Social Mode

This is genius.

Kudos to the editor who thought that one up.

I cannot begin to tell you the insight I gained from this. Can you believe there are people that sit on Facebook all the time? Can you believe people would rather stare at their computer screen and leer at the human zoo that is social media than interact in the real world?

“Last Friday, I had three clients in my office with Facebook problems,” said Paula Pile, a marriage and family therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina. “It’s turned into a compulsion — a compulsion to dissociate from your real world and go live in the Facebook world

The funny thing is… remember when it was all about MySpace addiction and before that AOL Chatrooms. I guess you know a company / media thang has jumped the shark when therapists are no longer accepting patients for an addiction with your brand associated with it.

Facebook Addiction?

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Apr 23
Perhaps my eariler post today wasn’t your company.. but is this more like it?

Nice animation!

Escher Animation

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Apr 23
In world full of fossils, the slightest movement of a pebble on the slope of the cliff is nearly enough to bring on a whole series of heart attacks–so you can imagine what happens when someone dynamites the whole mountain!

– Taken from page 139 of The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Is this your company?

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Apr 23
Oy, the pop psychologists and media sociologists are out in full force on the latest pop culture sensation, Susan Boyle.

Read all the theories in those links.
- don’t judge a book by its cover
- ordinary people do extraordinary things
- it’s a disney movie
- we all have hidden desires for the same thing as Boyle
- etc.
Blah! Blargh!

Try an experiment. Only listen to her singing. Do not listen to the audience or the commentary. You will not have the same reaction – the crying, the emotion, the anger at the judges… This is an actual experiment we could do. Take 2 groups who have not seen the video or know about the story and have them watch different contextual versions of the performance.

We are conditioned by the entire context. If the audience and judges aren’t laughing at her and giving standing Os, the performance is ordinary and our reaction will likely not be the one that drives a YouTube sensation. When others around us are laughing, crying, making fun… we get into that action. When the context then shows surprise and amazement we do too. This is less about Susan Boyle’s surprise talent than it is about the surprise of the audience.

No doubt she can sing, but millions of people can sing. No doubt she’s not going to win a beauty contest, millions of people won’t and can still sing. The situation is not uncommon, nor is our reaction.

Combine the context with our own behavioral histories… we have been conditioned to have reactions like we do to this (but when others are having the same reaction!). Cheer for the underdog, laugh at the ugly person and slap her back when she crushes it, gossip about a celebrity’s troubles but cheer her return, damaged goods done good, hooray!, ugly duckings/swan thang. This is the most common human story ever told and we tell it to our children from the day they are born. The thing is, the reaction of that audience is still the key to having our histories ignited. If the audience sorta half likes it and the judges have poker faces and say “cliche song”, Susan Boyle is still the ugly duckly. Most everyone needs to see the swan, for it to be a swan to us.

The success of Boyle is not a mystery. It’s not a phenomenon. It’s your run of the mill context meets shared histories often makes a wave….
Susan Boyle Singing Success Uncovered

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Apr 22
It’s a safe assumption that every newspaper and publisher has access to the basic data created and shared by the world. Newspapers and publishers can use Freebase or Wikipedia or some other aggregator/syndication service to fill their websites and their papers full of content. The race for coverage and exclusives is over – every outlet can cover everything simply by mashing it all up.

This availability of all data by all outlets has ruined the differentiation between local papers, category specific publications and most hobbyist content providers. It used to matter who the editor in chief knew, which city a publisher was in, how fast the vans could get to the scene or whether the product makers liked a publisher’s reviewers. The ability to get and cover content competitors couldn’t drove audience. Now, search engine optimizations, clever traffic arbitrage schemes and integration with portals are the drivers of audience for most traditional publishers. This is a short lived game though – for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that it’s too hard to compete – everyone is competing for the top spot in Google for the most important searches. The portals can only feature a small set of links every day. The arbitrage schemes are played out by a great many players, and money talks more than anything else.

The winning strategy involves Synthesis.   “Just the facts, mam” doesn’t cut it. Interpretation, analysis, synthesis of the causal webs, related ideas, the context, the history. All of that done via interactive visuals like timelines, charts, trends, projections, simulations. Every which way to expose fresh takes.

Synthesis still takes unique perspective and skilled people. Synthesis is what creates shared understanding – i.e. knowledge. Publishers need to get out of the data business and into the knowledge business.   Knowledge is defensible, data is not. Knowledge is worth paying for, data is not. Advertising tangled with knowledge performs, advertising with data distracts.

Are there examples of good synthesis?

It’s rare.

I don’t think cable TV does a great job of synthesis. Most talking heads are just creating noisy data. Good synthesis provides insight, demands more questions, finds connections. Yahoo News doesn’t. Google News doesn’t.

Edge.org does alright. The Economist usually. WSJ still does a good job with synthesizing. CNN, occasionally. Go to these websites, they aren’t just the data regurgitated. And they are rewarded with traffic.

This isn’t limited to news. Science information, entertainment, business intelligence, weather, and more all need synthesis.   Consider the spread of Compete.com and Quantcast.com versus Alexa. Alexa didn’t really synthesize the numbers into useful trends, audience slices or any more useful view.

You get the point. Enough of the “information age”, let’s bring about the synthesis age. Therein lies the value publishers can bring to consumers.

Synthesis is Key To Success of Newspapers, Magazines and Publishers

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Apr 20
From AC Grayling:

My final question is about the way we’re going to be reading, communicating and reflecting in the future. At the moment, we’re all very interested to know about the future in these respects. Not the future of the book specifically, although it has traditionally been one major focus for the reflective life – sustaining it, enabling communication between participants in it – because already we see the trend that there are different ways in which written content can be delivered to people who want it. Rather I mean the practice of reading, the practice of reflection, themselves; I mean the nature of what underlies our ability to be good conversationalists with one another, to be reflective and informed, to have a good knowledge of the classics, but also to be open to new ideas and new work across all the disciplines — history, the sciences, philosophy, and the literary arts. How are people going to relate to these things in the future, given that in the past this centrally involved reading and reflecting?

This is an interesting question because in the past our culture has been one that depends tremendously on the written word, on literature in all its forms. If the way that the written word gets to people changes in ways that make people use it less, and this is a phenomenon becoming more widespread now — formulating ideas and communicating them in very compressed forms, as in text messages for example — that kind of phenomenon might make a difference to our cultural sensibility.

Read the whole conversation.

This conversation covers a lot of ground from reflection, scientific progress, tabloid culture and civil liberties. Time to read and reflect.

Reflecting on Reflecting

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Apr 18
O’Reilly Radar has a very nice post about the new Federal CTO, Aneesh Chopra.

I really appreciate the blow out of a few actual projects he’s taken on:
The role of the CTO is to provide visionary leadership, to help a company (or in this case, a government) explore the transformative potential of new technology. Try a few of these Virginia technology initiatives on for size:
- the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook.
- integrating iTunes U with Virginia’s state education assessment framework;
- the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching;
- a Ning-based social network to connect clinicians working in small health care offices in remote locations;
- a state-funded “venture capital fund” to allow government agencies to try out risky but promising new approaches to delivering their services or improving their productivity;
- a lightweight approval and testing process that allows the government to try out new technologies before making a full, expensive commitment.
What’s GREAT is the EFFORT, not so much the specifics. There is no ideal use of technology in government – it’s about the constant process of course corrections and experimentation. Who cares if it’s web 2.0, social networking, podcasts, micro payments, etc. etc. The idea that there’s someone in charge that will TRY to DO something is what’s important. Chopra seems to be a great pick.

Also, can anyone name any other Federal CTO or CIO ever? I can’t. Seems strange to me that an economy and a culture so driven by technology hasn’t made a bigger deal out of the technology leaders in government.
Aneesh Chopra US CTO Details

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Apr 18
Google did it – They lost some revenue but still shine on.

They are right though. There will never be less advertising online, never fewer web searches, and never a reduced need to target more content and ads.

So until there’s a real competitor, Google will dominate even in weaker times.

Google Revenue Slip Means They Still Win

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Apr 16
From page 22-23 of english translation of The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them where they don’t want to go. The most intelligent among them turn their malaise into a religion: oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence! […] “What has become of the dreams of our youth?” they ask, with a smug, disillusioned air. “Those years are long gone, and life’s a bitch.” I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids without a clue about what has happened to them, acting big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears.

And yet there’s nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they’re adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. “Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is” is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that’s not true, it’s too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available engergy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that’s left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can’t find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children.

Perhaps an overly negative sentiment, but is the depiction not at least a little true for many people?

Borrowed Thoughts

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Apr 14
When I sit down to make sense of the world I often start with this question:

If beings from another galaxy were to show up on our planet on an anthropological mission, what would they think about all of this? What would they conclude? How is it all connected? What patterns would they find?

All of This right now refers to these very diverse situations on my mind:

Modern Day Pirates

It’s amazing we don’t have more modern day pirates. It appears relatively easy to take a non military ship. And, as far as I can tell, we have no well-crafted strategies for recovering ships and crew. Certainly our lack of strategies is a result of the fact that the US has basically commanded the seas for most of the last century. We haven’t been tested and lack the response behavior. Beyond the lack of strategies on our side, it’s very unclear what the pirates have to gain that they couldn’t gain from less risky efforts. A very strange situation.

False Populism

Are the people really sufficiently suffering to not just demand change via signage create it? I propose we’ve mostly lost the behaviors over the last 2 generations to implement change. While the 60s generation marched, sat in, yelled, voted, engaged… later generations built chat rooms, IM, blogs and Twitter. We rant online. We don’t look each other in the eye as much. And when we do, we talk politely…. and then fire up our iPhones to twitter our outrage. Our online behaviors are very disconnected from meaningful real world context. The conversations we have online rarely have direct consequences – in stark contrast to having a face to face debate, or showing up to the local public hearing, or meeting in our communities. Yes, the last national election was a nice break from the norm – people actually used online conversation to get out into the world – but for the most part that was a short lived activity.

Perhaps it’s just a result of the news cycle. We move on to the next news story before we’ve fully grokked the last set of events. I don’t buy that the news cycle prevents us from focusing. I really think that we are living more and more disconnected lives in the world while we think we’re more connected than ever online. In a world full of status updates, text messages, dropped cell phone calls, bad web ex meetings, as a generation we’ve lost the ability to hold a long, thoughtful conversation. We don’t read – we scan. We don’t debate – we tweet. We don’t listen – we mult task.

Is this “bad” or “good”? That’s the wrong question. Does it get us what we want in the world? Does it help us lead the lives we want? If not, what will? Perhaps marching on our leaders and community organization and old town councils aren’t the mechanisms to drive change anymore. What is? what comes next?

Newspapers and Journalism in Crisis

So is journalism really in trouble? is it just the papers? is it the print medium? is it the news business model? is it advertising?

Is finding someone to blame going to change what’s going on?

For me, the biggest question that probably will illuminate various reasons for chaos for the news business is: For organizations and businesses where recognizing and analyzing what’s going on in the world is their business, why were they so slow in recognizing their own crisis and coming up with course corrections? Ironic, to say the least.

I don’t think the print medium is going away. The existing business models are already gone, it’s just on fumes right now.

Golf as a One Man Brand

TV ratings for golf are 20-50% controlled by Tiger Woods. I imagine other business numbers like new players, club sales, tee times, Nike clothing sales are equally affected. This is truly an amazing thing. What’s more amazing is how in 12 years, PGA and golf in general has not found a way to diversify. Though it’s ok for now, in 10-15 years if golf hasn’t found a new format or a new set of interesting golfers, it’s going be in serious trouble.

What does it need to do? Really simple – start getting people from the real world. Most of the “golf brand” is not at all what the average person is. Watch the coverage of the Masters. As beautiful as it all is – it isn’t aspirational at all to most people. It’s actually off putting, especially now. Rich, mostly white, people at a country club all making millions. None of it looks attainable. It’s an argument golf has faced before… but they don’t seem to listen.

Boxing in modern times

It’s just plane strange if not downright boring. The modern sport just doesn’t really fit in the mainstream culture like it used to. The sport has few exciting athletes – in terms of personality and wider cultural presence. The media surrounding boxing is dreadfully boring with the same old same old announcers and approaches to coverage. A few years ago when The Contender started as a reality show, I thought there was some promise in reaching a new audience with a more raw, more down to earth viewing experience.

That didn’t last and the sport didn’t really commit to it.

Beyond the media, the sport itself doesn’t really work with a modern audience. Refs stop fights too early to get the big prize knock outs and most managers keep their great boxers out of big matches. So why bother to watch? 2 guys punching each other without the purpose of knocking the other one out really undermines the sport. I’m not saying boxing is good or bad or making any moral judgment. The idea of fighting is to beat someone up. When that’s no longer the objective, what’s the big payoff? When does the audience getting its money worth? A tactical boxing match is highly boring for non-expert viewers.

UFC and IFC and other mixed martial arts have filled this gap and they are running away with the audience, and many times the athletes.

Also, the idea of overly priced tickets and PPV events doesn’t work in a recession. Last night’s match card didn’t draw much of a live audience. I say if boxing returned to smaller gyms and more intimate coverage of lesser known, but more charming athletes they’d have a shot to be relevant.

Celebrity, Method Acting and the Paparazzi

One day soon this celebrity obsession thing is going to fall to pieces in the media. I know, I know, I certainly buy enough US Weekly’s and have run many entertainment portals and sites – who am I to say something like this? For a long time I’ve thought this whole “let’s watch everything celebrities do” would get terribly boring. Celebrities generally lead unremarkable lives, certainly not lives anyone would actually want.

Ok, so occasionally there’s an interesting story or some really bizarre behavior. I’m pretty certain the behavior of celebrities is conditioned by us and the media and is not a distinct feature of the celebrity. So, if it’s the bizarro behavior we like, you really can just annoy anyone in your neighborhood enough and they too will punch you in the face. You can now put it on YouTube and get famous.

Point is… methinks TMZ and US Weekly probably won’t have a market on this forever. At least that’s my hope. Move on.

Stock Market Index Tells You Nothing

The current behavior of the stock market indices provides no insight into what’s happening in the world. News outlets and investors wish it did. In fact, I challenge you to figure out what most economists and “leading thinkers” actually think by reading news articles and economic reports that talk about the DJI or SP500.

Probability of Life in The Universe

I just read an article in the May issue of Discovery Magazine about how the universe has a higher probability of life formation than we thought. Why can’t we let go of this desire to prove our existence is inevitable (either as something so rare it must be divine, or something so probable of course we’re here)? Folks, let it go. There’s simply know way to know how likely life was or is in the universe. Even if we find life elsewhere… 2 out of infinity is still undefined.

Bigger question: why do we care whether it’s likely or not?

Alright, enough, time for some Rockband or something.

Aliens from another planet – if you are reading this and can understand – please do tell us what you figure out, because we certainly can’t make sense out of all this.

Confusion on Easter Sunday

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Apr 12