TinkerX

I used to really like the Encyclopedia Britannica. By “used to,” I mean of course, “before Wikipedia.” It’s a fine reference work, and I never had anything against it until they, and others, started getting smarmissimus about how Wikipedia sucks because it’s written by people who aren’t on the staff of an encyclopedia. And how kids shouldn’t be citing it as a resource. Etc. etc.

Now… I don’t want to get into a fight about Wikipedia. I don’t care if you like it or not or have issues with it. This is not an opinion piece. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia gets waaaay more hits than Britannica. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia is free. Maybe it’s because it has lots more articles. Maybe it’s because people like to think that anybody (themselves included) is smart enough to help somebody else out with a reference question.

Maybe it’s all about elves and pixies. Repeat: I don’t care. From a marketing and sales perspective, yelping about how your customers are dumb because they choose a competitor is, well… dumb.  Britannica could hop about, get red in the face, and produce volumes of statistics about how it’s better. If users don’t have a compelling reason to go there, they’ll go somewhere else.

What Britannica *should* have been doing is figuring out a way to get more people into their space. Which they now have, with a very clever little program called Britannica WebShare. Basically, if you write a blog or publish on the Web in any way, you can apply for a free year of access to the entire online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and link to the full articles there.

That’s clever. Very clever. My readers now have an ancillary benefit from my blogging relationship with EB. If you’re a regular ol’ person with no subscription to EB (it costs $70/year normally), and you look up “Wikipedia,” you get this:

Wikipedia:  free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. The English-language version of Wikipedia began in 2001. It had more than one million articles by March 2006 and more…

Wikipedia… (75 of 754 words)

But if you go to that same article from a link on my blog, even if you don’t have a subscription, you can see the whole thing.

Yep. All 754 words. You’re welcome.

Very, very smart. They have turned chunks of their content into advertising for the whole, and enlisted the help of people who build the Web to engage in that advertising. They get links and good marketing, I (and my readers) get full text articles.

This is a good thing to think about in a general way — how can other content owners release some subset of what they create/own in ways that promote an economic model that makes sense for them?

PS: If you’re interested in the full text of any particular Britannica article, let me know and I’ll work it into a blog post  

After more than a year, JotSpot (bought by Google that long ago) has come out from behind the gCurtain and has reemerged as Google Sites.

I blogged the Google purchase of JotSpot back in November of 2006; I called it the “2nd wiki that Google bought.” Writely (the engine for Google Docs) being the first.

So… now you can use Google to create not just pages that you can view (iGoogle), but pages that you can share with everyone. Visitors can view the pages, registered users can create/edit stuff. [I’ll have a better review of the functionality after I get a Google Site up and running]

So what? So you can now use Google to search, create docs, create Web pages, share stuff, etc. etc. Nothing new here, right? These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

Maybe they are.

I keep pointing people to this essay by George Dyson on Edge. In it, he says:

The books that have been written are easy. They represent the collective memory and imagination of mankind, and the technical resources now exist to deliver The Complete Works of Homo Sapiens, Unabridged. Who can argue against this? It is the realization of every librarian’s dream — unless you harbor suspicions about who is going to need librarians once the Universal Library has digested all the books… The Universal Library promises us a repository for the souls of all existing books — and the resurrection of all titles that have gone extinct. And the books that have not been written yet?

Emphasis mine.

The biggest library in the universe is the one of those works as yet to be written. Every year the Web sees the creation of more content than exists in the Library of Congress. I don’t want to discuss the relative value of those materials at this point. I’m just noticing that lots of people are adding lots of new stuff to “The Library” all the time.

And now Google has pushed out another service by which that content can be… manipulated? Captured? Serviced? Advertised? Searched? OK… whatever you want to call it. You can do it on Google.

So what? Some will ask. I can create a Web site on MySpace or WordPress or with a free, generic tool and a couple bucks on GoDaddy. It’s not that what Google is doing with Google Sites is particularly unique, it’s that it’s doing it in conjunction with everything else.

Creation, too, has a much bigger brand footprint than search, advertising, etc. When you create something, you put yourself into it. The Web becomes more “yours” when you create a Wikipedia entry or post a YouTube video. Or if you create a site with Google.

No prognostication on this post. Just observation. The world’s mightiest search/advertising engine is now even further into the business of creativity as well as findability. It’s the printing press for the Universal Future Library as well as the table of contents and advertiser.

It takes love over gold nd mind over matter
to do what you do that you must
when the things that you hold can fall and be shattered
or run through your fingers like dust.

Dire Straits, “Love Over Gold”

Kevin Kelly wrote a great post recently titled, “Better than Free.” In it, he makes the point that, “…when copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.” He asks the question, “…why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” He then goes on to list eight “generatives” (because they generate value) that are “better than free.” They are (and I’m going to shorten his description of each, and add my own little parenthetical tag that will make sense in a minute):

• Immediacy – Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. [Get something for less of your time]
• Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot… As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. [Get something better that someone else has spent time on]
• Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. [Experts save you time]
• Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. [Don’t waste time on fake crap]
• Accessibility – Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. [Timeliness]
• Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good… The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive. [This is a red herring as far as this discussion goes… more on that in a moment]
• Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect… The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something…. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. [patronage is based on the emotional/brand connection between buyer and seller; another red herring on this list, I think]
• Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. [Findability = value in less time]

What I noticed about Kelly’s list when I first read it is that all but two of these “generatives” map to some kind of time value as opposed to product value. And I believe that the two “red herrings” I noted above, while indeed “better than free,” aren’t related to the digital world, which is what Kelly’s main (and excellent) point is about. I think he should lose those two from the list. Why?

“Embodiment,” is actually the idea of something having a tangible, “non-free” value, without regard to the content, per se. I can create the wonderful, creamy, cottony book experience for an absolute crap novel, and the physical value of the leather, paper, gold trim, etc. will be the same as if I print a book I love the same way. Any value I place in the book I love vs. the crap novel is the same value that differentiates a free, digital copy of the two works.

Second, “patronage” is a value that works as well (or maybe even better) in the physical world as it does in the digital. The idea that a digital copy I pay an artist for, in order to support their work, has more value to me than one I steal is, indeed, true. But you cannot separate out the value of patronage from the overall value of the work, digital or otherwise. Users will get no “patronage value” from a piece of work that they detest. And they may, in fact, have a negative patronage experience if they support an artist, and then are burned by a bad product. In short, what I think I’m trying to say is, patronage only works as a value if someone was going to value something anyways.

So… of the eight, six are, I think, pretty directly related to the value of time. I’ve been talking about this with my advertising students for a couple of years now. In order to understand the history of advertising, you have to start with a point in time when there was almost *no* advertising. And why was there no advertising? Because people made almost everything they needed, and had very access to cash. In that environment (which accounts for most of the last 10,000 years of civilized-ish human economic history), real value almost always devolves to land, in one form or another. You live on the land, get your food from it, get wood and coal and metals from it, get water there, etc. etc. You can’t have a king without a kingdom, and the “dom” is the land.

Over the last 150 years or so, though, we’ve moved away from land-as-root-value. Yes, it’s still there, of course. As the man said, real estate is a good investment because they ain’t making any more of the stuff. But more and more frequently, those things with the most value have little connection to real property.

One definition of wealth I heard years ago and really liked was, “Wealth is a measure of excess food.” Right. If you have to spend 100% of your time hunting/gathering in order to barely survive, you are as poor as you can be and not be dead. Better control/ownership of the land and its uses provides better/more food for people, allowing them to do things like invent even better farming tools/techniques, be artists, lawyers, teachers, etc. The wealthier a society is, the less time/effort per capita is spent on food, giving people more time to do other stuff that can add to the quality of life.

Did you notice how we moved into “time” as a value even in that discussion? Society (everybody doing something) needs to produce food, or we die. Less time spent on food = more time for fun, games, medicine, music, etc. As soon as somebody figured out how a horse can plow the same plot of land and get more food off’n it, the equation changed from “land is the basis of all wealth,” to “technology that improves the land use is a good thing, too.”

Back to Kevin’s list. And to a discussion on Terra Nova about whether or not the theft of virtual items counts as theft. When we pin all our ideas about possessions, wealth, etc. on “stuff” (like land), then the idea of virtual theft is absurd. Of course the owner/publisher of the game can just “undo” the theft instance and give us back our virtual thing-a-ma-bob. That’s not the point. I’m not paying the publisher (or the advertiser) in order to have access to things; I’m “spending my time.” And that’s a phrase that, now, I think is hugely significant.

We live in an age when food is almost free. Or course, this is only true in those societies engaged in the kind of digital economics that Kevin talks about. Very few areas where starvation is a real issue are in any way worried about digital piracy and the value of free copies of content. But for those of us in the “Internet World,” food is very, very cheap; about 10-15% of household income for those of us in the middle class. And since most of us don’t rely on investment income from real estate (or other tangibles), but on wages… time, in a very real sense, ends up being equal to money for us.

But… that value may not be fungible, depending on how you measure it. If you peg your time back to your salary/wage, you end up with a dollar-per-hour calculation that can easily be compared to that of everyone else. Right? Fred makes $20/hour and Grace makes $40/hour, so her time is worth twice as much as his.

Or is it? Grace’s time is worth twice as much to the economy that determines wages based on the service provided. But is it worth twice as much to society in general? Or to their families? Suppose, after work, Fred spends 20 hours a week tutoring kids who need extra help with reading. He does this for free. Grace, on the other hand, watches TV. Nothing wrong with that. But aside from their hours spent working, can we say that an hour of Grace’s time watching the Food Channel is as valuable to society as an hour of Fred’s time improving the minds of our youth?

And, regardless of the value to society, can anybody but Fred or Grace determine the value of any given activity relative to their own time spent? And another and… can anyone place a value on time spent doing things that are universally acknowledged as having personal value, such as playing with one’s kids, going to church, loving up your honey, etc.? Meaning, is one hour of Grace’s time spent with her family any more or less valuable to her than an hour of Fred’s time spent with his?

We need a new way to think about value when much of what we are concerned with is how we spend our time, rather than how we spend our money. Kevin points out, wisely, that there are things we can do to add value to digital stuff that is easily copied. My view is that most of those “generative” qualities map to relative time-value of various activities. I value…

• Immediacy – Getting something in less time
• Personalization — Getting something someone else has spent time matching to my needs, rather than having to spend that time myself
• Interpretation — The time of experts
• Authenticity — Not wasting my time on stuff that will suck
• Accessibility – Being able to get something at any time
• Findability — Spending less time looking for something

In regards to virtual theft, then… someone who steals my virtual “stuff,” is actually robbing me of immediacy (if I can’t use it when I thought I could), authenticity (the “magic circle” of me thinking of my stuff as mine), accessibility (I can’t use it when I want), and “findability” (I may have to go back to the publisher for a new copy).

When I spend time on a digital asset, I’ve assigned value to it relative to anything else I might have done with that time. When somebody/something requires that I spend more time on something, they’ve robbed me. Thus, DRM that requires me to spend time fiddling around with various protection schemes is robbing me of my time-currency in order to help protect the digital security of some content. The fact that a song I buy on iTunes can’t be used on all my devices is a theft of immediacy, findability and accessibility.

Time is the new gold. We should work on ways of assigning and evaluating time-value that aren’t rooted in dirt, food and metals.

Amazon has posted a video demo for its new eReader, the Kindle.

This has real potential. First of all, the device itself doesn’t look like hell. The early shots of the prototype looked… clunky. The one in the video, and in the Amazon store, though, seems OK. Some of the buttons and the keyboard still look a bit odd compared to standard UI stuff… but maybe (benefit of the doubt alert) its related to power savings, hardiness of the unit, whatever. It looks a bit geeky, but, then again, it is.

Features that make me wish it was cheaper than  $400:

• Free wireless hook-up. Yup. Amazon is eating the cost of cellular-network delivery (not Wi-Fi). So you just turn the thing on, connect to the Kindle store (and various other Web related destinations), browse for books, magazines, newspapers, etc. and buy ‘em.
• Automatic updating of subscriptions (magazines, newspapers, blogs, etc.)
• Email personal docs to the reader (MS Word, etc.)… for 10-cents per doc (I think).
• Click-through to definitions, Wikipedia entries and other reference sources
• Note-taking, book-marking, high-lighting, text/section clipping features
• Listen to MP3s and eAudiobooks (have to be uploaded via USB)
• Can hold 200-ish books

I already wrote about how I’ve been reading eBooks on my Palm/PocketPC for years. And so, for me, it will probably be awhile until I get one of these things (ie, until it costs waaaay less than a mobile computer that I need anyway for work, wireless phone, wireless web, etc.). So, for now, this falls under "really cool luxury." 

My guess is that (like Apple with the iPhone), in time, when more publishers are on board, the Kindle will come down in price, subsidized by Amazonian subsidies based on usage. It is, however, the first dedicated eBook reader I’d put on my Christmas list.

Buy it here

This is one of those rambling, "I’m figuring things out while I’m typing" posts. No guarantee of clarity. But there are good links, so there’s that.

If you play games, and haven’t heard-of or read anything by Richard Bartle, you need to. He is one of the creators of MUD, which you also need to know about. Richard created the "Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology" that ranks gamers on four scales; achiever, explorer, socializer, killer. It’s kinda like Myers-Briggs, but for gamers. I am an ESAK. From the test:

ESAK players often see the game world as a great stage, full of things to see and people to meet. They love teaming up with people to get to the hard-to-see places, and they relish unique experiences.

Breakdown: Achiever 40.00%, Explorer 80.00%, Killer 20.00%, Socializer 60.00%

This reminds me a bit of my Myers-Briggs type, ENTP (Extrovert, iNtuition, Thinking, Perception). When I took the full MB test years ago, I was right in the middle on the first three (ie, not particularly extroverted, somewhat intuitive, and inclined, a bit, to prefer thinking to feeling). But on the "Perception vs. Judging" scale, I was hugely P over J.  

So. There’s been some discussion at Terra Nova about "A fifth Bartle type." Timothy Burke, the post’s author, speculates:

Where the attraction to design is a part of the experience of play, and where the player’s activities within the game are at least partially aimed at a kind of pure understanding of how the game or world functions (rather than an understanding which is aimed at maximizing achievement). It’s always seemed to me that this approach to play was distinctive enough that it could easily be called a fifth Bartle-type to go alongside achiever, killer, explorer and socializer. Call it subcreator, or if you want to get fancy, demiurge.

It’s an interesting idea; that playing the game to understand (or appreciate or accept or influence) the game itself is, for some, more fun than achieving within the game, exploring the content or beating or socializing with other players. On the one hand, if I want to stay pure-Bartle, I think that Burke’s proposed category could come down under "Explorer," where the player is simply exploring the meta-game as opposed to the game. It’s a role I enjoy, both as a player and as a critic. In fact, one could say that someone who plays a game in order to understand its mechanics, player motivation, changes over time, etc. is not really playing the game, but "playing at gaming" or "playing at play." Or, maybe, sometimes even "working at play."

This intersects in my head with a post at The Escapist (by way of Infocult) called "WebGame 2.0." Kyle Orland writes about how aspects of list keeping–especially numbers of friends, popularity rankings, etc.–lend game-like aspects to some social networking activities. Self-googling, of course, falls into this category of behaviors, too. I made (and make) a very specific effort to be at the top of the listings on the major search engines for "Andy Havens." Why? Because a substantial part of my life is now "lived" on the Web. And Google is the phone book for that life. Currently, I own the first two pages of results for my name, and the majority of the results for pages 3-5. At that point, you’re getting into comments on blogs that have better SEO than my own blog.* On the third page, though, you get a link to my Googlegänger, who (unfortunately for me, I think) is a marketing guy, too… but who’s got some Web pursuits that I find a bit… well, it’s just not my style. If he (she?) were a trombone player from Australia, somebody happening onto his/her Web efforts would (probably) realize that I’m not both an Ohio, USA marketing guy and a musician from Sidney. When the Googlegänger’s activities are pretty close to mine, though… well, I’ll keep working on my personal SEO.

But (and here’s the point related to the above), is the fact that I’m keeping score and indication that I’m playing a game? I don’t think so. Although many games have scores, not all scores are related to games. My weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. are all "scores" of a type, yet I don’t monitor them as an act of play, but as something related to the decidedly non-play act of trying to stay alive. Similarly, many of the things we do to measure success (in a worldly sense) are scores–salary, neighborhood, quality of stuff, size of office, number of minions–yet are quite serious, non-play-y and not games.

There are all kinds of discussions about the nature of play and what is a game, etc. I don’t want to get into that, because others (including Richard) are much better at it and have done great work already. What intrigues me at this point, though, are the two ends of a continuum that seem to bracket a "play" experience:

1. Taking something that is intended for play (a game, in this case) and doing something with it that is non-play. Now, you can argue (I won’t) that the Fifth Bartle Type proposed by Timothy might be engaged in play. Sure, that might be the case. The act of building new resources for a game, for example, might very well feel like "play" to the modder. But it isn’t (usually) going to be within the scope of what the designers had in mind. You can make small totem poles out of baseball bats, but at that point you are not "playing baseball" in any sense of the word. You can write and perform songs about your favorite baseball team… but again, you ain’t playing the game.

2. Taking something that isn’t a game, and playing it. We use the phrase, "He doesn’t really care about you; he’s just playing games," to mean that the subject isn’t engaged on the surface level, but doing something else, using the activity in a different context. That we use the term "player" to describe a philandering male really brings home the idea that "playing" and "games" are often synonymous with a lack of sincerity or seriousness of intent. Someone who is not a player would, constrastingly, "work" at a relationship, neh?

I think Thomas Malaby said it best here:

Games… are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood… Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, I offer here a rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming.

Or (in Andy-simple terms), games ain’t always games, and play ain’t always fun.

The final point being a question: is there a model that describes a tendency to either "game that which is not-game," or "do ‘not-play things’ with that which is game?" Or does it depend on the game/situation? I have no interest in many of the social "games" that people play. Feh. And I do like to delve into the hidden, meta-nut-meat (what the hell?) of games beyond the surface. What does that say about me? What would those "types" look like?

• G vs. M = Gamer vs. Metagamer (in game spaces)
• S vs. P = Straightforward vs. Playa (in RL)

I’d be an MS. What that means, I have no idea. Yet. Let me play around with it for awhile…

Good Freakonomics post on why there are so many new competing brands of vodkas compared to other liquors. The consensus among the comments is that it’s about brand and marketing vs. taste, since vodka is supposed to be as tasteless as possible.

Which makes for an interesting question for a marketing class somewhere: how do you differentiate a product that is supposed to be, well… perfectly un-different.

The answer, of course, is brand. When Absolut began its wonderful print campaign, they were in the relative basement of vodkas, to say nothing about booze preference in general. Within a couple years of that campaign’s launch, they had not only increased their own sales immensely, but had increased the marketshare of vodkas across the board by 30%. Best of both worlds: they grew the pie and their piece of it.

It makes for a good way of starting one part of a branding brainstorm conversation. How would we brand this product if there was abolutely (ha ha) no product or service difference between us and the other guys? What role in customers’ stories do we want our stuff to play? What kind of prop is it? How does it fit into their lives? What does our brand taste like?

I read Freakonomics (WorldCat, Amazon) a few years back (as an eBook, btw), and really enjoyed it. Because of that experience, I now RSS the Freakonomics Blog (now owned by the NYT). In their most recent entry, Playboy editor Chris Napolitano answered questions from Freakonomics Blog readers: 36 questions. According to the blog’s authors, that was all the questions he was asked.

I don’t really care that it’s Playboy, really. I never read the magazine, just bought it for the pictures of the naked women. What is great, though, is that Napolitano completely engaged the blog medium and has now, I would imagine, really impressed the hell out of at least 37 people (the folks who asked questions, and me).

If it had been 807 questions… well, that would be absurd. But 36 is within the range of "doable." And responding personally to that many questions, though obviously more time consuming than cherry picking (ahem) 3-5, really shows that he’s using the forum the way it was intended at its best.

So I’m doing link jumping from a post on BoingBoing to a story about how "The Secret" is crap, and just generally glorifying in feeling mui superioso to those who write, market and spank this garbage. I got no beef with the poor people who buy these books; we all have to try lots of stupid stuff before we find something that actually has, well… any reality in it. The path to success, as The Beginner’s Mind will show, is paved with stones of failure. So fail on! hopeful "The Secret" readers… the fact that you’re trying is at least a step in the right direction (on a particularly obnoxious stone of failure).

Anyway… while doing so, I was checking out the writings and blogs of some of the people in what some of the lovely skeptical writers call the "New Wage Movement." Classic. One of these blogs — the posts of which are almost all about the author’s books, tapes, etc. and filled with links to his other sites — had the following footer at the bottom of EVERY post:
 

All writings here are copyrighted by John Doe. You may not use them without written permission but you may link to the posts or give out a link to the posts.

 

If you like the free articles on this blog, let John know by buying him his all-time favorite gift - an Amazon gift certificate. His email is xxx@xxx.com Click here

It’s super that he gives us the right, though, to "link to the posts or give out a link." ‘Cause, you know… if you don’t say that, it’s like, a violation of IP law to link to stuff. I bet you didn’t know that. You may also not have known that anything you write is automatically copyrighted, even without a statement like that. On every post.

From a marketing standpoint, what does the above say about the author? Well, first it says, "I don’t know much about copyright." Also, to me, it says, "I expect you to rip off my stuff, so… watch out!" Third, it says he don’t know diddly about how people who actually do stuff on the Internet use links. Fourth, it says that he doesn’t get what blogs are about, if he’s asking for gifts for the enjoyment of same. Since he’s hyper-rich, too, it’s weird that he’s begging for Amazon-bucks.

All in all, I just found this creepy bad.

I teach history of advertising. One of the things we do is look for good and bad examples of various advertising concepts throughout history. I can’t find a clip of a recent ad for the Heineken Draught Keg, but it goes into my book as an example of “badvertising.”

If you haven’t seen the ad, it’s because you haven’t been watching cable TV for the last two weeks. At all. I think I’ve seen the ad twice a day at least. And I don’t watch that much tube.

Short version: A green-skinned, robotic, hot-pants-wearing cutie with a page-boy haircut does a kind of robot dance onto the screen. She does a couple mechanical “vogue” poses, then opens up her thorax, exposing some advanced, cybernetic innards that contain a Heineken Draught Keg. Video below:

Yep. Green, robot stripper girl with a mini-keg fridge where her heart, lungs, etc. would be. All to the beat of some indecipherable techno-tronics. Smiling the whole time as she opens herself up for our beer-drinking pleasure.

It is, frankly, horrifying. And horrifyingly bad.

I don’t mind sexy ads. Or funky ads. And even if I don’t like an ad, that doesn’t mean I’ll label it badvertising without a reason. But this one… yeegadz. List of things that are wrong with this:

1. High-tech and beer don’t go together. Beer is primal. Beer is low-tech. Beer is the reason we invented pottery, not the reason we go into space, create better garage-door openers, and splice genes.
2. Beer goes from the outside of us to the inside. Seeing a very lifelike creature take beer from her inside, and bring it to the outside has two possible subconscious roots: urinating or vomiting. I do not want beer that has already been inside something/one else.
3. Woman as objectified sex object is fine. Well, not fine… but it ain’t going away. A beautiful woman bringing you a beer is as much a staple of American advertising culture as “shiny cars go vroom.” But woman as beer container? Or fridge? Keg-support-system with great gams? It pushes the limits of even my caveman appreciation for reducing a person to an object.
4. Green skin bad. Green skin sick skin. Maybe dead skin. Green skin goblin skin.
5. Robot dancing bad. Robot dancing sick dancing. Maybe dead dancing. Robot dancing late 80’s dancing.
6. Robots can’t get drunk.
7. Sexy, fit fembots would kick your ass if you got drunk and tried to play them.

Heineken’s brand is (or has been) very nicely handled in their previous ads where people do funny and/or slightly tawdry things to keep ahold of their Heinies. None of that here. No link to the old ads at all. Which isn’t always bad. But in this case, well… The old ads conveyed a brand that was about a higher-quality beer; something to be relished and coveted. If I could pick one word that they seemed to be aiming at, it would be “premium.” The ads were also quite funny.

The new ad isn’t funny. I don’t think it’s meant to be, either. So no points off for bad humor execution, just for letting go something that was working for something that doesn’t. The new ad doesn’t convey a sense of quality… just… gimmickry. Which I had never associated with Heineken. Until now.

Wagner James Au has an interesting post about how Second Life marketing may need to take into account the secondary marketing effects of repurposed media from SL. He gives the example of Chris Anderson’s SL YouTube video getting lots of hits… probably WAY more hits than people in-game visiting the Wired HQ. Chris is, of course, editor of Wired, and their current issue has an article on the failure of SL from a corporate standpoint. Chris blogged about it, and posted Au’s response here.

It’s an interesting question/debate. If you go to YouTube and search for "Second Life" videos, and rank them by view count, you’ll find that the top video has more than 4 million views. Now, it wasn’t made with SL, but with other VW tools like The Sims. But the 2nd most popular is the U2 concert in SL, with almost 700,000 views.

700,000 views ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at. According to SL stats, about 656,000 people logged onto the service in the last 14-days. So more people have viewed one MySpace video, of a 6 minute event, than actually used the thing in two weeks.

This is really pinging around in my head, now. Google (and the Web at large) are involved in aggregating our Long Tail interests… pulling many disparate sources of content together based on individual requirements. When it comes to text, we don’t really think to ourselves, "Yeah… that guy’s keyboard must be fantastic," because there is a basic equality in how we generate letters; the technical source of written content — a keyboard and maybe a word processor or blog engine — is invisible, essentially.

Second Life, however, doesn’t just create content for the folks who are inside. 700,000 people saw the U2 YouTube SL video. For them, SL was the content creation engine. And it can do some stuff that’s not possible elsewhere.

So maybe one of the things we should be thinking about in our online lives is: How do we measure the opportunities for repurposing what we’re doing? Could all the comments on my blog, for example, be collected into a blog of their own? Could my Flickr pics be a coffee-table book? Could I (should I…) splice my favorite YouTube videos into my home movies? Could my live book club discussions be recorded and podcast (podcasted?)?

I don’t know… but I hadn’t thought about the repurposeability of online activities as a measurement until today.  

By way of: Infocult. 

So… My 7-year old comes in and says, “Dad… Moms says I’ve got 10 minutes to go before bed, and I’m supposed to bug you so that I’m not bugging her.”

“That’s cool. Whaddya wanna do for 10 minutes?”

He thinks for a bit, then says, “I want to watch some funny turtle videos on YouTube.”

My wife and I get lots of links to various Internet videos, and find them ourselves during the course of being normal Web-using folk. Many of them are fine to share with the boy… many of them are not. We watch with him, so we can tell what’s going to be appropriate. But sometimes it’s hard to tell, on the fly, what’s what…

I asked him, “Were you looking at turtle videos before?”

He said, “No. But Mom’s showed me other funny animal videos on YouTube, and I’m thinking about how I may want a turtle, and figured there’d be funny turtle videos on YouTube.”

He was, of course, right. We found “Turtle vs. Cat” very quickly, and then a couple more. Neat stuff. Took about 12 of the 10 minutes Mom had given him, and off he went to bed.

While searching for funny turtle videos, though… I found some that I would not ever share with a kid. Because “funny” means lots of things to lots of people. Sometimes it means stuff that a kid wouldn’t get, like stand-up comedy. Sometimes it means really, really rude stuff that you don’t want your kid to see, let alone understand at the age of seven. For some people, apparently, teenagers skateboarding off the roof of their garage and breaking a bone qualifies as “funny.”

I started looking for more funny videos that were appropriate for kids. And it was harder than I thought. In many cases, you have to wade through a lot of junk in order to find a good one. In some cases, videos tagged with “funny” and “kid” are videos about kids doing funny things. Which is fine… but not what I want to watch with my kid all the time.

So I figured, if I was going to put effort into finding videos I’m OK sharing with my 7-year-old son… why not share them with other people and their kids? Thus, the idea for KidVidId was born.

Why the name? Well, hopefully, the “Kid” and “Vid” parts are obvious. I added “Id” to stand for both “ID,” as in “identification” — a way to ID good vids for kids — and because “id” also means the part of you that likes stupid videos. As opposed to the “ego” which likes videos of your own kids, and “superego” which likes doing things not involving Internet video.

All the videos at the site are pre-screened to be OK for kids. And by “kids” I mean my kid and his friends. I’m plunking down an “average” here, and if you still find some of the stuff  inappropriate for your kid, I’m sorry. It will all be PG or G stuff, won’t encourage violence towards others, may be educational or funny, or just interesting. Use the category tags.

If any TinkerX readers know of blogs/sites that cater to kids, parents, funny videos, cats, inventions, juggling, etc., and think they should have a link or post about KidVidId, please pass along the URL, as I can use all the link-love I can get.

For a year and change, I was doing legal marketing consulting full-time. During that period, I wrote a legal marketing blog (often called "blawgs") that was consistently in the top 10 results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN search for the phrase "legal marketing." For those who don’t speak SEO, that either means my blog was very popular in the legal marketing crowd, or that there weren’t that many legal marketing blogs. Or both. The blog averaged around 300 unique readers per post, and topped out around 550 for subjects that got some attention elsewhere in the blawgosphere.

Well, when I stopped doing full-time consulting, I sold the blog to Larry Bodine, who rocks very hard in the legal marketing realm; I wanted someone to keep the thing going, since I’d spent so much time building up a good readership. So he kept the thing going for more than a year, but then consolidated his new writings on his other professional marketing blog.

Well, that means that the blog just probably ain’t gonna be out there forever. So, to make sure that all ya’ll won’t ever suffer from a total lack of pithy Andy-style legal marketing wisdom, I’ve now collected them all here for your… pleasure. Or whatever.

I had fun writing them, and made lots of good contacts from the blawg. So it’s a nice memory for me, too.

I’ve been pimping TaleWeaver, my creativity/storytelling book/game for some time now. Between the newer one (which is better) on Lulu, and the one that got up on Amazon through no fault of my own a few years back, I’ve sold about 50 of the things, netting around $200. Which ain’t bad, considering I created the game as a personal gift for my wife and son. That dough just about paid for the sets I personally had printed/cut at Kinkos a few years ago for friends.

Clearly, though, I did not do it for the money. And I’m getting into some social spaces to see what kinds of benefits they have. At this point, here are my findings:

• MySpace: I can’t keep it up enough for it to matter. I’ve got multiple blogs on my own, and blogging from MySpace seems… odd to me. Maybe I’ll try just copying my posts from here, but that also seems lame. I really tried to get into some groups, but the ones that have anything interesting in terms of content have enormous numbers of users, and the signal-to-noise ratio is huge. I don’t have enough friends that use MySpace to make the "wall-to-wall" form of communication any kind of meaningful, though I can see how it would be for someone whose buddies are all in the space. Mostly I get random friend invites from strippers and bands. None of whom return my calls…

• LinkedIn: I’ve been using this site longer than any of the others. I have 67 direct connections as of the moment, all of whom I can actually claim to have known in real life or to have met online (eLationships). As of yet, it has been entirely worthless to me. I tried, several times, in my full-time consulting days, to establish clients or partners for projects. Some were in that first circle, some were one-step away, requiring an intro. Nothing came of any of it.
• Facebook: I’ve been on Facebook the least amount of time… and it is proving to be the most interesting to me. Why? Because I have connections there both from work (OCLC) and where I teach (CCAD). I’ve actually had days where I get two or three pings from the network, and I’m enjoying the kind of "casual / formal" feel. It’s formal, because everyong there has a current, meaningful reason to be connected. Casual, because not all the messages and moments are related to work/business, as is the case with LinkedIn.

So… Since I’m getting value from my Facebook account, I’m trying an experiment: I’m putting value back in. I found a widget that lets you upload files to your Facebook page. So I’ve put a free, PDF version of the TaleWeaver book and cards up there for download by anyone in my networks. And I put an ad stating such in the Facebook marketplace.

I’m testing to see if it does one of three things: 

1. Makes people happy to get a free download of something they find even marginally interesting.
2. Gets me more Facebook friends.
3. Moves more copies of TaleWeaver from my Lulu store.

I’m not really counting on any of this. I hope #1 happens, at least. I’ll report back later on the others if anything of note happens.

If you haven’t seen the new Absolut TV ad, check it out here and come back.

[Yes, at some point I’ll figure out how to embed videos right in the blog. It needs a plugin and I’m having issues with FTP today, if you care… ]

So. It’s a good ad, clearly, from a direction/production standpoint. Good timing, funny, unexpected… I would go so far as to say that it is "joyful," which is really rare in ads that are supposed to be funny. Most funny ads are funny because they’re just gonzo or weird or poking fun. None of that here. Just… the world’s largest pillow fight.

But what transforms it from being just a good ad into a great ad, is that it fits so well with a couple decades of Absolut’s print advertising from a brand standpoint.

There are hundreds to look through. One of my favorites is:

Which was the first I’d seen that was related to a person or style as opposed to a flavor or event, like this:

Since then there have been all kinds of ads. But they all feature a theme that visually answers the question, "What would this subject look like around/within the Absolut bottle?" The metaphor (or "gag" if you prefer) takes the outside wold and imposes it on the brand in an artistic, interesting, funny way.

Which is what’s so brilliant about the pillow-fight ad. It cinematically answers the question, "What would the world be like if it was seen through the lens of Absolut." It takes a concept that was focused on pulling outside elements into the brand space, and then reverses it — pushing the brand space out into the world.

This works better, of course, if you know the print campaign, but it’s not essential. The words I’d used to describe the TV ad — funny, fun, creative, interesting, unexpected — are all ones that work with the print campaign, too. The fact that the print ads are so well known helps, of course. I don’t think the ad would have been 1/10th as good if it had turned out to be the exact same spot… but for another brand of booze.

This process illustrates something similar to a creativity tool/exercize I’ve used with writing students: you take the metaphor of the piece you’re working on and flip it, or take a theme and reverse it, and re-write the piece.

For example, if you’ve written a poem that describes the haunting feeling of deja vu in terms of being followed by a copy of yourself… flip the metaphor. What does it mean to be "followed by yourself?" That could also be a metaphor for paranoia or insecurity, but that’s not the point here; we’re not trying to re-use a metaphor, but flip it entirely… take the internal and push it out. You might write a poem about how when you closely examine whatever you are doing, it tends to seem like deja vu. Even new events and activities become less interesting if you’re forever examining yourself. You never get to do something "fresh" if you’re under your own microscope. Then deja vu becomes the metaphor for, "It seems like I’ve done this before."

See? Fun and new ideas for a piece based on flipping the theme or pushing it out. Absolut could have gone with an easy-peasy (and bad) TV implementation of their print commercials; you can almost picture it, can’t you? Patrons around a bar shaped like the bottle… the bottle shape appearing in various locales as people do fun, drink-y stuff. It might have worked… but it would have been shallow.

What they did instead shows a real understanding of the brand on the part of their agency, and some real poetic thinking in terms of the creative.

Ask yourself, when crafting an ad or any kind of creative work, what would the world look like through the lens of this brand? If this product or event or theme were itself the icon of  by which people lived their lives… what would they do?

The TV ad answers the question, "What happens in an Absolut world?" Do that for your stuff.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly wrote about a Bill Higgins post called "The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design."

The metaphor Higgins brings to the table to help explicate his point is that of "The Uncanny Valley," which Higgins explains well. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is that we feel more and more empathy towards robots (or non-human characters, such as animated cartoons or video game avatars), as they begin to express more human features. At some point, though — the edge of the Uncanny Valley — they become too lifelike for comfort, but not lifelike enough to really fool us. Something is missing. Their appearance strikes us as just… wrong. Odd. Uncanny.

Higgins goes on to cite two films that are often used as examples of having fallen into this valley;  The Polar Express and Final Fantasy. I’ve seen both films, and I agree (especially in the case of The Polar Express… it just ain’t right for some reason).

It’s a well-thought-out article that has, as its main premise, the idea that the user interface for a piece of software should:

"…remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application."

So, the metaphor here, linking software UI to robotics/animation, is that we want something to not behave and/or appear to be too strangely like something else, while not actually being exactly like it. His main point is that Web aps that try to look like desktop aps, and vice versa, aren’t really doing anybody any favors.

Though well written and supported with a couple good examples, I disagree with the premise, and I think the metaphor is badly chosen. 

Metaphor first. We all expect people to look like people because, for the most part, people look like people. There is an instant — some biologists/anthropologists argue, innate — connectivity at birth between newborns and human faces. We respond to smiles. We track eye movements. We can, without any training, mimic facial expressions. We are hard-wired, at least emotionally, and probably chemically/biologically, to know the human face better than almost any other object in the world. When you work with human faces — as an artist, cartoonist, director, animator — you are dealing with one of the most sensitive and universal inputs/outputs available.

What does a "link" look like, biologically speaking? Or a block-quote, menu bar, button, etc. Yes, there are conventions… which change. Yes, currently a Windows ap looks different than a Mac or Linux ap or a Web ap. And if you gave me a program that looked 90% like Microsoft Word — one of the most succesful and widely used programs on the planet — but then had a couple fundamental features that were radically different… I’d probably have some issues with it. At least from a learning perspective, possibly from an adoption one as well.

Unless those differences were really cool and easily grasped.

Time and time again, I’ve used new software that broke some existing UI rule or convention… and surprised me pleasantly. When done well. I will agree with Higgins that purposefully making an ap look like what it’s not in order to glean some kind of borrowed brand shine is a bad idea. The plethora of "Web 2.0-y" glowing buttons, 3D tabs and various shiny bits, when applied to standard interface elements is, frankly, goofy.

Some might argue that much of this 2.0-look is an attempt to make Web aps look more like their desktop counterparts. In many cases, I expect that is the case. Design in everything follows trends. Designers often work for clients who don’t understand the underlying design reasons, but can keep their eye on trends and popular elements and who want their little slice of the Web to look "cool like that link I sent you the other day. Make it cool like that." It doesn’t matter that the site design being changed is one with a standard home page and six children, and the one being emulated is a robust, interactive, social application with all kinds of moving parts. "I want it to look cool like that" is, I think, as major an influencer of UI design as it is of fashion in any industry.

All that being said, however… I have real problems with the idea that UI needs to "look like" what it used to look like, or "should" look like at some level that, according to this metaphor, is emotionally equatable to that of the human face.

Higgins gives as an example, Zimbra, and compares it to Gmail. He says: 

"To me, Zimbra doesn’t in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook… On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel… I prefer [Gmail b]ecause over the past twelve years, my mind has developed a very specific model of how a web application should look and feel, and because Gmail aligns to this model, I can immediately use it and it feels natural to me."

Here’s my problem with that. For me, "email" is the "human face" of this metaphor, rather than the development/deployment platform. Users (like myself) who have spent 12 years in corpoate environments with various versions of MS Outlook would find Zimbra much more "natural" than Gmail. I have a Gmail account, and don’t use it much, partly because I find the UI to be so much different than MS Outlook, which is patched directly into my cerebral cortex for about four hours a day.

For Higgins, humanity is found in the platform. For me, it’s found (in this case) in the tool interface. He thinks a Web ap should look like a Web ap. I think that email should look like email… and, for me, that means Outlook. I’m not saying I’m right — but that different definitions of "natural" in a software design context need to be considered. In the end, what works is natural. It’s not turtles all the way down for UI development; we can actually do things as businesspeople and managers to see if our users respond well to various changes.

We only have one model (though billions of examples, obviously) of the human face. It is uncanny, indeed, when a replication of it gets close… but not quite close enough. In software interface design, I’m not sure that there is a universal model. And, if there is one, that it would be at the platform level. MS Word, Photoshop, TrueSpace, World of Warcraft… I run all of these on Windows XP. If they are all examples of what should "feel natural" for a Windows ap, then our anthropomorphic uncanny valley would be filled not with proto-human forms… but with lions, tigers and bears.

We are genetically programmed to fear change. Period. I know this, you know it. It’s OK. It makes sense. When you do something the same, you’re less likely to be poisoned by a strange berry or wander into a dangerous alley and get the crap kicked out of you or marry someone who speaks a language you don’t. Because of the predisposition, we almost always regard new stuff, different stuff, immediately as "bad," or at least "worse." Those who do it the other way will qualify it as "better," of course.

We have a hard time with "different." We’re just too dang competitive. See "evolution," "professional sports," "org charts" and "last piece of pie."
Problem is, a natural inclination to regard "different" as immediately "worse" or "better" is not logical. And we end up defending our first inclination because, well… we like to be right rather than sensible. Or successful.

Shoshin, or "The Beginners Mind," is a Zen Buddhist concept that suggests we’re better off always behaving as an appropriately open-minded amateur, rather than a "I know everything" professional. Shunryu Suzuki said, "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few."

So… Let’s have an example.

A recent Media Post "Online Publishing Insider" post titled, "Gobbledygoogle," talks about how the TV advertising industry shouldn’t let Google sell "scatter" TV advertising; ie, the ads that are left over after the upfront. His point is basically that by letting Google in the door to sell to people that can’t currently afford TV media, it will let in people who also can’t currently afford to make good TV creative. His metaphor is that of high-priced real estate:

New Canaan, Conn. has one of the most exclusive Zip codes in the country. Residents include David Letterman, Paul Simon, and, ironically, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric. The town maintains its immense value because not everyone can afford to live there. Television is like New Canaan — not every advertiser can afford to live there. What Google fails to recognize as it tries to play in this neighborhood is that, while it does make it easier for advertisers to pay the mortgage, those same advertisers can’t afford to build a home. Google advertisers pay a buck or two a click to advertise on Google right now. How much money do you think they are going to spend on the production of a television ad?

This piece is, frankly, the best example of defending "different" as "worse" I’ve seen in awhile, and I am grateful. Because it really helps us see how change can frighten the bo-jangles out of us while keeping us from seeing, as Suzuki said, the many possibilities.

Rosenberg, the author of the Media Post piece, has seen one possibility — that the same people that pay low dollars for pay-per-click search ads will pay the same dollars for pay-per-spot TV scatter… and (assumptions continue), that their creative will suck (more assumption) because (additional assumption) it will be similarly low-budget… AND (still more assumptions) viewers will cringe and turn away from badly produced ads. The number of assumptions in this chain of reasoning is quite impressive, and gives us lots of room to back up and behave like a proper beginner. And what does a proper beginner do? Ask questions. Smart questions. Lots of questions. Because questions lead to possibilities, and possibilities lead to more avenues to success. Questions we might ask about the, "Google TV ads will lead to great buckets of suck," conclusion:

• Are all advertisers using Google ads that don’t currently buy TV doing so because of lack of budget? Or are there other reasons? Could the logistical difficulties of spreading a decent ad budget over a national buy, but on local stations, or in tight verticals have been something that has kept advertisers out of that media? If I have a product that I sell, spread out, in 50 states, but don’t have the time to negotiate local ad buys with 50-250 Tier 2 or Tier 3 stations… and I don’t feel like paying a media buying service a huge cut to do that for me… is it a question of not having money? Or not having time or an appropriate tool for spreading my money appropriately?
• Are we even talking about the same people? Google AdWords can appeal to mom-and-pop shops with ad budgets as low as $50-100/month. If your ad word campaign is specific enough, you can get good results. I don’t think "cheap" in TV is ever going to be "cheap" in ad words. And the stations will still, clearly, get to set a basement on their prices, eh? We’re not talking about a 30-second spot going for $11. So though Google will be doing the selling, and though they will be attracting an audience of advertisers that is "different" than some current TV advertisers, that doesn’t mean they will be "different" in the same way that ad word advertisers are different front current TV advertisers. I suspect that there will be some overlap, yes… but that we’ll find lots of current TV advertisers simply upping their levels and finding new places to put current creative. Which leads to…
• Why must the creative be cheap simply because the media is cheaper? That’s just a bad assumption. If I have X to spend on advertising, I may decide to blow 2/3 on the creative, in the hope that it goes viral. If the price for TV comes within my range, it may open the door into some creative production that we haven’t seen before. Which leads to…
• Since when does "big budget" = "good" in creative land? Land’a Goshen… Think of the worst TV ads you’ve ever seen, and my guess is that they all cost more than $200,000 to make. Jeez. And last time I looked, home-made, low-bud creative was taking the world by storm, eh? The Quizno’s Spongmonkey ads kicked ass for them. And the production values were… uh… not there.
• And even if the ads suck… Does that mean that viewers will turn away? That’s the craziest part of this chain. Yeah. I’m watching a show that I like (probably on my DVR). And a bad ad (meaning most of them) comes on. I’m so turned off by the production values that I leave the station, never to return to the last 10 minutes of my show. Yeah. That’ll happen. Here’s the thing… If I’m watching one of the Big Four networks, I’m much more likely to be turned off by the low production values and fantastically bad writing of the local news team or an ad for a used car dealership down the road, which we’ve had for decades.

I have no idea if Google handling TV ad remainders would be good or bad for the industry. I’m not well versed enough in the details. But I know enough about how *not* to approach a new situation when it’s just out of the gate. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t take one trail all the way from "what I like now" to "what will be the worst case scenario if one little thing changes." Don’t confuse "different" with "worse."

And don’t forget to ask lots of questions.

This is a rant. And I haven’t done one of those in this space in awhile. If you don’t want to read a good, old fashioned, flame-on rant, and would just like a quick laugh, try out the Nietzsche Family Circus Mash-Up. Hysterical. For those of you inclined to stay on-board for the ride, here we go…

Happy Valentine’s Day from Target.

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!

BEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

(pause)

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

I’m not even sure "BEEEEEEEEP!" is the right phonetic representation for the noise in question. Poing? Boitch? Doong? Boooop? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Hard to tell through the blood build-up behind my eyes. Hard to concentrate when the fight-or-flight reflex has kicked in. Hard to remember when the retail-joy impulse that decades of "shop-is-love" American consumerism has bred into me has fled. A lifetime of social, big-box, mall interactions and happy-happy buying glee has been pushed out of my cerebral cortex by a noise that sounds like the Chuck E. Cheez version of the sound a hospital monitor makes when something wrong… something VERY VERY WRONG is happening to the patient in Room 209.

My God… MY GOD!!! What is happening? Why are they making that noise?

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

At first I thought is was localized, behind the new displays of Ninetendo Wiis. For a moment, I even thought the noise was coming from a Wii, and was maybe some weird, loud, Japanistic auditory approximation of  "Pain-of-Loss." That would make sense. OK. Game pain. I can live with that. But no… it was coming from a wall or a pillar or something.

We’ve just had a "snow emergency" here in Central Ohio. Level 3 in some counties. In Boston (where I’m from) or Buffalo (my wife) or Ithaca (where I went to school) the volume of snow we’ve had would count as "light to moderate." Here it is worthy of writing on stone tablets. And so, for a moment, when the noise came back…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

I thought, Maybe the snow has done something to the nice Target store… Maybe there is an emergency here? Maybe somebody has slipped and fell on ice and they need the… the… most able Target-person to go and… do the emergency thing. Whatever.

It was that loud a noise. It triggered the, "Where’s the fire?" response.

I’d stopped by Target on my way home from work to get two things: a Lego kit for my son (his Valentine’s Day gift) and some milk. A quick stop. And I like shopping at Target. It’s well lit. It’s clean. It’s well laid-out. You can get seasonal stuff, cards, a few food items, clothes, best-selling books, videos, games and…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!
BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Sweet mother of pearl!!! The noise went off again! This time I was up in the toy aisle and trying to find the right Lego kit, and it started hammering right next to me. Wow. It was loud. Really loud. I’d been in the big, main aisle before. Cruising along at finding-my-sector speed. Now I was in careful-hunting-mode. Leaning in close. Examining package details. Retail graze. And directly next to the post-thingy with the speaker up in its posty groin.

Now… I’m not a noise hater. I like loud music. I don’t mind big cities, traffic noise, airports, children playing, trains, concerts, action movies or Robin Williams. Noise is fine. And I’ve been accused on plenty of occasions of being a loud bastard myself. What I mean to say is that I do not require quiet, nor am I repulsed by simple loudness.

But as I grabbed my Lego kit and headed through Men’s Wear towards (whatever they call) Food, the brazen peal let loose again…

BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

And I felt the beginnings of madness. Seriously. This was dentist drill pitched noise. And at a volume that drove any thoughts other than, "Escape!" out of my head. This is the noise they should generate in buildings when there’s a gas leak or a bomb threat to make sure that kids aren’t hiding in the broom closet.

I did not linger.

I got my 2% and headed directly for check-out and, while waiting, asked a clerk who was working on a nearby end-cap:

"What on earth is that horrible noise I keep hearing? The ‘beep! beep! beep!’ thing? Is there some kind of emergency or something?"

Reply: "No. That’s just our phone system."

I was stunned. The phone? THE PHONE? THE FRIGGIN’ PHONE???!!! Having the phone "ring" with a noise that loud and piercing and terrible is the equivalent of "pointing" at someone with a flare gun in order to single them out in a crowd.

"Uh," I asked… "Why is the phone so insanely loud and annoying?"

Answer, punchline and cause of rant: "Because when it’s any less annoying, we don’t answer it."

I replied, "You may want to rethink that particular retail philosophy. Driving customers out of your store with the equivalent of audio napalm because you can’t train employees to answer a reasonable, human-level tone is arguably insane."

He nodded and said, "We hate it, too."

There you go. It sucks for everybody. So it must be OK.

Last time I checked, I pay about a 7% premium to shop at Target as opposed to some other big-box stores. I’ve gladly paid it in the past because I like their selection, service, lay-out, lighting, cleanliness and general ambiance. I say this, though. If I go back and get hit by that air-horn phone-from-hell again… I’m taking my business back across the street to Meijers, even though shopping there always makes me feel… well… a little sticky.

I’ve often used the following definition of marketing with my students:

Good marketing removes friction from an economic process.

That is, you can sell a great product with no marketing. But there will be friction between a possible sale and potential customers. You have to show the horse an ad with a pretty picture of the water. Offer a discount on the water. Have a map on your website so that he can be led to the water, etc. All ways to remove various frictions.

Here’s a question, though: does removing friction actually ever become a bad thing from a marketing/economic standpoint? My gut reaction is to say, "No." Because friction is bad, right? It slows things down. In business terms, it costs money to overcome all kinds of friction (geographic, time-related, information and language barriers, etc.). For centuries of business development, the manipulation of various "frictional deltas" is what has allowed companies to make profits (sometimes insane ones) not necessarily based on the merits of products or services, but on the relative inability of consumers to utilize or even understand those relative frictions.

For example, if there is any kind of monopoly in a given market, you have the issue of "information friction," where the lack of competition will keep the monopoly provider from really needing to be in any way open with data about products. Trade regulations that encourage competition help inject transparency and remove that friction.

Another example: better communication and transportation. If the only thing that allows me to make a profit on "Product X" is my ability to move it quickly from the point of manufacture to the point of sale, then the only friction I am overcoming is geographic. That is certainly not inconsiderable, and (until we have Star Trek transporters) will never be eliminated. But if a company relies on that as its sole value proposition, then it is at the mercy of anyone who can move stuff with less friction.

The same for communication… which is the basis of most marketing and advertising. If I can do a better job of informing you about the benefits of my product than can my competition, I’ve decreased friction in my process more than have they. That should help smooth the way for customers to get to me. Whether we talk about hard-sell, data-specific, promotional communications (product benefits, costs, FAQs, where-to-buy, etc.) or emotional, branding communications… both types provide, when done well, the means for customers to more smoothly identify the products in which they have an interest.

So, again… I’m sitting here thinking, "There’s no such thing as good friction." Any time you can get something out-of-the-way and make it easier to get that horse to the water, or help the horse decide which water he wants… hooray for marketing, the economic lubricant. All friction is bad.

Except… when you want to slow down.

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The social story thusfar…

This is the third in a series of posts about social networking/software, intended to put the current… er… enthusiasm… about making everything "social" into some kind of perspective, and to begin to assign some kinds of business and/or marketing terms and thoughts to the various processes and parts of social platforms.

The first two posts dealt with how we might measure the relative social value of various systems. It took me two posts to do it, since I use this space to think out loud, but with your kind patience, I came up with the following definitions:

So "Share of Participation" might be seen as the social equivalent of "Share of Wallet," but measured in time, number of "units" of participation (entries, comments, etc.). And "Social Share" might then be an equivalent of "Mind Share" or "Market Share." The first measures how much of an individual or group’s "social capital" is spent on a particular social network. The second measures how much of an entire, desired audience that network has captured. These are two very different numbers, their difference is incredibly important, and we’ll get to that later in this post.

I’ve been commenting recently on Raph Koster’s site on variousness related to his upcoming Areae… game? VW? Cyberverse? Who knows…  When I mentioned I was working on a blog post about the next issue in my series — social functions vs. features — Allen Sligar suggested that "social transaction" was a good synonym for "social feature." I like the term… but I think it’s now a third thing I have to think about, rather than a synonym for one of the two I already had in my head. So here’s where I am now:

1. Social Function = doing something for the purpose of "being social." IE, a dating site; the "MM" in "MMORPG." Communications technology per se. IM, email, etc. These have "social functions" at their core. You cannot "do" these things without "being social."

2. Social Feature = a benefit provided to users of the system that is only made possible through exposure to group-level actions. For example, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. The Wikipedia is made possible by the efforts of many thousands of writers and editors. It enables "social creation" of the material, but does not require "social use" of it. A reader of a Wikipedia entry benefits from the social nature of how the entries are created, but is not involved in social interactions himself, per se. Similarly, all the tagging data that is entered into del.icio.us is part of a social system, but using it is not a social function.

3. Social Transaction (thanks, Allen, for the brain-spark) = I think, the exchange of social value, through a social feature of some kind. When I award you a Digg or, on eBay, a positive review… that’s a "social transaction." I think that social transactions can modify and enable, improve and validate social features… but I’m not sure they’re required for them. When I use a Wikipedia entry or browse through a couple hundred Flickr photos, I’m reaping the benefit of social features, but not engaging in a social transaction.

For a time, when I was thinking about these two (now three) things, I had it in my head that there was/were some "many-to-many" and "many-to-one" differences going on here; i.e., that "social functions" were primarily one-to-one and that social features enabled many-to-many interactions. But I’m not sure about that anymore. The social functions of many sites/services seem, now, to be many-to-many. There are poetry groups at MySpace numbering in the tens-of-thousands. They facilitate a social function. And the tagging features of del.icio.us, while entered in a many-to-many scale, can be realized on a one-to-one basis, for sure. So I don’t think it’s a numbers game.

What I do think, though, is that the difference between feature and function will end up relating back to the difference between share of participation vs. social share. I think that systems that have, at their hearts, some level of social function are more likely to aggregate a long-term, low-churn share of participation. While those that rely solely on social features may have a large social share… but it may not be particularly loyal.

What am I talking about. It’s the difference between "audience" and "tribe," and it can be very, very tricky to figure out.

Let’s take, for example, MySpace vs. World of Warcraft . Both have huge social share. Millions of people are doing "social things" on both. There’s no arguing about that. But let’s look at the differences in features vs. functions.

• MySpace: Social features = blogging (page building), email, groups, forums, classifieds.
• WoW: Social features = chat, IM, grouping, guild features

On the surface, it would seem that MySpace is "more social" than WoW. And, in fact, you can play WoW as a solo game, so it need not be social at all. But if you do play WoW in group or guild mode, or for the PvP experience, it has, at its heart, a "WoW specific social function," whereas MySpace does not.

I don’t mean that each of the individual features of MySpace cannot fulfill social functions for individuals and groups… but those functions are ones that are easily portable. On WoW, however, that’s not the case. If you and I are enjoying a game of WoW, but become irritated by some feature of it (say, the graphics) and want to "take our game elsewhere," we are basically hosed. You can’t play WoW anywhere else. All the social features of the game are at the service of the social function: to play in a shared, fictional RPG experience.

On MySpace, on the other hand, almost all the experiences are transferable, and pretty dang easily. If a group of any size were to become disenchanted with any of its features, the functions would transfer. How long, for example, would it take to set up a blog, group, forum or classified for your MySpace group on another platform?

This is all leading to the last term I’m going to coin in this piece: social brand.

Just like there is brand in any part of marketing or advertising, I’m increasingly convinced that various social networking systems will have a social brand that presents to users a proposition based on the intersection of social features and functions. But where a traditional brand is something that is controlled by marketing departments and ad agencies, the social brand of a platform will be, to a degree, at the mercy of the users…

Except inasmuch as the developers of the system can understand the relationships of the features and functions (and transactions) they present to users, and the balance of how they are valued. Social functions are centralized and presented as definitional — either by the creators or, over time, by the will of the users. Social features are used horizontally and are the ways in which aggregate value is accrued to the system.  Things to keep in mind, therefore, when developing a social networking system and trying to develop long-term social brand:

• Are there ways to reinforce social functions in each feature/transaction?
• If the use of a feature is easily replicable elsewhere, can I brand it somehow?
• Are my users loyal to the aggregate, unique social function of my service, or to a set of features?
• If I’m seeking to increase share of participation, should I be increasing services or looking to deepen my root social function?
• If I’m seeking to increase social share, do I need parity with competitors in social features? Or a unique social function proposition?
• Why haven’t I hired one or more people to do nothing but manage these issues?

These are all very weird questions. We are talking about sites/services that rely on the interactions and content and data and information provided by users to create the value for the customers. Yeah, I know "user created content" is all over the place in the media and being discussed as such. Thing is, I don’t see a whole lot of talk about how to manage these "users" more as employees or as products/services themselves.

Because… if the value your service is providing derives from work done  by users, you need to think of that work as an operational center. And you need to think of the people doing that work the same way you would a contractor, employee or  (insulting!) piece of equipment. It’s not just "kinda neat" that they do stuff on your site that provides value. It’s core to the biz.

We need to talk about this stuff more.

The social story thusfar…

This is the third in a series of posts about social networking/software, intended to put the current… er… enthusiasm… about making everything "social" into some kind of perspective, and to begin to assign some kinds of business and/or marketing terms and thoughts to the various processes and parts of social platforms.

The first two posts dealt with how we might measure the relative social value of various systems. It took me two posts to do it, since I use this space to think out loud, but with your kind patience, I came up with the following definitions:

So "Share of Participation" might be seen as the social equivalent of "Share of Wallet," but measured in time, number of "units" of participation (entries, comments, etc.). And "Social Share" might then be an equivalent of "Mind Share" or "Market Share." The first measures how much of an individual or group’s "social capital" is spent on a particular social network. The second measures how much of an entire, desired audience that network has captured. These are two very different measurements, their differences are incredibly important, and we’ll get to that later in this post.

How & what vs. why

People get strategy and tactics mixed up all the time. They also get vision and mission mixed up. I’ve heard the two terms used interchangeably. I’ve always thought that "vision" makes sense as the "higher" of the two, as what you see or are looking to achieve — your vision — doesn’t change based on what you do, but your mission(s) — what you do — can change over time. Missions change more often than visions, so they should be lower on the totem pole of organizational chatter. But as long as you know what you mean… fine. That’s what I’m talking about. Higher vs. lower.

The "higher level" stuff is almost always concerned with strategy, and strategy is almost always concerned with "why" you are doing what you’re doing as opposed to "what and how" things get done. That’s because until you know the reason(s) why you (or your boss or your board or your customers) want to do something, it is almost always harder to formulate a decent plan for doing what and how. Why is that? Because there can be many, many different reasons for doing the same thing.

Witness lipstick. It’s the "what" answer to a "how" question: "How do we make somebody’s lips very, very red artificially?" With lipstick. Bingo. Quesion answered. Super. So… what are you going on about there, Mr. H?

Well, what I’m going on about is the difference between a feature and a function. Lipstick does, in fact, make lips very red. But if you are a woman looking to buy lipstick to make your lips red to look all sexified for your date… that’s a much different function for red lips than that of a circus clown. Same feature, different function. One can argue that clowns probably use some other kind of make-up entirely; not lipstick at all. At which point I say again, "Bingo." You’ve now narrowed your "feature" even further. It’s not just about red lips anymore, is it? It’s probably about the adhesive properties of the unguents involved or something. What do I know from lipstick? But my point is, for the one feature description, "Make lips red," there are several higher level functions that are radically different.

It gets much more complex when features and functions overlap. And when they aren’t well understood. And don’t have a history. When media are new and everybody is jumping all overthemselves to get in on a game that seems very exciting because all those crazy kids are setting up MySpace pages and downloading YouTube videos and using the Wikipedia to research their homework because it’s all so dang social… well, you need to stop and understand whether the social aspects of what they are doing are features or functions of those networks.

To put it another way: is any particular platform social in nature, or does it simply utilize social abilities to perform tasks? Or both? And, if it is social in nature… is it uniquely social? Is it creating specific social content, or easily replicable interaction? And, at this point, we’re back to ways in which we might utilize measurements like share of participation and social share.

Social features: Wikipedia rules

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, and somehow you’ve found my little blog… that’s just sad. That’s like some weird kinda reverse Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. But, be that as it may, Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a software platform that utilizes social aspects of computing almost completely as features… but is almost entirely devoid of a social function, except as an implicit byproduct for some of its authors/editors.

Most people who use Wikipedia come in contact with it as users; searchers for information. When you do that, you have no social interaction with article authors whatsoever. You are consuming information. Period. End of story, no social nuttin’. The whole Wikipedia might have been, as far as you know or care, written by one really smart dude, a computer, or a giant robot squid from the future. The social tools put into place — the social features of a wiki — are used in order to enable the writing and editing of articles on the site. The function of Wikipedia is to provide those articles to its readers.

If there are any social functions of the Wikipedia, they are, essentially, serendipitous; accident. You and I might "meet" while editing the same article, discover each other’s email address, correspond (probably not entirely on Wikipedia, but that could happen…), fall in love, etc. etc. I’m sure that a few deep, meaningful relationships have, indeed, formed across the pages and links of Wikipedia.

Then again, I’m sure that deep, meani