17 1 / 2012
Groupthink - Lite
Interesting piece from the NYT Opinion section this weekend. I’ve spent the last five years working in a creative environment alone, and I have to agree that is where my brain works best. I relish the idea of sitting quietly with my headphones on, because that is when my brain can wander and create connections that didn’t exist. I remember being part of a big brainstorming session at my last job, and it was a total failure. It was about something that I cared deeply about, was well funded, and was something that could really have created a great deal of name recognition inside and outside of the institution. The problem was we all just sat there staring at each other, with nothing to say. I was brought to the meeting because I was the idea guy, and all I could do was sit and stare blankly, and wish I were back at my desk thinking about this on my own.
The problem of course, is that total isolation puts us in a vacuum, where we have nothing to feed the creative beasts. People’s feedback is important to making creative ideas a reality or shutting them down before they get too far down the road of maturing into a bad idea.
I’m at this new job where I think the balance exists. Time will tell, but I love the ability to be creative, to think beyond the boundaries of conventional technology in my own quiet little world. But there are also these moments where we all spontaneously stop what we are doing and share our ideas, and I’m excited about that too.
Anyway, I think Cain takes too long to get to that part of the piece, but I think how this Groupthink works best. The Lite version is for me.
I wonder it the Bud Lite “Tastes great…less filling” campaign was a product of groupthink or just one guy in his cubicle?
04 10 / 2011
03 10 / 2011
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/A8FEr4pdn7Q/
Nice overview of some of the platforms we’ll be hearing more about this election cycle. Interested to see Ruffini’s work since I’ve been dreaming about that type of system for a while.
19 9 / 2011
Charity:Water Launches Dollars to Projects
via Mashable! Absolutely brilliant and inspiring new effort from Charity Water. Imagine if you could get this level of detail from all the people you donate your money to. Would you be willing to give more? I’ve never given to Charity:Water, but I think I will tonight.
19 9 / 2011
Infographic: 40% of Facebook Users Ditch Brand Pages
via ReadWriteWeb This seems like a pretty good justifiction for building your brand audience through more organic means. Contests end, campaigns end, and even specific issues can come to an end. But if you are consistantly creating good and useful content, then people are likely to stay.
28 6 / 2011
Skewed Results: The Filter Bubble and SEO
One bit of instant gratification in meetings is to Google a particular set of key words like “fracking” and “new york” to see whether my orgs blog posts are getting a good ranked return. Recently I’ve been amazed at how often our posts actually ARE showing up a the top of the results. Turns out that “filter bubble” Eli’s book is about is probably responsible for that.
16 6 / 2011
Blowing Bubbles
I’ve only just picked up Eli Pariser’s much lauded Filter Bubble and I haven’t really had the time to crack the spine yet, but I was reading an interview he did with Andrew Keen over at Tech Crunch this morning and one particular passage struck me as totally absurd.
“Google and Facebook, sure. And they have a lot of the same, you know, dynamics that are driving what they show people and what they hide from people as the old media did. And so, it’s not quite as much of a free for all as a lot of us hoped. It’s you don’t go direct, you don’t talk to a friend directly on line, you talk to them via Facebook and you don’t, you know, go find a small business, you go through Google.”
Pariser’s makes two points here, that we are not talking directly to our friends and that Google is acting like some kind of big box store filter.
I communicate with most of my friends via Facebook at this point, but where does his filter bubble apply here? I use the Facebook email function the same way I use my gmail or hotmail or enterprise exchange account. The only difference is that my Facebook inbox isn’t cluttered with spam or misapplied reply all messages. AND most of my friends are checking that email box more often than their “regular” address. I’m eager to hear exactly what Pariser hoped for when he envisioned the future of the internet, because unless we’re talking to one another in meatspace, we need some sort of service to connect us.
The second point needs some data behind it, maybe Pariser presents some data in his book, but I find this point wrong in two ways. Personal example time. I recently decided I want to start wearing a watch again (I want my son to know what a watch is) but the battery in my very old watch is dead. I know I can probably go to the nearest mall and go to a Jared and they’ll replace my battery dirt cheap. Or, as a DYI kind of guy, and can get online, use Google, and find the battery I need and probably some tools to do the replacement myself. Instead, I used Google Maps to find the nearest Jeweler. Turns out there is one a block from my office. It’s a tiny little mom and pop shop and it’s probably been there 20 years and I’ve never noticed it before. At lunch I strolled over and had a great chat with the owner, he told me he can replace the battery in 5 minutes, and I spent some time shopping for earrings for my wife. I can apply this to all sorts of things I’ve shopped for, from HDMI cables to a certain Duplo toy I wanted for my son. So In fact, i go to MORE small businesses than ever before. The second argument here is that this is somehow the same as how old media would have kept things hidden from me. The truth of the matter is the old media, the Yellow Pages, would have given me 200 jewelers in DC, and a personal recommendation from a friend would have yielded a single result likely not convenient to where I work. Google actually gave me what I needed AND gave me the opportunity to explore far beyond that filter.
So what exactly are Facebook and Google hiding from me in these instances? The spam from a Nigerian prince and the directions to my nearest Mall? Ok, fine I’ll take it, but you can’t argue that this is just as bad as how things once were.
I think Eli is a wicked smart guy, and lots of people I really respect are saying wonderful things about his book, and to be fair this is one tiny part of an interview about a whole book, but I hope Pariser has more solid arguments than this.
13 12 / 2010
The Games Nonprofits (don’t) Play
Confession, I have never played any of the Facebook games people love so much. Most notably FarmVille or the recently released CityVille. I imagine if I decided to play the game, I’d probably get hooked, but I detest the requests and updates that end up on the my wall, and I don’t want to do that to my friends. I guess I’m a curmudgeon like that.
I was a little amazed today when I read that CityVille reached 6 million users in 8 days, a feat that took FarmVille 46 days to achieve. Clearly, in it’s third major outing Zynga has a pretty good formula under it’s belt. Even more astounding is this stat that indicates that FarmVille, which is a little long in the tooth at this point, is still out performing television giants like Sunday Night Football and Glee. Impressive numbers for sure, but nowhere near Activision’s Call of Duty:Black Ops which moved 5.6 million units in it’s first day, grossing $360 million in sales. But despite it’s massive online audience (400,000 people playing as I write this post on the Playstation Network, and probably the same on XBox Live and PC) Black Ops is missing a key ingredient - social connectivity. FarmVille and CityVille offer social mechanisms that let you help your friends and your friends help you build better farms and better cities in an ongoing game, not 10 minute episodes of mayhem.
As this Mashable post points out, advertisers are salivating at the prospect and opportunity to get into the social gaming market. The non-profit world isn’t quite there yet, but like Facebook and Google Ads before it, I’m sure we’ll be jumping into the fray before long.
Missing from the conversation about social gaming though are the opportunities for non-profits to participate in the development with big game houses. What could a non-profit who works on sustainable development achieve in terms of public education to a non-core audience in CityVille alone? My assumption is that contributing to the development of the gameplay design instead of virtual billboards, a non-profit’s message would be better assimilated. A virtual PSA about LED lighting in your real home seems less compelling than earning a reward for using LED lighting in the city you are building. Add to those personal rewards the socialcasting nature of these games, and a non-profit couldn’t ask for a better “tell a friend” feature.
There is a bigger discussion about whether or not gaming changes behavior - as a gamer that discussion seems riddled with slippery slopes - and whether the impact of that investment can be measured. But I’ve gone on long enough.
There is a great opportunity here for the non-profits and game houses to partner to create something better and more meaningful.
[Photo Credit: Some rights reserved by jami0821]
11 12 / 2010
I’m in the process of writing a post about today’s session at Rootscamp National in DC and on a whim decided to do a tweet cloud. After correcting for a few words that were throwing the cloud off (can someone please make a word cloud generator that can be tweaked?) this is what the result was. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
