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?
February 10, 2009
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.)
February 10, 2009
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).
February 10, 2009
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.
February 9, 2009
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.”
February 9, 2009
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.
February 8, 2009
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.)
February 7, 2009
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).
February 7, 2009
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).
February 7, 2009
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!
February 6, 2009
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.
February 5, 2009
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.
February 5, 2009
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.
February 4, 2009
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.)
February 3, 2009
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.)
February 1, 2009
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.)
February 1, 2009
File this under “how did I miss that?” Looks like Gmail finally released an offline version this week (with Docs and Reader working offline it’s hard to believe it took so long — except, of course, it must be way more complex with the massive amount of email some people have). Anyhow, as the Gmail team explains: “Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network.”
January 31, 2009
I generally like articles that are short and to the point. This Wall Street Journal blog article fits the bill. It simply and precisely goes through three of the reasons many online communities built for businesses fail: 1) “They have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology”, 2) “Most … put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites” and 3) “Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.”
Yup, that about sums it up in my mind. Well that and no one cares about their brand.
January 30, 2009
Since there’s nothing like being a little contrarian, Rick and I have decided to start The Media is Thriving in response to the ever so popular The Media is Dying. Instead of tracking the death of the media industry, we plan to track it’s success. As Rick explained in his introductory blog post, “I also think that a LOT of internet people have no concept of just how much money goes through the media companies. Time warner collected THIRTY FIVE BILLION DOLLARS last year. Even if you take out their insanely large, profitable, growing cable division, their revenues are still 4 times Google’s. It’s madness.”
So there you go. Follow The Media is Thriving on Twitter and if you’ve got any tips, email, comment or @ us.
January 29, 2009
The Times had an interesting article Discovery Communications’ web video strategy. Essentially they’re going back in their vault and cutting up as much of it as possible into clips that are under five minutes long.
I’ve said to a few clients in the past that the reason to do something is that there’s no reason not to. That doesn’t always go over so well, but I think this is a particularly good example of that strategy. The cost of employing a few people to cut and upload video is lower than the ad revenue on the video they throw up. Even if they don’t get rich off it, $1 is more than $0. (Though the article also points out that Discovery is a bit unique in that it has global rights to the content it broadcasts.)
January 27, 2009
The St. Petersburg Times is up to something pretty cool with Obameter. As they explain, “PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.” It’s got an RSS feed and everything so you can keep score at home.
I think this is great. He ran on change and now he’s being held accountable (so far he’s doing pretty well). Let’s hope he can live up to his promises.
January 27, 2009
This is too cool. “Snow rollers form when the snow has just the right combination of sticky snow that is light enough to be moved by wind. If the wind is strong enough, it picks up snow crystals and begins to tumble them over across ‘downstream’ snow cover. Soon a little mini snowball forms. As it grows and increases surface area, the wind gusts push sheets of snow along.”
There are some more photos of snow rollers over at Flickr.
January 27, 2009
Over the last week I’ve heard of not one, but two atrocities that are a direct result of a piece of software called Microsoft Bob (named one of the 25 worst tech products by PC World).
First off, there’s Clippy, the awful Microsoft Office assistant. As James Fallows pointed out in his blog, “Clippy suffered the dreaded ‘optimization for first time use’ problem. That is, the very first time you were composing a letter with Word, you might possibly be grateful for advice about how to use various letter-formatting features. The next billion times you typed ‘Dear …’ and saw Clippy pop up, you wanted to scream.”
Next, there’s Comic Sans, easily the most misused font in the universe (I’m assuming if other planets have invented fonts they haven’t had one spiral out of control as badly as this one). It turns out that the face was designed for Microsoft Bob after Vincent Connare, the typographer responsible, saw an animated dog speaking in Times New Roman and thought it was all wrong (he spoke at ROFLthing yesterday).
On top of all this, guess who was a project manager for a short time on Microsoft Bob? None other than Melinda French, who now goes by the last name Gates and helps run a multi-billion dollar charitable fund. Fun facts abound!
January 25, 2009
This Marginal Revolution post from September, 2007 explains an idea I was trying to explain in yesterday’s post about networks: “What makes virtual worlds important for economics is that for the first time ever, macro-economists will be able to do experiments. I predict that we will see some very interesting experiments in the near future.”
This is true across the board, actually. What makes the web important is that for the first time ever we are all able to do large scale experiments.
January 25, 2009
One idea I’ve been turning over in my head lately is around the idea of desire lines. These are the unpaved paths people chose to take and eventually trample, turning what was one person’s decision to stray from the pavement into an all-but-official route. I love desire lines as a metaphor because they expose the network of collective decision-making that tends to otherwise go unnoticed in the physical world.
On the internet, of course, things are very different. Every day we encounter the fruits of collective decision-making and most of the time are quite aware of the role we play in it. As I wrote in 2006, “I think the most important effect of the internet thus far is that it’s exposed the network. For the first time everyone can understand what a network is and how it works. Now that we do, we’re beginning to take that knowledge and exploit it.” (By the way, I have trouble how much I love the fact that I can pull up forgotten thoughts from 2006 in an instant. It’s an amazing power to possess.) This knowledge, of course, is what leads to people gaming the system, whether it be shady search engine optimization or manipulating Digg. Ethical issues notwithstanding, though, it’s pretty amazing to think that so many people understand the core functionality of networks (even if they don’t understand that they understand).
What’s at the heart of this all is data: Before the web there was no real way to fully comprehend how networks functioned because the datasets were so small. In fact, I’d argue, that was true for most things. The web affords us the opportunity to play the role of amateur social scientist, looking at datasets that social scientists would have only dreamed of 30 years ago. As James Fowler explains in this Seed Salon with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi:
Well, the great thing about these massive, passive data sets is that we’re going to have really deep information about a very, very large number of people. So we won’t be forced anymore to make trade-offs between depth and breadth. But then the question becomes: What kind of preparation are we going to give our students? We’ve had a revolution in game theory in the past 30 years, so that a good number of political scientists all across the country work only on mathematical, closedform models. We’ve also had a revolution in the application of statistics.
But both of these revolutions have been built on this atomistic view of human beings. Statisticians make the assumption that all the observations are independent in order to be able to calculate statistical significance. Game theorists make it because, as you know, getting anything to work out in a closed-form model is nearly impossible if you assume that people are taking into account the preferences of other people.
We need not only to ramp up the amount of methodological training that people in social sciences have, but also to shift their perception into realizing that the relationships between people are important.
This is not constrained to social science, or even just academia, as people we all need to ramp up our understanding of the interconnection between individuals and their decisions. In fact, I think laymen may be ahead of the scientists in this respect. Social scientists (especially economists) have a lot invested in the individual view of human beings, the idea that we are rational actors generally unaffected by the world around us. This, of course, is wrong and behavioral economists are doing a great job of throwing a few wrenches into the field (of course the world economy collapsing isn’t helping either).
Anyway, I feel like I’m rambling and have lost focus a bit. Partly that’s because I don’t really know where to go here. I know this is important, but there’s a bit of a “what next” feeling left with me. What does a world look like where people understand the fundamentals of network science? How does the observation of group behavior in real time move us in directions we might not have expected? What does it mean for an individual to recognize their role within the mass?
Obviously, I’m not entirely sure how to answer those questions at the moment, but I’ll keep thinking about it (and would love any thoughts you have).
January 25, 2009
I really like this Newsweek interview with Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E (which missed out on the Oscar nomination for best picture).
Anyway, in the interview he talks about lots of stuff, but I especially liked his explanation of how the story ended up the way it did: “I wanted to wallow in that innocent wonder and joy that you could get out of a love story in a ’50s musical, but I felt there’s no way the world would accept that in today’s society. Unless you disguise it in a dystopian, sci-fi love story with two machines. Then, suddenly everybody’s willing to take down their shields and just indulge. And maybe realize how much they miss being fulfilled that way — with unadulterated joy.”
January 25, 2009
Learned an interesting tidbit yesterday: Turns out that there’s a big debate in the vegan community over whether honey is okay to eat. The hardcore vegans argue that it’s an animal product and that even though it’s an excretion, the bees are imprisoned. The honey-eaters, on the other hand, argue that if you avoid honey you have to consider everything bees are used for: “Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops.”
Also, following some links off the article I was reading a bit about pearls (which also aren’t vegan). The suggestion is that vegans who really want them should wear fake ones, which brings up a whole other interesting issue: Other people don’t know you’re wearing fakes and you’re therefore elevating the pearl in society (and thus the killing of oysters for them). (The same could be said about people who buy fake diamonds because they are against the diamond industry.)
January 21, 2009
Wow, this is pretty crazy, The Guardian points out that Google, Flickr and Last.fm saw significant drops in their traffic during the inauguration speech. As The Official Google Blog explains, “the overall query volume of Google searches dropped in the U.S. from the time President Obama took the oath of office until the end of his inaugural speech, demonstrating that all eyes were on today’s festivities.”
Update (1/21/09): Looks like everyone was just over at CNN.com: “Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.”
January 21, 2009
Generally I like this article about teaching kids probability because I agree that it’s a concept more people need to understand. (Plus I think it’s funny that I ran across two unrelated quotes — the other from a commencement speech — about the importance of probability in a week.) With that said, one quote from the article in particular stood out: “One must think all the time of what is not being reported – the dog that didn’t bark. When we see a hole-in-one video on YouTube we are sensible enough to know that this has been selected out of millions of shots that missed. We need to think the same way every time we hear of someone claiming that some new treatment has cured them.”
I’m not sure any of us take this into account often enough. I was actually just thinking about this the other day when chatting with a friend about Whopper Sacrifice. While I think it was a funny and kind of interesting idea, it gives people a kind of false hope that it’s easy to do this sort of stuff: That every Facebook campaign will come with the kind of buzz this one received. How many campaigns just like this fell on their face, never getting enough people to even notice their failure? But we don’t think or talk about that, rather we focus on the single success (wow, this is starting to sound a little like The Black Swan
).
January 19, 2009
I’ve always kind of wondered what the method of organizing is for the following icons on your Twitter page. The photos are clearly not in alphabetical order and they’re also not in organized by when you started following the person (as opposed to when you hit view all). Anyway, as I was looking at it tonight, I started to realize the order pretty closely reflected the MyFirstTweet oldest tweets list (which is worth checking out, I’m still the second oldest user on the list whose first tweet was not “just setting up my twttr”). So, after a little more digging, it looks like that’s the case: The icons are ordered by when the person joined Twitter.
None of this matters, really, I just thought it was interesting. Of course, not two hours after I cracked the code I ran across Matt’s post from last week with the same discovery.
January 18, 2009
Over the last few months Benjamin and I have been having funny conversations comparing the different levels of exposure/knowledge in the age of blogs. To aid in the process we’ve come up with this handy glossary:
I READ THAT: I actually read that.
I READ ABOUT THAT: I read a blog synopsis, article about a subject, or article about an article.
I KNOW ABOUT THAT: I have read several different opinions/reviews/synopsis to the point where I not only know the basic content of the original article but also the cultural impact it has made, yet I have not read the original piece.
I HEARD ABOUT THAT: I saw a bunch of headlines about that thing, leading me to believe it was important, but read nothing in depth.
I’VE BEEN REALLY INTO THAT: I read the original, and then have followed up on various other people’s opinions and reviews and synopsis
I’VE BEEN DISCUSSING THAT: I read about it, then posted something and am now commenting, discussing, etc.
Anything to add?
January 18, 2009
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