NoahBrier.com

Glowing Rectangles

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:55:13 +0000

The best onion articles are the ones that make you a little uncomfortable:

A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.

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Business Expiration Dates

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:39:09 +0000

What would happen if we decided at the beginning when a company should die?

I've had a few conversations recently about the idea of businesses with expiration dates and I thought maybe it was worth getting some thoughts down. Essentially I've been playing with the thought that instead of puttering out 8 years down the line there might be an opportunity for a company to choose its end date and put itself to rest peacefully.

Nobody wins forever. It just doesn't happen. The big company who have been successful for a century can be counted on your hands. Of course there are Harvard Business Review case studies written about them and they've been massively successful, but they are anomalies. A company like GE really shouldn't exist according to most of what we know about the world. (They are a client of mine, so take whatever I say about them with a grain of salt.) They're massive, in a ton of different businesses and have existed for over 100 years. This isn't normal.

What we see in reality are millions of corpses of businesses and ideas that have made their impact (or not) and then petered out into oblivion without leaving much more than a memory. Some of them get bought and swallowed by a bigger company, others have their ideas copied and commodotized and many just don't have the business or financial chops to make it all work for more than a few years.

So what if instead of worrying about all that you just decided at the beginning you were going to end it all six years in? I'm not sure how you'd decide the timeframe, but let's put that aside for a second and imagine what would happen if you did. One hope is that it would solve the short-term over long-term problem. Part of the long-term issue is that you have no idea how far into the future "long-term" really is. Company management doesn't know how long the company will last, so they optimize for the now (they also don't know how long their jobs will last, but I'll get to that in a minute). It may be overly hopeful, but as long as one choose a reasonable time-frame (5-10 years) I wonder if you couldn't lift the decision-making out of the immediate.

The problem here, of course, is that the employees will likely not plan on sticking around for all that time. This, I think, is actually the biggest problem in most of business at the moment. It's certainly the shortcoming of my business expiration idea, because if employees aren't in it for the full haul we'll have the same sort of misaligned incentives and general screwups (at least at the beginning). So on this one, what if we started making jobs with expiration dates? Most of the people I know go into jobs at the moment with little plans of making it beyond three years (as of 2008 the average job tenure for Americans between 25 and 34 years of age was 2.7 years). Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing isn't what I'm really interested in at the moment, instead I wonder what would happen if you just capped it. Especially in the advertising industry, where turnover seems higher than most, what if you just signed people up for 2.5 years in the first place. Companies would know what to expect out of the employees and could plan their transition far better and employees wouldn't have to stew as they got bored. Obviously you'd have to figure out a financial incentive system that worked with this sort of arrangement so that the person didn't check out at year two, but that could be figured out I suspect.

Anyhow, as usual, this is just me thinking out loud. Happy to hear any thoughts. I don't know if either of these are actually good ideas, but they at least seem theoretically intriguing.

Ethical Paralysis

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:10:12 +0000

I quite liked the following description of the state we're all left in by the glut of food books on the market at the moment (from an otherwise unremarkable Lunch with the FT with Jonathan Safran Foer):

I suggest that the effect of all these books could be to provoke a kind of ethical paralysis. A couple of years ago writers such as Barbara Kingsolver, Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon argued for local food because of the ecological cost of transportation - which made sense to me until I read Professor James McWilliams' Just Food (2009), which argues cogently against this locavore approach. Pollan has praised producers such as Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, known for its sustainable farming methods; Foer interviews another farmer, who thinks Polyface is "horrible" because it produces "industrial" rather than "vintage" birds. One side gives us permission to eat something; another denies it, so we end up walking out of the supermarket with no food.

I know it's not new, but it's nicely described and ethical paralysis is a good name for the situation.

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Editing the Google Algorithm

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:44:01 +0000

Wired has a real nice article on Google's search algorithm. It's a real score for the Mountain View massive as it makes the whole process seem not evil at all ... It actually feels quite quaint:

Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with "Cindy Louise Greenslade." The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person -- in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California -- but it failed to place Greenslade's homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. "We needed to be smarter than that," Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade's homepage is the fifth result.

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Gender, Salaries and Bachelor's Degrees

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:11:11 +0000

File this under: Data that seems like it might come in handy at some point.

Sociological Images (one of my favorite blogs) has a list of male and female starting salaries broken down by undergraduate major. Women lead the way in 25 majors of the 68 (37%) majors listed: Agricultural science, management information systems, marketing, advertising (by $7,100), computer programming, computer science, computer systems analysis, physical education, aerospace/aeronautical engineering, bioengineering & biomedical, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, environmental engineering, industrial technology, industrial engineering, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, mining & mineral engineering, nuclear engineering, petroleum engineering, systems engineering, nursing, clothing/apparel/textile studies and history.

For what it's wroth the highest differential between male and female starting salaries is in the "other humanities" major, where men make $19,600 more than women.

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Conceptual Collisions

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:25:39 +0000

As someone who does a lot of screwing around on the internet in the name of creativity, it's always nice to read an article like this from Wired about the value of distraction (especially the kind you run into on social networks).

A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It's hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that's the beauty of social networks -- they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.

In all seriousness, though, two things jump out at me about this: First, it falls into some of the thinking I've had about the role of serendipity tools in the creative process. What makes the web magical is it's ability to deliver the information you didn't know you were looking for and I absolutely believe you can optimize services for that (I'm working on one now). Second, and I think I've mentioned this in the past, I see a real connection between input and output: When I stop spending time on the web consuming content, I don't think as well.

via The Awl

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Website Infomercials

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:22:15 +0000

Maybe the most interesting part of this new Johnson & Johnson online stress consultation (plus fragrance) subscription service is how they're launching it:

Upliv will be introduced with a 30-minute infomercial, intended to begin later this month in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta. The infomercial, by Cesari Direct of Seattle, features the actress Angie Harmon, Upliv's spokeswoman, as well as scientists, a fragrance specialist and several women who participated in a trial run of the program.

I'm super curious a) how a paid web service from a packaged goods company will work out and b) how the promotion strategy will play. I've often wondered if you could use infomercials to drive serious web traffic for little money and I guess J&J will find out. Will probably just be worth whatever they spent on the site to learn that.

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The Worst of Both Worlds

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:26:35 +0000

Over the last few weeks both Slate and The New Yorker have hit on the current political environment where every voter wants everything and, in turn, nothing. Here's an example from Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

And, while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills' cost-control provisions--including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending--that have proved especially unpopular. On top of this, many people are just annoyed with the whole process: a survey of voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown in the recent Massachusetts Senate race found that forty-one per cent of those who opposed health-care reform weren't sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. In short, they don't know why they're against reform; they just are. It's a bit like Marlon Brando in "The Wild One." Asked what he's rebelling against, he says, "Whaddya got?"

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Danger! Danger! Media! Technology!

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:12:26 +0000

Slate has a nice little article cataloging hundreds of years fear of technology and media:

The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. A hundred years later, as literacy became essential and schools were widely introduced, the curmudgeons turned against education for being unnatural and a risk to mental health. An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools "exhaust the children's brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment." Meanwhile, excessive study was considered a leading cause of madness by the medical community.

I think from now on when I get in this argument I'm just going to send the other side this link.

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One Billion Creators

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:41:46 +0000

Just some random thoughts on being a content creator.

Whenever I tell the story of building Brand Tags, I explain that I finally decided to launch the stupid thing because I was feeling guilty about not having blogged in a while. (In the post where I introduced the idea I opened by explaining that, "In lieu of actually writing something interesting (which I haven't done in a while), I've decided to release a 70% done project.")

Just today I was feeling it again as I looked at the last time I wrote a "full entry" (which is what I call those things on the left side of the blog). It was December 31st, which is over a month ago and that post is hardly an insightful or interesting piece of writing, it's just a list of a whole bunch of blogs I steal ideas from.

None of this is to say much, except that I think it's funny that in the 21st century we have the luxury to worry about things like whether our blog audience is feeling as though we're paying an adequate amount of attention to them. In some ways it's incredibly egotistic, as if there's a whole bunch of you sitting around waiting for me to write something (which you are obviously not). In another way, though, it's the flip side of the whole "attention thing" people love talking about (I refuse to call it an economy).

As a content creator, albeit a small-time one, I feel constantly on the hook for finding interesting things to share with all of you. I scour the internet daily, looking for tidbits and ideas that are worth of your time and attention. It shapes what I read and, maybe more importantly, how I read it, as I am constantly reading with a critical eye towards insights.

I guess the point is that too little attention is paid to the effects of so many of us being content creators, since the consumption part is the topic-du-jour. Just think about how it changes the way you look at everything, even if you're only a creator amongst a tiny group of friends or family. Look at how differently you judge photos that are going to the web or how you've learned to describe experiences on Twitter.

Pretty soon we'll have a world with a billion-plus publisher/editor/creators and only focusing on the mass of content they create is probably missing the larger cultural impact of them all being this other thing that puts content out into the world.

More, More, More

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:09:04 +0000

We've all read about "the fear" or talked to someone who has it. It's that feeling that there's too much stuff out there, that some time in the near future that we're going to stop talking, that the kids are going to shit. I don't disagree with any of it really (well except that we're going to stop having human contact, that argument is stupid). George Packer had a good one last week where he wondered how it was all effecting us. I wonder that too sometimes. But in the end, instead of worrying about it, I just admit to myself that I really like it.

All of that is a long preamble to this quote from a piece titled "In Praise of High-Speed Overload over at The Awl:

A friend told me that there is a "Slow Media" movement brewing out there, somewhere or other. The Internet confirms. NO. I only want food to go slow! The growing advance of knowledge, the tantalizing proximity of answers to all our questions, the new ability to share and synthesize our knowledge, almost instantly--we're so lucky to be experiencing all this. If the price is more anxiety, then let me wind up like the Tasmanian Devil, just a blur of anxiety. Of unbelieveably knowledgeable, totally undeceived anxiety. So what if the Internet has turned each day into a panic-ridden informational hot-dog-eating contest? So what if with the incomparable gift of access to limitless knowledge comes also a little melancholy, and anxiety that waxes sometimes into an Ernest-Beckerish sense of impending doom?

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Best Community on the Web

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:48:31 +0000

As far as communities on the web go, I think Metafilter takes the cake. So it was with great interest that I read this interview with the founder, Matt Haughey (via rc3.org). In it he says pretty much everything I'd expect him to say (but as those brands building "communities" never think of).

In my mind the most brilliant feature of the site is the five dollar signup fee. Haughey explains the rationale:

It's mostly just putting a huge hurdle in front of having to deal with new users. 'Cause it's such a pain. The last ten years have shown that any time there's press, like the New York Times writes something about us, 300 people sign up and then wreak havoc for a while, and then go away. [Without barriers to entry] it would just be a nightmare.

On size, growth and just how much work it is to maintain:

It grew naturally over first few years. I never sort of advertised the site anywhere. It just sort of grows all the time. Just sort of randomly. I'm not doing anything to goose that or anything. Because [the site] doesn't work if it's big. Metafilter is actually run by me and two moderaters and a programmer. It's really done by hand. We're constantly emailing people, contacting people personally. It's a ton of work and would never work if tens of thousands of more people joined. I'm not interested in it going to twitter proportions at all.

And finally, on just how un-sexy building a regular old profitable business can be:

A lot of people obsessed with venture capital see Metafilter as a lifestyle business, but in my mind, it's a mature business. It works really well and yet nobody aspires to do something like this and I don't know why. Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.

Seriously, I could pull about five more quotes, but just go read the whole thing.

via rc3.org

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Un-Representative Representatives

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:36:26 +0000

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin points a fun Washington Post article that imagines new ways to divide Senate seats. Here's the income plan:

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets -- with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Obviously this won't be happening anytime soon, but it definitely puts into perspective just how un-representative our representatives are.

via Snarkmarket

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Seeing the Internet

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:27:59 +0000

I really loved this article about the many ways people visualize the internet. It brought me back to great scenes in movies like Hackers, where the internet is this totally ridiculous looking thing. The author attempts to explain the phenomena:

The problem isn't really that we don't know what the Internet looks like. It's that what it looks like is so horribly ugly: not a glistening Tootsie Roll pop, not an open freeway, not a shimmering clear pool of chlorinated water nor a siren-littered sea, not even a chiseled movie star, but giant, hulking factories dotting the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard, covering old landfills, sprawling, like dozens of Costcos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel generators and powerful cooling systems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 percent of the world's energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card statements cross paths with Medicare files and corporate budgets and your old love letters and the photos of Jennifer Aniston's newest boyfriend.

While reading I got so inspired I decided to set up a little site to catalog all the great ways the web gets visualized. So, with no further ado, I present Gallery Interweb. If you'd like to add your favorite, you can do that to (thank you Tumblr submit functionality). Excellent. Let the fun begin.

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Apples and Oranges

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:58:51 +0000

Waxy points to a nice essay about the iPad. The whole thing is worth a read, as it highlights many of the reasons that so many people have been down on the device, but what really got me was this quote:

Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It's likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who drives.

I often try to explain this same idea to people when it comes to different modes of communication. You can't say email is better than a face-to-face conversation because they're just so different. Sure, face-to-face is much higher fidelity, but flying to Japan for a two minute face-to-face conversation asking a friend to send back my copy of some book they borrowed hardly seems like the best use of anyone's time (not to mention environmental impact).

The saying "it's like comparing apples and oranges" didn't become a cliche because there was no truth. Comparing two things that are totally different doesn't really get anyone anywhere. (No pun intended by the apple thing, by the way.)

via Waxy.org

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