As we sat here…

… a fighter jet decided to dip down from above and buzz Detroit Lake.

The ground shook and my jaw dropped to the ground.

Wish I had known it was coming. I could have gotten a proper video. Not a bad capture given the surprise. On the first frame you can see that it was about 100ft off the water as it was flying through the gorge.

I hate wars, but love the toys they give birth to.

I’m writing this while sitting in a hospital waiting room while my father has a tumor removed. Obama is on the tv discussing the death of Ted Kennedy. So, this topic is heavy on the mind.

I have a simple, yet drastic, plan to solve the health insurance issue. Note, I did not say health care issue. That is a political term meant to fool you into thinking this is about your care. It is not. It’s about how you pay for that care. Stay focused people.

Eliminate The Middle Man
Eliminate all health insurance as we know it whether it be employer based or self insured. It’s an uber waste. Replace the current system with mandatory catastrophic insurance. Put the limit at 8k. Why 8k? This is the amount of money the average family will save per year by eliminating their insurance payment. If you have an unlikely procedure that requires more than 8k it will be covered. The rest of your routine care will be paid for out of pocket. This out of pocket cost is a fraction of what you currently pay per month. Replacing the current system, and preventing Obama’s proposed system, will save billions of dollars. Take this savings and transfer it directly to wellness programs. Stop treating the symptoms of this issue and find a cure. Sound simple? That’s because it is. You’re so used to this being complex. There’s a very good financial reason for that.

What would this do?
It would empower you to be the decision maker about how you pay for your health care. You’d pay for your care the same way you’d pay for anything else, with sound mind and complete freedom of choice. A choice with your best interest in mind. This would create a true free market where Hospitals and Doctors are competing for your business. Cost for care would plummet due to this increased competition. It would also create a direct relationship between you and your care provider without the bureaucracy that currently stands between you.

This plan would also keep government from further expanding it’s power and reach into your personal life. It would remove the proposed billion dollar band-aid they plan to throw at the problem. This plan would transform American attitude towards wellness, creating a more mindful responsible America. Even though this plan will save you thousands of dollars per year, attitudes change once you’re pulling out your wallet every time you go for care.

This plan would save the taxpayer billions of dollars. These dollars should be transferred into wellness programs that will further reduce the need for out of pocket and catastrophic use.

This plan would decimate the wild cost of drugs. Again, the free market would reign in drug companies who charge a premium because they know it is insurance subsidized. People would shop and buy generic.

Finally, this plan would eliminate the financial burden on your employer to cover some or all of your insurance. Why would you want to eliminate your boss paying for your care? Simple. It’s a nice thought that your employer is paying for you altruistically, but that’s simply not the case. The money your employer is using to pay for your care comes from somewhere. Eliminate their burden and you’d receive more than the standard cost of living raise. In other words, that money comes out of your paycheck one way or the other. Under this plan, you’d get it back.

Sounds good, but what about those that can’t afford the 8k?
Though more people will be able to afford the small monthly payment for catastrophic care, some people will still struggle to make the payment. The government should subsidize these families to cover them for catastrophic care thus freeing up their wallets for normal maintenance.

Conclusion
There is a reason insurance companies don’t offer true catastrophic care. It’s not profitable. Catastrophic insurance would cost a fraction of your old premium. The average American never comes close to using the money they pay in to insurance. If they did, insurance companies would cease to exist due to bankruptcy. Insurance is a profit business.

We trust ourselves to purchase everything else in this world. Why not trust ourselves with the thing that matters most? Why trust an insurance company to buy your care for you?

Finally, why trust the government? They’re a profit business as well. They speak of change in terms of metaphors, not actual pragmatic results based change.

The guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I urge you to push for a sensible approach to reform.

And I’m pretty happy bout that.

I put the dog on a leash and called the owner using the number they gave me. Disconnected. Surprise. Ok, we were going to take him home but first decided to walk him around Tabor a bit. That’s when we thankfully found you. You’d been drinking and lost your dog. We’re glad we found you, but this does not excuse the city’s neglect. At least I don’t pay for your neglect.

Your website says “Licensing helps pay for the care of homeless animals while attempts are made to find them new homes”. Perhaps someone should tell the kid on the phone.

Please spread the word about this to Mayor Sam Adams @MayorSamAdams and Multnomah County @MultCo. I’d like to hope that if my dogs were lost that more something would be done.

We’re pretty proud of our new site, so we thought we’d give some technical deets for all of our geek readers. We do hope the rest of you can appreciate it on a more laymen level.

The site is an aggregation engine that acquires feeds from both Wordpress and Yahoo Pipes. Pipes delivers Twitter and other social media feeds in a nice JSON wrapper to Flash. Wordpress data is acquired via XMLRPC. We made some custom modifications to enable it to deliver some specificity, however most of it was right there for the taking. A tip of the cap to Wordpress and its open source goodness.

We’re able to administer the entire site content using Wordpress as the CMS talking nicely with its Flash front. Given this, the site can function as our portfolio, social aggregate, blog, and company profile all wrapped up in a of sweet.

If you find any bugs or ideas for improvement we’d love to hear from you. More selfishly, If you’re a potential client and dig what we’re layin’ down, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d love to get in bed with you.

Thanks, and enjoy – theGOOD team.

Analytics Anyone?

Analytics. The word doesn’t show up in any spell checker, and dictionary.com barely even knows what it means. Then why does every client want it? Better question : why does every client buy them only to not use them? Website Analytics is akin to life insurance and here’s why…

Life Insurance – Something you buy but never use

Every client wants the basic information that analytics provides. They want to know who’s coming, from where, and how long they stayed. All great information for sure, but merely the tip of the data heap. What needs to be examined here is a deeper understanding of interactive metrics. As I said, typically sites are measured in broad wide swath terms such as traffic, or time spent on site. These two numbers are often deemed enough information to base a site success or failure determination. This is a mistake. The determining figures are those metrics that directly relate to a sites goal, such as quality of traffic and the interactions that take place once engaged in the experience. Let’s consider the following scenario: Two sites successes are determined solely in terms of time spent on the site. One is an e-card site and the other is a social media network. The e-card site clocks in averaging :45 seconds per visit, and the social media network averages 3:00 per visit. It is determined that the social media network is clearly a more effective site. This argument would be incorrect because it is incomplete. What needs to be factored into examination are the goals of the two sites. The e-card goal is to have someone watch a short 20 second video, customize it and send it to a friend. Therefore, the appropriate metric to keep an eye on would be those statistics related to it’s goal. ie : How many people sent out an e-card? How many people who received an e-card came back to watch it? More plenary: Of the traffic coming to the e-card site: which referring site or campaign drove the most e-cards sent. The amount of time spent on the site is of course going to be low due to the goal of the site. By contrast, the social media network has a high length per visit because users are there filling out blogs, forums, and other time intensive applications. The metric goals should be tailored to these interactions. Therefore, using length of visit is arbitrary and wholly dependent on site content and goal. Furthermore, the raw amount of traffic is not an indicator of a successful site, instead it should be used to measure the success of a media buy, banner buy, virility of the site or advertising campaign promoting the site. This metric should then be broken down into quality of said traffic by measuring in detail said traffics interactions within the site. ie: What did users actually do after they landed there.

“it’s not in the budget”

Great, so we’ve determined that clients should be looking at much more data than they are. However, this is only half the battle, the remaining is actually doing something with that data. The fact is : no clients use analytics data for campaign improvement (wide sweeping generalization used despite the fact I called it a fact. But, its close). What is the reason for this? Why do clients purchase analytics packages, that we as interactive studios sell, only to never put the statistical data to use? The answer is simple : “it’s not in the budget”.

Clients budget money for an interactive campaign from concept to launch. The End. There is no budget set aside for improvements once the campaign is live. The interactive shop works feverishly to concept a grandiose idea, they pitch it, they sell it, they build it and bam! both client and agency claim the site as a major success. Portfolios are padded, corporate managers satiated and all is good. This is extremely bizarre to me. Like, idiotically bizarre. Nobody bothers to check if the campaign actually worked. Furthermore, if they are an advanced client they may check. But, if bad news is found it is a moot point for there is no budget for improvement.

An Opportunity

So, how do we as interactive agency/shop/think tanks solve this? The answer is akin to a sea change in interactive on the whole. It requires placing just as much importance on the post launch part of a campaign as it does the pre. It involves staying invested mentally and financially in a campaign after you’ve built it. It involves both client and agency to set aside ego and admit when a campaign went wrong. To embrace the wrongness as a tool for improvement. It involves educating clients on this topic. It may even be impossible.

There is an opportunity here for our industry. I do believe an entire company could be sustained in such an endeavor. Perhaps there are entire companies being sustained by this very idea. I wouldn’t know as I write these posts blindly without any research whatsoever. However, if you are out there, why haven’t we seen you in our analytics data?

Last night I presented “Using Interfaces Without Interfaces” at Show and Tell Pdx. I showed off some Flash motion detection, Flash color detection and even demo’d a little voice speech recognition in Flash. Some of you asked for more info on how last one was accomplished. I’ll be posting more on this later.

Thank you to Substance for hosting, and thanks for all that attended and enjoyed the show. I had a lot of you come up to me and say that my work has insipred you to experiment more. Just wanted to say, that kicks ass.

What’s a developer to do?

THIS:

1. Create a Google Docs Spreadsheet – For this example I’m using row 1 to hold the field vars.

2. Set it to publish as a webpage – Be sure to select CSV format. Be sure to set it to re-publish when any editing occurs.

3. Set up Yahoo Pipes to fetch the CSV data – Set appropriate data mapping, renaming and use Regex to ensure data is proper.

4. Publish Pipe as your favorite data feed – For this example I chose JSON.

5. Load JSON into your Flash app. BOOM!

Bladow, your client can now go on doing what they’ve always done — edit an excel doc ( Google Doc ). They make changes there, it changes on their fancy experiential website.

Genius.

I’ve started an interactive think tank.

Therefore, please consider all work performed there as being also in my portfolio here.