Social Mode

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
Emotion research is now routinely referenced as a part of an evolutionary substrate. However, explicit experimental evolutionary analyses of emotions remain rare.

The implications of natural selection for several classic questions about emotions and emotional disorders should be the focus of research programs that are stagnant with 19^th and early 20^th Century hypotheses that cannot be proven but are failed to be dismissed by those doing research in the area marring if not diluting the term ‘social scientist’.

Emotions are NOT special modes of operation or unique states shaped by natural selection. They ARE conditioned artifacts of centuries of classical conditioning between flight or fight related contingencies that then are conditioned using conditioned products of those states to set up additional pairings that come to elicit response once related to fear, threat, escape from danger, avoidance of peril, and other euphemisms of exhaust [with all the physiological and nervous system components apparent as if a real threat or escape from isolation were present] from contingencies involving wide swings in homeostasis. They are conditioned most assuredly and supported by the environments (including people) that have notions [history in context] of similar states.

Collectively they are, or they make up, a large scale of response parameters [behavior sets] that may have or potentially do increase fitness by learned adaptations to challenging situations that occurred over the course of the individual’s history and were taught to generations over the course of that tree’s evolution. Some societies are almost devoid of emotional content while others are mired in emotional waves as a ‘tradition’ or a cultural response to the vagaries of life’s changes.

In all cases emotions are valenced.

Valence, as used here means the property along a continuum (positive – negative) of an event, object, or state. Ambivalence here would refer to no particular valance based on the context or history of the organism. No, valences are not just for humans but are represented differentially by any organism that displays changes in affectations based on behavior.

Valence is not an absolute property of any identified emotion but is relative based on context and history. Selection shapes each case where contingencies that have influenced fitness in the past shape expression. In situations that decrease fitness, negative emotions are useful and positive emotions are harmful.

Selection has partially differentiated subtypes of emotions from generic precursor states to deal with specialized situations: our communication of internal states that are not available to view by the outside world. This communication of subjective states – emotions – has resulted in untidy associations that blur across dimensions rendering the quest for simple or objectivity futile. For some social scientists this state of affairs doubles their efforts. For others, the recognition of emotions as exhaust is good enough for both communication and but also the redirection of research time and effort on things, events and states that lead to a better understanding of what’s going on in the world. Non-scientists use the same approach to make their course corrections only those sets of changes lack a unique vocabulary to allow communication and efforts to be reinforced effectively by the environment.

Selection has shaped mechanisms that control the expression of emotions on the basis of an individual’s appraised value of a state based on the past and the current context. This is the conversion of data to meaning. This meaning of events, etc. is the synthesis for the individual to use in evaluation of subsequent conditions – some of which may be related to avoidance and some of which may be related to acquisition of reinforcers whether they are goals, etc. or states of existence.

The prevalence of emotional disorders can be attributed to several conflicting values [also conditioned in us all] and valences that go with them as factors that contribute to something being a ‘disorder’ [negative] or a ‘passion’ [positive].

Evolution, Emotions, and Emotional Disorders

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Apr 9
I’m about half way through reading The Blue Sweater, by Jacqueline Novogratz. Give me a another day or two and I should have it wrapped up.

This is a great book, but not in that “great read” sense. Sure, it’s a good read and an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon in the spring sun. But it is more than a read. A call to action? A warning to those that think making an impact is easy? A thesis on developing economies? A subtle case proving understanding behavior and cultural context is one of the more potent economic tools and a requirement for development success? It’s all of those things so far.

My first reaction was: how the heck does one end up where one does in life? Jacqueline’s stories leave you wondering what the odds really are for all of our lives to end up where they do. Yet at the same time I ask about the unlikely probability of Jacqueline’s life, the futures of the people she works with seem all too likely. Certainly makes a strong case for what a culture and environment of exposure to many possibilities can do. I suppose that’s one of the main points of this book.

For those looking for a Dummies Guide to Changing the World. This isn’t it. As much as it is a call to action (do something!) it is also a warning that results do not come easy. Though her story is tightly packed into 250 or so pages, you can tell that her work was not an overnight success. The Acumen Fund and other successes are the result of decades of hard work (most of it before we had PCs, cell phones and the Internet!) and carefully forged relationships. Heck, I’m not sure I could even learn 1 additional language in the same time she seemed to pick up 2 or 3 plus doing everything else. Creating a microlending institution for developing countries and communities is not the easiest way to get involved.

I was less surprised by the difficulties she had in adapting to behavior (economic, political, cultural) systems built on different consequences than those of the US. Many people hold that there is some Platonic value system that will work anywhere and everywhere once people understand it. There isn’t. Jacqueline learned this. The idea of consequences and associated returns to effort is universal to behavior modification but identifying what those consequences, returns and efforts are for specific cultures is an exceedingly difficult anthropological task.

I can safely say I know very little details about Rwanda and many other areas in Africa. Certainly I have an OK base of basic knowledge picked up from periodicals, documentaries, wikipedia and a handful of novels and non-fiction books. This book goes deep enough to showcase that real people are far more complicated than an AP report or wiki entry can capture. As descriptive as the book is in many aspects, I get the sense that only an extended trip to these locations could properly instill appreciation and understanding.

Last tidbit from me until I finish the book. The idea of running a fund to provide capital to businesses that can help eliminate poverty seems completely insane in a business sense. and yet, after you see how they pull this off you’ll wonder why more big banks, VCs and money types aren’t invested in this approach. I’d definitely like to get my hands on some data to compare ROI on this approach and this market versus Internet VCs, or banking for average small biz in America….

Argh! So much to read, learn and do. best to get on with it.

The Blue Sweater Book Review – 50% done

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Apr 5
The market will not support all these photosharing sites in the long run.

Here’s why:

Twitter will be purchased or exclusively locked up in a strategic relationship by one of the companies that already has a photosharing set up/photo monetization platform.

Under that scenerio the acquiring company is unlikely to promote such a disaggregated approach to the aggreagtion of media in microblogging. If there is money to be made with Twitter it involves pushing people into monetizable experiences, like monetizable media destinations and transactions/etailing. (The social networks have finally figured this out e.g. MySpace/Citysearch)

Sure, there will still be boutique image hosters and tiny URL providers, etc. etc. But ultimately the world just doesn’t need 20 different places to dump your photos. The ones that will still hang around will be the ones most tightly coupled with the apps that encourage the uploading.

Photosharing Bubble

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Apr 5
Please listen to this file. It’s called the Shepard Risset glissando. It’s very unnerving to me.

If I were to put sound to various cause and effect data trails from complex systems (like human behavior), I imagine it would sound a lot like that.
- What is the cause/are the causes and effects of human behavior?
- is stimulus a cause?
- is it an effect?
- can a behavior be a reinforcer at the same time as being reinforced?
- Are schedules of reinforcement causes AND effects? are they exhausted from the behavioral system as much as they are determinants?
Perhaps these questions are just Saturday afternoon philosophical/blog musings. However, I do think the strange loopiness of animal behavior (humans in particular) is what makes almost all models of behavior inconsistent and mostly wrong. Or maybe just my understanding and application of them is wrong.

I have another question. Human memory is not like computer memory. it’s definitively fuzzy… so…

is there a difference between remembering the past inaccurately or predicting the future inaccurately?

in both cases aren’t we just modeling context/situation/filling in details based on limited inputs?

and the biggest question is… DOES ANY OF THIS HELP UNDERSTANDING?

for fun, more about strange loops here and here.
Human Behavior is a Strange Loop

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Mar 28