need to make tough decisions about what to prioritize, where. They're treading a very fine line as a company that uses data we create and serves it back to us, increasingly rearranging not in their original vision (ranked in order of what we think is most relevant), but rather in order of what makes them the most money.
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Tags: business, google, music
Hi, I'm 