Is bullying a missed opportunity?
A story back in August about bullying really stuck with me because it changed the way I thought about the phenomenon and what I think we, as a society, can do about it.
Essentially, the the story said that the leverage point, when it comes to bullying, is not the bully or the kid being bullied. It's the bystanders. Bullies want and need an audience, so really the most important actor in the whole scenario of bullying is the group of people looking on.
When I was in school at least, there was no attempt to deal with the issue in any way but by confronting the bully and the victim, as far as I know. But what an amazing lesson to teach our children. A democracy works best when we all take an interest in the fate of those around us. We are all at our best when we care most not for our own safety or our own face, but for those among us who are least powerful. Every miscarriage of justice, every abuse of power in the wider world relies on the tacit complicity of those who stand by and do nothing. That these people are merely bystanders is a fiction.
Someone I know recently said that he always voted for a school levy, even though he didn't have any children, because schools are the crucible where our larger society is made. He's absolutely right, and while I'm all in favor of getting students' math scores up, I think these opportunities are the most important. These opportunities where we decide, as a people, who we want to be.
Tech brand death match
Yesterday, a respected study came out naming Google the most valuable brand in the world. The brand itself is worth $100 billion, say the good people at Millward Brown Optimor.
Microsoft came in at #2 at a value of $76B, and Apple was #6 at $63B. It's an interesting report at this moment because Google and Microsoft have just effectively declared war on each other.
Google has announced that it will launch a new operating system to compete with Windows, and has pushed its answer to MS Office, Google Apps, not only out of beta, but into high-profile, direct competition with Microsoft via a massive marketing campaign (this, btw, from a company that doesn't supposedly market). Microsoft, on the other hand has launched a new search engine, Bing.com, which will also power search for Yahoo. And Microsoft is pushing a version of office out into the cloud.
Meanwhile, while Apple could typically be expected to remain aloof as the BMW (the #2 auto brand, behind Toyota) of computer producers, but now (probably at AT&T's behest) it has tossed Google Voice's app out of its App Store for the iPhone.
Which brings us to the government. The government, which used to like to pick on Microsoft for anti-trust violations, is considering turning its gaze upon Google. Similarly, the FCC has decided that the best way to assert its right to regulate the internet might just be to make a brouhaha out of the Google Voice/App Store debacle.
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple and Microsoft have been around a long time. They've fought a few tech wars and lived to tell the tale. They've been blooded. But Google seems to have the most momentum — the company is barely more than ten years old and it's got the most valuable brand in the world. They've got a fun campus, free lunch and lava lamps. They've got an innovative entreprenurial culture where Microsoft seems to have a culture specifically designed to make things suck.
But, it's very possible that Google has the most valuable brand in the world because it's only been around ten years. It hasn't had time for its problems to stick. It's customer service is notoriously awful, it's products are no more universally reliable than Microsoft's, at least in my experience, and the corporation whose motto is "don't be evil" has been remarkably happy to help the Chinese government censor the internet.
Like I said, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. 'Till Skynet takes over, of course.
Cell phone users of the world unite!
I am a busy and impatient person. Friends who walk slow invariably get wherever we're going 20 feet behind me. People who drive 5 miles an hour under the speed limit are subject to a stream of invective that would turn any 10-year-old licensed to charge for naughty language into a vertible Scrooge McDuck at a quarter per word. But few things drive me as absolutely, frustratingly, high-blood-pressurey, bat-poop crazy as a long out-going voicemail message.
Recently, some tribesman wandered out of the deepest Amazonian jungle. Apparently, we knew they were there, but they didn't know about us, and in an uncharacteristic fit of leaving well enough alone, we didn't make our presence known. But that was the last group of people who didn't know what to do after the beep.
So my out-going message is always a study in minimalism. I identify myself so that people know they haven't misdialed, I try to avoid curtness, and ... that's it! What else is necessary?
But the cell phone corporations have decided that no matter how fulsome I am in my brevity, they must advise people of how to use voicemail AND how you can leave a numeric page.
A numeric page!!! What insanity. They might as well give me a number for the telegraph office while they're at it. Has anyone used this service... well, ever? It didn't even make sense as a service when people still had pagers. Because it is already on a cell phone. What kind of sociopath leaves a numeric page on a fully featured phone?
Unsurprisingly, the phone companies do this just to force you to stay on the phone an extra 15 seconds. Several cell phone company executives have admitted as much to David Pogue, The New York TImes personal technology writer.
Because he feels as I do he has organized a campaign, in his most recent email column, to put an end to this despicable practice. He published a list of the appropriate contacts at each company and he (and I) request that you contact your respective provider and ask them to see discretion as the better part of valor and cut it the heck out.
I reproduce the list here because the email column was not yet posted on his site at the time of writing:
* Verizon: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/FJncH.
* AT&T: Send e-mail to Mark Siegel, executive director of media relations: MS8460@att.com.
* Sprint: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/9CmrZ
* T-Mobile: Post a complaint here: http://bit.ly/2rKy0u
In any case, please, do me a favor and strike a blow for the childishly impatient everywhere.
NB Pogue points out in the meantime that each provider lets listeners skip the message by pressing a special, unpublicized key. It's different for each provider, but for AT&T (my provider) you can hit any key to skip the lame numeric page message.
A bulldozer is a happy machine
What if we just bulldozed everything that was for rent for more than a year?
We'd make exceptions, of course, for buildings of particular historical or architectural value, but that should be a relatively short list.
But otherwise, what if when driving around Sandusky, wherever you now see an abandoned building, you saw an empty lot? A well maintained empty building looks like a sad orphan, one that hasn't been restored — especially one that bears witness to the architectural sins of the latter half of the 20th century, or was built using the disposable construction methods that became deriguer in recent years — looks more like a bad day in Beirut.
An empty lot on the other hand, maybe covered with wild grass, maybe even with a tree or a wildflower or something, looks at least vaguely pleasant. And if you're in a community that doesn't have for sale/for lease signs in half the windows because the supply of space has far out-stripped demand, then an empty lot looks like an opportunity.
You could even restrict for sale signs on empty lots. Make people feel like people might actually want the land. Every for sale sign, when they reach critical mass, starts to read, "warning, danger, put your money here only if you're tired of money and would prefer never to see it again..."
Obviously, land-owners would have to be compensated and funds would have to be found somewhere (prolly from the taxpayers) for that and for bulldozing. Then of course, there's all that new lawn to mow...
These are hurdles, but they seem surmountable to me. Especially so since I'm willing to bet that the hidden costs to the community as a whole for maintaining all this unused property must outstrip the costs of simply adjusting the supply to match reality.
Maybe I'm late to this party and barking up the wrong tree. Maybe this has already been suggested, studied, and rejected because it didn't make sense. Maybe it's already been suggested and rejected out of hand because it was politically untenable. (Of course my definition of political leadership is not simply achieving what is already politically feasible, but by identifying what we need to do and finding a way to make it politically possible.)
But maybe its just the kind of wacky, radical program a city like Sandusky needs.
The passing of a king
One of the macro trends of the news business for the last decade or so has been that there are more and more news outlets chasing fewer and fewer stories (you can read all about it at journalism.org; that particular observation was in last year's study, if memory serves). This is largely a result of the rise of cable news, which is all about the big story right now, and the systematic gutting of network news departments.
Some news outlets have counter-programmed quite effectively, offering cogent, in-depth news on a variety of subjects including some of what is actually important. Most notable is The New York Times, though it's also truer of newspapers in general than it is of another news medium.
Generally I find whatever the national media pack is obsessing over at any given moment to be utterly trivial and made even more so by their inane coverage — and the Michael Jackson story is no exception. Really, I think it's sad he died, but no sadder than when anyone else dies. Which is not to say it isn't news, but really, to the exclusion of everything else? No.
Of course, if Rolling Stone wants to cover it obsessively that makes more sense.
But I am going to make an exception in the Michael Jackson case because of one thing. Say whatever else you will about him, the man could dance. Justin Timberlake is a poor, poor substitute. The comparison between Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake is the same as that between Gene Kelly and that-other-guy-in-Singing-In-The-Rain-whose-name-no-one-remembers. Seriously. I am not much of a fan of his music, nor is it even the kind of music I generally like, but I keep the music video Thriller on my iPhone at all times. It is effectively in a glass case in my pocket, ready to be busted out in case of emergency. No matter how bleak things get, watching the Thriller dance will always put a smile on your face, I don't care if you are in fact the Grinch himself. (I also keep the Christopher Walken/Fat Boy Slim video, Weapon of Choice on my phone for the same reason.)
So, here's my Michael Jackson tribute, if you watch it, I guarantee satisfaction:
After watching this one, I'm thinking of divorcing my wife, just so I can get married again and do this:
Apparently, if you're going to go to prison, do it in the Philippines (the poster on YouTube felt it necessary to specifically say that this was not a punishment):
And, in case you want to spread the joy yourself:
How do I get you what you want and not what you don't?
When you stop and think about it, we do a lot of stuff. Matt Westerhold likes to point out that we put out a full-length book every day. And that's just the printed newspaper!
We do all this stuff because it's all valuable, but any individual really only cares about 10% of it. But for each person it's a different 10% of course. So how do you get people to the stuff they want, and not to all the stuff they don't?
In the paper it was easy. You just stick it in there somewhere and people will find it eventually, right? Okay, it's definitely more complicated than that, but it's different on a website. There's many ways sites aren't really very different than printed products, no matter what the hype is, but this isn't one of them, I don't think.
Right now, we have newspaper sites co-branded with our two main print products, an entertainment site and tab with its own brand, and a sports site and tab with its own brand. We're going to improve all our classified verticals and our directory, and that could mean another site. Or sites. And we're working on another site to house hyperlocal subsites. And we're seeking to make all this work as simply as possible for advertisers, so we have started treating all those sites as a network.
And that's just the next six months.
Of course, we're not sure that this is the best way to break it all up. Do we want a single sprawling site? A portal like a local aol/yahoo? Or do we want to atomize it as much as possible and have dozens and dozens of sites for every little thing? The trend seems to be toward sites that do one thing as opposed to lots...
Obviously part of the solution can be Netflix/Amazon style recommendation engines and that is somewhere we want to go, but I think it's a branding/marketing and information architecture problem first. To rely on an algorithm is just lazy and sloppy, in my opinion, and I want to build on a better foundation.
So for those of you who don't spend most of your time thinking about websites, what makes sense? I'm fully willing to believe I'm overthinking it...
The beginning of Skynet? Or the future of the auto industry...
My mother, who I have mostly trained not to send me forwards of any kind, sent me this YouTube video. I shows a highly-automated and very nifty VolksWagen factory. While I appreciate the robotics, I'm really more interested in the first part of the video which follows two people to the factory itself to buy their new car.
In the midst of all the sturm und drang over the auto industry, a few people have suggested that maybe a part of what needs to change for the American auto companies is the buying process — that maybe the dealer model, such as it is now is overly complicated. And I can't help but feel they have a point.
I am a car nut, and yet I still feel that the car buying process is just too much of a hassle. In the age of Wal-Mart and Amazon.com is a half-day of visiting four different dealers to look at the cars you're interested in and another half-day of hanging around the dealership while you finalize the deal really the best we can do?
After the Kindle launched Jeff Bezos mentioned one very telling thing in the interview. Kindle owners weren't buying fewer printed books. Instead, the total books they bought went up overall. Make it easy to buy things and people buy more — big surprise.
Obviously cars are more wa-a-ay more expensive, and they can't be treated just like books. And I realize that such an innovation wouldn't be good news for dealers, but business needs to adapt to the needs of the community it serves, not force people to waste their time watching promotional videos in the waiting area while the salesman "sees what he can do" with the manager...
What would you think of having voting on the comments?
Not too long ago, a regular user of our site asked me if we would ever consider offering users the opportunity to vote on the comments on our site.
If you haven't seen this before, it's sorta like how on e-commerce site's reviews you'll see links that say "was this review helpful?" or something like that. On content sites, it's often simply a thumbs up or down on the comment, but it can be more complicated, giving you the opportunity to label a comment something descriptive like: "insightful," "entertaining," "mildly interesting," or "the work of a troll."
When you have people rating comments, then you usually actually sort the comments by their rating — instead of the time they were posted.
What's nice about this is that, if it's actively used by the community, it generally means that the apparent signal to noise ratio goes up, because the good stuff floats to the top (where more people are more likely to read it) and the ravings of trolls (not that we have any of that, of course) sinks to the bottom.
It also gives commenters some feedback — some peer pressure, if you will, in a good way. People are more likely to post well-thought out or funny comments and to stay away from flaming because they get positive feedback.
It's fairly popular with content producers because usually it takes the place of monitoring. Many very reputable companies online (mostly tech companies) get out of the moderation business altogether. For one thing we don't really want to be censors — though we do want a site that gives everyone a voice and encourages them to use that voice in a good, interesting, and entertaining way.
That said, it means that it's hard to follow a developing story, because you can't just go down the comments (or up them) to where you left off, the order's all jumbled. And, of course, conversations are difficult to follow because of the order. That is good and bad. That there can't really be conversations seems to me like it would encourage commenters to focus on the article not each other. And we've always got the forums for real conversation as opposed to "comment."
So what do people think? Would you like to see us implement such a system? Would you comment more or less? Would you vote on others' comments?
OMG: The blogs, the Forums, disaster! ...or not
As some of you noticed about six weeks ago, we put the forums and blogs into a new web framework. It was not problem-free when we launched it, but it didn't have too many major bugs — of course our goal is always zero, and I would have preferred things to go smoother myself. We did get other complaints, though. Some people didn't like the new version of the forums or blogs or found them difficult to use.
Those kinds of complaints are much more difficult to deal with in software development, because you can often be unsure whether people are reacting to something that is actually worse or something that is just different and which, therefore, requires a little time to get used to.
Some notes you get from users are obviously truly relevant, of course. For instance one user wished that the reply button in the forums would quote the comment being replied to. This is a common function in forums and one we will add as soon as we have another development window available. But other comments are more murky.
Now the indications are good that the new system is a step in the right direction. Last month the traffic to the blogs and forums more than doubled from where it had been before the change over.
And generally, we've had a lot of complaints stop. But while a lot of developers will tell you to wait and see if people are still complaining after two weeks with a redesign, I worry that people aren't quieting down because they are actually satisfied with the new system, but because they got tired of shouting.
So please, now that you've had some time to get used to it, are you seeing any other lingering problems? Or are you seeing things you wish you could do or you wish were easier? Or are you wishing for features you've seen elsewhere?
The way I look at it, we're here to serve and satisfy everyone in this community, so I want to put everything you care enough to take the time to tell me about at the top of our list. I know it doesn't seem that way sometimes, but that is actually why we introduced the new platform.
The new web framework is open source, which means we are in control of it. Often in the past, we've been forced to say 'no' to people's requests because we are limited by the way our proprietary systems work and we have no ability to change them. Open source solutions require more time to set up and manage and maintain, but they give us the ability to react to your needs and do so much more to accomodate them.
In many ways, this is your site, not ours.
Google's window into the zeitgeist
Recently the MSM has been running a bunch of stories about the echo chamber online — not that they ever call it that. What they're talking about is the fact that the online obsession with the 'Most Popular,' 'Most Linked,' and 'Most Emailed' means that we tend to see the same top 10 stories everywhere we go.
In some ways, it's not much of a change. After all the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune famously used to flip-flop front page stories in the second edition, copying what the other did in its first edition. Tons of fun.
The MSM's criticism of the echo chamber online is that what is most popular is rarely what is most important. But who knows what's most important anyway? People forget that the watergate story, arguably the most important story of the 20th century, was hidden on inside pages for most of its development.
The real problem with those popularity lists, is that they don't accurately reflect people's interests either. They get on the list often due to a fluke, but once they're defined as popular they get promoted all over the place and they become popular just cause they're on the front pages of the most visited sites on the internet. And some people realize this and then they manipulate the system to put certain stories in the 'popular' category.
As soon as you turn a statistic into a public target of any kind, it ceases to be a relevant measure of anything.
Which is why I love Google Trends. It's not well-known, so it isn't really corrupted by some version of the Observer Effect. Google Trends is a report on the most popular searches at any given moment. Log on, and you can see what millions of people are thinking about at that very moment. You can see where millions of people are thinking the same thing. And it's often wacky.
Who is Jared Ashley? Right now, his name is the most searched term on the internet (72% of all US search inquiries happen on Google). He's a finalist on the show Nashville Star and he recently charged someone with assault and harrassment.
Okay, not a huge surprise that he's number one right now.
But what about number two: "laodicean definition"?
Why were millions of people suddenly interested in the definition of "laodicean" two hours ago?
Ah, the detail page tells me it was the winning word in the National Spelling Bee last night. Okay I admit it, I'm not a spelling bee enthusiast. It is fascinating to me that so many other people are...
The fun continues:
Why is "goat locker" number 69?
You gotta love that Microsoft's new search engine, bing.com, is number 82: "bing search".
What on earth is "whack a kitty"? It's 58.
So, Google Trends. Check it out. Please, just don't tell anyone...
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