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Can the human brain be rewired?

2009-08-19T10:39:00Z

Just read a great article titled Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. - and I think you all should read it - it's important stuff to understand, especially if you make websites.

Things I learned:

Seeking is related to opiate side of the brain, and controls our desire to seek more information. Addiction is controlled by the dopiate side of the brain, and is unrelated to seeking. This means people can't literally "be addicted to Twitter". Opiate drugs are cocaine and amphetamines - different from dopamine increasing drugs like Marijuana.
"Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop."
When we sit and hit refresh on Twitter or Facebook feeds for hours on end, we are seeking. When we find something interesting to consume, we aren't satisfied, so we keep going.
When we play a game the "possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one."

The article parts with concern that we are being hard-wired to like small snacks of information and have shorter attention spans. It offered no proof however. I want to believe in our human intelligence and say it's impossible to hard-wire ourselves like that, and that people will still always be able to consume longer-form information if we need too. Leave a note in the comments if you have more information on this.

The internet has clearly moved us a shorter-form for all content - and I'd argue this is good as it's making us more efficient. Yes it's true you can't write a Pulitzer in short-form, or even get across a complicated thesis like you can in a book. Or can you? Most nonfiction books have 1-2 chapters of actual thesis - the rest is buildup or fluff that could easily be skipped. For instance, I recently read Free by Chris Anderson - and if you want to know the gist of Chris's thesis all you have to do is read his article in Wired - the rest of the book was interesting - but non-essential to his overall point.

Things I wonder: has the human mind ever been "rewired" before by media or societal change? I've heard it said that the Internet is revolutionizing our society on the level that only introduction of TV and the industrial revolution have done in in the last century. Did those events re-wire our brains in any way?

Book review: The Man in the Iron Mask

2009-08-12T12:39:00Z

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars A great finish to the D'Artagnan series - definitely enjoyed it. Ending wasn't what I wanted though, you could tell he was just trying to permanently end the series. It could easily be having seen the movie made me want more drama. View all my reviews >>

Review of Free by Chris Anderson

2009-07-17T11:50:00Z

Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A business classic that everyone should read. Explains 20th century and 21st century economics from a big picture perspective. The basic thesis is that while in the physical world (atoms), products have cost and thus companies can afford to give away small amounts of free samples (5%), or give away cheaper loss-leader related products in order to maintain profits. In the digital world things are reversed as products have little to no marginal cost and companies can afford to give away 95% of the product for free and make money on the remaining 5%.

My Notes

* For physical products free is a marketing tactic. Give away one product to make money on another (cell phones to sell plans, razor blades to sell razors, jello cookbooks to sell jello, etc). This is the concept of a "loss-leader", and is the basis of much of 20th century marketing.
* Value psychology: things that were once paid have a difficult time going free because people think it must not be as valuable anymore. Things that have always been free can still have a high perceived value.
* The Penny-gap: The psychology of a free product versus that of a product costing even one cent is huge. Koppelman says many businesses can't make the leap. Study where truffle is $.15 and kiss is $.01 and 70% choose the truffle, then reduced to .14 and free and now 70% choose the kiss. Free is disposable so we can't make a bad decision by choosing it - it's a psychological thing.
* Products in a truly competitive market tend to fall to the marginal cost. A true competitive market was mostly an economic theory as most real economies have inefficiencies (the products are somehow differentiated). However with digital economies we finally have true competitive markets, with marginal costs so close to zero that it's often rounded down.
* Reputation and attention economies are other important things that motivate people. Time is money! People will pay for status or to save time in a game, even if they wouldn't pay for the entire thing. There has been an explosion in gaming lately as games become free to play then charge as people play (Habbo Hotel, WOW, Puzzle Pirates, Second Life, Club Pengiun, Runescape, etc)
* Giving away your product for free or allowing piracy can be a good thing if you can figure out how to make money from the attention you get as a result. Microsoft would rather people be using pirated versions of Windows & Office than be using a competitor - it establishes them as the market leader and leads to more sales. Bands in China and Brazil give away as many free copies of their album in towns they visit as possible to get everyone to buy a ticket to their concert.
* Google is the best example of the above. They make so much on advertising from their main product (search + advertising), that they can afford to hire thousands of engineers to work on dozens and dozens of quality products that don't need to make money, they just need to establish Google more as a brand people use (gmail, google docs, google calendar, google apps, youtube, blogger, google analytics, google ad manager, and many more)

I was also fortunate enough to interview Chris Anderson about this book: check it out here.

View all my reviews >>

5 things I learned about Google Adwords

2009-07-14T09:17:00Z

I just read a really insightful article in Wired called Secret of Googlenomics. Here are 5 things I learned:

1. The key component of which ads get shown more on Google is the Quality Score. This is based on a bunch of factors, but the key one is the CTR. This means ads that each ad has a "trial period", and after that if it has a low CTR it just won't get shown very much anymore.

2. Google puts a minimum bid on ads with low quality scores. This means that rather than show bad ads when they are out of inventory for good ads, they show NOTHING. Ballsy! But important, as it's what makes everyone think Google Ads are quality and targeted.

3. Google used to have a real live sales force, which was largely replaced by Adwords and the auction algorithm. It seems to me that the role ad sales plays in media companies today is moving more and more upstream - focusing less on selling the client, and more on helping them undertand, analyze, and improve their ad campaigns.

4. Google has developed their ad auctions into an economic science, and they hire people to do both economics and statistics. They have "one statistician for every 100 computer scientists".

5. Google thinks the auction model can help other industries. I fully believe this - it's variable pricing in it's extreme. Only a very mature market has a true stable price exactly matching supply and demand. Most markets however have significant fluctuation - something only a sophisticated software bidding platform could solve. Imagine if you went to a bookstore and books were priced based on demand instead of a flat rate made up by it's publisher. Twilight would still cost a lot - but book's in lesser demand might be closer to the true cost of the book - and thus might sell more.

Master and Commander review

2009-05-23T14:07:00Z

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the most enjoyable stories I've read in some time. Captain Jack Aubrey was a fascinating character. You just wanted him to succeed - to capture the Spanish vessel, to gain the respect of his men, to gain the respect of the Admiral.

The book is set during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was interesting to see all the Kings ships were nothing but glorified pirates, capturing all vessels they could on the open seas.

The book also strongly reminded me of my sailing lessons from last summer - I still had to look a lot of words up, but I remembered ones like leeward and abeam. Makes me want to go sailing!

View all my reviews.

What is this twitter thing anyways?

2009-03-13T11:51:00Z

I heard a piece the other day on NPR about Twitter. They were trying to understand and explain what Twitter was. They had clips from all kinds of Twitter users explaining it. I hear a lot of people saying they have no idea what Twitter is, and I'm frankly amazed that a service with such a convoluted purpose can be so popular.

I think Twitter needs to work on its purpose and branding so people can understand it better! Do people ask what Google is about? Facebook? No - a quick visit to the homepage of either site and you will get it.

Twitter is an information filter. Plain and simple. Google is an information filter too, but Twitter is a bit different in that you consume information from friends or interesting people that you follow. If you need information about what news people think are interesting - Twitter is a great place. Twitter really shines around specific news events - whether is a plane landing in the Hudson, or discussing a talk at a conference as it happens. If you want the pulse of what the people you follow think is interesting about an event, there is nothing like Twitter out there.

Many people who misunderstand Twitter say that they could care less about what their friends are doing at all random hours. And I agree! Tweets about random nonsense like "playing with my kitty" are useless, and Twitter should work on getting rid of those. Facebook is making progress there by changing the question they pose from "What are you doing right now?" to "What's on your mind?". That will totally change the answers, and I think for the better. Being able to group your friends and see updates from each group would be sweet too - anyone know why Twitter is stalling on that feature?

You can follow my terribly interesting updates here.

Here is the Daily Show piece Twitter.

What's your favorite ebook reader?

2009-02-17T14:53:00Z

I learned a lot about ebooks at the Tools of Change conference last week. There are ebook readers galore apparently - but the question remains if anyone will use one! Here are some options:

Adobe Digital Editions. A secure DRM ebook reader.

BookGlutton - a nifty epub reader all done in javascript

Stanza (by Lexcycle) - the most popular iphone ebook reader

Kindle 2 - not out yet, but I'm eager to try it. I have only seen a Kindle 1 in the wild once. You?

I'm back!

2009-02-17T07:46:00Z

After a brief hiatus due to technical difficulties and some laziness on my part, my blog is back in action - yay! Check out the spiffy new group widget on the right :)

Web 3.0 is all about API's

2008-10-29T14:01:00Z

Facebook started it last summer with its platform, and things have continued building up. Now the NY Times has one!

Cool design site

2008-10-29T13:52:00Z

Bookmark this one: http://patterntap.com/

Bytes of Life

2008-10-28T13:45:00Z

From the Washington Post's article Bytes of Life:

"We all have the tendency to see our behaviors in a little bit of a halo," says Jayne Gackenbach, who researches the psychology of the Internet at Grant MacEwan College in Alberta, Canada. It's why dieters underestimate their food intake, why smokers say they go through fewer cigarettes than they do. "If people can get at some objective criteria, it would be wonderfully informative." That's the brilliance, she says, of new technology.

Information is good. And it can definitely help you streamline your life :)

Book review of Neverwhere

2008-10-28T12:32:00Z

Neverwhere: A Novel by Neil Gaiman

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Just finished this and have to say I really enjoyed it. I was kind of worried the plot wasn't going anywhere for much of it, but the writing was really good and drew me in.

For much of the book I thought the main character (Richard) was too weak of a character for me to like much, but I liked how he grew in confidence towards the end. I think anytime one undertake's an adventure or a journey like that you grow so much. You have to get out there and fail a few times to have the confidence to know how to succeed!

I also have to say I loved Mister Croup and Mister Vandemar. Their dialogue and interaction was hilarious. It really reminded me of Mister Wint and Mister Kidd from James Bond's Diamonds are Forever.

View all my reviews.

the value of your consumer engagement

2008-09-16T13:16:00Z

A google alert on my former company Tickle lead me to an interesting article. Well, interesting if you can get by his dry formal business-school language!

"a fundamental shift in the value of consumer engagement. Several years ago, practically any type of consumer engagement was valuable. A large community of unique users either created a desired asset to a strategic buyer looking for Internet reach or, alternatively, provided enough impressions to get to profitability on an advertising-based business model. More traffic, more value. These days, that’s no longer the case. "

So it's all about creating engagement with value. Instead of millions of users engaging each day at a 10 cent cpm, you'd get more value with thousands that are paying $10 a month. Or somewhere in the middle. The only problem is - in this land of free - will people pay for content online?

Rails 2.1

2008-09-11T00:38:00Z

Goodreads is now on Rails 2.1 - yay! A few strange things, but we love the eager loading optimizations, so it made it highly worth it!

This blog was very helpful doing the upgrade.

Programmers are the new gunslingers

2008-09-02T12:29:00Z

As we've been searching for new hires for Goodreads, I've had a few thoughts about engineers. In traditional big companies, engineers are the workers, getting things done, and being managed by managers. Their skill-sets were rare enough to make them often highly paid, but also so focused that the engineers were just building a small cog in a bigger product.

But I think the internet has changed, and frameworks like Ruby on Rails have made it so a good engineer can now make the whole product. A good engineer can now make a website front-to-back in a relatively short amount of time. What does this mean? It means having product managers to organize things isn't necessary in a small company. Especially if the engineer can think about product and user interface too. These last things are where most Engineers fail however. For a consumer focused website they are critical, and so any engineer who has learned these skills is head and shoulders above the rest.

Programmers no longer have to be a small cog in the machine - they can build the whole thing. And this means we hold all the keys. We are the gunslingers in the wild west that is the internet. I think more engineers are recognizing this, but I think it requires a mental shift in many engineers' thinking. It requires thinking more like an entrepreneur (I know, it's a dirty word) - thinking about the bigger picture and how you can make a difference. Paul Graham and his YCombinator fund are only giving money to technical founders - and I think this is why. It's also why its so hard to find those good engineers - they're all out doing their own exciting things. I'm still trying to figure out how to find those that aren't - and suggestions are welcome!