I hate to make my first post in awhile be totally random and ridiculous, but I can't help myself. Apparently an English professor got tossed from Starbucks for refusing to order a bagel without cream cheese. That's right, when she refused to say "without butter or cheese" she was "forcibly ejected."
<rant>
This just happens to be a pet peeve of mine as well. Without even going in to how ridiculous the whole Starbucks lexicon is, when ordering coffee or a bagel at any establishment the default should be additive free. That means when you order a coffee it should come without milk or sugar unless you specify and when you order a bagel it should come without cream cheese and untoasted. It really does drive me insane when I take a first sip of coffee and it's all sweet when I asked for just coffee. I've also gotten in to an argument at Starbucks with a "friendly" barrista who insisted that I had to order my coffee not sweet if I wanted it that way. When I told him that was not the case at any other Starbucks I had ever been to, he insisted I was wrong.
</rant>
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Tags: coffee, nyc, rant, starbucks
The messed-up world of hiring advertising agencies.
I just got done reading The Big Short, which is the third book in my personal series of trying to wrap my head around how we managed to so fundamentally screw ourselves over (Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail). Out of these three books I've taken away two important lessons: First, when evaluating risk, make sure you understand the worst-case-scenario and take it into account and second, incentives explain almost everything.
Of course neither of those ideas are terribly new, and some folks would argue agains the second with behavioral economics (though I don't actually think they'd argue that incentives explain almost everything, but rather that often we just don't understand how people are going to react to those incentives).
But I don't really want to talk about finance, rather I was left thinking about the incentive structure in my own industry: Marketing. Like any industry you have two sides: Buyers (brands that are looking to advertise) and sellers (agencies that are looking to provide their services to brands for a fee). The buyer, theoretically, is looking for something simple: To sell more of whatever it is they sell. This, as with most explanations, is over-simplified, as there could be any number of potential motives for choosing to advertise, but at the end of the day almost all of them eventually get back to selling more stuff.
The sellers price, in a perfect market, would reflect the potential quality of the product (piece of communication) they can deliver against the buyers objective. This leads to two major issues. First, there is no real way for agencies (or the marketers that pay them) to understand the effectiveness of their own campaigns, which leads directly to the second problem, that opacity in effectiveness creates a pretty serious market inefficiency: One side having a whole lot more information than the other (which leads to exploitation).
Eventually that lop-sided information flow leads to an over-emphasis on brand rather than actual ability to deliver results, which gets me to the whole point of this little diatribe: Agencies are more incentivized to build their own brands rather than that of their customers. Sure there are safeguards against this, mainly long-term agreements that agencies covet. But the problem is that even those "long-term" relationships tend to last at most two-or-three years. While there are certainly a few long-term relationships around the business, the vast majority of work being done these days is done with the express understanding the whoever's doing it is unlikely to be doing it three years from now.
What's funny is that this is the exact inefficiency that advertisers so covet, making it all the more surprising they wouldn't recognize the same issue when it's happening to them. By that I mean, in a category (say toothpaste) where the vast majority of the public has no understanding of how effective one product is compared to another they come to rely on brands (this is pretty much the premise of marketing). Ultimately people end up making their decisions based on a bunch of factors that speak to just about everything but whether it will do the job it says it will do.
So I guess what I'm wondering is whether the industry recognizes this? I know everyone in the agency world goes through phases where they wonder whether any of the work they do really has any purpose, but how come there aren't more folks on the buyer-side (clients) who are demanding that the incentive structure change to better reflect (and measure) effectiveness. I have to assume it has to do with a general industry belief that we'll never get there, but there are lots of places on the way to there that are further along then nowhere.
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Tags: advertising, agencies, economics, incentives, marketing
About a month ago an article came out about online stalking and I was the subject (the stalkee, if you will). Essentially the author collected everything she could find out about me on the public web and presented me with my dossier over a cup of coffee in Soho.
The publication, Assembly Journal, asked me if I'd like to respond and I took them up on it. The reply, which they gave the title STALKED? NOT REALLY: NOAH BRIER RESPONDS basically presents my position, which shouldn't come as a great shock, that the value of making this information public outweighs the dangers and that most, if not all, of the information she uncovered would have been available before the web (although much more difficult to collect).
For what it's worth, I'm especially fond of my conclusion, which I really owe thanks to my brother-in-law (who also happens to be a lawyer) for helping me articulate: "At the end of the day a breach of privacy requires some reasonable expectation that something would be kept private. Not only did I not have that expectation, but for much of the information I put on the web I hope for exactly the opposite."
Anyway, hope you enjoy. (Oh, and sorry for the lack of posts around here. Am working on a new project that I hope to launch in the next few weeks. It's taken up most of my blogging time.)
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Tags: law, me, privacy
The Economist has a story about a group of academics that were able to create some software to extract keystrokes by just listening to people typing [the article is unfortunately now behind the Economis paywall, but Google's still got a cached version which probably won't last long itself]. The method is actually pretty straightforward:
The new approach employs methods developed for speech-recognition software to group together all the similar-sounding keystrokes in a recording, generating an alphabet of clicks. The software tentatively assigns each click a letter based on its frequency, then tests the message created by this assignment using statistical models of the English language. For example, certain letters or words are more likely to occur together--if an unknown keystroke follows a "t", it is much more likely to be an "h" than an "x". Similarly, the words "for example" make likelier bedfellows than "fur example". In a final refinement, the researchers employed a method many students would do well to deploy on term papers: automated spellchecking.
The solution to potential security breaches: Turn up the music.
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Tags: security, typing
Six years ago today I started this blog.
Over that time I've gone through four designs, written 1,429 entries (including this one) and gotten 5,504 comments (some of which are certainly spam). I've made countless friends, launched a global coffee meetup and a little brand research tool that went on to collect millions of perceptions.
It's helped me get jobs and is even responsible for me meeting my wife. I still am amazed every time someone tells me they enjoy my writing or takes the time to leave a comment. All the talk about blogs being dead is just dumb. While the blog as we knew it may not ever reach the mass that once seemed promising thanks to countless offshoot platforms, it's still alive and well here and elsewhere.
Mostly I just want to offer a heartfelt thank you for finding this, sticking around, reading, commenting, emailing, meeting up for coffees and beer and just generally helping me think about the world. As crazy as it may sound, I really can't imagine what my life would like without this site.
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Tags: me, status
Kevin Kelly has an interesting piece on what screens do for reading in Smithsonian. I especially liked his thought here:
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen "friends" for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner's manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can't do what we need it to do.
To me, the most powerful thing about blogging is having this constant outlet that leads to critical reading of almost everything. What's interesting is that while Kelly is right that new ideas do promote a reflex (just like his article has done for me right this second), the act of creating the content on top of it is actually where the contemplating happens for me. In trying to turn something I found interesting into a post I'm forced to contemplate what and why it matters.
[PS - Sorry for the bad title ... I couldn't help myself.]
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Tags: reading, technology
With all the World Cup posts and today's entry about Lebron this is starting to feel a little like a sports blog. Sorry about that, but here's one more. This one is a followup to my post from a few weeks ago on the Uruguay handball against Ghana. The comments on the post were super interesting, as folks debated both sides of the ethics goal line handball.
This post, which labels the move as "rational rule breaking" sums up my opinion quite nicely:
My own view is that this is not "cheating." It seems to me "cheating," in its colloquial understanding, involves not just breaking the rules but attempting to prevent others from discovering you've done so. What happened in that game was what I would call "rational rule breaking." There was no intent to deceive; the Uruguayan player knew the only chance he had to save the game was to break the rules, and accept the penalty, and hope the Ghanans missed the penalty kick. True cheaters don't wish to break the rules and accept the penalty, they just wish to break the rules and avoid the penalty.
If I want to cheat at cards, say by dealing off the bottom of the deck, I'm going to do it in such a way that attempts to mask what I'm up to. I'm not going to make it obvious what I'm doing becasue I do not wish to accept the penalty. Rational rule breaking, by contrast, is done with a clear understanding of the costs and benefits and not just a willingness to be caught, but an actual positive desire to get caught because the penalty is worth preventing the outcome that will come from following the rules.
[Via orgtheory.net]
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Tags: economics, soccer, worldcup
Interesting analysis of Lebron's decision by a game theorist:
By allowing Bosh and Wade to make their decisions first, did LeBron possibly get himself into a situation where he ended up with a sub-optimal outcome? If so, it would certainly put that ESPN special in a whole new light - not just obnoxious, but possibly even counter-productive. By committing himself to a specific timetable - and remember, the demands of the ESPN show called for absolute secrecy regarding his decision - he gave Wade and Bosh a chance to both (1) move first and (2) have a little time to think through the strategic value of moving first. So in the end, the need for the King to play to the public may have led to the King himself getting played - surely not the first time in history this has happened!
He definitely misplayed that one ...
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Tags: basketball, gametheory, lebronjames
I'm up in Boston for a few days for work and found myself making a pitcher of cold-brewed iced coffee with none other than Mr. Doug Pfeffer (if you haven't explored his crazy awesome projects it's worth it). Anyway, after getting it all done I figured I'd share the recipe for this summer delicacy:
- Mix a ratio of 1.5 cups water to 1/3 cup ground coffee (medium grind is best, which is also the same stuff you put in a coffee machine)
- Let it sit in the fridge for around 12 hours (more should be fine, less is probably not so good)
- Strain through a coffee filter or something else super fine
- Drink (over ice if you so desire)
Enjoy.
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Tags: coffee, recipes
The plot: One man's quest to raise a team from the dregs of Italian football and return them to the glory they once had ninety-plus years ago.
The catch: The narrative is entirely born out of a game called Football Manager where instead of actually control the players on the field, you make all the administrative decisions and see how your team performs.
Seriously, though, there's like a hundred entries in this series and I'm completely engrossed (I'm about 3/4 of the way done). Every time I pick up my iPad to read it I realize how totally insane it is (I'm reading an account of a video game which is in itself an account of a real soccer team with fake players in an imaginary future). But really, it's amazing and sometimes funny and sometimes gripping and at the very least it's worth reading because it's definitely different.
Here's a small, almost random sample, from an entry titled "Wolves to the Slaughter:
When you're right on course for a safe mid-table finish, it sometimes feels like there's not a lot of news to report. A win isn't a huge story, but then, a loss isn't a huge story either, and time can slip by pretty fast as you make minor adjustments and chart the weekly ticks in your balance sheet. One game blends into the next, and before you know it, the season turns into a reverie. You're living life like a Middlesbrough fan. If you want to be sharp, you have to fight the glide.
Enjoy.
[Via Metafilter]
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Tags: creativity, footballmanager, soccer, writing
For what it's worth I fall on the side of Luis Suarez's handball that thinks it's one of the more brilliant plays I've ever seen in sports. In case you missed it, it came in the last minute of extra time between Uruguay and Ghana. After two rebounds Ghana had a clear shot at goal and Suarez stuck his hand up and pulled it down before it could cross the line. He was immediately given a red card, ejecting him from the game, and Ghana was given a penalty kick, which they went on to miss. Extra time ended a minute later and Uruguay won on penalty kicks 4-2. Here's The Wall Street Journal on the play:
How likely was it to pay off? Two of Ghana’s five goals at the World Cup had come from the foot of Asamoah Gyan on penalty kicks, and he hadn’t missed yet. But two kicks hardly are a big sample size. Before he stepped into the box, players had made nine of 12 penalty kicks at this World Cup. (That’s not counting the penalty shootout between Paraguay and Japan, because teams can assign their best penalty taker to take penalties during games.) That’s still not much to go on. A study of 1,417 penalty kicks taken in top European leagues found that 80.1% were successful — though the rate went down to 73.3% in the final 10 minutes of games, perhaps because fatigue affects penalty takers more than goalkeepers. Another study of 459 penalty shots taken in European leagues found a success rate of 74.9%. (Thanks to Advanced NFL Stats for the links.)
Lots of folks are calling what he did cheating, but I'm not sure I see that. Yes, it is against the rules, but so is pulling a player down who is making a clear and open run at goal and that happens. To compare it a handball that goes uncalled and leads to a goal (as AP writer John Leicester did) just seems absurd. The only argument I'll buy on this one is that FIFA needs to change the rule to make goals like this stand (making it a call like goaltending). Otherwise to me it seemed like a brilliant split second decision between going home and giving your team another, albeit incredibly slim, chance to win the game.
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Tags: rules, soccer, worldcup
Today's word of the day comes from Adam Greenfield in an excellent post on Apple's interface design choices. Specifically, Greenfield decries Apple for their cheesy faux-analog Calendar, Notes and the cringe-worthy page turn within iBooks. As you might now imagine, a skeuomorph is "a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." Seems like a word that might come in handy.
Greenfield's solution:
What Apple has to do now is find the visual language that explains the difference between a networked text and a book, a networked calendar entry and a page leaf, or a networked locational fix and a compass heading, and does so for a mass audience of tens or hundreds of millions of non-science-fiction-reading, non-interface-geek human users. The current direction is inexplicable, even cowardly, and the task sketched here is by no means easy. But if anybody can do this, it's the organization that made generations of otherwise arcane propositions comprehensible to ordinary people, that got out far enough ahead of the technology that their offerings Just Worked.
[Via Daring Fireball]
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Tags: apple, design, iphone
Looking for new ways to tell stories.
Over at his Reuters blog Felix Salmon points to today's New York Times story on a waiver AIG signed giving up its right to sue the banks it paid off. While the story is interesting in and of itself, for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on the source materials (the actual waiver), which the Times posted in a special browsing interface.
Funny enough just two weeks earlier Salmon had written a piece calling the paper out for not posting this sort of stuff, so it's a nice about face. But it also is a really interesting way to tell a story differently. As I see it most of what journalists are doing these days is not a lot different that what they were doing when we weren't all staring at screens for eight hours a day. Of course there are exceptions, whether it's liveblogging Wimbledon or, well, I can't really think of another example right this minute but I'm sure there are more. Journalism, for better or worse, is still mostly the same journalism it always was and we still engage with publications in the same sort of ways (albeit with more lists and slideshows now that they're on the web).
Source materials seems like an incredibly interesting and untapped area of innovation for news organizations. While I understand that posting this sort of stuff is often out of the question, it can't always be and I have to believe there's much fun to be had in telling stories through the documents collected instead of just the paragraphs that boil them all down. I guess some might see this as diminishing the role of the journalist, who has traditionally been tasked with finding the story, I'm not sure I agree. I dont think that there's any less of a need to find the story in a sea of documents, I just think this is a different (and hopefully more compelling) way to tell it.
In a lot of ways it feels like I'm talking about media invention, which Robin Sloan was kind enough to define last week:
Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn't satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS--a media inventor doesn't like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.
I think maybe we've all become a little too comfortable with our CMSes (whether they be some big enterprise job or Wordpress or even Tumblr and Twitter). While these do an amazing job getting content out into the world, they also dictate how we present that content. Most CMSes want words, in paragraphs, in stories. Even Tumblr, for it's different approach, now just spawns content that can be scooped up and turned into a 150-page book with pictures.
So as not to end on a down note, though, the whole point of writing this is that I'm pretty excited with the stuff the New York Times is trying in this realm. They're playing with ways to tell stories and lots of others are as well (though most of them are outside the big news organizations). Even MSNBC's new page design seems like a step in a new direction. So please don't take this as some sort of whine about the state of things, but rather as excitement for what's coming.
Update (6/30/10): I should have mentioned the Guardian is doing some really cool stuff as well.
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Tags: creativity, design, journalism, news
Just in case you were starting to believe all those articles about how performance in the world cup is representative of some deeper national psyche, here's what Gideon Rachman at the FT has to say:
In fact, the nice thing about international football is that it actually does not track political or economic trends. Instead it provides a sort of parallel universe with its own world order. Brazil is the "sole superpower". The Security Council of countries that have won the World Cup more than once is completed by Argentina, Germany, Italy and Uruguay. The US is a middle-ranking power, much admired for its sense of fair play. Japan is not in decline, but flourishing. China and India - the rising powers in the real world - are nowhere to be seen, since they have not qualified for this World Cup. On Planet Football, the rising powers are largely from Africa, such as the "Black Stars" of Ghana who saw off the Americans on Saturday.
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Tags: politics, soccer, worldcup
Stephen Baker, former BusinessWeek editor and author of the book The Numerati
, has an interesting post about what LinkedIn has in store:
The company has some 70 million members. That's data on 70 million careers. Conceivably, the company could provide a service showing each one of us the paths that others took when they were in the same position we're in now. It could diagram where those choices led. ... "Maybe he ends up deciding to be a high school math teacher,..." Nishar [Vice President of Products and Services at LinkedIn] says. In that case, he could find current math teachers who have followed that path and debrief them.
The information in and of itself is not that valuable probably, but when combined with the ability to connect with folks that have followed a path that seems interesting sounds exciting. Of course, you'd need those people to respond to your request for advice, though, in my experience, that's actually easier than most folks think it is.
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Tags: jobs, linkedin
There is something fun about people taking the opportunity of a big sports tournament to ask serious questions about the human psyche. Such is that case in this pair of articles on cheating in soccer from Foreign Policy and Project Syndicate. Beautifully, they argue opposite sides with Foreign Policy suggesting cheating is part of the game ("Strange as it might seem, rule bending is an integral part of international soccer. Everyone cheats, and there's a lot to be learned and enjoyed from how each team does it.") and Project Syndicate suggesting we should not accept ethical lapses on the field any more than we do anywhere else ("Players should not be exempt from ethical criticism for what they do on the field, any more than they are exempt from ethical criticism for cheating off the field, for example by taking performance-enhancing drugs.").
Not sure where I fall on this one. Probably somewhere in the middle. It does seem that some bit of acting is a part of the game forever, if for no other reason that you can't reliably judge how hard someone was bumped. However, in instances where there is nothing subjective (such as whether a ball went over a line) it's hard to understand why players like German keeper Manuel Neuer shouldn't be disciplined for admitting that he knew the ball was in the goal and just pretended it wasn't (at the very least tell the world you didn't know it crossed the line).
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Tags: ethics, soccer, worldcup
Is it time we started making things harder on purpose?
I broke my iPhone before I left for my honeymoon and a friend was kind enough to lend me an old unlocked Nokia. The phone worked out fine and not having access to all the iPhone holds was probably a bit of a blessing (though I'm pretty seriously missing it now that I'm back home and can't get my hands on a 4G).
Anyway, as part of having a phone with a keypad (not even keyboard) I went back to T9 (you remember it, predictive type for SMS messages).1 The struggle to send a simple message made me think about how we are likely going to need to start add elements to our interfaces that actually make tasks harder, not easier. Imagine how many fewer emails you'd write on your iPhone if you were forced to use T9 for instance.
While it's not the perfect parallel, something like WriteRoom lets you block out everything else when you're trying to write (Pages now has a full screen option as well, actually) and I remember hearing about an application from a few years ago that turned off your WiFi until you restarted the computer so you could get something done. It's funny to think that we've reached a point where things are so easy that we need to start making them hard again.
[PS: I'm married, honeymooned, done with Cannes and back in NYC.]
1 As a side note, the guy who invented T9 has a new text input method for touchscreens called Swype. ↩
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Tags: design, interface
Right. So I'm now married and honeymooned and almost back to reality. Before that, though, are a few days in Cannes for the big advertising festival. (If you're around drop me a line.)
That's pretty much it for now I think. Expect blogging to resume sporadically at first and then back to normal next week. Thanks everyone.
Oh, and sorry about the no guest blogging, apparently there was some technical difficulty.
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Tags: cannes, me, status
I mentioned last week I was getting married and now that that part is complete it's time for the honeymoon. I leave tomorrow and will be away for a couple weeks doing the best I can to not go on the computer.
Luckily for you I've had three very smart guys agree to take over the site while I'm gone: Rick Webb, Joe Liebman and Colin Nagy.
I trust they'll keep things interesting around here until I'm back. See you in July.
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Tags: marriage, me, status
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.
In the meantime, there are lots of great sites out there to give you your fill of random links and interestingness, including these which I've been especially enjoying lately: The Awl, clusterflock, Scott Rafer's blog, Barking up the wrong tree and Sweet Station.
Enjoy and see you in a few weeks.
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Tags: marriage, me, status
The Awl has an excellent interview with Pac-Man on his 30th birthday. Here's a short excerpt:
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.
Nice Friday afternoon reading.
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Tags: funny, interview, pacman
In case you needed another reminder that congress doesn't represent you, here's the Washington Post on political ATM usage:
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.
[Via clusterflock]
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Tags: atm, congress, politics
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.
I'm ready for the World Cup to get started.
[Via Eric Sumberg]
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Tags: soccer, sports, worldcup
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.
[Via The Awl]
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Tags: aol, facebook, privacy
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.
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Tags: business, perspective, youtube
Hi, I'm 