One of the things I've been thinking about and watching for is how Social Spaces change depending on the size of the community. For example, LinkedIn's news has the comment field at the top (it adds a second one at the bottom once there are three comments). This is fine when you have a small community leaving very few comments. However, if you had a slashdot sized community, this would encourage idiots to post before they read what other's said.

Too often we treat all practices as if the fit all communities, but the fact is size matters. For instance, Joshua's favorite example of the top diggers page, recently removed. What motivated folks at the beginning became a gamed liability once they got big. Much as we are reluctant to change UI's and remove features, there is a reasonable strategy for it....

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A nice reminder of the wisdom of "You are not the user" at a product manager's blog: Eating Dog Food?

The real issue is that this is just another symptom of a big problem we have in our industry, but especially here in the valley. We tend to believe that our customers and users are much more like ourselves than they really are.

and even better, a reminder that there ar ea number of people you shouldn't consider your user either
Why Silicon Valley just won't shut up about FriendFeed

Has it ever occurred to Arrington that he is, in the argot of product managers, an "edge case"? Entrepreneurs desperate for coverage, and aware that he never reads email, are trying a new way to reach him -- and Arrington, in his compulsive neophilia, actually tries out the new medium, for a while. He then quickly tires of it, and throws a tantrum. Catering to such a person's whims is no way to run a company.

To that list I add Scoble and your CEO. And no, Steve Jobs is an exception, not the rule.

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We celebrate flickr's new video feature with Amelie's debut as a song-and-dance (wo)man.

Glad my cane has a more pleasant use...
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Last night's Product Management class covered two important business areas: Business development (Guest lecturer to remain anonymous) and "Tips for success in growing revenues" - Guest Lecturer: Steve Tennant. I'll put up tennant's slides when/if they become available. The BD talk was from an individual from a big company with a lot of paranoia any time any of their people talk, I appreciated the chance to learn.

A couple of metaobservations. In a case study, one observation was that advertisers just won't advertise against user-generated media. There is too much concern over potential porn, infringement and old-fashioned crappiness, making many UGD projects unprofitable, despite guarantees you put in place. Hardly news: i remember randy Farmer mentioning this being a problem back in his palace days. Interesting that with the prevalence of UGC it still hasn't been solved though.

Secondly, it was pointed out that 99% of your end users will watch the work of the 1% who will actually make content with any tool you offer, which means you have got to make certain that you have enough traffic that 1% of that 1% will actually be cool enough to attract an audience (Don't forget Sturgeon's law!), or the whole thing is unprofitable.

MORE...
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As of late, I've been extremely focused on how we motivate behavior via our design choices; that theme is reflected in most of the talks I've been giving. Social spaces are particularly critical because of their complexity, subtle clues in interface make a big difference.
Often panels can be a bunch of folks sitting in the spotlight congratulating themselves for begin smart-- I prefer it when it's a chance for a series of lighting talks on a theme, then hopefully some discussion. Joshua's short talk from SXSW is a good guide to behavior in a compact form. I hope my panel form IASummit complements it.

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No, that is not me. This definitely motivates me to put in a photo of myself. it's close to Vimeo's old cro-magnon man image.

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Out of Print in The New Yorker

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, "At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, 'How are you?,' in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce." Keller's speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline "NOT DEAD YET."

MORE...
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She climbs in my bed, demands getting under covers, steals my food and demands cartoons on the tv. And in exchange? Kisses owie.

worth it!

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From The Financial Times, Seven categories of rot that appeal to big cheeses

Last week, I came across the following rot-rich announcement from a leading UK institution. "It is with regret I announce that Mr X is leaving Institution Y by mutual agreement at the end of April. Mr X has been an outstanding colleague who has contributed much to the organisation . . . I am sure you will join me in wishing him all the best for the future."

There are four rotten sections in this peach of an announcement. "It is with regret" means it is with relief. "By mutual agreement" means we fired him but have agreed that neither of us will talk to the press.

Mr X "has been an outstanding colleague" means anything but; indeed, the greater the protestations about the departing person's marvellousness, the greater the joy to be seeing the back of them.

"I know you will join me in . . . " means I don't care what you actually think, but I am the boss around here and I am telling you what the public line is.

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Truth, naked and cold, had been turned away from every door in the village. Her nakedness frightened the people. When Parable found her she was huddled in a corner, shivering and hungry. Taking pity on her, Parable gathered her up and took her home. There, she dressed Truth in story, warmed her and sent her out again. Clothed in story, Truth knocked again at the doors and was readily welcomed into the villagers' houses. They invited her to eat at their tables and warm herself by their fires. -- Jewish Teaching Story

I've been reading a number of books about how to communicate effectively, and one thing they all harp on is the power of story telling. No need to sell me! But it did send me to my bookshelf to fish out a book I had ordered long ago on someone's recommendation. The second chapter opened with the above story, and I found it so compelling I had to share.

Since I am currently enamored of lists, I'll share the author's (Annette Simmons) six key types of stories:
1. "Who Am I" Stories
2. "Why Am I Here" Stories
3. "The Vision" Story
4. "Teaching" Stories
5. "Values-in-Action" Stories
6. "I Know What You Are Thinking" Stories

Each one is designed to establish credibility, create empathy and eventually teach or persuade the listener. I appreciate Simmons continual attention to the end goal of story telling in the context of our work lives, as other books get caught up in the mythology and poetry of our oral history. This is a business book first, and knows it. If you are a disciple of Fray, if you are a student of Joseph Campbell, or looking to write the next American novel I recommend you look elsewhere. Bu if you have to make a presentation to the executive team, this is the perfect book for you. I'm only a third in right now, so I'll probably have more to tell as I work my way through, but so far I'm enjoying the focus and the form.

Here is a short article by her if you'd like to sample her writing style: The Power of Story: Dressing Up the Naked Truth.

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I don't know how I got so lucky, but suddenly I find myself bombarded with rules about how to write SO YOU CAN BE HEARD just as I am attempting to edit a couple books.

Thought I'd share them.

From Frank Luntz's WORDS THAT WORK: IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY, IT'S WHAT PEOPLE HEAR we have these ten. The examples are my summarization given on Twitter, and thus all under 140 characters, except ironically rule 2, brevity, in which the negative example required its own tweet.

Ten principles of effective language.

Rule 1. Simplicity: Use Small Words. Don't use words you have to look up, because most (people) won't.

Rule 2: Brevity. Use short sentences. Good: Just do it! Bad: John Kerry "a bold progressive internationalism that stands in contrast to the belligerent and myopic bush administration"

Rule 3: Credibility is as Important as Philosophy: "Ultimate driving machine" "Read my lips: no new taxes." Both catchy... both true?

Rule 4: Consistency matters. "It's the real thing" 1943. "The breakfast of champions" and "M'm M'm Good" 1935. "Good to the last drop" 1915.

Rule 5: Novelty. Volkswagon (and now Mini's) promoting small when everyone else is pushing big.

Rule 6: Sound and texture matter. "Snap, crackle pop" "intel inside" "quicker picker upper" "think different" ... beauty before accuracy.

Rule 7: Speak Aspirationally. "A diamond is forever" "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I think Obama read this book.

Rule 8: Visualize. "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" The secret to visualization is the word "imagine" The work is done by the reader.

Rule 9: Ask a question "can you hear me now" "got milk" "are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Passive becomes interactive

Rule 10: Provide Context and Explain Relevance: From "Have it your way" in 1973 to "No late fees ever" from Netflix today: Be relevant

You can't help but notice that rules 1-5 are all Strunk, while 6-10 are all White, if you are a fan of The Elements of Style.

Next up, from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Dieb by Chip and Dan Heath. This site is lousy with free examples, btw. Thus the below is a direct excerpt from the book.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission -- sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day's worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise -- an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus -- to grab people's attention. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the fortyeighth history class of the year? We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge -- and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS

How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions -- they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images -- ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors -- because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves -- a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas. When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable Statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: "Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago."

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic "37 grams" doesn't elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it's easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES

How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

Finally, from George Orwell's Poitics and the English Language. Interestingly he also said "Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations."

"I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

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Administrative Debris

It struck me that Tufte's description of "administrative debris" and its opposite, which I suppose might be called "proper interface/content integration" or an "information interface," may finally explain my penchant for hypertext as a user interface medium for many types of information display. HTML, and the web's basic architecture in general, is designed in such a way that demands that interface elements related to navigation and moving through content, areas prone to administrative debris, occur in a way that's naturally suited to the content.

With hypertext, the information itself is the interface.

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Bernardo A. Huberman has been, so far, the most impressive speaking in a very impressive series. and, lucky you, they just just posted the video of his talk.

The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that was never possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of several studies of social dynamics in the web, as well as mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences with digital content.

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My sister-in-law just got cast in Play, by Samuel Beckett and sent me this fascinating short video of this fascinating short play.

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Paul Graham says

The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed....
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.

Well, other than the fact that anyone willing to get sucked into a company team-building scavenger hunt is already a different species....

but yes, employee-ship is different. You see it over and over again; company acquired, employees leave as soon as contractual handcuffs fall off (and some before that.)

But there is one theme is his essay I dislike: the use of the word humans (I dislike his emphasis on prgrammer as well, but one fight at a time.) Are all humans alike? Uh, no.

One big mistake I made when I was first a manager was assuming all designers were alike, and that they were all chomping at the bit to make crazy big things. In particular, there was one designer who just churning out banners. I figured s/he was dying to do something a bit more meaty; but when I moved this designer onto an interactive project they were simply miserable and no amount of extra mentoring time made a lick of difference. Only retuning this person to their 9-to-5 ad slot job returned their equilibrium and -- yes it's shocking-- joy. Since then I have seen many other folks suffer; big problem people stuck on a website when the redesign was over slowly going mad with "optimization," and optimization people getting the deer-in-a-headlight look when it's time to start a big project for a new product line.

More recently, I've seen employees star-struck by the silicon valley startup stories suffering in silent embarrassed misery, able only to leave by proclaiming the company f*cked up, which --even if true-- is an excuse for getting the hell out. Is joining a tiny startup a good idea? Hey, we promise you roller coaster thrills AND all the visits to office depot for ink cartridges you can eat (literally, since we can't really replay your expense account. Want some more stock?)

When you are in a start-up and like it, it's hard to quantify why it's so awesome. No health insurance, you get to figure out what's wrong when the network doesn't work, you get to deal with the blue screen of death yourself, you get to answer the six a.m. east coast what's this on my credit card call in exchange for what? Freedom to make your own crappy decisions?

It's worth it for me.

I'm like a cat, only slightly domesticated. I'm not a wolf, I won't die inside a company, but if you dump me on the side of a highway I'll be fine. Perhaps a bit wilder than that: every so often I have to go walkabout, with no guarantee of return to my food dish.

But there is no shame in being dog-people, and I hate that Paul Graham's essay suggests there is something wrong with you if you are.

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