I've been remiss keeping this blog updated, but I'm proud to announce the launch of my new venture: Forcery. a leading Salesforce and Pardot Consultant in NYC. 

New York is a city in a constant state of rebuilding itself.  The Manhattan skyline has constantly pierced new heights, especially during the last century, defining what a metropolis could be.  

The 1920's brought the Woolworth Buildng and the Met Life Tower.  The 1940's saw the Art Deco ascension of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.  The 1960's saw the Modern developments of the United Nations and the Pan Am Building.  The 1980s saw the rise of the monolithic Twin Towers, while the 2000's brought about the construction of One Worldwide Plaza.  

By 2020, the face of the skyline will have changed again, with the mega-towers in NYC changing the landscape again.  From One World Trade to One Manhattan Square to Hudson Yards to Central Park tower and 432 Park Avenue, Liberty Cruises tracks the heights of this great city.

Dreamforce is now less than a week away, and I couldn't be more excited!  I'll be speaking this year on a Trailblazer Spotlight panel entitled "Top Insights from B2B Marketing Experts."  The panel will take place on Wednesday September 26th from 4-6pm at the Palace Hotel at the Pardot Station (Pied Piper).   Bookmark to save the session in your Agenda Builder, though seating will be first come first serve. 

Come learn about how Elegran has used Salesforce and Pardot to revolutionize our marketing stack, and becoming renowned as America's "Most Innovative Brokerage".  

This will be my third year speaking at Dreamforce, last year speaking about leveraging lightning to drive user adoption at Dreamforce 2017, 

and lead nurturing using Engagement Studio at Dreamforce 2016.  

Announcing Gotham, the first Ducati Owners' Club in Manhattan New York City.

I had a chance to visit Slack's NYC headquarters last week, for an event about building better chatbots for users.  Whether it be Slack, Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, chat (as a medium) has largely surpassed social media in terms of engagement and time spent on platform.  Therefore as the chatbot space becomes more crowded, setting standards for chatbot development best practices (especially standards for user experience) is crucial for individual chatbots to succeed. 

I've long been a Slack chatbot fan (and was recently highlighted as a Statsbot super-user on their website). 

Last weekend, the rains were coming down on the Lower East Side, but the sun came out during the afternoon on Saturday.  Outside of my apartment, I saw some bizarre cloud cover filling the neighborhood, and the permeating smell of woodsmoke.

The Beth Hamedrash Hagodol Synagogue was on fire...

Curbed has some fantastic photography of the interior of the synagogue. 

I had take some interesting photos of my own over the winter. 

and after... 

Apparently, there is a teen already charged for starting the fire, but it's valuable real estate right in the middle of one of the biggest redevelopment projects in Manhattan, so I'm a bit skeptical that he acted on his own. 

I was walking to my friend's Fintech conference (#empirefintech) on Tuesday, when I looked up to see Salesforce Tower had added their logo at the top of what used to be the MetLife building. Many people are suggesting this is a harbinger of the tech industry supplanting finance in NYC, though I think Silicon Alley has a ways to go yet... 

Note: This article originally appeared on the Elegran Blog

Alphabet’s (Google) own Sidewalk Labs hosted one of the first NYC Sidewalk Talks this past week, at their headquarters on the 26th floor of the newly-opened 10 Hudson Yards. Sidewalk Labs is Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, an amalgam of different initiatives and acquired companies focused on improving urban infrastructure. Sidewalk Talks was announced this spring, and aims to connect and inspire both entrepreneurs and city planners around technology designed to shape the modern city. I had joined Sidewalk Labs at Google’s NYC headquarters this spring, entitled Reimagining the City as a Digital Platform, one of the most provocative presentations I had ever seen, and was excited to be invited for an evening of presentations and discussion around the question of, “What role can technology play in easing the housing affordability crisis?”

Last winter, I was incredibly inspired to see Dan Doctoroff at Inman Connect. Doctoroff was previously deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg and is now CEO of Sidewalk Labs, and he philosophized on technology as the fourth major revolution to shape the course of human social organization. Beginning with the “steam revolution,” the train and the industrial revolution moved agrarian societies into cities, creating economic benefits and social hazards for humanity. “Electricity” allowed population density to compound, offering (to avoid repetition) civilization unprecedented control over their own environment, creating artificial illumination, and giving birth to the modern skyscraper. The “automobile” allowed cities to expand, both with the benefit to human mobility, but wreaking havoc upon urban infrastructure that was not built to sustain automotive commuters. 

Sidewalk Labs aspires to be a platform of programs and initiatives that address the ways digital transformation will transform modern cities, from data aggregation and pattern analysis to home and system automation, as well as sustainable design and architecture. They look to address the challenges and opportunities facing urban life, with their most notable project to date being LinkNYC, a free WiFi, phone call and device charging initiative, as well as to replace payphones, whose kiosks started dotting Third Avenue in Midtown earlier last year.

Sidewalk Talks began this year as an open forum, where technologists and urbanists discuss the future of cities. I am a member of Google’s NYC Tech Talks, and was eager for Elegran to join to brainstorm. Attending were city planners, representatives from the Metro Transit Authority, HUD officials, as well as several notable developers and architects alongside a number of engineers and product managers from leading tech companies. The talk at Hudson Yards began with an open networking session, and then broke into structured groups led by leaders of some of the most creative leaders in the urban technology space, from Andrea Chegut from MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab to Nathaniel Decker of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing and Innovation to Jerry Paffendorf from Loveland Technologies, as well as three other groups that I joined to hear pitch, loosely discuss, and then brainstorm ideas around the product: 

Ollie.co

Chris Bledsoe presented on Ollie, a company built around affordable luxury. “Ollie revolutionizes the living experience for urban renters with professionally designed, fully-furnished studios and shared suites, lifestyle-relevant services, extraordinary amenity spaces and unique community engagement opportunities: attainably priced luxury.” The idea behind Ollie is that unused living space and luxury amenities drive up the cost of housing, making high-end rentals in densely populated areas in New York City unaffordable to most consumers.

By building new constructions with micro-apartments, and communalizing luxury amenities, Ollie is able to offer community living and legitimate luxury rentals to residents that would otherwise be unable to afford them. One of Ollies revolutionary new projects is already under way in Kips Bay, at a 32 unit building called Carmel Place.

NoAppFee.com

Tyrone Poole is an incredibly inspiring figure. Once homeless as a result of an injury, Poole became incredibly frustrated by the lack of information and transparency around the rental application process in Portland, Oregon. Even when he was able to produce the funds to rent an apartment, he encountered an incredibly complicated network of application fees which make the process disproportionately difficult and expensive for those with bad credit or the homeless.

Poole responded by pitching the city of Portland on a solution, who rewarded him with a grant to build NoAppFee.com, a standardized database that does everything from run credit-checks, to basically prequalify users for different buildings. Not only does the service tell members what buildings they will most likely qualify (saving the renter numerous application fees), the website offers specific advice on which penalties to address to increase the likelihood of a successful rental. NoAppFee has been incredibly successful in Oregon, and has expanded to Georgia and with plans to grow even larger. 

Sidewalk Labs

Perhaps the most inspiring discussion was led by Sidewalk Labs’ own Designer-in-Residence Eric Baczuk, who talked about “the high price of low innovation.” After presenting on some of the economic, ecological and social challenges facing affordable new construction, Baczuk went on to discuss the building and testing of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). 

ADUs present the opportunity to bring down the cost of infrastructure in incredibly creative ways, producing modular housing at low cost and with minimal labor. ADUs can also be built with amazing home automation, with entry by facial recognition, biometric monitoring sensors, and cameras throughout the house, ultimately allowing artificial intelligent apps to adapt to a resident’s rhythm and lifestyle. Finally, Baczuk believes there is a huge growing demand for affordable housing, especially within the senior community.

Last year, I sat in the crowd listening to Seth Godin evangelize upon permission marketing at Inman Connect, charging the crowd with enthusiasm.  I heard Brad Inman wax poetic about "predictive analytics," which I think this year is already being supplanted by "prescriptive analytics," rooted in artificial intelligence, decision engines that actually recommend a course of action based on a desired outcome through machine learning, a subject upon which I've written a couple articles for Inman News. 

This year, I'll be taking center stage at Inman Connect 2017 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, with a few other real estate rockstars to share what I've learned about Digital Marketing over the years in a presentation called The Best Digital Marketing Plan You've Ever Seen.  I'll be sharing my experiences about the buyer journey, client segmentation, and analyzing a marketing funnel throughout the customer lifecycle, so that marketers can build out data models around return on investment, and how stakeholders can make smarter choices with their money.  And, I'll be discussing how Elegran has built real estate as a scalable business model, closer to a tech company than a traditional brokerage, built on a foundation of technology and automation.

I'm honored to be joining real estate and tech leaders like Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, the leading SEO platform (in my opinion), the CEO of Ellevest Sally Krawcheck, a digital investment platform for women, and Fredrik Eklund, a TV Personality / power broker.  Please join the who's who of real estate (and me) on January 17th at 9:45 am in Times Square for ICNY17!

I've been ruminating a lot about bots recently, and whether all of these new machine learning products are actually artificial intelligence, or if AI is little more than pattern recognition, as complex as it can be.  And while we're marketed plenty of products that clearly aren't actually intelligent (which of course begs the question what exactly we mean by "intelligence"), the one field that has a vested interest in mimicking human emotional response is the world of chatbots. 

I use chatbots every day for my job in marketing, and I wanted to share a list of some of the most valuable chatbots I've found, why they're useful, and how much they cost. During a fascinating Slack meetup last week, I was interested to learn that people are now spending more time on messaging services than on social media, which is a profound change in how we used the internet.  Even more intriguing is that a growing number of conversations that take place through Hipchat, Facebook Messenger, AIM and slack are now conducted with automated messaging robots called chatbots, which are built to make developers', salespeoples' and marketers' jobs easier by executing specific commands directly from within one messaging service, rather than navigating across multiple platforms. 

Here are some of the best chatbots I have found for marketing that will make my job easier in 2017.  

1. Statsbot

Statsbot is one of my first and favorite chatbots, allowing me to query both Google Analytics and Salesforce, as well as to set up recurring reports and alerts at a specified time of day, week or month, and finally to set certain alerts if benchmark metrics are not achieved, or thresholds crossed.  Statsbot understands fairly complex complex commands, and has become a vital tool for reporting and business insight. 

Cost: The free version is quite powerful, though the paid version is affordable and well worth the cost, with tiers at $5, 15 and $25 per month a pop. 

2. Workbot (via Workato)

Workbot is sort of an IFTTT for Slack, connecting over 150 platforms to the messaging service, from GitHub to Quickbooks to Docusign.  You can run simple commands in each app, as well as set up complex recipes from using everything from notifications to resolve issues assigned to you about your codebase, when invoices are created, or a contract is signed.

Cost: Workbot is cool, but the free version is close to useless, and the next tiers are $99 and then $499 per month, limiting its use to enterprise power users.  I can't justify the costs personally, though the tool is quite powerful. 

3. Senders 

Senders is actually an email plugin with a chatbot that offers the same functionality to query information about someone using their email.  Senders creates a professional Rapportive-like card for anyone who emails you, including links to their website, social media profiles, as well as any recent blog entries or social posts that person or person's company might have made.  Though they push users to volunteer information to complete on online profile, it's a great way to get a little information about the sender of any email and where they work.  

Cost: Absolutely Free! 

4.Trello

Trello is a great (and mostly free) project management software, that I've used across several companies for years. Trello uses a simple Kanban board of cards and categories, allowing you to assign tasks and project to different team members, track the progress, and attach documents and collateral all to cards that move across a board.  The Trello slack bot allows you to update information and progress on each card, reassign users or even move cards around according to the status of the project. 

Cost: Free; Trello has some paid features. 

5. Reveal

Revealbot is a really compelling bot that allows you to not only manage and report on Facebook advertising spend, but also supposedly optimize and automate some of the work that goes into running an effective social media campaign. Similar to bid optimization scripts in Adwords, Reveal claims to allow users to not only report and manage Facebook Ad Spend, but run slash commands and schedule rules to optimize campaigns, for example to cut a budget if the Cost Per Acquisition crosses a higher than desired threshold.

A few weeks ago, Elegran was invited to be one of the first real estate brokerages to speak at Dreamforce in San Francisco, on a national stage at the largest tech conference in the world.  Salesforce invited Elegran’s Tigh Loughhead to speak about the company’s industry-wide leadership in lead generation and nurture, and innovation with marketing automation.  Elegran was recognized for its revolutionary use of marketing automation technology to segment its clientele—for in depth training of the firm’s sales and marketing teams, to educate their team about the product working for them, and finally for achieving success by building hyper-targeted, complex lead nurture and drip campaigns built around specific buying criteria and friction points throughout the purchasing process. Elegran has grown rapidly as a result, with the company’s relatively small team of salespeople generating 7-800% more revenue than the average NYC real estate agent.

[] caption “Tigh Loughhead speaking about marketing automation at Dreamforce 2016 in San Francisco”

Marketing automation is a burgeoning technology.  As more and more businesses move towards digital transformation, there is an inevitable thrust to automate inefficient tactics and scale processes that generate profit.  Traditionally, marketing has been an entirely separate endeavor from sales.  However, digital advertising creates the opportunity for granular data analysis at every stage in the supply and demand chain, from brand awareness to marketing conversion, to sales outreach and follow up, to closing a deal.   

Marketing automation closes the loop in the consumer lifecycle, allowing automated processes to supplement the inefficient administrative tasks of marketers and salespeople, and generates the insight to let ROI drive business decisions, and a number of tech companies are taking notice. MailChimp, a popular entry-level email marketing platform, now offers drip campaigns out of the box, and Zillow, the largest internet listing website, is starting to offer automated follow up and lead nurture as part of their Premier Agent product. What these tech companies have realized is that marketing automation, if done correctly, can allow a traditional business to scale their profit.  

Elegran has been optimizing lead generation tactics in New York City for years, building a complex, multi-channel marketing strategy encompassing SEO, SEM, Remarketing, Display, SMM, inbound and content marketing, email and much, much more… As a result, Elegran amassed a large database of leads to feed a powerful sales team, but lacked the insight at a high level to track each lead all the way to closing a deal, within its customer relationship management platform.

Elegran had invested in the premier enterprise CRM platform in Salesforce for the entire sales team, though before launching drip campaigns, Salesforce adoption among their actual sales team was extremely inconsistent, as there was no standardized operating procedure for client classification or workflows in Salesforce.  Although Elegran was profitable, the lack of a data structure restricted sales people’s individual ability to grow their business, and limited Elegran’s expansion and profit as a company.

Elegran realized that defining a data architecture would provide the foundation for growth and scalability, empowering both sales and marketing teams, and offering management the business intelligence to make smarter investments.  To define this structure, the team dove into the entire consumer journey of a client, from a prospect’s first exposure to the Elegran brand, to the needs of a long term client transacting their third deal with a trusted real estate advisor, and every potential progressive step in between.

The four stages Elegran derived from the customer journey were Awareness, Follow Up, Nurture and Re-Engagement, encompassing the entire consumer journey and the different needs at every stage.  Each stage was further segmented by lead or client type (Buyers, Sellers, Renters, etc.), as well as micro-segmented by purchasing criteria, such as budget, neighborhood or amenity.

In the interest of transparency and accountability, to educate the sales team, Elegran hosted in-depth focus groups and numerous training sessions on the what, why and how of each drip campaign.  In addition, a marketing automation campaign directory was provided to every Elegran employee, outlining what criteria or action would opt a prospect into that specific campaign, details about that drip, and the specific business goal the firm was trying to achieve.

Elegran is now running between 10-15 drip campaigns across the Awareness, Follow Up, Nurture and Re-Engagement stages, providing personalized content and contextual messaging dynamically generated to provide value to a consumer’s experience.  In April, Elegran participated in a closed beta-test of Pardot’s “Engagement Studio,” providing the inspiration for one of Elegran’s first complex, multi-path drip campaign, which was presented at Dreamforce.

As a result of the success of this complex, multi-path journey generating significant revenue for the firm, Elegran’s Marketing Director, Tigh Loughhead was asked to speak about the success of this campaign at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco on October 4th at Dreamforce. Tigh talked about how, as a result of one of many active campaigns, Elegran has to date, funneled a little more than 1200 prospects through the Awareness stage, that previously would not have even been touched by the sales team, which now have been properly nurtured all the way to the closing table.

This single innovative campaign resulted in numerous deals and tens of thousands of dollars in profit that would have been untouched otherwise. Prospects that would have been discarded or overlooked last year were turned from dormant or cold leads into luxury real estate clients. This single campaign eliminated the need to cold call (or email), allowing Elegran to scale email outreach to new leads, using a totally automated solution. Elegran continues to experiment with automated strategies across all segments of their data architecture, optimizing campaigns, diving into ROI, and being the first in real estate to create automated strategies to serve their clients and their entire team.  

Yesterday Salesforce launched the general availability of Pardot Engagement Studio, a powerful new UI for creating and reporting on lead nurture and drip campaigns.Elegran was lucky enough to participate in the private beta, and I must admit I'm quite impressed with the new interface and its functionality.

Read more about the product release here and here , or check out a short video of how Elegran implemented the reporting interface below: 

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/06/salesforce-pardot-engagement-studio.html

http://www.pardot.com/blog/salesforce-announces-general-availability-pardot-engagement-studio-b2b-marketing-automation-reimagined/

Elegran specializes in high-end luxury Manhattan real estate, but the firm is also dedicated to being a leader in real estate marketing technology.  We currently have several drip programs running using Engagement Studio, and we've already seen a some incredible results re-engaging lukewarm and forgotten leads, and handing them back over to our sales team to close, continuing to close the loop in our marketing to sales to deal funnel.  

Engagement studio actually empowers Pardot users to listen to numerous "triggers" based on user actions, then channel the customer journey along a personalized drip, visually representing the path to marketers along an intuitive flow diagram , that makes visualizing and reporting upon the success of content and design much more robust and user friendly. 

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to share any experience or insight I might have gleaned using the program so far. 

Slack Commands for Salesforce and Google Analytics Automation

I've been a huge fan of Slack for a while now, the team-collaboration tool that is becoming more of an automated work management system than simply an instant message platform.  I use Slack to keep in touch with multiple teams; the marketing team at work, as well as my motorcycle club, including many individuals operating across multiple offices and timezones.  However, the true utility of Slack extends far beyond personal communication, as apps like IFTTT, Zapier and Statsbot actually integrate external software and even devices from Slack Channels and Bots, allowing you to control, report and even automate your personal and professional life directly from Slack. 

Slack commands are incredibly useful, and have replaced many of the myriad calendar, to do list or even project management platforms I've perfunctorily used in the past.  Using the /remind command in Slack allows a bot to schedule a personal reminder at a specific time, on a particular day or in a few hours from now.  Setting reminders for other team members, or even an entire channel is even more useful.  Simply type (in any channel)   "/remind [someone or #channel] [what] [when]" and @slackbot will not only remind you of [what] at that particular time, but keep a log of tasks due and completed in your Direct Message history. There are numerous other incredibly useful "slash" commands to /invite users, take a /poll, or even set up a /call with the #channel, nearly completely supplanting the utility of Skype. 

Slack also integrates with multiple other platforms and devices, allowing you to query and control other platforms directly from Slack.  I can access my Google Drive, or create a Google Hangout directly from within Slack, or integrate with other project management tools like Jira, Asana or Trello. Using IFTTT, I've set up social media posts or mentions to post to a #social channel so I can monitor activity across different sites.  I've set up a Craigslist scrape to post any new motorcycle listed for sale in New York State mentioning the word "Ducati" in the title to a Slack channel in real time. I've configured my Amazon Echo to automatically post reminder to Slack, anytime I add an item to my Alexa To Do list. 

These personal and professional automations save time, but the most impressive app I've seen yet is called Statsbot, which allows you to run Google Analytics and Salesforce reporting directly from within Slack.  As much as I absolutely love running reports in Salesforce  (then exporting and waiting to download a CSV, then finally manipulating the data) @statsbot has native querying language and native graphing tools built into the app.  

For the past month, I've set up automatic weekly and monthly traffic and conversion reporting, so I get a direct message in a private channel as soon as I get a cup of coffee on Monday morning, or right before a marketing meeting. 

Similarly, I've set up alerts for traffic or goal thresholds, that automatically notify me if visits and conversions don't reach or surpass specific targets, so I can make adjustments to the website or any campaign in real-time.  I have similar email alerts set up through GA, or Uptime Robot, but I'm much more likely to notice a Slack notification over a form email. 

I've been playing around with my new GoPro Hero4.  I shot the following video in 4K with a timelapse effect of 1 frame per 2 seconds.  The East River and Brooklyn from Downtown Manhattan are beautiful in the morning, especially when you concentrate the late March sunrise of mid-morning (about 5am-9am) into a few seconds of urban beauty. 

As New York City mass transit costs increase again for the third time in six years, it's interesting to note that the MTA ridership is still a shadow of what it once was.  I'm a proud passenger of NYC public transit, but it's hard to imagine that the annual travelers on the NYC subway system today is well below the passenger totals of the 1930's and 40's, despite New York having a population of a million or two less people. 

     -via DadaVis

With over half of NYC Condos $5,000,000 and above purchased by anonymous shell companies, New York City has become a haven for the wealthy elite to hide their money in Manhattan real estate.  According to a stunning expose this week in the New York Times Real Estate section,  "government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico" are taking advantage of American tax loopholes allowing billionaires to literally "house" their money in untraceable, exuberantly expensive condos. 

Opaque shell companies own 57% of the condos at the Bloomberg Tower and Trump International, 64% at Time Warner Center, 69% of condos at The Plaza, 77% of the Condos at One57, sparking public fears that real estate in New York City has become an for foreign wealthy elite to hide their illicit accrual of wealth. The condo boon brings a massive influx of capital into New York City, but also pushes us one step closer to making Gotham into a billionaire's playground. 

Read more on the article here: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html

In the late 1950s, advertising legend Bill Bernbach came up with the idea of pairing art directors and copywriters into teams. The strategy worked and DDB ended up creating some of the most iconic work of that era. Since then, the art-copy team structure came into existence at most, if not all, agencies.

They maybe working towards a common goal, but as a creative species, copywriters and art directors are not all that similar. Their differences are best highlighted on a Facebook page titled CW versus AD where Caio Pena (art director), Henrique Parada (art director) and Letícia Hanower (copywriter) share their cool, quirky illustrations on this subject. Check out 17 of their best works below.

1. The brush

2. The file

3. What the account manager wants from us

4. Starting from scratch

5. The colors

6. The software

7. The reason for our anger

8. The vintage version

9. The app

10. The Moleskine

11. Reading time

12. How do we know pop culture

13. Leaves office at…

14. The social network

15. The tattoo

16. Wishing Happy Birthday

17. The dream pet

(Finally something in common)

       -via CW Versus AD

So, the Metropolitan Opera is currently in the news due to the ado over the staging of The Death of Klinghoffer (hooray, opera is socially relevant!). In browsing the Met’s site, I discovered that they keep an amazing public-facing database with details of every performance dating back to the 19th century (why can’t every orchestra do this?). In keeping with the spirit of events, I decided to do some analysis of the last century of opera at the Met (around 24,000 performances).

Check the bottom for information about the data, how I compiled it, and possible errors. 

Klinghoffer, as it turns out, is barely “contemporary.” It was composed in 1991; imagine if “Everything I Do I Do It For You” was considered a current pop song. Anyway, let’s look at the Met’s history of performing operas that have been composed within 25 years. Their record was much different, with regular stagings of operas by Puccini and Wolf-Ferrari in the early 20th century.

Maybe that’s not fair to the Met. How about performances of pieces written within 50 years? The collapse is quite striking here; most pieces the Met used to be perform were considered “contemporary” in this way.

Ok, let’s cut to the chase. How many composers were just straight-up dead when the piece was performed?

The Met’s Composer Gala, 1983:

If we look at the median year of composition, we can see that it has barely budged in the last century. You’re more or less going to see an opera written around 1870 if you randomly drop by the Met.

What if we consider this another way: we can graph the distance between a given year and its median year of opera composition. That should give us a measure of “conservativeness:” the relation between a current time and the operatic repertoire the Met is performing.

Let’s look at the nationalities of composers performed at the Met. Most striking here is the way German opera increases in popularity right up to late-1910s and the late 1930s, when the trend suddenly reverses course. I’m guessing that had to do with certain international events.

The trend above is vividly demonstrated in the collapse of performances of Richard Wagner starting in the late 1910s and 1930s.

The general list of operas most performed at the Met are somewhat expected: an assortment of Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner.

"But wait!" you say. "Why aren’t American composers included above? The Met is an American opera company!" Well, frankly, American composers are more or less a rounding error at the Met. The best showing was a run of "Porgy and Bess" in the mid 1980s. To their credit, it does seem to be improving a bit.

Lastly, how about a graph of female composers performed at the Met? Thanks to Garrett Schumann for first bringing this to my attention.

Update 10/28/2014: To clarify, the MET has produced one opera by a female composer: Dame Ethel Smythe’s Der Wald,performed twice in 1903. 

About the data: data was acquired from the Met Opera Database, in a timeframe from 1905 to present. One “performance” is a night of an identifiable opera performance. Opera performances data was scraped from the HTML and matched up to scraped composer/opera data from Wikipedia. The process of scraping/matching may have introduced some error.

The licensing of the Met Opera Database is not clear; if they allow, I will gladly post the dataset of ~24000 performances in its entirety on GitHub for any corrections.

 -via Suby Red

Did you know that bulls cannot see the color red, and matadors attract them simply by motion? Or, that Napoleon was in fact taller than average for his time? How about that the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space, filing a missing person's report with the police does not require a 24hr absence or that historical Vikings never wore horned helmets?  How  that shaving thickens hair?  

Each of these misconceptions are assumed widely, and have spread through popular culture and the media. Yet the team at  Information is Beautiful  debunked these prevalent myths, with the sources and origins scrupulously researched (below).  Whether spreading in virality as a result of folklore (I'm guessing gum and mucous myths), popular perpetuation as a narrative trope or device (think undercover cops or killer pennies) or reinforcing the mythology surrounding a figurehead or celebrity (in the case of Einstein or Napoleon), people and cultures actively accept and spread information that is simply and empirically not true. 

Why do we choose to believe these falsehoods then?  Perhaps an oral tradition is difficult to eradicate, or the simplest solution, albeit untrue, is easier to perpetuate than complexity. Or is media and literature inherently deceptive, relying on misleading tropes to create a believable framework?  We are certainly willing to craft mythologies around our heros, perhaps moreso post-mortem. All of this makes me wonder how deluded we actually choose to be. 

from Knowledge is Beautiful

If there is one thing I learned while living on the Upper East Side many years ago, it’s that York Avenue is quite a hike from the subway (at least as far as hikes from subways in Manhattan go). That fact can sometimes help keep housing prices down, at least until the 2nd Avenue Line comes in.

All that hiking got me wondering: What residential building in Manhattan is farthest from a subway station entrance?  Is it in the Upper East Side? The Lower East Side?  The West Side?

Well, in the spirit of my earlier Starbucks-Distance analysis, I turned to Open Data to answer that question once and for all. To do so, I merged two data sets, the MTA Subway Station Entrance data set and PLUTO, which gives information on all lots in NYC. I then calculated the distance from the center of each lot to the nearest station.The map of lots colored by distance from subway entrances looks like this (with green being close and red being far): 

And there on the map lies the farthest residential building from a subway entrance in Manhattan according to my analysis:10 Gracie Square, located at the end of 84th street at the FDR Drive.  It is 0.7 miles from the subway station as the crow flies, or 0.8 miles using the grid.  My favorite part about the finding is that the Penthouse, which I guess is literally the farthest place you can live from the subway due to the longer ride down in the elevator, is currently on the market for $18.9 million, down from $23 million last year.   That’s right, you can pay $18.9 million dollars to have literally the longest walk to the subway in all of Manhattan!  But fear not power walkers, there is also a two bedroom listed with a the same walk but a slightly shorter elevator ride… for $3.75 million.  

Update:
I’ve added a Google Doc for you to look up your own residential address and see how you compare to the rest of Manhattan.

From IQuant

via benjaminrosamond.com

Inspired by John Nelson's Breathing Earth, Joey Cherdarchuk of Dark Horse Analytics created this beautiful visualization of New York City as a "breathing" organ. 

NYC is a patchwork of ethnicities, neighborhoods, micro-economies and cultures.  Artist Jennifer Hill plays off this "quilt" metaphor, utilizing collage to represent the different districts of each of New York's five boroughs (except Staten Island), including the date in which the borough was incorporated.  You can purchase these posters here.

Neighborhoods included: Marble Hill, Inwood, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Manhattanville, Harlem, Morningside Heights, East Harlem, Wards Island, Upper West Side, Central Park, Upper East Side, Yorkville, Roosevelt Island, Clinton / Hell's Kitchen, Times Square, Midtown, Garment District, Murray Hill, Kips Bay, Chelsea, Gramercy, Stuyvesant Town, East Village, Greenwich Village, West Village, Alphabet City, SoHo, NoLita, Lower east Side, Little Italy, Tribeca, Chinatown, Financial District, Battery Park City, Ellis Island,

Neighborhoods included: Greenpoint, Williamsburgh, Bushwick, Navy Yard, Vinegar Hill, Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights, Downtown, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Cypress Hills, Crown Heights, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Gowanus, Park Slope, Prospect Park, Lefferts Garden, Brownsville, East New York, Canarsie, East Flatbush, Flatbush, Prospect Park South, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Greenwood Cemetary, Greenwood Heights, Sunsent Park, Borough Park, Midwood, Marine Park, Flatlands, Bergen Beach, Mill Basin, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Fort Hamilton, Bensonhurst, Marine Park, Sheepshead bay, Gravesend, Bath Beach, Fort Hamilton, Gerritsen Beach, Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, Sea Gate

The Queens Map Print includes the city's neighborhoods filled with a JHill pattern. The year Queens, New York was settled and its coordinates are included.

The Bronx Map Print includes the city's neighborhoods filled with a JHill pattern. The year The Bronx, New York was settled and its coordinates are included.

"Hoagie" is a dead giveaway.  

The New York Times launched an interactive American dialect test, and I scored highest on the heatmap between Pennsylvania, NJ and New York City (fairly accurately).  I feel a bit pigeonholed by my sandwich preferences though. 

 - From NYTimes