Social Mode

Somewhere along the way I lost capital letters and periods in my emails, IMs and other documents.

People started to notice.

Where did they go?

Blackberry, Office 2007, and other software took them from me! That’s right! Authoring software for mobile emails and office documents now does so much for me that it even caused me to stop hitting shift + letter when I start a sentence. Capitalization mistakes appear so frequently in my emails now because my primary email client is Thunderbird and it does not autocorrect.

At first, I thought it was a stylistic choice. Perhaps I picked up on Generation MySpace style or maybe the various companies I consult for conditioned me. I am the next ee cummings.

Nope.

It took me some time to see it and isolate when and where I lost this behavior, but after going back through documents and emails, I lost it as soon as I got my blackberry 7130 and Office 2007 Beta 2 installation.

I’m not making this up. See Exhibit A, sample pre and post -blackberry and office 2007 emails. See Exhibit B for a primitive mistake frequency analysis.

Months and months and thousands of documents later my typing behavior is altered to the point where my capitalization and punctuation changed by style of communication. The chain of consequences is even more dramatic as people read my notes and docs differently, in a different mindset, with more or less urgency and so on.

Does it matter?

Yes. It does to me as I want to have more control over whether I’m saying what I mean to say. Punctuation, grammar, capitalization and other style guides make it slightly more possible for us to understand each other. As soon as those norms go out the door it’s communication anarchy with emails, phone calls and conversations filled with “huh? What does that mean?”

What am I going to do about it?
Pay attention.
Turn of the auto correct features.
Use my paper notebook more.
Slow down.

~R

EXHIBIT A: Typical Emails Pre and Post Losing Style

Email from 1/21/2004 6:53 AM
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Try resetting it to the details below and then test it by logging in as him. (be sure to log out though!)

I’ll call ya from the factory.

R
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Email from 2/18/2008 8:18PM
———————————
well, well, well.

time to catch the prowler in a net… i’ll ping him and see what he’s into.

R
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Exhibit B:
From 1/21/2004 – 2/18/2006: 1734 emails composed in sample set. 1.2 capitalization or punctuation errors per email.
From 2/19/2006 – 2/27/2008: 1567 emails composed in sample set. 2.9 capitalization or punctuation errors per email.

CaPiTal lEtTers and !punctuation,;.?! Where have you gone?

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Feb 27
John Bryant observes:

A combination of factors affecting this year’s Academy Awards viewership show on Sunday:
- Gruesome /dark nature of many of the top films up for awards
- Number of non-traditional film subjects
- Writer’s strike got us away from TV too long and we didn’t come back that Sunday
- Host was a wing-affiliated effete snob cable guy that was not popular with networks
- Poor results at theaters for all but twenty movies during the past year
- Campaign’s were more interesting than what anyone was allowed to say on air Sunday
- Lack of interest in the pretty people now that we are moving due to bankruptcy
- Read that there would be a 15 sec delay so to screen inappropriate comments
- Decided four hours was better spent watching contestant humiliation game shows
- Ran out of interest during Regis’ red carpet prattle with people that are boring in real life
- Was hooked on one of 38 reality shows catapulted to prime time for last 4 months
- 14% decrease in views = 14% increase in ticket cost of movies receiving homage
Academy Award Viewership Issues

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Feb 26
John Bryant writes:

At the 80^th Academy Awards Sunday Feb. 24^th, 2008, an actress stood up and said that her award is an “accident” because she didn’t know how she got up there to receive her Oscar. No one can attend to the how this particular Oscar award came to be. Besides “accident” being monocausalitis (see definition below) itself, she was probably responding to reality for her. There are so many variables and interactions involved in winning an Oscar it is very hard for a person to ‘understand’ with any empirical certainty how it did happen! That loosely translated to her as an “accident”. Giving it a ‘cause’ like fate, luck, Buddha or alignment of the stars is preposterous.

Monocausalitis

Yes, it is a made up word but it represents a very serious brain freeze. Humans drift to monocausalitis whenever possible. Quick links between one event and another are reinforced by others due to…

Û competition

Û access

Û information

Ü absolutism

Û # of approaches

Ü data validation

Simply put, “one problem; one solution” can also be seen as one event, one reason; one effect, one cause. Very MBA-driven and very superficial science.

Ernst Poppel coined the term in an Edge.com paper as far as I know. Ernst is the neuroscientist and Director of the Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Munich and says that humans are victims of “evolutionary heritage being satisfied only if one and only one cause for a solution to a problem is identified.” I think that conclusion is bunk but it is an interesting launching point.

Single causes are simple, complete and represent closure in a life that seems increasingly complex and that escapes both understanding and conclusions.

I am not sure that evolution is involved in monocausalitis as Poppel has suggested other than that detection of things in the environment is part of selection by consequences. The consequences for finding a single or major ‘cause’ are almost universally reinforced. Thus, the strategy that goes in that direction is repeated over and over; taught, mimicked, and copied. You see it all the time:
- Book of the month revealing…
- Cop shows… Game shows… Law and order brands…
- Guru solution for…
- Stock on the move due to…
- Magic cures…
- What the government (doctor, lawyer, baker, hair dresser, etc.) doesn’t want you to know…
- Reasons for this, that, or the other thing…
The behavior of organisms is frickin’ complex. Simplistic connections between behavior, world hunger, war, peace space exploration or a Super Bowl win are junk despite being the daily fare from Foxy talking heads cleverly passing themselves off as “newstainment.” Move on. Even the relationship between a PowerBar and getting homework done is not 1:1. Fill your head with something you can count on: multi-causal relationships.

The scientific basis of the behavior or organism’s hasn’t advanced much for a zillion or reasons. the ease with which we can claim a person is ‘evil’, talented, dumb, biased, towel head, female, liberal, fundamentalist, ADD or this and that dilutes any substantive understanding of behavior by helping to keep behavior ethereal rather than tackling its existing complexities.

Don’t take my word for it! Test monocausalitis for yourself. If you can find a ‘single cause’ for anything send it to this sight. We’ll post it and any information you can provide for others to rejoice in. Believe me, it will be a big deal and the start of some awesome conversations.

If you see the telltale signs of monocausalitis anywhere, be suspicious, be very suspicious. If you can, dig deeper. In science, trust is not a virtue.

Understand that the idea of ‘cause’ itself is not exactly cogent with what we know about how things work in the universe. For 5 decades ‘cause’ has been a very low credibility concept of a mechanistic or Newtonian ilk. Poppel’s appeal to end it in everyday usage is refreshing but improbable. As a way of speaking, and thus thinking, it is too well established to have it go away swiftly.
The Accidental Oscar?

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Feb 26
In October of 2006, Netflix released a $1,000,000 contest to improve their rating prediction/movie recommendation algorithms. No one has won the prize yet (surprisingly).

I read the latest wired mag (i know, i know) which featured a contestant. I’m easily inspired to work on difficult challenges. I figure this will be good learning AND good research into software collaboration (one of my favorite topics). Yes, I’ve entered the fray as Team SocialMode. Heck, I’ve been looking for a meaty project to put a bunch of my thoughts together. This prize is perfect for that and it takes nothing more than access to cheap CPU cycles and a brain (both of those I have, which I have more of I don’t know.)

My approach will not be highly abstract. Having built several Pay Per Click engines/behavioral targeting systems, simple content recommendation engines, search algos and a few collaborative filtering systems, my experience leads me to believe an improved algorithm will come from practical analysis of rating behavior, user interface behavior, exposure to movies to be rated (cognitive dissonance type concepts), clustering of practical movie meta data (e.g. I like anything with George Clooney, 10 explosions or more, or dinosaurs) and normalizing simple “flags” (all people dislike the Star Wars with Jar Jar, just need to adjust for an individuals rating scale).

Some assumptions of mine:
- People rate things they haven’t seen
- People rate in batches
- People don’t rate as they watch
- Viewing experience affects rating
- Technical quality affects rating
- There are Gender and Age differences
- Every individual has a different 1-5 scale
- It is cognitivily easier to rate something as 1 or 5 (love or hate) than 2-4
  - We deal with bits better than inbetween values
  - User interface widgets often times make it harder to rate inbetween value
I’ll have more to say on this.

My solution will be using Python and the Orange library and will utilize data from IMDB, BoxOfficeMojo and RottenTomatoes.

Some interesting links:
Let’s roll! All progress will be posted.

~R
Netflix Prize – I’m Going For It

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Feb 24
Consider the Democratic Primaries. Do we see any predictive power in internet traffic?

Quantcast Demographic Info:
Hillary
Barack

Compete.com: Hillary vs. Barack

Alexa:

Check here.

Quantcast:

Conclusion:

It’s tricky! however, I think we need to normalize the traffic by demographic as raw volume is not a good predictor at all (very low correlation between results+exit polls and internet traffic). See here for detailed information on results and polls.

No conclusion yet…

Next Steps:

I will be mashing all this data together to show trends overtime. AND, i will be overlaying it on tools like PolicyMap to show how Internet (general and social networks) + real world policies + polling locations + business all works together.

Amazing that we have all these tools and an incredibly small set of people uses them. Oh, that’s not amazing nor surprising – perhaps frustrating.

Does Internet Traffic Offer Any Political Guidance?

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Feb 23
Yeah, it’s all the rage in agency/vc/online publisher land but Online Video and Online Video ads is not going to get very many people rich really quickly, not like search ads and domain squatting.

Yes, youtube and other video outlets are growing like weeds still but their revenue is not even close to their costs. Their infrastructure providers aren’t even making a profit. Users are consuming content but not ads and advertisers aren’t buying.

Really.

There are some very specific reasons why:
- The cost of serving videos is anywhere from $1-5 cost per thousand. That’s 10-50x higher than text and text ads (the major of online business)
- The consumption of video is very low relative to other content like emails, ims, stories, blogs, comments, news and photos
- Viral activity is limited – You can’t email full videos to each other and certainly not wrapped in ads like emails and stand alone webpages
- The cost in time, money and creativity to make watchable video and video ads is 10-100x greater than text copy and text ad copy
- The targeting mechanisms suck to the point that they are worse than no targeting at all
- over 95% of video isn’t monetizable easily (pump and dump like text ads). Most consumption is in bad home movies, porn, music videos and highlights from TV.
- The video experience is catastrophically altered by video ad pre rolls and other intrusive ads. We all can easily ignore banners that surround text, we can’t ignore pre rolls that keep us from the content. We could all get over that as consumers if the content were good quality/engaging and exclusive a site, but its not and won’t ever be
- Media Entropy – there’s no possible way for us to aggregate video and a/v experiences like we did when only the boobtube pumped out content on 3 channels. Consumers are everywhere and no where – at least 10 major aggregator video sites, 10,000 legit video publishers, embeds on every blog, cell phones, slingboxes, set tops, video game console on demand, TV, and LCD screen everywhere we go
- Video Ad Rates have NO CORRELATION to transactional nor brand value, not even audience size gets you much. The rates are all over place and are overly high, only because the costs are high. Rates will drop faster than costs making online video damn near impossible to do at high margins. (I know this FIRST HAND and would love show data… but that data will become apparent as the market matures)
- Hollywood types have been asked to the party. Yup, the first Internet explosion was built by a totally new crop of thinkers. it was devoid of most of the hollywood gimmick and a lot of traditional agencies and publishers didn’t participate. Now the stakes are so high that everyone is involved and the level of raw creativity has gone down a lot – Or the raw creativity is being washed out by all the white noise from everyone who ever had a thought, good or bad. Barrier to entry is so low with all these great toolsets, cheap hosting and complete anarchy in copyright law.
Personally, I love this. the complete destruction of all rules. the annihilation of former schedules. It’s not going to get less complicated.

Certainly tons more to say on this and tons more to talk about when i say search ads are still where the money’s at……..

~R
The Video Advertising Myth

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Feb 23
In my last post, I pointed out the inevitability of entropy and energy consumption in media businesses.

Well, you can’t avoid, but you might want to know how I spot it when the entropy is costing money?

Change the measurement.

Measure Profit/Employee and Profit/User and Profit/Pageview. Those 2 metrics tell you everything you need to know. You’ll spot inefficiencies very quickly with that.

Really. try it.

~R

Change the measurement – Media’s Second Law of Thermodynamics

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Feb 19
“Why did you {them, this company, those guys, that company, this group} do this?”

Yup, that’s the first – maybe second – question any consultant or new hire in a media company asks. The hope is to find some easily understandable, presumably correctable, explanation for how the hell on earth a product, service, experience, division, or company came to its current state.

That question is never answered easily nor accurately, though almost everyone asked responds with a flurry of justifications and musings.

There is no accurate answer possible.

When a company or product is successful, we heap praise on the executives and their innovative approaches. We retroactively assign a grand plan. i.e. Google eyed Microsoft from the beginning. Steve Jobs planned the destruction of the music distribution model. American Idol creators just knew they had a pop culture masterpiece. “We stuck to our guns despite the disbelievers.”

When a company or product is awful, we blame those engaged as lacking vision or being too stupid to see the obvious. i.e. Ford didn’t see the hybrid coming. Yahoo! hired too many Hollywood types to see that search was the way to go. “The guy before you just didn’t get it.”

In either case, this is myth. It is impossible to explain the current state of a product, company or service with any accuracy. Not only is it impossible, it would be worthless if you could do it – it would take too much time and wouldn’t be all that accurate for whatever comes next.

So? what’s yer point?

Media and business can’t avoid the second law of thermodynamics – systems never decrease in disorder. (there are lots of variants on this). That’s right. A company is never going to get more orderly. A product is never going to get more orderly. It’s just not. It’s impossible. It is a universal law. Media properties, websites, networks, companies behind those entities are never going to get more orderly.

Thus, any explanation of why things are at the current state doesn’t help you avoid the looming disorder.

The only way to go from a poor product, company or experience is to move completely into a new one. Start over from a more orderly state. Don’t spend any energy in gluing the broken coffee cup back together, just go get a new one or form one from raw materials.

Yes, it is possible to pour a huge amount of energy into something that is in disorder to restore some order but the work (real energy) require to do so is not 100% efficient – that is, you’d be wasting a lot of energy in ever increasing amounts to battle disorder.

Now imagine your own company and situation? can you provide an example where a project, product, campaign, division actually got more orderly without diminishing returns? I can’t think of a single instance of this in my own experience.

I’m going to draw this out more specifically for different types of media. There’s no way to battle disorder. There is a way to benefit from disorder…

~R

Media’s Second Law of Thermodynamics

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Feb 16
Here’s a terse little paper and experiment showing some clean (easy to understand and rework) results.

DISCUSSION

Past research on the benefits of network structure on the flow of information has often focused on the positive properties of small-world networks [2, 3]. The results of our research cast this view in the wider perspective of fit between network structure and problem space, highlighting the importance of exploration vs. imitation. For the network structures we studied, the lattice promotes the most exploration, followed by the small-world, and the random networks, with the fully connected network producing the least exploration. The needle payout function requires the most exploration to find the global maximum, followed by the multimodal, and then the unimodal. Since there is a tradeoff between the exploration of a problem space and the exploitation of good solutions [4, 5] this tradeoff seems to be highly relevant to the ability of a group to succeed at our task.

–Winter A. Mason, Andy Jones, Robert L. Goldstone

That’s pretty academic talk and I’m going to add to it. Check this essay out. Combining the two essays and we have something interesting. The Lattice network set up is best at solving a problem requiring exploration AND we are unable to construct an algorithm that can optimize the traversing of the lattice. The best path emerges simply by trying to solve the problem AND it’s better than other networks like Small World.

Here’s some quick definitions: (from this nice little doc)

Lattice Network –

Rural areas resemble societies long ago and is characterized as “structured lattice.” That is, people in rural areas are more likely to be friends with each other, while having less bridging friendship ties with the outside world.

Small World –

Urban areas resemble random connection societies. That is, from telecommunication advances that are readily available in urban areas, more friendship bridging ties are available.

Okay, now a fun exercise is defining the structure of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Open Source Community and sussing out why each one may be so good at what it does. This is purely me just toying with an idea (what do you think?).

MySpace – Full. You can and do connect to anyone and everyone. It’s a race for connectivity and theirs no real “neighbor” paradigm. MySpace definitely has the imitation feel to it.

Facebook – Lattice, small world. Your neighbors typically are your college mates and work mates. Apps, links and “problems” propogate and are reworked quickly, far more quickly in my experience, than on MySpace.

LinkedIn – Lattice. hard to assess linkedin’s ability to solve problems or propogate thinking. It’s mostly a lead gen network.

Master Software Developer Competition – Lattice. but hard to say. There seemed to be a few key nodes and generally some “neighborhoods”. On slashdot it was full, but once the Google group took over the network structure changed a lot. Hmmm… need to think on that.

Open Source – Lattice, sometimes small world. Open source projects generally are not completely wide open (there’s a skill level required/credibility) and their aren’t random. Ideas, code propogate 1 or 2 degrees from the original node. Very rarely isn’t it full, like the internet. Everyone connected. Ideas and problems are very efficiently solved in open source but it’s damn near impossible to predict who, what, when.

The implication that network structure alone can have that big an impact is very interesting, and a powerful concept to understand if you are in the business of solving problems or socializing ideas/policies or marketing a product.

Methinks the network structure is a proxy for the schedules of reinforcement at play. Different structures reinforce behavior in different ways.

~Russ

Social Networks Problem Solving Paradigms and Best Network Layout

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Feb 5
The Amazon Kindle inspired great anticipation in me. It almost boiled over when I didn’t get one until late January 2008.

Unfortunately, the anticipation didn’t match the reality. The Kindle isn’t bad. In fact, it’s really awesome. Really awesome.

What I didn’t expect is how not ready I am to move from books to ebooks. My experience with books is so profound it’s going to take awhile for me to move on or add on to my reading behavior via the Kindle.

Why?
- Books don’t break down or need resetting. It’s not horrible on a Kindle to reset or anything, it’s just you NEVER have to do that with a book. Try sitting in an airport for 3 hours with no book on hand and your Kindle goes wonky. Argh!
- Finding your last place is so easy in a book. Heck, finding random places in a book is so easy. On the Kindle you have all sorts of ways to bookmark, store and arrange things but none of them come close to just folding the corner of a page, jotting a side note, leaving the book open
- Shopping for books is NO FUN and NOT EXCITING AT ALL in the Kindle Store. For an avid book reader, there’s no greater experience than being among stacks of books – the spines calling out to you, the cover summaries juicing you, the smell intoxicating your mind.
  - A lot of this is recall from childhood. And that’s a big factor with Kindle – I have no experiential anchors to it. Perhaps the next generation, the generation that grows up with a Kindle, will have experiences of the Kindle that will excite them like bookstores do for me now.
  - The electronic store is bore to navigate. There’s no real discovery process. It’s so single modal it’s painful. How can a small print book by a no name author really catch your eye in the kindle store? there are no color covers, no handwritten reviews from the local bookstore owner, the preview chapters are not up to you (you can’t just flip to a page and read)
  - Prices, Prices, Prices. They are just in your face. Bookstores have prices as the third or fourth piece of data. Kindle store book pages have 2 or 3 prices on them reminding you that you really don’t want this book as much as you think
- Ownership – the Kindle experience is very “rental”. You get no sense of owning the materials. In fact, if I wanted to bequeth a book to someone or let them borrow it for a day, how can I do that? Heck, you can barely hand someone the Kindle to say “you have to read this!” and let them take a peak. They have to know how to use the thing.
- Page turning as a sign of progress. I measure my reading progress by page turns. Kindle has “page buttons” and measures things by “locations”. It’s not anything like pages and page turning so my sense of progress is way out of whack.
- Technical books stink on the Kindle. Images are not good and if you need math or code samples they do not format well on this thing. Fiction, Paperbacks and essays work well.
- Note taking is hard. Typing random thoughts is tedious. You can’t doodle, circle, cross out, draw arrows or personalize anything in the next. You can “clip/highlight” and add SMS like notes. They are search-able, and that’s cool, but i can’t type fast enough to make enough use of them
- Hand position – i don’t hold a book anything like you need to hold a kindle. I have tons of nervous habits when i read and holding a Kindle for me is like telling a 2 year old to sit still. It’s hard to read it for long stretches because of this.
- Escapism, negative. Bezos pitched it like it disappeared like a book. It just doesn’t. It has a freakin’ keyboard on it. The page turning is slow/delayed because of the repainting of the eink screen. It just reminds you that it’s digital and a device. You can’t just escape into the story because the device is such a new experience and new way of holding this type of information you can’t help but notice everything
- Worrying about power source and wireless connectivity is weird. I know, it’s just my own hang up but I am concerned about running of juice. It’s just like how cell phone conversations are always more terse than land line conversations. We just know that our phones only last so long so we hurry to say things. Now I hear to read or only scan.
You see how much behavior, feedback looping and schedules of reinforcement are tied up in my basic experience of reading? The Kindle is so disruptive to so many of those data points it makes it hard to transition to the Kindle reading experience. For anyone who knows me, that’s a rarity for me to say about a device.

Again, the Kindle is amazing.

Why?
- 100,000 books at your digital fingertips
- Tiny. This thing weighs nothing and eliminates backbreaking weight from backpacks
- Search functions – this thing searches over wikipedia, the books on your device and your notes (that’s a killer app in my opinion)
- No need to connect to computer – well publicized feature lives up to the hype. I hate syncing my ipod more than anything, which is why i still buy CDs. the ipod touch now has wifi store access, and I almost never buy from itunes on the desktop anymore. Kindle has that experience built right in from the beginning
- Blogs and Newspapers aggregation. Heck, I used to love newspapers. Then I hated how they piled up by the trash can so we stopped getting them. Now I can get them again without the trash! Again, another killer app for this thing. Timely, scanning friendly content does well on the Kindle
No doubt this thing is a winner. It’s not replacing my physical catalogue anytime soon. Not because it couldn’t. …….. I’m just not ready.
Amazon Kindle Review – A Behaviorist Perspective

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Feb 3

Û competition	Û access	Û information
Ü absolutism	Û # of approaches	Ü data validation