Hey everyone, just a quick note to say posting will be pretty slow over the next month or so as I get married and go on my honeymoon. I may try to talk a few folks in to picking up the slack around here while I’m gone, but I’m not sure I’ll actually get around to it.
dotmuncher80: I’ll let you in on a little secret: None of us move as quick as we used to. The other day Blinky had me stopped in an alley in the upper left and I was like, “Fuck, this is it,” and I hear the dude WHEEZING. I was like, “You wanna sit this one out?” and he goes, “Dude, you don’t even know.” We are all running out of energy. BALK: The power pellets don’t help? dotmuncher80: You mean the speed? BALK: I thought they were just “power pellets.” dotmuncher80: Dude, they’re speed. I am a 30-year-old SPEED ADDICT. Real accomplishment there. What a wonderful life I’ve made for myself.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D), for example, told the Omaha World-Herald this week that he has never once used an ATM, relying on bank tellers instead. His Nebraska colleague, Sen. Mike Johanns (R), has used his ATM card fewer than five times. And Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, told the newspaper that he has a bank card but doesn’t use it for cash.
“I’ve never used an ATM, so I don’t know what the fees are. It’s true, I don’t know how to use one,” Nelson, 69, said.
I’m very glad the folks making the decisions are also part of the 7 percent of Americans who don’t use ATMs. Great.
I can’t for the life of me remember where I found this or who sent it to me, but over at a blog called The Unlikely Fan someone has done an excellent comparison of the World Cup teams to US sports teams. Argentina, for instance, gets the Washington Redskins because “They’ve been good for about as long as the game has been played. They have so much history that your default expectation is for them to always be good, even great. But the reality doesn’t support that: they haven’t won anything in around twenty years.”
But the very best comparison is Japan = Gonzaga:
A team that has come to dominate its humble region the last couple decades or so. But they don’t make a dent in the big dance, despite amazing hair.
While it feels like everyone in the world is talking about the whole Facebook privacy thing, my quick and informal survey of some non-internety folks came back with a bunch of blank stares.
Anyway, Openbook does a better job explaining what’s up than just about anything I’ve seen. Do a quick search for anything you imagine people wouldn’t want made public about themselves and it comes back. It sort of reminds when AOL released a whole bunch of supposedly anonymized search data only to find out that it’s really easy to track back to individuals. Only this time there’s not even an attempt to make it anonymous. Now I get that people should have a better understanding of what they make public and all that jazz, but it’s pretty easy to find some stuff that any person with half a conscience would hide away for the person who made it public.
In general I found this I, Cringely post about Veetle a bit boring, but the first paragraph is great:
YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner. Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.
For me it was one of those zoom out moments where all of a sudden someone puts into perspective a number that’s come to seem pretty regular. Two billion is such a massive number (I assume he means streams, not downloads) and it is pretty amazing that it takes that sort of scale to make money in the game YouTube is in. I mean it’s great if they’re making some cash, but as Cringely points out, that’s pretty maddening.
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an improvement in performance and spur the player to try again. But gambling is a game of chance, which distorts gamblers’ thought processes – near misses cause them gambler to overestimate both the level of skill involved and their chances of winning. This spurs them to continue gambling.
Interesting to think about the implications of this sort of stuff on the “gamification” movement currently going on. The article also highlights that manufacturers of gambling machines have been smart to this effect for awhile: “Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves.”
Lately I’ve been having lots of conversations about augmented reality. Not the marker/webcam type, but just the general idea of using technology to augment the world we experience. While there is a lot of cool marker/webcam stuff, it’s not really “useful” yet. That why I love it when I see stuff like this new feature for an iPhone app called Sodoku Grab that can read the puzzle you’re looking at and overlay answers (or tips) in real time.
As a total aside, it reminds me of another puzzle cheating story. A few years ago I had a few thousand people land on a random entry via the search term “tom wolfe catchphrase 1970s.” Confused, I quickly put up a page with that title and asked people what the hell they were looking for. As it turned out, they were all trying to cheat on their New York Times crossword puzzle. The clue was “Tom Wolfe catchphrase popularized in the 1970s” and that had randomly landed on my site. If you’re ever wondering about some of the more random phrases that pop up in Google Hot Trends, now you know.
Most interestingly, neither of Gilt nor Groupon uses SEO to push their offers. In fact, traditional product offer SEO would kill their businesses. One of the reasons that the merchants can offer lower prices via these services is that the prices will not appear in Google searches and therefore difficult to include in comparison shopping systems.
His larger point, which he goes on to make, is that Google’s never-ending march towards efficiency has created market opportunities in the other, non-efficient, direction. They purposely obfuscate the price of their goods from the world at large and it seems to be working pretty damn well for them.
In surveys [people] almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form. In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson’s subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.
The article also points out how many “disruptive” TV ideas have missed a basic premise of how we consume: With other people. I can’t help but feel like the current wave of “social TV” applications that aim to allow me to connect with my friends while watching shows will suffer the same fate. The reality of the situation is that the vast majority of my TV time is already spent consuming it socially with the person sitting next to me on the couch.
The Atlantic has a great story on the Conficker worm which I had heard about, but not paid a ton of attention to. Apparently the thing is pretty damn sophisticated and some of the smartest computer security folks in the world are trying to fight it (mostly to no avail). I especially enjoyed the game theory of the whole thing as both sides try to guess what the other is thinking the other is thinking:
I think they were trying something, and I think that they’re too smart to do what everybody figured they were going to do. You have to remember, the world was watching this thing and waiting for the world to end from Conficker on April 1, 2009. The last thing you’d want to do if you’re the bad guy is make something happen on April 1. You’re never going to do that, because everybody’s watching it. You’re going to do something when you’re least suspected. So these guys are sophisticated. They have good code. And just even seeing the evolution from Conficker A to B to C, where there’s the peer-to-peer component, which … strikes fear into the heart of botnet hunters because it’s just so damn difficult to track–these guys know exactly what they’re doing.
Robert Hodgin (one of the co-founders of Barbarian Group, where I work) is posting some amazing videos of his swarm experiments with Cinder, a C++ library for doing crazy visual stuff.
1) If I am far away from my neighbors, move towards them.
2) If I am too close to my neighbors, move away from them.
3) If I am neither too close or too far from my neighbors, move with them.
I just started reading a book called Country Driving and it’s super interesting (I’m only 800 units in on the kindle). It’s subtitled “A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” and is essentially an American’s journey through China from behind the wheel. I particularly liked this story of negotiating a small traffic accident (which apparently happens quite regularly).
Once, a driver backed into my rental car near the Lama Temple in downtown Beijing. I got out to inspect the dent; the other motorist, by way of introduction, immediately said, “One hundred yuan.” It was the equivalent of about twelve dollars, which was generally the starting point for a midsize Beijing dent. When this offer was relayed by telephone to Mr. Wang [the rental operator], his response was also immediate: “Ask for two hundred.” I bargained for five minutes, until the other driver finally agreed to one hundred and fifty. Mr. Wang was satisfied; he knew you never get what you ask for. And every accident had a silver lining–dents were good business. There wasn’t any paperwork for these exchanges, and I suspected that the desk men at Capital Motors sometimes kept the cash.
A few weeks ago I was telling someone about the Bodega food pyramid video from a few years ago by the Internets Celebrities. The gist, more or less, is that the food options at your average bodega (corner stores in urban neighborhoods) leave much to be desired.
Apparently New York City is addressing this problem with the Healthy Bodegas Initiative which was covered by the Daily News last week. The program, which is currently on at 1,000 bodegas around the city, aims to provide both financial incentives and marketing assistance to bodegas that agree to carry more healthy options:
Bodegas are encouraged to apply for permits allowing them to sell fresh produce on the sidewalk in front of the store to increase the space afforded to fresh produce, and to include healthier foods into their deli and grab-and-go sections. The Healthy Bodegas Initiative also helps stores promote and advertise their healthier items to customers through in-store displays, improved storage and shelving, promotional materials, and window advertisements.
This is the sort of program I’m happy to see my tax dollars go to.
“Since 1977 about 700,000 new businesses have been started in the US every year. The number barely changes from year to year.”
“A ballooning in both venture capital funding and university courses on entrepreneurship since 1980 has had no effect on the rate of business formation.”
Hey all. Just a quick heads up that I’ve cleaned up the old site a bit. For the vast majority of you this won’t matter, as you never visit the site and just read the RSS feed/email, but for those that do hopefully you like the new digs.
As always, if you run into anything that doesn’t behave, please let me know.
Here’s a quick rundown of the changes:
Everything is in one big column: This was the big change. Basically I was tired of having two columns for my entries. Increasingly the quickies on the right were becoming the content of the site, but they weren’t getting enough love because people weren’t noticing them. This also takes a lot of pressure off me to keep the long-form entries flowing (which I’ve been totally terrible at lately).
Thumbnail Stream: If you come over to the site you’ll see a bunch of thumbnails at the top. This is just a little script I wrote that goes out and grabs stuff from Flickr, Delicious & Tumblr, makes thumbnails for all and then posts them. Seemed like a nice way to drive to the other stuff I read around the web and add a bit of flare to the site.
Right Sidebar: Now that I don’t have entries over on the right I had a bunch of space to work with. I’ll try to keep that side updated, but for now it’s a quick rundown of what this site is all about and will, in the future, include a bit of a blogroll. One big thing that’s not changing on the right is the comments on the entry pages. This is something that I’ve had on the site for a long time and I still believe is the best way to illustrate my belief that comments are as important as entries.
Well, I think that’s about it. Like I said, for most of you this won’t matter, but for those of you that visit, I hope you enjoy. I have not done a lot of cross-browser testing with the new design, so if you run into weirdness please just take a screenshot and send it over. Thanks.
Thank you for choosing FormToEmail by FormToEmail.com
Version 1.7 August 13th 2006
COPYRIGHT FormToEmail.com 2003 - 2006
You are not permitted to sell this script, but you can use it, copy it or distribute it, providing that you do not delete this copyright notice, and you do not remove any reference to FormToEmail.com
DESCRIPTION
FormToEmail allows you to place a form on your website which your visitors can fill out and send to you. The contents of the form are sent to the email address which you specify below. The form allows your visitors to enter their name, email address and comments. If they try to send a blank form, they will be returned to the form.
Your visitors (and nasty spambots!) cannot see your email address! The script cannot be hijacked by spammers.
When the form is sent, your visitor will get a confirmation of this on the screen, and will be given a link to continue to your homepage, or other page if you specify it.
Should you need the facility, you can add additional fields to your form, which this script will also process, without making any additional changes.
This is a PHP script. In order for it to run, you must have PHP (version 4.1.0 or later) on your webhosting account. If you are not sure about this, then please ask your webhost about it.
SETUP INSTRUCTIONS
Step 1: Put the form on your webpage
Step 2: Enter your email address and continue link below
Step 3: Upload the files to your webspace
Step 1:
To put the form on your webpage, copy the code below as it is, and paste it into your webpage:
Step 2:
Enter the email address below to send the form to:
*/
$my_email = “nb@noahbrier.com”;
/*
Enter the continue link to offer the user after the form is sent. If you do not change this, your visitor will be given a continue link to your homepage:
If you do change it, remove the “/” symbol below and replace with the name of the page to link to, eg: “mypage.htm” or “http://www.elsewhere.com/page.htm”
Save this file (FormToEmail.php) and upload it together with your webpage to your webspace. IMPORTANT – The file name is case sensitive! You must save it exactly as it is named above! Do not put this script in your cgi-bin directory (folder) it may not work from there.
THAT’S IT, FINISHED!
You do not need to make any changes below this line.
*/
// This line prevents values being entered in a URL
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != “POST”){exit;}
// ADDED
if($_POST['Spam'] != ‘eyeball’) {
echo ‘
Sorry
You didn\’t pass the spam test.
If you\’re not a robot, I apologize, please hit the back button and try again. If you are a robot, get out of here and find someone else to spam . . . Please.
// if(!(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'],$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']))){print “Please enable referrer logging to use this contact form. Your message was not sent.”; exit;}
There are quite a few ways to get in touch with me, but the easiest is either a) send an email to nb@noahbrier.com or use the handy form below.
* I ask you to type this for spam purposes. It’s to make sure you’re not a robot. If you happen to be a robot who can miraculously type the word in question, please type toenail instead.
Okay, subscribing to this site is pretty easy: 4,500 people already do it. You basically have two options, the first is to enter your email address below and receive daily updates (never more than once-a-day).
Your second option is slightly more complicated. It’s called RSS and it stands for Really Simple Syndication. You’ve probably seen the icon, actually, it looks like this:
If you’re not quite sure what to do with that link then you probably don’t yet use RSS. To get started I’d recommend checking out Google Reader, my RSS aggregator of choice. Once you’re there just click subscribe and enter http://noahbrier.com/index.xml.
If you’re thinking about reaching out to me, please go ahead and do it. I really like receiving unsolicited email from folks and am usually up for a coffee or something if you’re around NYC.
I am Noah Rubin Brier, but normally I just go by Noah.
My bio says something to this effect: “Noah loves the internet. But not so much for the fart-lighting videos as the metaphor it offers. He uses the web to understand the world. In his eyes, everything is linked, and Noah treats every encounter with information as a potential web waiting to be untangled.”
I concur.
I am currently working on some super secret internet things.
I was last head of planning and strategy at The Barbarian Group, purveyors of awesome digital stuff. Prior to that I worked as a strategist at Naked Communications, a creative lead at Renegade Marketing and before that wrote about the impact of cultural, media and demographic trends on the marketing field at American Demographics Magazine. (Obviously, anything written on this site is my opinion and not necessarily that of The Barbarian Group.)
Hrm, what else to tell you? I love Mexican food and hot sauce. I live in New York City. I like getting deals, a trait I inherited from my father along with a taste for pretzels. And I drink a lot of coffee.
Internet Week: The Art of the Side Project. This panel discussion, featuring an assortment of thinkers and makers, will explore how to balance your side project with work hours, continue momentum and overcome creative and technical hurdles to keep the process going. (June, 2011)
University of Montana: Entertainment Management. (March, 2010). This marked my fourth year visiting Missoula to spend the weekend talking about media, technology, entertainment and the web.
Media Thinking Congress Asia. Singapore (December, 2009). “Noah Brier, head of strategic planning at Barbarian Group, was first up at the speaker sessions at today’s inaugural 2009 Media Thinking Congress held at St Regis in Singapore. ”
“Brand Exposure: Practical Strategies in Social Media”. Internet Week (June 2, 2009). “On June 2nd, during Internet Week, Toby Daniels of Social Media Week and Celia Chen of Notes on a Party will launch the first in a series of events that are designed to provide senior brand marketers with practical strategies in social media.”
“Good Ideas in 2009 in Digital”. “This morning’s Good Ideas Salon focused on Digital, exploring new ways in which individuals and brands are storing, sharing, and archiving their online narratives. The panel, moderated by Piers Fawkes (PSFK), included Claire Hyland (Electric Artists), Johanna Beyenbach (Naked), Mike Arauz (Undercurrent), and Noah Brier (Barbarian Group) and touched upon a range of topics spanning from the evolution of virtual identities and collaboration to mobile technologies and the relivening of analog through digital.”
“Spread The Good Word”. Boards Summit New York (October 24, 2008). The Big Idea? All well and good, but unless you get it out it there to consumers, it’s worthless. New media platforms, fragmented outlets and ADD consumers mean that digital strategy is taking an increasingly crucial place in agency thinking. Hear from some of the digital world’s top strategists as they discuss how to get your creative to go global.
“Social Media: New Guns vs. Marketing Gurus”. PSFK New York (March 27, 2008). “In a ‘new guns’ versus ‘marketing gurus’ debate, Josh Spear(Undercurrent) & Noah Brier (Likemind) join Marc Schiller (Electic artists) & Steve Rubel (Edelman) to
debate how social media will change in 2008 and how companies can
leverage this digital phenomenon in the most rewarding way. Moderated
by Noelle Weaver (SS+K).”
“The Great Re-bundling Debate: Should Media and Creative Come Back Together?” ad:tech Chicago (July 31, 2007). “Despite protests from a consistently familiar group of agency executives, the issue of re-bundling is back on the table. Interestingly enough, we rarely hear from clients that an “unbundled” world is a better world and a whole new class of new-breed agencies have risen up to offer clients a world of bundled services not out of convenience or differentiation but out of necessity and real-world market conditions. And although some agency executives may be in denial about what is happening across their own networks and agencies, the reality is that even in the world of unbundled agencies, re-bundling is occurring in plain sight. In this Exchange Series session, we want to hear from you on this subject and hear exactly why you think the world should remain unbundled or whether a re-bundled world is inevitable.”
“Social Media: Evolution to Execution.” Promo Live (September 19, 2007). “As consumers are increasingly taking control of their media consumption, smart marketers are evolving their contact strategies. With Social Media (aka Web 2.0) evolving from theoretical discussion to executable strategy, marketers are looking for ways to capitalize on the new consumer landscape. What do consumers respond to? What determines success? What can Social Media achieve for your brand?
Answering these questions and more, our diverse panel representing a wide spectrum of marketing experts will look beyond tactical examples and share insights into Social Media strategies that resonate with consumers. Our panel will discuss how to use Social Media strategies in meaningful and impactful ways that deliver results and support other marketing efforts.”
“Are Brands Prepared for 2010?” Nielsen Buzzmetrics CGM Summit 2007 (October 25, 2007). “What are the leading brands doing to rewire their DNA for a world increasingly impacted by CGM? How are they changing the way their companies listen, the way they communicate, and the way they manage customer relationships? How have past CGM experiments and lessons informed marketing innovation and planning for the future? Where are we certain, where are our vulnerabilities?”
Hi, I'm Noah. I am the co-founder of Percolate. I like writing on, thinking about and making stuff for the internet. I'm responsible for a few internet experiments like Brand Tags, likemind and My First Tweet. On this site I write about media, marketing, culture, technology and randomness. I like it when people email me.
Subscribe to NoahBrier.com by RSS or by email (in once-a-day digest form).
The drip denotes a curated post from Percolate. The comment is mine, the content on the other end of the link is not.
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
and it’s super interesting (I’m only 800 units in on the kindle). It’s subtitled “A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory” and is essentially an American’s journey through China from behind the wheel. I particularly liked this story of negotiating a small traffic accident (which apparently happens quite regularly).
Hi, I'm 
