You may not be aware of the ‘nofollow’ link attribute, which lets website owners tell Google, “I do not trust this link on my page.” Google sees this, and doesn’t count that link toward the page’s pagerank.  Again, that’s the general principle.

There is hot debate around whether this nofollow link ttribute should be used or not. Some argue that yes, using nofollow keeps spammers from creating junk links on your site — link in the comments to this blog, or a message form. Without a way to discount user-generated links, those forums and blogs could be abused to the point of being unusable.  But take away the benefit of the spam, and (the theory goes) the spammers will stop targeting your site.

On the other hand, some say that nofollow is abused by big sites to effectively collect Google juice and boost their own pagerank, then refuse to share the love by ‘nofollowing’ all outbound links from their site — trusted or not.  For example, many bloggers link to sites like Stumbleupon and Twitter, but those sites (and others) have taken the policy to nofollow amy user-submitted url.  So the large sites implementing this policy benefit from all the inbound links to their site, but don’t give anyone they link to the same credit.

I’m more in the latter camp than the former, and think nofollow is pretty lame. Then again, I’m not fighting spammers all day.

But more than just ‘nofollow is lame’, I’ll go out on a limb and say “google is lame”.  The count-inbound-links algorithm that is Pagerank is susceptible to these kind of spam attacks, and nofollow is a band-aid on top of that. Google is basically saying, “the number of links to a site is a good indicator of the site’s relevance; except when its not.”  By obeying the nofollow attribute, Google then puts the power to decide which links are relevant and which aren’t in the hands of every website owner.  This is either brilliant or incredibly naive , I’m not quite sure.

I suggest that whoever figures out how to do this — using not just the number of inbound links, but somehow figuring out their quality in a fair and transparent way — has an opportunity to take on Google search.  You hear that, Bing?

To further spur discussion, I like this page which suggests a policy of nofollow reciprocity. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

“On the interwebs, nobody knows you’re a dog”.  

Or in my case, a lazy dog with poor grammar.  What I’m trying to say is, “blogging is hard!” and I haven’t done much of it lately. 

Which makes me wonder, maybe there is something to this microblogging / twittering stuff after all. It’s human nature to be lazy, and maybe people will be more likely to write or “create content” as they say if the threshold for writing is lower. This flies in the face of my ‘twitter is dead’ assertion, we’ll see which side wins ou. 

I also have a problem with staying on topic. I tend to write about web development here, and I feel a little weird whenever I veer away from that. Know your audience, and all that. But lately I’ve just been working, and watching the economy blow up, and haven’t had anything interesting to say.  Or anything I thought was interesting, anyway.  I’ll spare you my poutine recipes and holliday photos.

So when I got home and opened the box, you might say I was a little disappointed. That’s a bit of an understatement.  I was a bit more, WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING.  This game is possibly the biggest turd to ever come out of a box of cereals, and that’s including the short-lived “Turd Crispies”.

First, its in some weird clunky wrist-watch form factor. Maybe 5-year-olds like that, whatever. Not a major gripe, just… whatever.

Second, the ‘game’ consists of a tiny LCD screen with a few sprites representing musical notes your character is supposed to catch. They ‘move’ by disappearing from on position and re-appearing in a nearby position. This is the basic principle behind video games and motion pictures, but in this instance there are exactly 3 positions for the notes to appear in. Nobody is fooled into thinking these things are moving — they’re just blinking back and forth. This is 1981 technology here folks, re-implemented for the millionth time for the brand of the week. So not only is it not ‘good’ , its not even a decent attempt at making something worth keeping out of the trash can.

Third — and this really pisses me off — is that whoever in Guitar Hero Inc that greenlighted this thing should be fired, then shot. Why, you ask? Wait for it… there’s no sound.  That’s right folks, the company and the game that ’s all about rocking out, makes toys WITHOUT SOUND.  WTF, d00d.

Ok, so its a cheap plastic game with the Guitar Hero logo slapped on it. What’s wrong with that?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Millions of people who have never played your game, maybe never even heard of it, are going to experience this lame cracker-jack prize. And its going to suck, and that suck will be forever associated with your brand and your product. None of them will think to themselves, “hey this Guitar Hero cereal prize is a piece of crap, but let’s plonk down $100 for the Playstation version!”

Now, maybe this is MTV’s fault — they bought Harmonix (creators of Rock Band) in 2006. Or maybe the blame lies with Activision, who acquired the Guitar Hero name. Either way, if they keep up the shoddy marketing, Rock Band will be a has-been in no time, as the cool kids who propelled the game to stardom move on to something else.  

Maybe the owners (MTV, Activision) are ok with that. Maybe that’s the whole idea — the 5-year-old-kid-with-a-playstation market is probably a lot bigger than the hipster market, and they just want to sell more games. But what about the makers of Guitar Hero, Harmonix?   If Guitar Hero was your baby, how would feel?

 Dan Ariely, behavioral

economist

*ok, so maybe it’s still partly about economics. But a recent talk by Dan Ariely shed some light on the quirky, human aspects of our financial decision-making. 

A few days ago I saw Dan Ariely speak at MIT as part of the Media Lab’s Center for Future Banking.  The Center is sponsored by major banks like Bank of America,  so in that context Ariely spoke about his research and how it relates to the current financial problems we’re facing. 

Ariely is known as a ‘behaviorial economist’, which is to say he studies how people relate to money.  I’ve been following his work for a few years now, but recently he’s been getting a lot more attention for his book Predictably Irrational and regular NPR radio series. 

So Ariely’s big thesis is that we incorrectly assume people behave rationally, always acting in their own self  interest and maximizing their personal gain. As a society we enact policies that assume these economic principles.  For example, we increase penalties as crimes get bigger, because we assume people will weigh the risk vs. reward and decide the increased jail time is not worth the payoff. 

But reality is different. People do not always behave rationally, especially when money is involved.  And here is where we get to the current events surrounding the ongoing financial meltdown.  

Ariely’s experiments show that people will cheat or steal, but how much they steal is not determined by external factors as much as it is upon our own self-image.  We steal as much as we can as long as we can look ourselves in the mirror.  As much as we can rationalize, as much as we can justify stealing that is how much we will.  

One experiment involved having participants complete a quiz, and then self-report the number of completed answers.  The participant was then paid $1 for each answer.  It was obvious one could cheat; the question was, would they and how much? 

The control group averaged 4 completed questions, worth $4.  The test group averaged $7, implying that they self-reported 3 more questions than they actually deserved.  Test subjects were also more likely to cheat if someone (an actor) obviously cheated from the start — they would just follow his lead and cheat in the same fashion, as if the actor was validating their actions.  

Another test tried substituting tokens instead of cash.  The idea was to see if people are more likely to steal if they are stealing things that do not remind them directly of the monetary value of what they are stealing. Tokens, credit card numbers, etc. As it turns out, Ariely’s experiment shows that people are more likely to steal the tokens — which they can exchange for cash just a few feet away — than they are to steal the cash directly.  It is more abstract, we can rationalize it to ourselves easier, and we can deny that it is really stealing anything of value.  

How this applies to Wall Street is pretty obvious. Take executive compensation, and the back-dating of stock options.  Stock isn’t real money (although it can be sold immediately and electronically for cash in your bank account), so that becomes easy to rationalize.  Stock options aren’t even stock, they are a ‘right’ to purchase, so that is even easier to rationalize as a non-valuable good.  And in the case of back-dating options, we’re not even talking about executives stealing or giving themselves more of those — just changing the dates around a little.  In this light, we can see how executives who engage in this illegal practice can justify and defend these actions as “not really stealing”.

Other psychological links to the financial world: 

• People want to see the banks that made poor lending decisions suffer — even if it means they have to hurt themselves (by paying) in the process. 
• Business students are taught how important diversification is, and yet still concentrate a lot of their own worth into their own company’s stock — like Bear Sterns, which later collapsed.

But.

I think there is a bigger conversation to be had. A conversation which is only a little bit about Twitter. Bear with me.

Twitter is often referred to as ‘a micro-blogging platform’. Users are asked the simple question, “What are you doing right now?”. The answers are as varied as the people that use it. From the mundane (“eating lunch”) to the useful (“eating lunch at http://localcafe.com ; try the reuben!”) Users ‘follow’ other users, whether they are friends or just good tweeters who post interesting content.

Now, why is twitter so popular? And here is where it gets interesting:

Twitter is popular precisely because it asks so little of its users.

To maintain this blog (which I do a terrible job of, even when I’m trying) takes quite an effort. I need to host my blog somewhere, I need to choose a layout and title, categories etc. And then I need to think of something interesting to write about, and write an article. I usually have to research links to related content I want to include in my post. I’d say I spend about 30 minutes on every entry I write — which is probably why I don’t write too many.

But Twitter…

Twitter users contribute because they don’t have to do too much. Participating in Twitter takes next to no effort — just write one line. In fact, that’s about all you can do. But over time, you get better at creating interesting content because you see other people do it (those people you follow). And you can respond to other tweets, which is much more direct than commenting on a blog.

So what is the bigger picture here? If you have a web property — a ’social network’, say, or a dating site, or any app that asks users to contribute anything at all — find ways to let your users participate with as little effort as possible. Facebook does this with the status message, which is probably the thing I update more than anything else — simply because it takes 2 seconds and little thought or effort to say what I’m up to. Its big bang for little effort.
There’s an old saw about “2% of the users create all of the content for the other 98%”.  If you have any interest in getting more users to participate, think about how to make it as easy as Twitter. Let them ask a simple question. Take a poll, post a comment. The less effort involved, the more likely you users are to create something.