New Collages by Adam

Far Out (Collage). 24” x 24” on a wood panel.

Untitled (Collage). Cut and glued comic books. 24” x 24” on a wood panel.

I like my cousin’s work.

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Innovation, Money-Making, and Public Services

Yesterday we were talking about the state of patent and copyright law, and whether it helps or hinders innovation.

Generally, the thinking was that “creator’s rights” encourage people to make things – if your invention is protected, you’re more likely to profit from it – but that after a certain point, competition-eliminating or world-changing innovations ought to be in the public domain. My brand-new colleague Joe pointed out that Jonas Salk famously did not patent the vaccine he created for Polio: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” (Wikipedia)

I tend to agree with that statement.

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Fans, CPM, and Academic Rigor

A while back, I got pretty interested in something called “Player Efficiency Rating” (PER). Being a fan of the NBA – and in particular the Lakers – I’m interested in the recent shift across some clubs to a more stats-based approach. It turns out that the teams that use “advanced statistics” to make personnel decisions and to inform their players before each game do significantly better than those that do not. “Advanced Statistics” are things like PER that use an algorithm to bring together multiple individual metrics into a single number. There are plenty of criticisms to this approach, many of which focus on the way the algorithm is built.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I looked at teams that have stats people integrated into the decision process. (Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Oklahoma City, Portland and I may have included Orlando — I’m not certain what they do exactly.) It was seven or eight teams. They had won 60% of their games, and that’s counting Houston, which has only won half their games because they’re missing Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady wasn’t playing.

The teams that don’t have quants won 40-some percent. And it was pretty linear … the more or less they had someone integrated into their decision making, the more or less they were at the extremes of winning and losing. [Emphasis mine]
TrueHoop – The State of Basketball Analysis

I’ll reiterate the main point for emphasis: NBA teams that use a stats-based approach win 60% of their games, while those that don’t win 40%.

But I guess *my* point is not that stats-based approaches are always the way to go, but rather that if you’re going to take a stats-based approach, it’s important to really think hard about how (and why) you’re using data.

Which leads me to a quick dissection of the state of nerdery in basketball today:

That, friends, is the formula for PER. It takes all the valuable individual metrics for a player (which have been recorded since around 1950) and rolls them up into one number that represents the total contribution of a single player per minute of each game. There are plenty of other ways to judge players using advanced metrics, including Adjusted +/- (how the team does when a player is on the floor versus off), Rebound Rate (just what it sounds like) and Wins Added (also what it sounds like).

And while I won’t bore you with an explanation of every portion of the algorithm, you can see that it takes into account good things (points scored and how they’re scored, blocks, steals, rebounds, assists) and bad things (turnovers, shots missed, fouls), and includes the team’s pace-of-play in comparison to the overall league. Each of the “contributions” is weighted to essentially create an index where the “average” player in the NBA has a PER of 15.

When you anecdotally compare players’ performances to their PER numbers, things start to make sense:

Only 14 times has a player posted a season efficiency rating over 30.0. All of them are between 30.23 and 31.84. Michael Jordan leads with four 30+ seasons, with Shaquille O’Neal and Wilt Chamberlain having accomplished three each, and LeBron James, David Robinson, Dwyane Wade and Tracy McGrady having accomplished one each. The 2008-2009 season was unique in that it was the only season in which more than one player (LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, with Chris Paul just missing the cut with a PER of 29.96) posted efficiency ratings of over 30.0.
Wikipedia – PER

I bring this up now because there’s a lot of talk lately of the value of a “fan” on Facebook (or rather, the value of a “liker”), and the analysis seems pretty shallow. Compare PER (judging the value of an NBA player per minute of play) to the formula proposed by Vitrue and Edelman for the value of a “fan”/”liker”:

Don’t get me wrong: there is absolutely value in a fan relationship that can be measured by looking at the free impressions that relationship creates. And while it’s nice to have a low-level algorithm to determine that component of a fan’s “value”, I think we can do a whole heck of a lot better.

To me, judging fan value by how many free impressions they can create seems like judging an NBA player only by their free-throw shooting ability. Or even by how fast they can run end-to-end on a court. Or in a pretty good case by their PER. In all cases, there’s a much bigger picture to take into account.

Take into account this bit from a fascinating article in the Times Magazine from last year, about analyzing the performance of players like Shane Battier, the “No Stats All-Star”:

There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone. [Emphasis mine]
Times Magazine – The No-Stats All-Star

I’m not arguing that the creators of the “Fan Value” metric should be shot, but none of us should feel good with an impressions-based valuation of fan relationships. Instead, I’d argue that each business needs to figure out (as basketball nerds already have):

  • What constitutes a “win”
  • Who/what contributes to those wins
  • How those contributions are made
  • and Who else competes for those contributions

Only then can you figure out the value of a fan.

Or not. Thanks to Mike and Alex for looking at this pre-post.

Posted in Digital Thinking, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Stupid Movie Quote Infographic

I stole the very good idea and even better design from FlowingData’s Data Underload section to create this “info” graphic about some of my favorite movie lines, from some of the stupidest (and awesomest) movies of all time.

I hope you enjoy it. I enjoyed making it. It was a long, tiring, good week, and doing a bit of design just now was quite enjoyable. Now I’m off to the Foursquare Day party. Hope to see you there.

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Barrier-Utility Cheater’s Hypothesis

In theory, people maximize their lives by weighing costs and perceived utility for goods and services. What this chart presupposes is…maybe they do the same when it comes to (a) Sex and (b) Digital Things?

This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it was worth a quick discussion yesterday at work and (as usual) a quick whiteboard diagram. So if you’re faced with a scenario where you have the opportunity to cheat (on your wife or on your favorite digital service), use these handy charts.

High barrier, low utility? Don’t cheat. This is why VIRB never became a serious part of my life, and Facebook continues to be my leading lady. It would take too much effort to recreate all my connections elsewhere, so it’s very hard to tempt me with beautiful design and cool features. Sorry, VIRB. You’re hot, but not hot enough. However, it’s my position that creating artificially high barriers to cheating is actually a bad thing when it comes to digital experience.

Barrier-Utility Equilibrium is the likely source of many marital problems. In the case of Tiger, the barrier should have been high: gorgeous wife, child, potential multi-billion-dollar losses due to a tarnished image, etc. But his perceived utility was able to overcome any mental barrier, and the rest is history. This equilibrium, I imagine, occurs mostly with new services, where both the barrier and utility is low. Why not try Gowalla AND Foursquare, if the winner in location-based services is unclear?

High utility, low barrier? Definitely cheat. If it were easy for me to move everything to a brand-new and clearly better system – including connections, photos, permalinks, etc. – that would be pretty attractive, right?

Interestingly, WordPress and the 37signals services encourage cheating: they allow users to easily take their data and migrate it to new platforms. But as far as I can tell, they don’t suffer much churn because the alternative services don’t provide enough utility. It’s also my belief that the creation of a barrier-less platform actually reduces the perceived utility of other services.

But perhaps I’m not thinking straight. Happy Friday!

Posted in Digital Thinking, Wading | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Sequoia Sempervirens

Where I grew up, there’s a special tree called the Coastal Redwood. It doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world, and it’s by far the tallest (379 feet at the reported maximum) and nearly the oldest (up to 2,200 years) tree on Earth. They’re simply stunning. And for a long time now, I’ve wanted to get a marker of home on my body, and in particular, a representation of these trees. Now it’s done. And I love it.

Sorry, mom! I know you hate it, but I love it. And many of your favorite internet people have tattoos, so… :) ?

Posted in Wading | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Systems + Desired Traits

We were talking today about how the openness (or closedness) of a system affects the attributes that the system creates, fosters, or otherwise cherishes.

In my mind, a more closed system seems to enable (promote?) design, and open systems seem to enable better performance.

In the case of Apple – a famously closed system – apps are held to stringent design standards, perhaps to the detriment of their performance. And when I pick up an Android-powered phone, I’m always super stoked on the speed of the apps, but super disappointed in their design/interface.

Certainly you could say design is a part of performance, but for the sake of this discussion, keep them separate.

Do you find this to be the case?

Posted in Design, Digital Thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Size Does Matter

Alex and I came up with an idea for a talk at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Here’s our idea as we submitted it to them.

Short Description
Drawing on our experience with some of the world’s biggest brands, we have a bold recommendation: strive for smaller things. The world’s going that way, in biology, culture, and politics. So why are marketers still chasing big impression numbers? Why are we obsessed with the idea of scale? Let’s make small, awesome things, rather than big, crappy ones.

Long Description
Things want to be small.

Our talk provides a new perspective for the digital world that celebrates the self organization of people into groups that are smaller, harder to find, and harder to communicate with, but ultimately more valuable to marketers.

Our talk begins with our experience in helping some of the world’s biggest companies set their digital strategies, and builds on those insular learnings with those from other fields. We’ll examine lessons from biology, politics and popular culture to show that networks inexorably trend toward smaller and more specific iterations on the norm. For nations, it’s a yearning for autonomy; for field mice it’s an adjustment in width and length based on competition; for culture, it’s smaller, yet more complex ideas that create interest (see Steven Johnson).

We hope that learnings from other fields and the metaphor of “small” will help marketers in the digital age. Our mission is to break the advertising model where companies are more concerned with collecting impressions than making them.

Our three rallying cries:

Forget scale. It seems that everything is growing online except for trust in marketers. We’ve been obsessed with collecting more fans, gaining more views and bombarding more people. We want a new strategy for the next billion people to migrate online, one that is more about quality than quantity.

Design for one. Here, we challenge people to think about concept first and audience second. Also, to break away from the comfort of large caricatures of society like “millenials” and “baby-boomers.”

Segment for value. Using the Gini Coefficient (and the Lorenz Curve) we show how a small world view can help segmentation. To date, we’ve been unnecessarily inefficient with our messages by shouting them into a crowded room. Instead, we should speak softly to only those that matter.

With the internet as a catalyst, people are less and less willing to be forced into groups that don’t help them identify, belong and produce. We hope that people leave the talk with a new perspective on boundaries, measures of success and a new understanding of what’s to come for marketing.

What do you think? If they don’t pick us, we’ll do this talk somewhere else.

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Gaming FourSquare with Bill Brasky

This is a guest post from a friend. They’ve requested to remain anonymous. If you like hacking and location-based services, this is some good fun:

Bill Brasky is a sonofabitch! For the unititiated, Bill Brasky was a short-lived character who appeared on Saturday Night Live in the mid to late ’90s. Bill, himself, rarely appeared, but his associates would swill scotch and recount all of Bill’s legendary — if not bizarre and often mean-spirited — accomplishments which, like any good folk hero, grew with each retelling.

Fifteen years on and Bill Brasky has signed up for FourSquare and his behaviour is no different; he’s still a dick and he’s looking to usurp your mayorship, but he also wants to be your friend. Bill Brasky is, obviously, not a real person, but in this case, Bill’s not even portrayed by a real person, he’s an automated script.

As a web developer, I’m regularly checking out different social networks and other novel online tools, and FourSquare has recently drawn my attention.

Immediately I realized that the location-based service was ripe for manipulation and, barring a major change in how either GPS or the Internet works, it will likely always be that way. The fundamental problem of check-in authenticity is a classic problem of “Never Trust The Client”. For the non-technical, ”The Client” is whatever is sending check-in requests to the FourSquare API. Many people use iPhones or other, similar, devices. With the software running on these, FourSquare gets a venue ID and, optionally, GPS coordinates. This is all well and good when you know you can trust the client. The standard iPhone application takes real location data from the device’s GPS and sends it along, but anyone with a web browser can access the FourSquare API and fake the requests. Essentially, FourSquare has to trust the user that they’re where they say they are and this leaves a major opening.

The folks I know who are regular users of the service seem to really like it, and mayoral statuses, especially for hot venues, are highly coveted. Knowing this, the service was practically begging for some tinkering. Enter: Bill Brasky.

I began work on some Perl scripts to play with the FourSquare API and setup an account (Bill Brasky) to test with. I gave Bill a list of locations I wanted him to check into and set him loose. Bill hits up each venue with a random time delay to, at least superficially, appear as though he’s an actual person touring the town. At the time of writing, Bill’s siezed mayorships at 11 different venues, in some cases displacing real patrons.

Right now, apart from the random timing of check-ins, Bill doesn’t do much, but I’ve got plans for him. In the future, Bill will begin friending those he steals mayoral status from. He’s going to start using actual venue lat/lon, with a touch of random positional noise added, in his check-ins to appear as though he’s actually “there” as a preemptive strike against FourSquare “locking down”. He’s going to start getting routes from Google Maps so his checkin times aren’t just random, but plausible, given the actual driving distance/time between venues. He’s going to start seeking out popular venues on his own and making moves to become the mayor. Basically, Bill’s going to start acting, or at least appearing, more human; albeit a semi-malicious one.

I must confess however, that this idea isn’t original. I have to give credit to Jim Bumgardner of KrazyDad.com who began similarly gaming FourSquare some time ago. Though this isn’t a new idea, I’m trying to push this further on the social side by establishing relationships, in particular with those people that Bill’s “bested”. I’m curious to see how folks respond to Bill’s constantly encroaching on “their bar”, especially as more people adopt the serivce. Beyond the social component, there’s the question of the obvious marketing potential of a service like FourSquare which we’re already seeing from some businesses which are offering freebies or discounts to those who regularly check-in or have mayoral status, and how an eligitimate player like Bill might start affecting that.

Super Mayor

More than anything, this is just a fun exercise for me, and a curiosity to those who track the world of social media. It’ll be interesting to see how Bill fares over time, how other user’s respond, and what FourSquare might try to do to make the game harder for Bill to play. The social world is costantly evolving and reinventing itself and as we work towards total integration the stakes (and dollar signs) become bigger and bigger. What happens when the likes of Bill Brasky starts affecting the bottom-line as tools like FourSquare are used to promote and market businesses? I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

For the technical among you, I’ve started work on a (very simple) FourSquare module for Perl, which I’m hoping to get into CPAN in the near future, but I’m making the code available for now via this blog.

foursquare.pm - The Perl module for interfacing with FourSquare View Code | Download Code

dummy.pl - A sample script using the module. View Code | Download Code

The code is ugly, I know. It uses some gross techniques (e.g. regex for XML “parsing”), but it will be cleaned up as I work on it.

Editor’s Note: I would love to hear what any Foursquare people have to say about this, and the rest of you readers. Definitely interesting.

Posted in Digital Thinking, Social Media | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Report Up @ Canvas8

Borrowing an idea from Jon Kolko – and an examination of a work he pointed to in a presentation I wrote about a while back – I recently created my first piece of “real” editorial work since college for Canvas8, a subscription-only digital publication out of the UK. Their blurb adequately explains what I was trying to get at:

Consumers don’t view the world in categories, they see products and services side by side and they compare them, similar or not. Are brands ready to be judged as part of a collective consumer experience?”

Since you can’t read it without a subscription (sorry), I can’t post it here. So this is basically a post for:

  • My scrapbook (eek, made the “editor’s choice box!)
  • My mom (see above)
  • Shameless plug: I wrote the whole thing in Writeminds, and it was awesome!

That’s all. Thanks to Jo, Alex, Ana and Jen for giving me feedback on the idea.

Posted in Inspiration, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment