Home is where you hang your @

Twitter poetry

2008-11-12T17:12:00.004-08:00

Would you call them poetweets? Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the first, but I've become interested in the idea of Twitter poetry. Poems that can fit inside 140 characters. Examples:

evrywhr:i c mmnts crl'd back like lips frm ancnt teeth;evrywhr:i C the bones,their shapes ntwined in2 the flowrs of gd's infnite spirogrph

That one's exactly 140 chars, which is cool. Here's another:

I wlk nr hom:flwrs&mud&proof of lives livd wth jy&srrw&othr namelss thngs;wrlds story a pudl;tiny mmnt a cvrnus sky;blu wth hrt's own relish

Twitter is what has come to be called a "microblogging" platform. A way of publishing very small messages to large numbers of people. You might not find the time to write a long article in a blog, but you might find the time to post an interesting link you found, or make a quick comment on a news article. I'm sure I'm not the first to think it's also a good medium for poetry. I like the creative limitation that 140 characters gives you. In exchange, twitter gives you a whole new medium for your poetry: simultaneously posted to people's cell phones, facebook and twitter feeds.... very 21st century. And, as a bonus to the reader, if you don't like my poetry, you only need to suffer through 140 characters of it at the most! Here's my twitter feed: http://twitter.com/fergusson. Follow me! If you have Twitter poetry of your own, let me know - I'll link to it here, and in my various feeds and profiles. Tweet, tweet! Update... Here is a list of some links to other posts on Twitter Poetry:

Tom Watson's Blog post on Twitter Poetry
This is a bit different: TwitterPoetry is a long poem made from Twitter posts, added by the community.
Utmost Christian Writers have a Twitter Poetry Contest.
Michael Tippett (reporting on NowPublic) has noticed Twitter Poetry before.

Bird and Plane image is Machine, by Hambo. Creative Commons via Flickr. Snowflake image is Flake on Snow by circulating. Creative Commons via Flickr.

Onward!

2008-07-10T10:23:00.003-07:00

It's always bittersweet to be at the end of one thing, and before the beginning of something else. I'm proud of the work I've done, growing the Kinzin network to nearly a million members, and building applications that people love to use. There have been some very interesting challenges here, and along the way, I've worked with some people I'll remember for the rest of my life. I'm about to take a week off to hang out with the kids and recharge a bit. Then... Onward!

CNMA Finalist: Producer of the Year

2008-06-09T12:00:00.004-07:00

I heard on Friday that Kinzin was a finalist for "Excellence in Social Media Applications", and that yours truly is also a finalist for "Producer of the Year". Given the quality of the other two finalists, I would be quite surprised if I won (on the other hand, I'm very surprised to have made it to the final three), but Kinzin is a truly excellent social application. The team has done amazing things in the last six months, especially, and Kinzin is growing faster than I really thought possible at this point. They deserve the recognition. I only stand on the shoulders of giants.

Crazy MomCat on Kinzin

2008-05-02T18:37:00.003-07:00

Crazy MomCat has posted a review of Kinzin today. She starts out by describing her ongoing concerns about privacy, her frustration with existing photo sharing sites that make privacy hard and bombard your visitors with ads for photo finishing services. Then:

"...I think I've finally found a solution to all of this. Kinzin is a new site dedicated to protecting your privacy while letting you show family and friends what is new with you and your family."

That's great stuff. She loves the new photo "print and mail" service as well, which she uses to keep her Father-in-law up to date with the latest photos of the kids. Thanks, Crazy MomCat. Everything we do, we do for you! :-)

Working with Facebook Social Ads

2008-03-19T13:49:00.006-07:00

So, here at Kinzin, we've been experimenting with Facebook's Social Ads for the last few weeks, and I have a few results to report. Simple stuff first:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that's 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
For some reason, we got quite different results (30-50% variance) if we ran exactly the same ad in exactly the same region, configured to show to men alone, women alone, and men and women together. For some reason, both together got much better results than either gender individually. Weird.
Again, the same ad: top four for clickthrough rates: Seattle, Portland, Alberta, and NYC. Bottom four: Toronto, the Maritimes, English Quebec, and Texas.

A little more subtle is the results from using "Social Actions". That's feature that Facebook advertises as being the differentiator for their ad platform. For those that don't know what that is, Facebook will insert a blurb to let you know a Friend of yours has a relationship to the app or group that is the subject of the ad. A friend of mine might see, above an ad in the Facebook margins: "Michael Fergusson installed this app yesterday." This is what Facebook has to say about it:

"What you're looking at is a Social Ad. Advertisers provide the text, and Facebook pairs it with a relevant social action that your friend has taken. Social Ads mean advertisements become more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules; advertisers never have access to personal information about you or your friends...."

In theory, it could be useful to know that friends of yours use a particular app. In practice, it's a bit creepy to see the name and photo of your friend in a banner ad. My advice in short: don't use that feature. As I said in my last post, we're still figuring out the rules of etiquette in this new space, but I don't think Facebook (the company) has it quite right yet. For sure, it's not right for us and our community.

On that note, I'd also like to apologize to any users of Kinzin applications that were creeped out by our (brief) use of that Facebook feature. We were as surprised as anyone by our own negative reaction to seeing it in practice, and we turned it off as soon as we heard that others were feeling uncomfortable about it, too. We take our role in helping define this new space very seriously, and that role is not to push the boundaries of what's acceptable, but to reflect the growing consensus of what's desired.

It would be interesting to hear about other people's experiences with the Facebook Social Ads. Anybody have anything to, um, add?

(Added 03 /23) I should add that I purchased clicks from Facebook and one other ad network. That other ad network cost 70% less and generated clicks for me at 100x the rate, but virtually no conversions, and traffic to the landing page didn't seem to match the clicks being reported. Hmmm. Facebook ads actually converted at a pretty reasonable clip - 5% or so.

I may not get a lot of clickthroughs on the Facebook ads, but at least they seem to produce some measurable results. My experience dealing with the other ad networks has not been good at all. Most of them seem like shoestring/basement operations at best, and outright scams at worst. Anybody have any good experiences to report?

Privacy and Social Networks

2008-03-17T11:39:00.004-07:00

Mark Ury has a great post on Privacy at his blog The Restless Mind. As I said in my comment on his Blog, I'd like to make an observation about why managing privacy (and other rules of social etiquette) is even harder than it seems.

Real social networks have actual humans as the end points in the graph. Complicated, technology independent humans. I have dozens, perhaps even hundreds of social networks I participate in, and each one has its own complex rules of etiquette and privacy, even when the membership of the network is mostly or even completely the same. In fact, it's those rules that really define the network itself: the people I trust with my kids, the people I gossip with at work, or the group of cousins in my family that happen to be around the same age. Each of these is defined as much or more by what we do together (the "social grooming" as Robin Dunbar calls it), as by the membership, which may be mostly or even entirely the same. One reason for why these rules especially difficult to express in software is that these networks (especially the ones most established in my life) are typically multi-modal by nature. Take the network of "the people who love and care for my kids", as an example: some are in FB, some are email-only, and some (like my Gramma) offline entirely. We humans are very typically very good at picking up on and managing these social "rules", but often have difficulty migrating those rules to a new or unfamiliar modality of communication. As the number ways in which we can communicate with each other increases (more rapidly all the time, it seems), the harder it becomes to manage the complex social rules that govern human interactions.

Kinzin's approach to this problem is to build what we call "Virtual Private Social Networks". You decide on the rules and membership of the network, independent of the communications technology. This is obviously easier with smaller networks, and where the level of trust and familiarity is high, so that's where we've focused ourselves. These Are My Kids lets a network of close friends and family share information about the family's kids. The rules for privacy are set by the parents, and the invited members of the network can use (nearly) any medium they like to access the network: Facebook, email, postal mail, etc. This way, busy parents can spend their time thinking about what it is they want to say, and not worrying about how or where to say it.

Michael on TV

2008-02-20T16:11:00.003-08:00

Pretty lame to post this a couple of weeks late, but I've been busy, then I was on vacation, then I was busy again, then I forgot... you know the drill. Anyways, I was interviewed on CBC television for a story on internet privacy. Here's a link (thanks, Frank): http://gallery.mac.com/flee1#100129. Sticking with TV Fame, Episode 140 of The Lab With Leo Laporte on G4 Tech TV in Canada includes me doing a segment with Leo, talking about designing and building applications in the era of social networking. That interview will be made available on The Lab website after it airs on television.

My interview on Raincity Radio

2008-01-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note that my interview with Dave O from Raincity Studios has made its way to the web. Since that interview, our membership numbers have nearly quadrupled, but the basic message remains the same. Those Raincity guys are a lot of fun - Dave and I bonded over our love of hockey history. He especially loved the vintage 1916 Vancouver Millionaires jersey I was wearing (see pic). Any other Cyclone Taylor fans out there?

Teens and the Internet

2008-01-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

The Pew Internet and American Life Project published a study of Teens and Social Media in late December, using data captured mostly in 2006 (so the stats on Facebook usage in particular are probably low). Great subtitle: "The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media."

Some quick hits:

64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004
39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.

Girls are more likely to Blog across all age groups. 35% of online girls blog, and even younger girls (32%) blog more than older boys (18%). Boys are more likely to use YouTube, and twice as likely as girls (19% vs 10%) to be posters of video content.
55% of online teens ages 12-17 have created a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace; 47% of online teens have uploaded photos where others can see them (remember this data is from 2006).
Most teens restrict access to their posted photos and videos (77% say most or sometimes)– at least some of the time. Adults, somewhat surprisingly, restrict access to the same content less often (58%). Maybe they don't know where to find the privacy settings.
Posted photos or videos are the launchpad for conversation. Nearly nine in ten teens who post photos online (89%) say that people comment at least sometimes on the photos they post.
Phones are still prominent in teen social life. What Pew calls "Multi-channel teens" layer each new communications opportunity on top of pre-existing channels. These multi-channel teens are slightly more likely to use landlines "every day" than the broader group(39%/46%), and twice as likely to use cellphones(35%/70%), IM (28%/54%), SMS (27%/60%), and send messages over social networking sites(21%/47%). The use of email is interesting: 14% vs. 22% - both very low compared to the other forms of communication.

The whole study is worth a read. It's short, but interesting.

An Apple a Day (for a hundred and sixty billion days)

2007-11-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine pointed out that that Apple recently passed both Intel and (holy cow! really?) IBM in market capitalization. Wow. So much for Apple being a footnote. Also an article in Wired today about Apple having more cash on hand than Facebook's entire (MSFT-driven) valuation.

You know, Apple hasn't made any strong "web 2.0" moves yet. hmmm...

Is the world normal?

2007-10-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last week, 24Hrs Newspaper published a story about Kinzin's Facebook plugin Are You Normal? in their print and online magazine (see the great photo on the left, by Rob Kruyt, that accompanied the article). In the article, I'm quoted as saying that we've reached 90,000 people around the world. Thanks to the power of the network effect, as of this writing we've already passed 220,000 (from 184 countries!) and still going strong.

The point of this post is not to toot my own horn (at least, not only to do that :-), but to mention for your interest that the next set of survey questions we publish will be written in part by our user base. We've had questions submitted from Finland, Spain, Greece, Australia, and the UK so far. I'm very excited about this in particular. As with many things, when we're talking about what's "normal", what we choose to measure is often as interesting as the results.

I'll keep you posted as things progress...

You can't have small without the big

2007-10-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Robert Scoble, in response to comments made by Evan Williams, creator of Twitter, at Web 2.0 asked the question: "why would anybody want a social network with only 10 friends? Seriously, don’t we already have this? It’s called a family." Williams was talking about creative constraints. Limiting the scope of a social network (TuDiabetes), or limiting the size of a message (Twitter/SMS). I'm surprised, frankly, that Scoble would make such an obtuse comment. That I have lots of friends isn't a reason to not use Facebook, and that my family exists says nothing about the modalities of communication I use to "groom" my relationships with them (to borrow a term from Robin Dunbar).

TuDiabetes for example is a small network (recently passing 1100 enthusiastic users), constrained in scope to the issues related to living with Diabetes. That it is small and constrained makes it more valuable, not less.

On the opposite end of the scale, The Economist recently published an article called "Social Graph-iti - There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye". I think it's intended to be a cautionary article about "irrational exuberance" in the social networking space, along the lines of the recent New York Times article. There's a lot that's right in the Economist's article, but I disagree with a few things. I think the author doesn't understand the nature of social networks in this respect: we can and do belong to many at one time (as we have since before there were "humans" at all). Many of our social networks, in fact, are built on top of other, existing networks. For example, the management team I work with at Kinzin is a small network built out of my larger "business associates" network, which is part of my "everybody I know" network. It overlaps with my "close friends network" and my "co-workers" network, and so forth.

But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect.

Mr. Saffo is both sucking and blowing, though, using "Social Network" to mean two things at the same time: the sum of all the users who are members of a particular social networking application, and all of the connections that each individual member has on that network.

My personal network doesn't scale for all the reasons that I've written about previously in my commentary on Dunbar's Number , but Facebook's network doesn't have the problem in the same way. It can contain every human in the world, and it doesn't lose value for me (at least not the same rate or in the same way), because I only need it to be able to find everyone in the world who potentially could be my contact, I don't need everyone to actually be my contact. It seems to me the Economist doesn't account for the fact that we all have multiple overlapping networks, containing people that in the end all are drawn from the same pool, namely all the humans in the world. If I'm trying to maintain 10 different social networks (friends, family, business, acquaintances, etc.), it's helpful to have the underlying system contain all the people in all the networks. So Facebook having 6B members helps me to better create the 10 person network that represents my geographically dispersed family.

Everyone's trying to make it simple: "Irrational Exuberance!", or "Everything's Really Different!" The reality, as it usually is with humans, is much more subtle.

Booksimreading: The Wealth of Networks...

2007-10-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

As part of an effort to think more and do less, I just started reading a new book: "The Wealth of Networks; How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", by Yochai Benkler. What do I think so far, after the first 30 pages?
"At the beginning of the 21st century, we find our selves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment," says Benkler. "What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action plays a much greater role than it did or could have (before)"... "the removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts (of our economy and our society)." Just as the proprietors of the new printing presses of europe used their economic clout to gain independence from the church and aristocracy, people today, both individually and in groups, are exploiting the economics of the internet to take on massively ambitious projects. An important difference, though is that they are often taking on these projects just because they feel like it, and not for economic reasons.
It's this idea that first caused me to pick up this book, actually. The amplification of the individual human as a social creature, as opposed to a "market actor". This is a major change in thinking for some. Capital is less important than it has been in the past. Groups of individuals, acting from motivations unrelated to economics, can often organize themselves more quickly and effectively than a corporation can. I find this idea exhilarating. More as I read along...

What's "Normal" anyway?

2007-10-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

Our Facebook adventure sure has been interesting. In the week since we launched, we've had over 15,000 people do our surveys (Update: three days later, and we're now over 22,000...) and discover just how (ab)normal they are. One curious thing I've noticed while discussing "Are You Normal?" with people is that, at least among the people I talk to, most people assume that their normalcy rating will be very low. In fact, being "abnormal" seems to be what they're hoping for. The thing is, the system only calculates your rating based on what everybody else said, so if everybody's a bit strange, well... that's what's normal. It's what I really like about this application - the community decides what's normal, not us. We could have used some standard psychological test and given a stock answer, but everybody deserved to be judged by a jury of their peers, don't you think?

In case you're wondering: I'm 23% normal (and falling).

Which brings up the other interesting side-effect of the way we calculate the answers: that your rating can and does change over time. As more people answer, the most common set of answers changes slightly, effecting your rating against that "standard". To take advantage of this interesting side-effect of our rating system, a new feature we're planning is the ability to check your rating against specific groups - your own friends, for example. And when Facebook launches their new "contact grouping" feature, you may be able to compare yourself against particular sets of people - work, family, whatever. Let me know if you think this feature would be really interesting to you - if enough people call for it, I'll get the development team to move it up the schedule.

Some tidbits, gleaned from the results so far:

68% of people answering the surveys are very concerned about the environment, or are taking action to do something about climate change. 9% say they're not concerned, and a full 23% don't take either position, which is interesting.
9% describe themselves as conservative, 25% as liberal and the rest (65% or so) describe themselves as non-partisan or none of the above.
25% think that a family should have only a mommy and a daddy.
41% of parents lied, saying that having children hasn't effected their sex life ;-), the rest need to get away for the weekend.
45% wish that their kids knew more about their family history and culture

There will be a new survey in the next day or so (Are you a normal Facebook user?), and some UI improvements, so stay tuned.

Cross-posted at the Kinzin Blog.

Extending and enhancing an existing network

2007-09-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a comment to my previous blog post. It seems important enough to promote it to a post of it's own. Personally, I walked away from the McCrae Alumni weekend very impressed. Here's a group of people who have built a (human) network that transcends the institution that initialized it. Below is an example of the group's internal discussion. Good suggestions, and thanks for letting me be a part of the unfolding dialogue.

Hey thanks for buying the power assited bike Michael.

I think I asked a question about effective practices that each McRae alum could engage in immediately: (1) on existing social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and MySpace, and (2) what are the most effective ways we can project our power as a network, i.e., what are some good examples of other successful networks of people who have projected power?

A couple of answers that occurred to me:
RE: effective practices on existing social networks ...

we need to be consistent in the name we use for our program. Because "the Program" has changed names some call it McRae, other APMCP, others Cap. Consistent name and tags would make our profiles and comments easier to find,

be a good follower. Charles Caldwell introduce many of us McRae folks to Linked in within a year of its founding, most of us didn't take it seriously. Many still have not spend a lot of time moving their contacts in. I didn't spend anytime on Linkedin until I noticed that a guy who is at least 5 years older than me and commands millions (maybe billions) of investment funds and put $50-million into our project in China had 80 contacts there. For example, if someone opens McRae Facebook group ... join, comment ... it take seconds.

do business with fellow alum, refer them for jobs, collaborate, coinvest, help your fellow lobsters out of the pot (Canadians usually spend thier time pulling each other back into the pot! who said pot?),

practical recoms for the alum website - expand the profiles, add some mapping/geotagging, let each person add photos and attach business plans/documents to share to their profiles, add RSS feeds for each profile and the whole site so that when anyone contributes content the network gets the intel,

I wonder if now is the right stage for philanthropy efforts. Sure if a fellow alum is running for a cause by all means, but if we are raising $20,000 as a group for something, should we be reinvesting directly in the network (improve website, hire someone to write a report on where the alum network goes from here, particularly if Cap is out of the picture completely).

Good introductory presentation on the changes that are effecting everyone.
Thanks

You're welcome. Thanks for letting me be a small part of it!

How to organize yourselves

2007-08-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

This last weekend (August 23rd), I was speaking to Alumni of the McCrae Institute of International Management about the social shifts taking place today as a result of the Internet. "Groups of people can organize quickly and efficiently and make their voices heard," I said. "The locus of control is shifting from corporations to people, with powerful implications for politics, marketing, product development." In response, I got the obvious question: "how?" Recognizing that I took the answer to that question for granted a little, here is a short treatise on the ways groups of people (such as the McCrae Alumni) can make finding each other and getting together a little bit easier. In the end, you'll need to have a motivated, passionate, and involved group of people to get anything done, of course. That problem hasn't been solved with technology, at least not yet ;-).

Get involved in the Blogosphere. Create your own blog (typepad is good, so is wordpress. I use blogger). Find others who share your interest who blog, and comment on their blogs. Link to their blogs from your blog. Blog about their blogs. Strike up conversations. Talking, linking, and generally letting people know what you're about and that you want to connect is how it all begins.
Get set up on LinkedIn. Make sure you fill out the "additional information" section at the bottom of your profile with relevant details of your interests and affiliations, and make sure your "contact settings" encourage people to contact you. Actively search for contacts, and invite people you know.
Find your friends on Facebook. I'm a little more wary of Facebook's privacy policy and terms of service, but if you're careful about not revealing non-essential information you should be fine. When you're filling in your profile information, don't forget to put information in the other tabs (to the right of the "basic" tab) that will make it easier for people to search for you.
Create or join a private or public discussion group. You can use Yahoo! Groups, Google groups, or Ning. Try to use them more than point-to-point communications like email and IM. These days, I like Pownce. ...and I hear Jumpnote is going to totally kick butt when it comes out of alpha.
Most importantly, follow your passion: find out where people are already gathering and add your voice.

Hey Blogosphere: any other keen suggestions for a motivated and savvy, but loosely knit, group of people who are hoping to get more organized?

My first online social networking application (1982)

2007-08-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

It was 1982, and I was calling into a music video show called "Soundproof" (1979-1983... big love out Buzz E. Miller and Dave Toddington!) on the North Shore Community Cable Channel. Ring. Ring. Ring. I was hoping to request Shrink's "Paranoid" (anybody?), and I was waiting for the phone to pick up. They didn't even have IVR to pick up and put you on hold, so we'd call and let it ring while we watched videos. One day, I was sitting on the couch at 1 AM, with the phone to my ear and I realized I could hear voices in between the rings. "Hello?" I said. To my surprise, somebody responded.
Dozens of us would call the request line and chat in between the rings. Can you imagine? "Oh yeah, I'm (ring) totally into Wall of (ring) Voodoo. 'Callbox' is the (ring) best song ever!"
Check out the article on page 8 of this old UBC student paper.
Warning: Some bad language in this video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KNUnLaRekg

An equitable arrangement

2007-08-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Springwise for bringing this to my attention: Home Equity Share. An interesting twist on P2P lending, illustrating yet again how stale the mainstream financial industry has become, and how a little creative thinking can go a long way in that space. Here's how it works: It matches investors, who want to get into the real estate market, but don't want monthly payments or tenants, with buyers who have cash flow to make mortgage payments, but don't have a downpayment. The buyer can acquire the investor's share at a later date, or they can agree to sell the property and share the appreciation. Simple, really. Not that it doesn't have it's challenges (the mid-2007 subprime mortgage meltdown), but it has the advantage that this sort of arrangement is really quite common. Parents helping their kids buy their first house, for example. If you don't have parents who can help you financially in this way, Home Equity Share will find you a "surrogate". So far, the company doesn't seem to be leveraging existing social networking applications to connect people together who are likely to have a higher degree of trust due to smaller "degrees of separation", but that's an obvious extension.

How do you say Peer-to-peer in Mandarin?

2007-07-30T16:53:00.000-07:00

One more update on P2P lending: here is a Chinese P2P lending project called PPDAI. It turns out that most lending in China (not much of a surprise) is P2P (the old-school, IRL type), usually between relatives. Most Chinese don't have access to bank financing, apparently. This could be amazing to watch: 1.3 Billion peers... wow.

Addendum to Bypassing the Banks

2007-07-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Update: Here are a couple of interviews with the companies mentioned in my previous post, at Social Lending Watch. Interesting read, both of them. Thanks for the comments/links!

Update: More on bypassing the Banks

2007-07-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

I posted earlier on a peer-to-peer lending project called CommunityLend (love the logo, by the way), which is still as yet unlaunched. Here's another interesting angle: a facebook plugin. Using existing social networks to make (presumably better-trusted) connections between lenders and borrowers. LendingClub has this to say for themselves:

Now that Lending Club is available to Facebook members, person-to-person lending on Facebook is finally possible. “Chip wants to pay off his crazy 18% credit cards; can you chip in $100? You’ll get $110 next year, and even better, you’ll know you helped him out and you may also earn a seat at his debt-free celebration dinner.” Your real friends will even validate the purpose of your loan, and strengthen your desire to live up to it.

And more formally:

Lending Club is an online lending community where people can borrow and lend money, bypass the banks, and get better rates. By working together, members can borrow money more easily and at a better rate than they would get from a bank, or invest in a portfolio of loans at higher rates than those served by savings accounts or CDs. A proprietary technology called LendingMatch™ helps match lenders with borrowers using connections established through social networks, associations and online communities, and build diversified portfolios based on lender preferences.

Their blog has some interesting content discussing P2P lending, and financial advice more generally for the Facebook set. Some articles are quite interesting, including this one on loan pricing. LendingClub is currently open to Facebook users, and plans to expand beyond (presumably to other social networks) soon.

On a personal note

2007-06-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

For the most part, I've been focusing this blog on my professional interests, but today I make an exception. I've lost a young cousin, an Aunt, and an Uncle to cancer, and an older cousin is fighting hard today. This is not a sad story though, but a story of empowerment and inspiration: My mother, Jill Alexander (turning 70 on her next birthday), is training hard to run a marathon in October to raise money for Leukemia and Lymphoma research (the cancer that took little Tommy and Aunt Arlene from us). She has a website where she's keeping a training log, and accepting donations. I hope you will visit, and consider making a donation. I should say a little about my Mom: My Mother is the great inspiration of my life. With all the challenges that come with being a single mother of two small boys, she grew a business from nothing into a beautiful day spa and health centre. She worked hard so we never felt that we lacked for anything that truly mattered. I remember her greeting customers and employees alike with a hug and loving kindness. Losing her brother and sister-in-law, whom she dearly loved, and burying baby Tommy would be a terrible burden for anybody, but she has turned the pain of her loss into a positive will to do good. Those who know my mother well will tell you that this is how she lives her life: with love, and to the fullest she knows how.

Boom!

2007-05-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

In Turning the Generational Dial, Carol Orsborn (who works at Fleishman-Hillard, along with my good friend Jennifer Torney) makes the case that the generations that follow the Baby Boomers will be the first in all of history "not (to) have grown into adulthood anticipating the marginalized, invisible, powerless future boomers once expected to have—but rather, the promise of lifelong vitality, relevant entertainment and the thriving careers at midlife and beyond that boomers pioneered." This, I find very interesting. I've heard it said that the web is for the young, that youthful early adopters (alone) are driving the new generation of applications we're seeing on the web. I don't believe it. I heard something at the Web 2.0 Expo regarding the demographics of users of the instructables website. I can't for the life of me, find a link anywhere to it on the internet. If anyone can find something, please let me know. Instructables is a site where people post plans for projects that people can build themselves. The interesting tidbit was that Instructables users fall into two categories: posters and readers. Posters tend to be older (over 35) and readers tend to be younger (under 35). What's interesting about that is how obvious it is. Older people passing their knowledge and skills onto younger people. How... human. One of the things the web 2.1 may give us is better access to an increasingly web-savvy older generation with more energy and more things to share than ever before. Maybe, I'm starting to get a sense of why I should care about the Wikia search engine project... Google lets you search what's on the web, but how do you search somebody's life experiences? That's what I want. Anybody working on that?

Kinzin beta update

2007-05-09T16:11:00.001-07:00

It wasn't the worst I've seen, but I think it's fair to say that the Kinzin launch wasn't as smooth as we wanted. Anyway, Paul's team is working fast and furious (quickly and furiously?) to get the holes patched and loops closed. In retrospect, I would say the Mother's day promotion was too ambitious for the first release. Still, we're getting more signups every day, so despite my own perception of the warts and flaws, there are people out there who are adopting and using Kinzin (a big "thank you" to any of you that might be listening). The next phase is going to focus on closing the loop on publishing and inviting, to make it more fun to create using Kinzin, and more obviously valuable to visit.

All together now (all together now)!

2007-04-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

The great people that I work with at Uniserve (hello Paul, Kate (Trgovac), Dethe, Joanna, Kate (Inglis), Vince) have launched a great new product. It's called Kinzin, and it's a site where people can create many small, overlapping, family-centric social networks. It's very cool, and the launch promotion right now is a free high-end custom photobook for a Mom in your family if you sign up and create a family space. It's kind of in a public beta phase, and it would be excellent if you would sign up and try it out. With families getting spread out geographically and bigger age gaps between generations, there are very few truly shared family spaces, where families can share and nurture their micro-cultures. Kinzin is an attempt to give people the tools to create those spaces for themselves. It's just the beginning, too - there are all sorts of cool things coming down the pipe. Check it out!

Unbanking

2007-03-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

(source: Springwise) CommunityLend is "an online community where people lend money directly to other people. (...)You can set your own rates, payback periods and meet some cool people along the way..." I love the sound of this, and I'm very glad it's made its way to Canada. Peer-to-peer lending "banks" been launched in Holland and Germany and, it seems, with some success. In the Netherlands, Guus Drijver, founder of the unfortunately named Boober, says: "Boober doesn't work with hidden costs and is completely transparent. We don't sponsor yacht races or soccer teams, and don't have expensive headquarters or pay thousands of people high salaries." Amen, brother. In "the next few months", CommunityLend will be launching what the are calling a "test phase" where you can "set up profiles, manage loans, bid on auctions and create groups without using real money". I can hardly wait.

The Human Network

2007-03-06T21:53:00.000-08:00

Just to follow up my last post, I should point you at Cisco's site The Human Network.

Welcome to a place where we're all connected.
Where remote villages are included. And your PDA is a stadium seat. Where home videos are experienced everywhere at once. And Web applications mash together to create new experiences. On the human network, wonderful things are happening everywhere.
Join us as we work, live, play and learn on the human network. Visit collaborative sites, share network stories, hear podcasts and watch videos, even contribute your thoughts to the human network Wikipedia definition.
Together, we are more powerful than we ever could be apart.
welcome to the human network.

There's not a lot of buzz about it that I've seen yet. I wonder if that's because people don't take Cisco seriously in this space? Maybe everyone's waiting to see what comes next. I know I'm curious...

Socially Networking

2007-03-03T12:54:00.000-08:00

Visualization of a Community
Originally uploaded by DC Rob.

According to an article in the NY Times, to follow up on their purchase of Five Across, Cisco is purchasing Tribe.net. It looks like they think that "social" networking with and among customers will become a standard part of corporate infrastructure. Fancy that. Marc Andreesen says this: "The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches."

messy times
Originally uploaded by el frijole.

I'm not sure if I would go that far, given Cisco's resources, but his point has some validity. There's not a lot of ordinary people in the circles that Cisco typically runs in. Still, it looks to me that they've recognized that the networks that really matter to most companies are made of people, not machines. Good for them. Interesting times...

Canuck Love in the Blogosphere

2007-01-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

Canadian Bloggers of Note (the Z-list)

2007-01-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

Kate Trgovac just published a list that I think is worth repeating... the Canadian Bloggers' Z-list.

Check 'em out!

Co-Creation Rules!

2007-01-01T23:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a great manifesto I got from the folks over at Changethis: Co-Creation Rules. Written by James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore, it gives 17 guidelines to those hoping to engage with their customers, Marketing Participation-style. I liked how they opened their essay, suggesting an exercise to the readers: Draw a picture with one of your colleagues. Using a single pen, and without speaking, take turns adding lines to draw a face, and then give it a name. Which one of you "owns" the picture? Does it look like anything you've drawn before individually? Can you imagine collaborating with your customers in this way to create a new product or campaign?

Five things about me

2006-12-27T23:33:00.000-08:00

I like this meme. Five things about me:

I'm a Jamaican citizen
I once won a kickboxing match by knockout
In 1978, I won three medals in the Jamaica national cultural festival (poetry, acting, and recital)
I met my father for the first time when I was 27
My great-grandmother was known for making a fantastic curry. One day, she brought home a young journalist named Winston (who later became very famous for other reasons) who had heard of her famous curry, and wanted to sample it.

In the interest of passing this meme along, I tag three very interesting people: Dethe Elza, Paul Prescod, and Colleen Nystedt.

A new name for the Marketing department

2006-12-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

Like many companies, Uniserve has a Marketing department. Today, I proposed to my colleagues we change the name of the Marketing Communications function (MarCom), to Marketing Participation (MarPa). Marketing is a conversation, and I think we need to be explicit: we are participating together with our customers in a conversation. What do you think of this? This reminds me of a post that Ross Mayfield made a few months ago. Let's see if I can find it (rummaging through bookmarks). Oh yes, here it is: Power Law of Participation.

"As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. Even when we Read, our patterns are picked up in referral logs (especially with expressly designed tools, like Measure Map), creating a feedback loop. But reading alone isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users."

Consumption is active. We are what we eat. Culture is an activity.

Authenticity is the new "new black"

2006-12-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

I gave a talk at the High Tech Communicators' Exchange two nights ago with my colleage Kate Trgovac, reprising many of the themes from an interview I did for Destination KM with a former (and very distinguished) Blast Radius colleague, Philip Guegan. For the benefit of those who attended my talk (a bright and enthusiastic cross section of Vancouver's high-tech marketing community), I have posted my slides for you to download and use. In keeping with the theme of my talk, it is creative commons licensed, as stated at the bottom of this page.

Who owns culture?

2006-12-04T02:03:00.000-08:00

Culture, by David Davis

One of the interesting conversations at the Web 2.0 Conference was a discussion about copyright law, and remix culture. Most of the discussion centered around the mechanism by which artists (that is, their labels) might receive compensation for these remixes. I thought the whole discussion sounded like an elaborate misdirection. The "record" companies already have incredibly sophisticated systems for calculating and distributing royalties. To add "mashups" to ringtones and jingles wouldn't be hard at all.

Yellow Submarine, by Marco Canestrari

The real issue is that the whole framework of copyright is less and less at the service of society and culture, and more and more at the service of big business interests. It is an absolute fact that culture belongs to the people who express it. Not the companies that try to profit from it, or the institutions that try to control it. The sad fact is that our copyright law is diverging further and further from this reality. Law isn't my area of expertise or interest, so I won't comment further on that, but it seems obvious to me that extending copyright for longer and longer periods is simply wrong. With all due respect to the fab four, Yellow Submarine doesn't belong to you. I sing it to my kids at night, I hum it to myself when I'm jogging, I make sideways references to it when I'm talking politics... it belongs to me. My culture belongs to me.

Thanks, but we'll take it from here.

2006-11-15T21:31:00.001-08:00

Party's over_2, by xerones

Is it my imagination, or was there a distinct "party's over" kind of feeling to the Web 2.0 conference this year? Not quite so many really good ideas, more big companies, and most of the interesting startups were already funded. Most of all, though, it lacked excitement. When Amazon.com and AOL are the companies that really stick in my mind, I take that to mean the conference has lost the mojo. Not to put those companies down, they're clearly doing very interesting things, it's just that the first couple of years it was the startups that were centre stage. This time, though, it felt like the big kids showed up and said: "thanks a lot for your help so far, but we'll take it from here..." Not that it wasn't worth going - it just didn't feel like the place to go for inspiration. There were a few things that stick in my mind:

Nary a word about families. Nothing about kids; nothing about the elderly. Apparently, there's lots of opportunities still to be had as social networking goes mainstream.
The platform wars are on again, and this time AOL and Amazon.com want to be players
Don't build any more technology than you have to. It's expensive, and makes you harder to buy, and M&A is the only realistic exit right now

So that's good! There's still some helium left in the balloon if you're smart, fast and light.

Just call me "Mr. T"

2006-10-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

"There’s a seduction to being an expert, an assumption in society that credibility relies on deep (and narrow) expertise. However, for people operating at the edges, interesections, and overlaps where innovation thrives, being a generalist is far more powerful." bplusd: On being a generalist

Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, writing in Fast Company, had the following to say about putting design at the heart of your organization's storytelling:

Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking -- not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we'll make it better. And that's an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market.

he more real you make the story for yourselves (he recommends using rapid prototyping), the easier it is for everyone to stay on the same page. ...And what kind of people does he look to get into his organization to make the stories real?

T-Shaped People

Mr. Brown goes on:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need.

he world is so broad now, and the interactions between things so complex and unpredictable, being too specialized can slow your forward progress. When putting together productive, innovative teams, finding the most effective blend of individual strengths and propensities, while ensuring that they elemental skills native to the domain are present is the challenge. Not quite brain surgery (more like writing a symphony, in my experience), but I believe it may be the most important managerial skill for an entrepreneur to develop.

As an aside: I've noticed that people use "Brain Surgery" and "Rocket Science" interchangeably as metaphor for things that are too complex to understand, but I tend to see them as two ends of a continuum. Brain surgery is more of an art: we really don't know how the brain works exactly, and math doesn't help you that much. In contrast, rocket science is largely newtonian, and rewards proficiency with math. I recognize this is a gross oversimplification, but I suppose that's the point of the metaphor.

technorati tags:theory, generalist, organizationalbehavior, design, innovation, teams

Manualizing your business processes

2006-10-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

Breakthrough, by The Forrest aka/klepto

What's the opposite of automation? Manualization? What I'm referring to is deliberately engineering humans back into processes that were formerly automated. Why? Because making it faster, or making it cost less, is sometimes too expensive. Sure, it's faster for me to "press 1 for tech support" to get put in the queue, but maybe having a human answer the phone puts the value in the right place, rather than just in the place where it's easiest to count. To quote John Thakara we need to "deliver value to people - not deliver people to systems". The first time I read that, I had a flash of insight (it's rare, but it happens):

Hand Squircle, by The Forrest aka/klepto

Why shouldn't we be able to design a call centre system that a) is financially progressive, and b) is enjoyable to work in? Let's design people in and create new opportunities for meaningful, interesting, fun work to be done. It's mythology that machines are more efficient than people. More efficient for what? With all due respect to our local telecom monopoly, having people greet other people is a much more efficient way to be friendly, as people are simply better at it than machines. Exception handling is usually the single greatest expense in any automated system. It also happens to be what people are best at — in fact, (surprise, surprise) it turns out that they enjoy the variety. Resources :

Ezio Manzini
In the Bubble, 2005, by John Thackara
Resisting the Virtual life, 1995 by James Brook (Editor) and Iain Boal (Editor). Wow, has it really been 10 years since I read this?

technorati tags: businessmodel, business, mainstream, design

This is going to be fun...

2006-10-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

The beginning of something wonderful, by Oi Jimmy!

So this is my first blog post as the Chief Products and Innovation Officer of Uniserve Communications Corp. I suppose I've been putting it off for too long, as I search for just the right topic to start off with. I hope you can forgive me :-). As an aside, before I launch into it, just a quick note as to why I accepted this position, which on the face of it probably seems like an odd choice, given my background and personality. Three reasons:

Will Spratt, the CEO. This is a man who knows how to do deals, structure businesses, and make money. Even more importantly, he is a person of the highest integrity.
$25M in revenue, growing quarter over quarter for years now, and generating profit, with over 110,000 customers coast to coast.
The competition is fat and slow, and complacent. When was the last time your telco/ISP did something innovative for you? Press 1 for never, press 2 for a long time ago, and press pound to get put on hold with torturous easy listening versions of songs you didn't like even in the original version.

So there you have it. A great opportunity to build something very interesting on a great platform. Onward!

The (in)accessible Government initiative

2006-09-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

OK... here's how you don't do it: I'm applying for a government document online. This is fantastic, of course - the government of Canada makes it possible for me to apply online and ensure my documents are in order before I bring them in person to a physical office and submit them. Let me start by giving credit to the Government for at least going this far. Now for how it all went wrong: I sign up for my online ID (time-consuming, but appropriate), and begin the process of filling out the form, when I'm confronted with a message that the website needs to ensure that I have a supported browser. That's OK (I think to myself), I have the latest version of OSX, fully patched, and the latest version of Firefox, also fully patched. Should be a cinch. I'm actually a little encouraged as the little progress indicator has a clear "Mac OSX" kind of look about it. BZZT. Apparently, I can only use IE6 on Windows to access the government of Canada website. (grrr... didn't I pay a whole whack of taxes when I bought this PowerBook?) Anyway, I'm savvy: I switch to Virtual PC and use IE6 to access the site. Here's where it gets strange. Remember that I just got told that I can't use my Mac... I'm told as I go through the whole process again, that I need to use IE6 on Windows because among other things I need to use Java (you know, the cross-platform one), and that I need to install the Sun JVM, because the Microsoft JVM isn't supported. It helpfully adds that the Sun JVM is installed by default in OSX, so if I'm using a Mac I won't need to install it. So, to make a long story short, there's nobody in the world who has, by default, the configuration needed to access the government of Canada's online forms. Nice.

Government comics - the best kind!

2006-08-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

OK - I know this has nothing to do with anything, but it is hilarious, so I'm posting for anyone who hasn't seen it before: government energy conservation comic - the Superkids. What is a lot less funny is how they didn't think they needed to aim any higher, but this isn't a political blog, so I'll let that go for now.

Stories that tell us stories

2006-07-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

photo by Kevin Meredith

When my grandfather tells me a story about how he saved his platoon in the second world war, and teaches me his mother's bread sauce recipe (explaining that, although there is always a full, untouched bowl at the end of Christmas dinner, it is crucial the tradition be maintained), he is doing more than telling me stories. He is teaching me about myself. What does it mean to be me? What kind of a person does he hope I will continue to become? Sacrifice, tradition, honor, loyalty... the meta-narrative that underlies the stories told in my family. It doesn't matter the stories are not precisely true. Feelings are what matter, not fact. Culture is what he is giving me, not history. Mythology is as crucial an element in the formulation of our identity now as it ever was. We are getting much worse at capturing those stories, though. A project I'm working on right now hopes to make it easier for families to discover, share, and explore their culture - finding the hidden links between people and places, stories and events. Think "Hero with a thousand faces" meets MySpace. More later.

The pen is the sword

2006-05-25T12:06:00.000-07:00

Some very smart people at Blast Radius (my former employer) have started up a new project called Sutori. The project is the brainchild of Marketing Radian John Ounpuu who has this to say about the project:

"(U)ltimately the meaning and value of (a company's products and brand) is not determined by engineers, designers or marketers, but by customers—based on their own experiences. We’re developing Sutori in an effort to bridge the gap between companies and the customers they exist to serve. For customers, we hope it will offer a chance to make your voice heard, to tell your stories, to connect with others and assert your collective power. And for companies we hope it’s a chance to listen and learn."

John describes Sutori as an opportunity to:

Tell stories about your life as a customer.
Join in by voting on stories, adding comments and connecting with friends.
Make a difference by sending a message to businesses about the things that matter to you

Intruiging experiment. So if I understand correctly, I can testify to my experience as a customer, and invite the community to comment on my story, as a kind of jury of my peers. I wonder if companies will pay attention? How will the community handle differences of opinion? I'll be watching with interest.

Here are three tidbits that caught my attention

2006-04-20T00:18:00.000-07:00

Here are a few tidibts that caught my eye in the last few days. I've been meaning to write something meaningful to tie them all together, but you know what? I don't have time right now, and besides, you'll all draw your own conclusions anyway ;-). By the way, this is my first post from the Flock browser, so please let me know if there's anything amiss (love it so far, by the way; and congratulations to the Flock for hiring Will Pate, who I think very highly of).

Pepsi's online ad budget has gone from 1% of total ad spending to 5%-10% in five years
General Mills expects to double online ad spending in the current year
Kraft plans to double online campaigns in 2006, and increase by 50% the number of brands it advertises online
Anheuser-Busch's online ad spending will double in 2006, hitting 5% of the total ad budget

To put it in context, packaged goods companies accounted for 11% of the 145-billion U.S. ad market in 2005 -- but they spent just 1.6% of the ad money online last year. There is, to paraphrase the Google uber-bull case, a lot of room for a major ad-dollar budget shift. A lot of a lot of room.

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Consumer Product Companies Heart Online Ads - Flock

The number of monthly visitors to each site rose at rates ranging from 185 percent (Citysearch) to 528 percent (Blogger.com) between February 2005 and February 2006. Their growth far exceeded the 4 percent increase in overall Internet visitors in the United States during that period. The traffic analysis shows the Internet is still a space where new brands such as MySpace can suddenly break into the upper ranks, where older brands such as Citysearch can revive themselves after languishing for years, and where established outfits such as Google often wind up as beneficiaries because they buy or copy services pioneered by upstarts.

New Trends In Online Traffic

For many teens, hanging out has moved online. Teens chat on IM for hours, mostly keeping each other company and sharing entertaining cultural tidbits from the web and thoughts of the day. The same is true on MySpace, only in a much more public way. MySpace is both the location of hanging out and the cultural glue itself. MySpace and IM have become critical tools for teens to maintain "full-time always-on intimate communities" where they keep their friends close even when they're physically separated. Such ongoing intimacy and shared cultural context allows youth to solidify their social groups.

Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace

technorati tags: advertising, businessmodel, business, mainstream, blogging, traffic, revenue

Goodbye, and good luck

2006-04-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

Goodbye, Blast Radius. In particular, goodbye to the great people I had the opportunity to work with over the last three and a half years. A tremendous amount of talent has passed through Blast Radius during the time I was there, and I will certainly miss working with many current and former Radians. It's always bittersweet to move on from a project you've lived and breathed for years, and this one has plenty of both for me. Parting is such sweet sorrow. Enough about the sorrow, though. Let's get on to the sweet: There are all kinds of exciting things going on right now, and many of you have been kind enough to let me in on some of it. Thanks for that, and I plan to try and keep you all posted with what's on my plate as things go along. What a fantastic time to be alive, don't you think? I feel a little bit like I'm poking my head out of my hole, looking at a glorious springtime of opportunity. Drop me a line, and tell me what you're up to.

People Are People, or: I'm Only Human

2006-03-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

Depeche Mode, by Painkilla.

So... I'm no social scientist (just a lowly entrepreneur), no expert (just a talented amateur), but I would like to rant a little about a couple of things I have observed. One of these is that social software, social networking, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it, has not fundamentally changed what it means to be human (certainly not any more than written language, smoke signals, or the telephone). Dunbar's number, for example, holds true, whether you are going back to neolithic villages, Roman army legions, Hutterite settlements, or MMORG guilds/tribes. What social networking applications like Flickr, LinkedIn, or MySpace can do is give us tools to perform better some of the natural social grooming behaviors we've evolved over the millenia. For example, Gossip and celebrity have always been with us, and in fact perform a vital social function. Now, though, internet-based applications give us powerful new tools to discover, manage, and distribute gossip about our friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and celebrities. So what's my point? My point is that perhaps MySpace beat Friendster (as an example) not just because of the vagaries of cool-seeking among the younger set, but also because it was better optimized for the kinds of social grooming that people naturally want to do for the class of social relationships being represented there. Teenaged boys always took note of passing females, and MySpace is well-optimized for this type of superficial and fleeting relationship. What's new is that MySpace allows one to search, browse, sort, filter, and "bookmark", which happens to dovetail nicely with a primitive desire to keep track of potential mates. There's nothing new under the sun.

Why I've slowed down

2006-03-24T14:08:00.000-08:00

Slow Down Sperm Whale,
by kalavinka.

I case you're wondering why I haven't posted recently... Just Systems, the largest ISV in Japan, is acquiring the company formerly known as Enfolding Systems, which has been keeping me quite busy. I have a bunch of half-written posts that I promise I will get up in the next few days. Thanks for your patience.

In praise of green jube jubes

2006-03-07T22:37:00.001-08:00

Green jube jubes are lime flavoured. Sometimes they come alive and do back flips for you. You are one of those, and I'll tell you, those are the best kind.

photo: rainbow candy, by pastelhearts

I've got FOAF in my genes...

2006-02-20T12:03:00.000-08:00

...or perhaps more accurately, in my brain.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I believe that the mythology of cyberspace often serves only to muddy our thinking about the new reality of our networked world. I think this is particularly true of the discussion around "social networking". Our online social networks are more similar to the villages and tribal groupings our anscestors created than they are different. One of the ways in which they are similar is their size. Neither smoke signals nor broadband internet access has substantially changed this fundamental aspect of human behavior, at least not yet. In fact, there is a specific number that has been suggested as the maximum number of interpersonal relationships that a human can reasonably maintain, Dunbar's number, which is 147.8. Dunbar (a researcher at the University College of London hypothesizes:

...there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. ...(this) group size... would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming. (...) My suggestion, then, is that language evolved as a "cheap" form of social grooming, so enabling the ancestral humans to maintain the cohesion of the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time.

Christopher Allen has some interesting observations to add about how that group size might be effected by the introduction of modern communications technologies:

Ultima Online provides one of the best examples of what sizes an online community will support because it's well documented and the overall game size is large enough to generate many smaller communities. If you look at Raph Koster's statistics for the size of groups in Ultima Online, you will see a definite point of diminishing returns at around 150; however, you will also see that most groups are around 60 large.

I note, with some interest, that the number here is smaller, and not larger, than Dunbar's number. It doesn't seem like the additional communication modalities (if you like) afforded to us by the internet is having a significant impact on our ability to do the "social grooming" that Dunbar postulates as the limiting factor on the size of our social networks. We seem to still be developing the set of non-verbal cues we take for granted in face to face communications - emoticons are hardly a precision instrument for social grooming - so perhaps our networks get "looser" (when their primary context is online), but apparently not broader. To me, the interesting question is not whether these relationships are "better" or "worse" (they're simply different), but to what new use shall we adapt them, once we've gotten over the idea that they are an analog for "off-line" relationships?

My interview with a late adopter about web 2.0

2006-01-20T14:27:00.000-08:00

It took Gutenberg's printing press decades to make an impact on the lives of ordinary people, and the impact of the Internet on day-to-day life for most people is just starting to be felt. Watching the early adopters is instructive and fun, but the mainstream is where the real money is, right? One of the things early adopters do that mainstream users will not is manage complexity, so let's look at some of the places where we early "web 2.0" adopters tolerate complexity for clues about what Web 2.1 can do better. Here's my notes from an interview with a classic late adopter. She's a relative of mine.

Email habits: Nearly every day she checks inbox at least once. Answer. Typing skills not very good, so often wait a few days to get the 30-45 minutes it takes to write an email. In a week, she responds to 10 emails, and send an original email about once a week. Most email is exchanged communicating with friends and family, but sometimes for business. Business communications always start on the phone, but sometimes the other person initiates a switch to email. Less often she initiates the switch to email. She explicitly adds people's addresses to email address book, because it's easy and convenient, but keesp other contact information separeately on paper. Can't imagine a good way (or a good reason to) amalgamate the two "address books". Have a couple of dozen contacts (family far away eg) that she only corresponds over email with. In contrast, there are 8-10 people she only writes to over post. For about a dozen people exchangine email has replaced letter writing. She has two larger mailing lists that she's created, each with 30 members. Both of these lists are related to reunions she's organizing (one for her college grad class, and one for a family reunion). She Has one smaller group made up of more intimate friends as well. 90% of the time she spends on the computer is dedicated to email. Other than email, she uses the computer for Banking (checks balances only, does everything else in person at the branch). Uses browsers default search engine to search for - recipes - health info - family history research She knows difference between search and location field in the browser and sometimes types urls directly in that people have given her. When she finds what she's looking for, she usually prints it out and files it. Doesn't know what bookmarks are or how to copy and paste from web pages into other files ("sometimes it gets garbled..."). Aspirations: To be able to manage the information I find better Wants to learn to do more, more proficiently, but doesn't want to spend more than two hours a week at it. Next project is to learn about Digital photos on the internet, how to share them with friends and family, and use software tools to improve photos ("what's 'photochop'?") What kinds of photos and with whom (I ask)? Family pictures to share with others who are far away. Print pictures to put in an album. (Why print them at all?) To share with people wo aren't online, want to sit and browse pics sitting around the coffee table.

These are basically my notes copied directly, so hopefully they're readable enough to be useful. I thought I would share them unvarnished with all of you, in the hope you may get some value out of them. I know I found it interesting.

Web 2.1

2006-01-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Web2.0 extended mindcloudmap, by kosmar.

I'm looking forward to Web 2.1... You know, the one your mother/grandfather/cousin can use. The one that makes it easy for late adopters to tag and placecast and vlog. I know a great many people who would fall into the "late adopter" category, who are also avid content creators of one type or another. Very few of them use flickr. Fewer still have a Blog. None of them has a flickr badge on their Blog, or even create blog entries based on their photos in Flickr (which doesn't seem that hard to me, but apparently is above the threshold of difficulty for most). Web 2.1 will make everything easy. More on this later.

Get Your Butt Out of My Face

2005-12-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

Get Your Butt Out of My Face,
by sallyjenn.

In a MediaPost article titled "The Importance of Online Social Networking", Tom Hespos says: "...corporate America still thinks, by and large, that ads need to be interruptive in order to be effective. How long will it be before these companies figure out that one doesn't need to plaster the Internet with pop-up ads to be perceived as interruptive?" I wonder when they will realize that in the online world, and increasingly elsewhere, interruptive marketing is largely perceived to be offensive? (I couldn't resist the picture, with the perfect title and everything! I thought it was a perfect analogy - your cat jumps up in front of your browser window and sticks his butt in your face...)
Jim Meskauskas (I think) coined the term "Flow Experience Marketing" (which is a little flowery for me, but still...) to describe how marketing can 'get in the flow' instead of interrupting all the time.

"The idea is that instead of creating an arresting experience with advertising full of a product's and brand's value propositions, you let products be part of an experience already being had. You let the product play the role of Robin rather than constantly casting it in the roll (sic) of Batman. The product or service becomes part of an experience and, thus, part of a user's 'background of everydayness.'"

To me, this is a crucial concept for marketers to internalize: don't leach value out of the context you're in (like TV ads do) - always add value (like Levi's antidote, or Coca-Cola's sponsorship of Buzz-oven). If you're not adding value, you're sticking your butt in your customers' faces. Unless you're in the porn industry (although sometimes it's hard to tell), this is usually a bad thing. I know I've said it before, but I feel so strongly about this, I'll say it again: buy the drinks. Your customers will make you part of the conversation just as surely as if you barge up to the table and shout "have I got a deal for you!", only they'll be saying nice things. Technorati tags: Marketing, Advertising, Sponsorship, Customers, SocialNetworking

Whoa - is that my business?

2005-12-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

,
by t-squared.

I had a conversation today with Christian Cotichini, entrepreneur and founder of a company called Make Technologies, and somebody I've known for years. We spoke of many things, but one topic that I thought was worth a brief posting was our experience of how taking venture capital distorts a business. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of your new investor as a "customer" - and your business plan as the "product" they have purchased from you. Your business model can become a kind of artifact, describing a theoretical five-year exit strategy, instead of a living document, with day-to-day relevance.
Technorati Tags: Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Business

Ahhh... Those were the days

2005-12-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

In honour of the fifth year since I founded Enfolding Systems (which was originally called Burning Tiger), I thought that I would repost a conversation we had in the early days about precision vs. expressiveness. This conversation was captured by my friend and colleague Stewart Butterfield (later of Flickr fame), who was working with us at the time.

"...we humans spend most of our time classifying and constraining: This is a fax number and not a cell phone; this is a press release and not an airplane manual. The free-form world is made up of primitives that we assemble together to construct more complex systems. The challenge, as I see it, is that these primitives are themselves made up of yet smaller things, and so forth, fractally. You could go to the nth degree of detail, but that's not how humans work. We get to an acceptible level of detail for our purpose, and then approximate the rest. For any given actor in a particular context there is a level of detail that is acceptible, and it can be substantially different given a different actor or even subtle changes in context."

Who's watching whom?

2005-12-16T13:35:00.000-08:00

Here's something new and interesting...
"The TiVo Videoblog Project is currently experimenting with ways to make the new medium of videoblogs accessible on television. If you have a videoblog or are interested in participating, please fill out this form."
So, here is Tivo asking for viewers to participate in the creation of content on their network. How about a version of the Tivo hardware that is for 'casting as well as viewing? Camera and microphone built in, bundled with a hosting service, etc. I can think of a few people who would love it, including my parents, who are always interested in seeing more of their grandchildren.

A Medicine for Melancholy

2005-12-16T08:20:00.000-08:00

Levi's has launched an interesting project in Europe called Antidote (my apologies to my readers for whom this is older news - I realized I hadn't posted this article before). Levi's will provide support for youth grassroots "self-publishing" projects. Poetry Slams, "collaborative fashion exhibitions", small-scale local magazines, music/photography exhibitions - their intent is to support approximately forty such events across Europe in the first year.

Helene Venge, who is the Digital Marketing Manager for Levi's in Europe, says:

"Youth reality today is defined by what you choose to believe, not what you are told to believe. This is one of the reasons indie or �amateur� publishing is at an all time high. Antidote�s content is driven by the views of cultural passion communities at a local level and shared across Europe in a way that only the Internet allows. It�s a dynamic, integrated program across three streams, ultimately coming together online. This means three different opportunities with which to reach our target audience where they are, in a way that is relevant for them."

"Levi's� Antidote is a living, growing snapshot of what people are thinking and doing across Europe. It's a collection of stories, images, sounds and movies in bite-sized chunks. With each chunk you can find out about the people behind it, and ways you can get involved in the program. We collaborate with many contributors to share their work here on the site and in a free quarterly print magazine, which is distributed in Levi's� stores across Europe. We collaborate with many contributors to share their work here on the site and in a free quarterly print magazine, which is distributed in Levi's� stores across Europe."

As you know, I'm fascinated by how young people (like my own four children) effortlessly extend their senses and identities beyond the boundaries earlier generations take for granted. I think what Levi's is doing here, supporting the exploration of these new spaces, is tremendously powerful. And pretty brave: they're not entirely in control here. I wonder when this effort will make it to North America? Or maybe somebody else will beat them to the punch?

Nobody's watching - they're all in the studio working on the next episode

2005-12-15T17:22:00.000-08:00

We Are the Web, by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine.

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion. Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outclassed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer involvement is a complete Lazarus move: "We thought that died long ago." The deep enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned 10 years ago. This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.

I have a question for you: what happens when the quantity of content produced is greater than we can consume? What happens when it's 10x? 100x? What then? It's nearly there already. Think of all the content you create in a day, passively as well as actively. Five hundred channels seems conservative now, even quaint. How about five billion channels?

But this one goes up to eleven...

2005-12-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

Push For Free Cheese by Vidiot.

Kathy Sierra writes in Creating Passionate Users about using what she calls "EQ Modelling" to come up with Breakthrough Ideas. It's reminiscent of the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which talks about defining an entirely new space for your product to compete in. If you make yourself uniquely valuable to your customers, you make the competition irrelevant, or at least give yourself some breathing room.

Coming up with breakthrough ideas using EQ modeling
Least effective way: Figure out what the existing sliders are for this product or service, and change the value of one or more sliders. This is how most companies compete, and it's usually the most painful--the constant struggle to reduce price, add features, whatever it takes to stay one step ahead of the competition.

More effective: Tune one or more of the typical sliders in an extremely dramatic way. For example, instead of cutting the price, make the product free. But this usually means you end up creating one or more new sliders for whatever business model allows you to make this drastic change.

Much more effective: Add new sliders for things that competitors have taken for granted, and haven't been competing on. In other words, dramatically change the weighting of things the competition had not considered changing. Example: our books.

Most effective (for breakthrough ideas, not always the best ideas ; ) Add wildly new sliders for things nobody in that industry had considered. Note that what's "wildly new" for one type of product or service might be standard/typical for another. A Customization slider, for example, would not be unusual for a wedding cake bakery, but was very unusual for athletic shoes.

This is great stuff. Sometimes it's easy to forget the joy to be had in the unexpected; the gift you never would have thought to ask for, or the ingredients you never would have thought to mix together (Whisky in tomato sauce? Carrots in salsa?). It's also easy to forget that sometimes you just need to trust your intuition and head out into the undiscovered country.

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana

2005-12-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

Fruit Sign, Salt Lake City, Utah 2003, by Roadsidepictures.

It's coming up on five years since I formed Enfolding Systems, now a subsidiary of Blast Radius more commonly known as XMetaL. I would like to take a moment and recognize a few people who have positively impacted my life in the last five years. Dethe and Ron, who were the first two people I recruited to my crazy scheme. Michael Gannon and Paul Prescod, who were crazy enough to accept job offers for this strange startup, and who have been an unbelievable treat to work with. Most of all, Deborah (you know why). ..And to everyone who's contributed to our progress so far: customers, employees, partners, investors, friends... Thank you.

Caveat venditor

2005-12-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

�a ira: Parigi brucia mentre io scrivo/3,
by Babsi Jones.

Let the vendor beware! This is a new era of customer empowerment; we've probably all seen the cartoon with a small fish about to be eaten by a larger fish, who is in turn about to be eaten by a huge school of tiny fish. For this metaphor to hold true in the world of online retailing, all of the "little fish" (the customers) must choose to move together. One small indescretion is unlikely to make this happen. What careless or clueless vendors often overlook is that each small interaction you have with a "tiny fish" is a tiny bit of motivation - it may be positive, negative, or neutral - to act later. Each customer you have encountered is inclined to feel some way about your business, and in this new world of online flash crowds, reaching the tipping point can have some substantially deleterious effects. Is the balance in your account positive or negative?

Socrates, the original Blogger

2005-12-01T13:08:00.001-08:00

I thought I would share with you all a great comment from Phil Jones I came a cross while wandering around Nicholas Carr's weblog:

Socrates was just some guy (a stone-mason) who wandered around picking arguments with people in the market-place. He fisked his opponents with nit-picking fine-grained carping over details; made all sorts of outrageous anti-commonsensical claims - which an echo-chamber of dittoheads all dumbly agreed with; never respected any formal learning institutions or professionalism; and annoyed most people to the point of wanting to kill him. How do you get more blog than that?

Hilarious! So, on that note, Nicholas Carr has some good (and controversial) things to say about "Web 2.0", but I disagree totally with his position that the "cult of the amateur" is a dangerous force on the web. The reality is that we're all amateurs - I don't care how much specialized expertise you have in some area, one day in the future people will look back on your understanding as quaint and childish. The "cult of the dishonest" is a much more dangerous, and real, force on the web. Deliberately claiming to know more than you do, or citing facts you know to be false, is dangerous. Spouting off about something you're not credentialed for is just human nature.

Uniting creative executions and innovative advancements

2005-11-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

Spinning,
by phil h.

Spinning, mashing and connecting... it's what I do. I've come to terms with being a Generalist. In fact, I've come to be proud of it - after all, it's one of the hardest things to do well. It's not just a matter of spinning cellphones on tables to see what happens, although that's usually how it starts ;-). Steve Hardy makes his case in The Creative Generalist that Generalists are key to discontinuous innovation, being better situated to see how previously unrelated things can be recombined to create something new.

"Ideas are the product of divergent thinking, lateral steps and questions dealing with completely unrelated notions. Seldom pure and often appearing out of nowhere, ideas come from a kaleidoscopic grab bag of other ideas(...) Ideas cannot belimited to the confines of a silo. They need space to run around and occasionally bump into strangers."

On that note, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is taking an interesting multi-disciplinary approach to research:

"(T)he institute is building horizontal links among departments to foster multidisciplinary studies and creating research teams that integrate individuals� deep expertise across disciplines to enable more comprehensive studies beyond those led by single principal investigators. We expect this new approach will redefine the very nature of the university system � the traditional home for fundamental research."

Vitruvian Man,
by AstroAlbert.

...Which is very cool, of course. I would like to see a University of this type take its General Studies program this seriously. Bringing teams of specialists together to share insights is great, but where are the "connectors", the Da Vincis who can bring perspective, without the preconceptions borne of specialization?

"Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen."
--Leonardo Da Vinci

FlagrantDisregard's Cool Flickr Toys...

2005-11-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Trail (color),
by fd.

All the Flikr nrds already know this of course, but those of us who still leave the "e" in "er" might appreciate knowing of flagrantdisregard.com's Flickr Toys. Create a mosaic, magazine cover, playing cards, and other neat things with this suite of web-based flickr tools. Silly, but fun - especially for the kids.

LinkedIn Feature Request

2005-11-24T01:22:00.000-08:00

mandala green, by jackfrancis.

I've been using LinkedIn and Plaxo quite extensively over the last few weeks and months, and I've run into a limitation in both to a greater or lesser extent. An article in Fast Company discussing the question of quality vs. quantity of contacts in your professional network alludes to the problem. You can optimize your LinkedIn network for one or the other, but it doesn't give you any help in balancing the two. If you're like me, your contacts don't fit strictly into one or two buckets, but live on a continuum from family through friend to remote acquaintance. Just as I think I benefit from having contacts that are very close along with contacts that are less familiar, I think the network benefits from having a variety of networking styles in play at once. This lets me do useful things like optimize my "path" through the contact network for either speed (shortest path) or strength (highest "friend" quotient).

LinkedIn doesn't give you any way to call someone a "friend" (like Flickr does - those guys are so smart...). Although Plaxo does let me say that someone is allowed to see my personal information along with my professional information, it doesn't let me do anything interesting with that metadata, like query on it. Pretty please, I want to add my own metadata to my Plaxo or LinkedIn contacts beyond just a simple note field. As a start, I want be put each of my contacts somewhere along a continuum from family/friend to acquaintance, and use that metadata to optimize my networking activity appropriately for my objectives at the time. Thanks!

All your base are belong to us

2005-11-23T16:58:00.000-08:00

Wow. They're mad.

It's some how not as catchy as "Workers of the world, unite!" but I think it comes from the same place... In "What's your Antidote?" Alan Moore writes that "we shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things we care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers." Damn right. It's not just that we want you (marketer) to give up control over your brand, it's that your brand already belongs to us. We simply don't care what you think your brand is all about. We're going to mash it up for ourselves, and all the little (tm) symbols in the world ain't gonna stop us. Our culture belongs to us.

There's no such thing as cyberspace.

2005-11-16T11:14:00.000-08:00

Analog Sky,
by Corporal Tunnel.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." - Neuromancer, by William Gibson

William Gibson was wrong (whew). It turns out that there's no such thing as cyberspace. A few things collided in my mind recently. One: I've been reading this report: Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Teen Content Creators and Consumers. Two: Last Saturday night I had a conversation with friend of a friend a party about the isolation and impersonality (did I just make up a word?) of "cyberspace". And three: I have this meme I inherited from I know not where: "Always-on Relationships." Obviously, as a civilization, we're still processing, just beginning really, to feel the impact of the expansion of our network beyond physical space. We're still updating our idea of what community is, what workplace, education, conversation is, in this new environment. Those who are going through the process of change marvel at the young ones who had no such preconceptions, and seem to stretch effortlessly past the old boundaries. I love the idea of "social networks" because it contains within it the recognition that "the net", at least the human part, has always existed. Instead of having only light and sound waves as the communication protocol, now it also includes IP and those things we've built on top. Some interesting tidbits from the Pew report:

40% of online kids who live in cities remix and mash original creations out of the web
38% of all online teens say they read blogs, and 62% of those say they only read blogs of people inside their social network
57% of internet-using teens and 50% of teens overall (representing 12M US youth) self-publish on the internet
90% of kids who blog, and 72% of those who don't, use IM to communicate with their friends, and 55%/35% use SMS (I'm guessing this is different in Europe)

That doesn't sound very isolating and impersonal. It sounds like conversation. I can't remember where I first heard the term "always-on relationships". I could be that I inherited this meme from the writings of Philip E. Agre, from the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, who wrote, among many other things, two papers which I highly recommend you read: Cyberspace as American Culture and The Market Logic of Information. I find very compelling the idea that we beginning to see a generation that has not grown up with the idea of the internet as a separate "cyberspace", but instead experiences it as an aspect of the environment in which they live; another channel alongside "real space", only with different characteristics. The Internet as a technology, without the ideology of cyberspace.

Death to slogans!

2005-11-14T14:51:00.000-08:00

Say it with me: Death to slogans! At least to those empty, one way, marketing slogans that attempt to change the way I feel about something I already own. That last bit doesn't sound so good when you shout it, but you get the idea. Interesting article by Al Ries in AdAge.com, talking about how the city of Atlanta has chosen this incredibly lame slogan for the city. I bow to Mr. Ries' industry experience when he explains why, in general, bad slogans happen to good people. In this particular case, he points to "creativity" as the culprit. The ad agency wants to win awards, and so they need to do something "new". I'm not sure I entirely agree. This doesn't look especially creative to me. Maybe the problem is that they weren't creative enough, either in using the existing brand asset, or in establishing any new positioning. This is a perfect example of a community that already exists, and has a narrative of its own. This city don't belong to the marketing department, the city bureaucrats, or the politicians. If Atlanta is "Hotlanta" in the minds of the community, then that's what it is. No matter how much new city letterhead you print.

It's not really about the web...

2005-11-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

I was reading mynameiskate (which is fast becoming my VERY FAVORITE blog), and it took me to gapingvoid, a site written by Hugh MacLeod (who also helps to run a bespoke tailoring firm English Cut who coincidentally just made a suit for my friend Stewart), where I heard about this contest to help design a new wine bottle for a South African winery called Stormhoek and it got me very excited. You see, one of the things that Hugh MacLeod said to Stormhoek was "You're not competing with Jacob's Creek or Blossom Hill. You're competing with Google and Microsoft and Apple and Skype." Wow. So I entered the contest, and this is what I wrote:

One of my favorite things to do with wine is bring it to someone else's house. It spreads the word, and it's a bottle that's pretty sure to get drunk by a group of people who might not have purchased the wine before. This wine should be the most "give-away-able" wine in the store. It should become a story we can tell to each other at the time we drink it, and later, remembering. To make it giveaway-friendly, I should be able to personalize it; make it a story I tell, not just a gift I bring:

A (mostly) blank label. Maybe it's treated paper and you need a special pen, like those kids in the car drawing kits. or something like one of those kid's drawing tablets that has a top layer you peel off to erase and start again?

A label that is "remembers" my hand-print as I carry it into the house - maybe heat sensitive label that "sets" after a few minutes of consistent contact with your hand? If it had a "mood ring" quality to it so that every hand print was a slightly different colour that would be great.

Each label is a clear sleeve into which I can put a photo. The launch of the new bottle design would somehow include an instant camera so the picture can be taken "before bottle is drunk" and "after bottle is drunk". Give the recipient a reason to keep the bottle (and the branding) in their house afterwards.

The wine should be an ice-breaker; it should become a story we can tell to each other

Each label can be removed to create a cool and fun ice-breaker game. It could be enhanced by (but not require) a visit to the website. .

Each bottle comes with a USB key, that has some "limited edition" MP3s burned into ROM (along with the useful RAM, so it can be used as a regular USB key).

...or how about we get really crazy and make each bottle a disposable MP3 player itself? The electronics to do that are tiny now (think about $2.50 in volume - each bottle has a headphone jack and plays a different song. Bring a six-pack of 500ml bottles and you're the bartender AND the DJ.

So the wine bottle becomes a web 2.0 application, hooking into and enhancing services and communities that already exist.

What if everyplace was everywhere?

2005-11-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

At the Media in Canada Forum last month (and as reported by one of my favorite bloggers mynameiskate) , David Verklin foresees a "collision of commerce and cause where marketers will combine their efforts with philanthropy, creating a new, and hybrid medium." This is fascinating to me, and I'll write more about this later, but then he went on, in more sparsely reported comments, to advise his audience to "look for ways for your brand to have physical contact with your demo(graphic)." This got my mind churning... To return to the topic hinted at in an earlier post of mine, I see the narrowing of the gap (mind the gap...) between our virtual and our physical lives accelerating. One of the early markers of this trend, Geocaching, has been popular for a while among those with investigating feet. Another one of the interesting manifestations of this meme is "Placecasting." HP Labs has been doing some work in this area, participating in a project called scape the hood, and there's an interesting project called "Mobile Bristol", both of which attempt to anchor the webscape in the landscape. Walmart, it appears, is taking this seriously. The internet will be everywhere in the physical world, for sure. What will it mean if the physical world is everywhere in the internet? At Web 2.0, listening to a panel of teenagers talk about their lives, I was struck by how much their relationships were always "on". Their friends were always with them, either in person, or on the phone, via SMS, or via IM, and they differentiated little between these various channels. How long will it be before being together in physical space is just another channel you can tune in?

...and this is your R&D on drugs...

2005-11-03T21:45:00.000-08:00

I got an email from Randy Hanker (who is the Princial of Enable Technologies, a PDM consultancy in Vancouver) in response to an earlier post of mine. I had quoted Dr. Paul Kedrosky, as he made the case that in a world where the cost of customer acquisition, data storage, and software infrastructure drops nearly to zero, and the real value of any startup is in the quality of its concepts, access to venture capital becomes a less and less important success factor. Randy pointed me to the November Business 2.0 where it's suggested that R&D costs have plummeted (as well) because "the user base has become the manufacturer's R&D lab". I hadn't seen that talkback (thanks for that, Randy), but I had noticed what Randy was talking about, this very interesting change in the way that R&D is being done. Companies (like Konfabulator), are leveraging the community gravitational effect to build active innovation communities around their platform. It's a popular idea (that often proves hard to execute) that by publishing web service/RESTful APIs, or by open-sourcing some or all of your IP, you can bring value to these communities. The most successful Web 2.0 companies are being proactive and going further, creating forums (fora?) for their customers to add value of their own, strengthening the ties that bind the community to itself, and to the platform. At the same time, some larger companies are adopting a kind of R&D model that has been popular in the Pharmaceutical industry for quite a while: small companies (like Ludicorp), innovate, creating new capabilities (like Flickr) with only a general idea how to commercialize. Once they have proven they have something of value, a larger company (like Yahoo) acquires them to feed into their "commercialization machine". As an interesting aside, I'd point out that in addition to looking outside, Google has leveraged their enormous cash resources to create their own internal community of part-time entrepreneurs, who then get "bought" from their current projects to work full time on their new invention; gmail and scholar being two examples that stand out. It's easy to see how these two trends reinforce each other: Lots of entrepreneurial activity creates lots of opportunties for bigger players to cherry-pick, and those high-profile success stories encourage yet more activity. It's when you add venture capital accelerant that the whole thing starts to spin out of control, but that's another story. Coming soon: Oprah Winfrey gets it. Jon Stewart, not so much.

Conversation is the new Television

2005-11-02T15:56:00.000-08:00

Further to my thesis that technical writing and marketing (not advertising!) need to converge, I dug up an older article, Conversation writing kicks formal writing's ass, from Kathy Sierra, blogging for Creating Passionate Users. In it, Kathy points out that in studies performed by the Journal of Education Psychology, perfomed in 2000, participants who used trainging materials in a conversational style "produced between 20 and 46 percent more solutions" than subjects who used documentation in a formal style. She goes further:

(...) one of the theories on why speaking directly to the user is more effective than a more formal lecture tone is that the user's brain thinks it's in a conversation, and therefore has to pay more attention to hold up its end! Sure, your brain intellectually knows it isn't having a face-to-face conversation, but at some level, your brain wakes up when its being talked with as opposed to talked at. And the word "you" can sometimes make all the difference.

This makes perfect sense, of course. Humans are pack animals, and are built to crave authentic, human, interactions. Put that thought beside what Bob Garfield at AdAge says in his article "Listenomics":

"...and that native authenticity is out there, like Arctic oil, just waiting to be tapped. Pitiful as this may sound, there are people all across this great nation of ours who give immense amounts of thought to, for instance, the Whopper Jr. They�re not in it for the money, either. They just plain care."

They sure do. They're creating unsanctioned television ads, writing unofficial user guides, mashing up logos and trademarks into new works that express how they feel, and what they want to get out of your products. Garfield gives the great example of Skin So Soft, which was known as an effective insect repellent. I know this to be true, because I was treeplanting in the late 80's and we all used it instead of Deet. Of course the company hated this - it wasn't part of the story they were trying to tell around their product. It took them a decade to bring out the product we all really wanted: a "Skin so soft" optimized for repelling insects. Have you ever driven 15 miles in the cab of a truck with 6 sweaty treeplanters covered in heavily perfumed body oil? Ugh.

So, now I'm really convinced...

2005-11-01T11:38:00.000-08:00

David Hornik, who is a partner at August Capital writes in VentureBlog that he's got no idea what Web 2.0 is all about (probably because it's not about venture capital). Once you get past the giggle that he's writing about this in his blog, he goes on to make a very good point, that it doesn't much matter whether Web 2.0 is revolutionary or incremental if it gets entrepreneurs creating cool stuff that makes our lives better. I'd add to that - what the heck is wrong with just building (and owning 100% of!) a small, profitable, company? Well... unless you're a venture capitalist, I guess. Paul Kedrosky, who is a Fellow at Ventures West, and was one of my co-presenters at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum's panel on Web 2.0, said it perfectly: The cost of customer acquisition has plummeted, the cost of infrastructure has plummeted, the cost of software has gone basically to zero; so why do you need venture capital again? He added that when entrepreneurs come to him and say they need n million dollars for their new Web 2.0 startup, he tells them: you don't get it. In 2001, when I started Enfolding Systems, the tech bubble bursting imposed some of that discipline on us - we couldn't really raise significant capital, and we had to focus on building value, and doing it on a shoestring. Ultimately, we were acquired by Blast Radius in 2002, which worked out well for everybody, I think, but that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't left ourselves (as shareholders) the flexibility to exit in a creative way, that suited us. If we had done a VC round (as, frankly, we had hoped to do), that acquisition would never have happened, and I wouldn't have been able to do all the cool stuff I've done in the last three years.

Put down the term sheet and step away slowly...

2005-10-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

"Please God, give me one more bubble. I promise not to screw it up this time."
Bumper sticker seen on Sand Hill Rd.

I'm telling you right now: don't take the money. You don't need it. In fact, I think taking venture capital for Web 2.0 businesses is immoral (I'm overstating for effect, here). That is money that should, by rights, be going into projects that are truly capital-intensive and can really change the world, like cars that run on water or a pill that curbs your desire to ask your doctor about the latest designer pharmaceutical. Please, let's spend our time building cool but inexpensive things (or expensive, but really important things), and not frothing up the social networking investor frenzy until it collapses in another maelstrom of daytrader bankruptcy filings. I was scoffing to a friend the other day about how web 2.0 had only made it a lot cheaper to build companies with no discernable business model, when I thought to myself: wait a minute... that's really fantastic. Think of it: No "hockey stick" revenue graphs, no powerpoint sleaze, no VCs... ever. Work hard, have fun, maybe even get a little bit rich. Now that's cool. Try this on: What's new about Web 2.0? A new model for web-based micro-business, based in small geography-independent social groups. Social (network) proximity joins physical proximity as the foundation for the establishment of online "neighborhoods". ...this is an interesting idea. I'll think about it some more and get back to you. What do you think?

The Physics of Online Communities

2005-10-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

Flickr community mosaic, originally uploaded by Bongocopter.

Gravity is a fundamental force in the universe. We're not sure what it is, or how it works, but we can observe and measure it's effects. The Law of Universal Gravitation can expressed as an equation: F=G*(m₁m₂/r²), where F is the gravitational force between two objects, G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the objects, and r is the distace between the two objects. Likewise, I believe there must be ann equivalent principle, that expresses the force that binds together an online community (that I will call, for reasons that will become clear later, the Group Law of Universal Gravitation, or GLUG). The GLUG says: F=G*(C(S-N)/P²)

F = The Gravitational force the community applies to you
C = The member's level of contribution to the community (your "mass")
S = The level of relevant activity in the community (Signal)
N = The level of irrelevant activity (Noise) � Signal and Noise taken together represent the "mass" of the community
P = The Priority you place on the Focus of the community in your life (the higher the number, the lower priority) � roughly equivalent to "distance"
G = The tendency of humans to bond together - the "gravitational constant"

I mean GLUG as a metaphor, obviously, as these values can't truly be quantified, but I think it's a pretty good illustration of the point I've made in some earlier posts. If your customer base is well represented in this community, or you're trying to encourage a community that exists around your product, look at this equation and consider this: what of these values can you influence? Not G, and it's very hard to influence P; you can try to reduce, or at least not increase N, which, once it reaches a value higher than S, causes any community to explode in a shower of spam. You can obviously effect S, and this is usually where marketing efforts start (you need to think carefully first, so as not to increase N). Every community needs valuable content and contributions - think of this as the icebreaker activity at a party, or the "life of the party" type people you invite to encourage conversation. Something that's often overlooked, however, is your ability to increase C. Giving community members good tools to become more active participants (which is what an open bar at a networking event is intended to do � <grin/>) can have a significant impact. Slashdot's "reputation" is an excellent example of a tool that encourages C, by giving people a reason to post. Flickr's deceptively simple "post to Forum" button beside every one of your photos is an excellent example. Until I started to use it, I never would have thought myself a valuable contributor to any community related to photograpy (thanks again, Stewart).

Apparently I've distinguished myself

2005-10-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a surprise. Vancouver Community College, where I volunteer my time on the Program Advisory Committee, has seen fit to present me with an Award of Distinction, for "outstanding contributions to my field of endeavor". This is flattering in itself, but this is a new program for the 40th anniversary year of the college, and apparently I'm getting the first one. Although there will only be one per year from now on, this year they're presenting one for each decade the college has been around. The other three people (alphabetically, of course): * Ujjal Dosanjh, the Federal Minister of Health, and former Premier of British Columbia * Paul Mulangu, who founded the Centre of Integration for African Immigrants (CIAI) * Eliza Olsen, who founded the Burns Bog Conservation Society Wow. Two prominent community activists and a federal cabinet minister. And lil' ol' me. Thanks.

Speaking at Vancouver Enterprise Forum

2005-10-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

I have been invited by Dick Hardt, the CEO and founder of Sxip Identity, and the driving force behind Identity 2.0, to speak at Vancouver Enterprise Forum on the 5th of October. I'll be speaking about user-generated content, and will be sharing a stage with some very bright people from all around the Web 2.0 scene, like Paul Kedrosky of Ventures West, Roland Tanglao of Bryght, Andre Charland of eBusiness Applications, Geoff Hansen of Rocket Builders, and of course, Dick. It's going to be a lot of fun - hope to see you there! I've just taken a look at the Sxip press release on this. Dick called me a Luminary... it's usually the other way around. LOL.

Marketing and user-generated content

2005-10-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

Most marketing people I meet are frightened and confused by the explosion of user-generated content. It turns their whole world inside out and they don't know how to make heads or tails of it. They feel like they've walked into a room full of strangers all involved in deep conversation and they don't know how to butt in. Maybe I'm standing too close to the wireless hub, but it seems increasingly straightforward to me: The most effective marketing is a compelling story. These stories become part of my own narrative; not a story told to me, but part of the story that I tell about myself. The stories we tell each other about ourselves is the glue that holds a community together. I think that this is where traditional marketing types begin having some difficulty. It's a difficult leap to make, to agree that they won't *own* these stories, that they belong to the people, but I believe this is fundamental. If you (the company) let it be my story, you lose some control, but in exchange you get to be a part of something far more fundamental to my identity as a person. For example: Why is "adopt a child" so much more powerful than "send some money"? Because it becomes a story I can tell. The picture on the fridge is of a person that I know about - I can tell my friends what she's like, what clothes I bought her, how she loved the teddy bear the best, how the glasses helped her to read for the first time. It becomes part of the narrative of my life. So, the moral of the story? Don't butt in. You can't control this conversation - it's not yours to control. Buy them a drink so they don't need to break the flow of their conversation. Give them a place to talk, give them something to talk about; make it compelling and you will be at the heart of it more surely than if you crash the table and break the spell.

still life with corn dog

2005-10-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

still life with corn dog,
originally uploaded by Bongocopter.

Thanks, Gizmodo, for using this photo as the caption for an article on memory-stick hosted email applications. My daughter's art has now been seen by thousands of gearheads around the world. I love the web.

Turning your company inside out

2005-10-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

TechPubs is not a very influential department in most companies. You're considered a cost centre, massaging content and concepts that originate elsewhere in the company (like engineering), and then pushing it out into the world. As a result, most departments justifiably consider themselves underfunded and understaffed, and find themselves fighting for budgets and respect. But the times are a-changin'. Multi-channel publishing initiatives like syndication networks and collaborative product development are accelerating demand for high-quality content. Blogging, Wikis, and other social-software phenomena are transforming the nature of marketing on the web. In the Web 2.0 world, people don't buy products, they join communities. Often, those communities know more about how your company's products actually work than the engineers who designed them. This presents a tremendous opportunity to the forward-looking techpubs department to turn their traditional role inside-out, and become a conduit for customer participation in the process of designing and documenting products. Many will, understandably, fear this change. Letting your customers participate directly in the development of product documentation will require new processes, new ways of working, new relationships. But in that change is an opportunity to become more meaningfully engaged in the process of creating excellent products.

OpenDocument - why do we need this again?

2005-10-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

Look - I'm as big a standards geek as you're likely to meet, and I have a world of respect for Tim Bray, but I simply do not understand why I should care very much about ODF, let alone why it should "turn the world inside out". As far as I can see, this is simply encoding as XML the same broken model we've had in MS Office for many years now. Content and presentation mashed together in a jumble, and ten years from now, if I want to get my content out, I'll need to know quite a bit about how openoffice works (encodes fields, handles page breaks, styles text runs). Contrary to Tim's comments to News.com, the web was a tremendous explosion, not because HTML was an open standard (it really wasn't at the time). Leaving aside the fact that we had access to a world wide network for the first time, a) there were browsers on nearly every computer, b) HTML was simple enough that it could be coded by hand in notepad, and c) because you could teach yourself how to write it by using "view source" on any page you thought was cool. ODF: strike one, two and three by my count. Decouple the content from the presentation entirely, and then I'll be impressed. To me, DITA is the more singificant development. Now we can take a sophisticated XML content framework, and specialize it with company/industry/domain semantics without needing to futz around with DTDs or Schema. True single source, multi-channel publishing. Now that could turn everything inside out, not refighting the office suite wars of the 80's.

Web 2.0 - is it really made of people?

2005-10-13T21:27:00.001-07:00

One of the most interesting things about the web 2.0 conference was all the talk about communities. About how this new wave of innovation is really about empowering and connecting people. Lots of companies displayed their new plumage for us, displaying all kinds of great new social environments for the expression of social proximity. How are all of these companies going to make money, you ask? They are going to plaster billboards on their plazas and squares, and sell advertising through Google. Somewhere, somebody is going to solve the problem of connecting web communities with community-based business, though, I'm sure of it. That will be cool.

2005-06-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

$1,032,150,000 US Dollars and counting. That's how much money I've turned down since February 2005. I know that the various widows, bank managers, bureaucrats, and others who have contacted me did so confident that I would be able to help them move these funds out of their various troubled african nations of residence. I know that each one represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (except for those that got sent to me at two different email addresses), but I'm holding out for the perfect combination of incredible wealth, political intrigue, and convoluted grammar. Anything worth having is worth waiting for, right?

2005-06-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Irony is the most powerful force in the universe. Irony depends on the audience being able to recognize the opposition between what is obvious on the surface and what is known, but not apparent. Irony is what makes humans special. Slapstick hits the reptilian brain - it's physiological - but only conscious human intelligence can produce irony. My favorite superhero would be Irony Man. His superpower would be: "to make observations that reveal insight into human nature, especially poigniant in consideration of facts known only to the audience."

Why is Captain Beefheart so freaky?

2005-06-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

under the pool, originally uploaded by Bongocopter.

My four-year-old daughter asked me a few days ago: "Why is Captain Beefheart so freaky?" I said: some artists think differently - their brains work in a different way than other people; they put thoughts together that other people wouldn't. I could see her thinking about this. Since then, she's mentioned it once or twice. I wonder what will come out of this? I wonder if listening to C.B. from such a young age can have an impact on brain chemistry? Kind of like listening to Mozart, but more... freaky.

2005-05-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

I've eaten the morning... and stabbed the light with my sharper eye pounded on the doors of heaven demanding satisfaction

God's infinite spirograph

2005-04-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

Flickr seems unstructured to most people I talk to. A random collection of pictures thrown together with some simple keywords and search to try and derive some order from the chaos. To me, it looks crystalline, with fine threads hanging here and there like pencil lines, dividing the world into spaces: christmas/flower/manhole/fire.... each new tag is a new geometric aspect. //everywhere I see the bones - their shapes entwined into the flowers of god's infinite spirograph//

2005-03-24T00:35:00.000-08:00

I love to see my friends do well. This week, two people I respect and admire negotiated acquisitions of their respective companies. Smart people with good hearts; nice guys finishing first...

Mapping the Universe

2005-03-23T23:48:00.000-08:00

My father once said to me that (his) religion is like a map to the universe. I thought of this while some friends were discussing free will and fate and other light dinner conversation. If you believe that our thoughts and memories exist physically in our brains (it's hard to imagine anywhere else they'd be), then it follows logically that our understanding of the universe is always, necessarily, deficient in some way. At least it seems obvious to me, given the difference in scale between the number of neurons in our brains and the bits of information in the universe. I see religion as a useful approximation of the universe, in the way that a street map is a useful approximation of a city I may visit. (An aside: Mistaking the map for the city... When I see buildings exploding on TV these days, I think of people trying to change the world to make it match the map they carry around in their heads.) We (humans) seem to be very good at managing abstractions of this type (See my earlier post on approximation and schemas...). This trait, being "wired to believe", appears to be very useful for survival: if we couldn't use maps to get us around, we'd get lost a lot more often, or maybe stay a lot closer to home. At least, that's approximately what I think. ;-)

My daughter, the river

2005-03-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

My daughter, the river, originally uploaded by Fergusson.

My daughter. We sometimes call her scooter, because of the way she learned to move at first, undulating like a caterpillar. She went directly from that to walking, never crawling. To me, she's like a river, full of motion across dimensions. Slowly, the banks widen. Here: rushing water over clattering stones. There: slow water running deep. A permanent mark on my landscape, dividing my life into now and then. The closer I get, the more I see, fractally.

2005-02-23T21:28:00.000-08:00

OK - I'm going to give this Blog another try. This is going to be my third run at it. Each time something gets between me and the time required to post regularly. The acquisition of my company by Blast Radius, the birth of my third and then fourth child. You know, small things.

Sometimes, it seems to me that time happens all at once. I bumped into a woman recently, with whom I was madly in love as a young man (15, 16 years old). It was like the last 20 years never happened. My tongue felt like a throw rug - I half expected my face to bust out in acne. Sitting here at the computer, in my house, it seems now like a million years ago, but in that moment on the sidewalk it was like somebody had put the two ends of the string together, and I just stepped across from 1985 into my (somewhat chubbier) body. Maybe some parts of us are outside time, happening all at once. Maybe when you love someone, they occupy some physical part of your brain that only activates when they're there with you. If you're together, your love can grow. If you're apart, it's frozen, like in amber, waiting...

2002-07-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

XML is a destabilizing technology, and content authoring is an excellent example. Nobody has yet figured out the magic formula that will encourage content authors to broadly adopt XML in the content creation process. I think this is because XML gives us a completely new idea of what "content" is. What does it mean when you have a universal standard for describing structured data? It means that the application that originally created the content is irrelevant. It doesn't matter that a document was created in MSWord, or in Excel. What matters is what you, the current user/editor of the document want (and are allowed) to do with the content at that particular moment. What matters is your current task (Do you want to edit? Chart? Annotate? Approve?), the document type (sales report? resume? legal brief?), and your security/authentication information (what are you actually allowed to do?). In a word, the context is what matters. We're so used to sending each other "Word Files" and "PowerPoint Files", we've forgotten that it's us that owns the document, not our software. What we need are editors for tasks, not editors for files.

2002-01-16T18:48:00.000-08:00

Scripting News (Dave Winer) thinks that the browser vendors should work on in-browser editing. For most people, this means wysiwyg editors. The problem, though, is that wysiwyg editing is what broke the web in the first place. Wysiwyg editors abound, and they do allow some kinds of structure to be indicated, like links and paragraphs, but they don't separate content from presentation. What we need is a simple, web-based XML editor, and some simple, standard extensions to XHTML (you do know that XHTML is modular and extensible, don't you?). Microsoft tried to do it's own end run around this with Smart Tags (tm), but authors want control over what's in their documents.

2002-01-11T23:58:00.000-08:00

"Pride goes before a fall." Knowing your weaknesses is a key business skill; honestly assessing to yourself the weaknesses in your position gives you the opportunity to protect yourself. It sounds obvious to say it, but the casualties keep piling up. It's been my experience that the most common symptom is getting too far ahead of yourself, looking too far past your current challenges, and so missing some key detail in the environment. I'm trying to keep my eye on the ball.

2002-01-11T19:05:00.000-08:00

What does it take to create a powerful yet usable editing tool for natural-language semi-structured XML? Based on an email conversation between Dethe Elza (Chief Scientist at Burning Tiger) and I. Previously published, in part, by my favorite minor celebrity Stewart Butterfield . We humans spend most of our time classifying and constraining: This is a fax number and not a cell phone; this is a press release and not an airplane manual. Our free-form, semi-structured world is made up of primitives that we assemble together to construct more complex systems. The challenge, as I see it, is that these primitives are themselves made up of yet smaller things, and so forth, fractally. You could go to the nth degree of detail (and XML can let you go there), but that's not how humans work. We get to an acceptible level of detail for our current purpose, and then approximate the rest. For any given actor in a particular context there is a level of detail that is acceptible, and that level can be substantially different given a different actor or with even subtle changes in context. The model (schema) and view (interface) should be flexible enough to allow for different levels of approximation. On the other hand, if you were exchanging address listings with the others in your company and you arbitrarily changed the way you describe phone numbers (to remove the area code, because you didn't really need it at the time) you would potentially be hampering, rather than aiding, communication. The fact that everyone agreed on a common set of constraints is itself useful. Consider this example: Jane, the Lead Technical Writer for SpamTastic! Corp has a dual role: she creates the body text for SpamTastic!'s mailings, and she also is responsible for approving the work of other writers before it is released to publishing. When she opens a particular document for editing, does she want a full editing interface, with the ability to add and delete markup, or does she want simply to see checkboxes beside blocks of content, to indicate her approval for publishing? Does she always need to see the metadata that indicates the date and time most recent edits to a document? A smart authoring system would take into account the task at hand (editing or approving), the workflow state, the capabilities of the author (say, expert or novice), in addition to the document type being edited when determining what editing capabilities to provide, and what content to expose for viewing or editing. It would give the actor the ability to "blur the edges" where necessary and not overwhelm with complexity, while being tolerant of the errors of approximation likely to result.

2002-01-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

My eldest daughter published her first artwork to the web. She's going to be setting up a weblog with her class. How times change...

2002-01-03T21:29:00.002-08:00

Did Jesus have a nest? How much of our life is instinctive? How much of what we do as humans is really animal behavior, and is wrapped up in a civilized package? In the heart of winter we pad our nests, gather up our hoarded food and various baubles, and huddle together for warmth. Christmas.

2002-01-03T21:29:00.001-08:00

Sasha knows that I'm basically an inventor, and she's always coming up with "inventions" of her own. Automatic chairs that will set themselves based on the height and weight of the person using them, so you'll always be at the right height to eat your dinner. She trying to decide what to call her company, and it's down to two choices: "Superstar with cool inventions", and "Black Star, Red Star".

2002-01-03T21:28:00.000-08:00

Wow, did that just happen? What a holiday. I just cooked turkey dinner for 15. I still feel sleepy. I didn't go nuts on the presents like I did last year, which is good. Not so for the rest of the family, though. I guess that's what happens when you've got 3 young daughters: everybody showers them with presents. I just hope they grow up appreciative of their good fortune. Speaking of the kids, I keep forgetting to put pictures up. Damn, sorry. I'll get to that soon.