that's what I'm talking about

Barack Obama is putting web widgets to work for America.

And proving -- as if it needed to be proven -- that math can change the world.

Dear Sir, I have no complaints. You did this one absolutely right on.

(Unlike, er, Twitter and Email.)(Although, truthfully, you turned that email thing around.)

give it up

As of Friday, Planned Parenthood had taken in $802,678 in donations from 31,313 people. ... More than two-thirds of the individuals are first-time donors to Planned Parenthood ... and the money came in from all 50 states.

The New York Times reporting on the success of an anonymous email campaign which encouraged recipients to "make a donation to Planned Parenthood, of any amount. In Sarah Palin's name."

Go ahead -- give a little »

Related: John McCain on the benefits of using a condom »

@barackobama re twitter: ur doing it wrong.

Photo: Silicon Valley Insider

Dear @barackobama,
I think it’s super cool that you’re tweeting, and even cooler that you’re top of the pile among the cool kids with, at this writing, just shy of 76,000 followers. Also impressed that you follow back: that’s not common among the superstars of Twitter.

But here’s the problem: You’re doing it wrong.

Search twitter, aka summize.com, for “@barackobama” and you’ll see what I mean: Your tweeps are talking to you. One of the things that makes Twitter work is that lovely “@username” syntax -- a string that not even the folks at Twitter anticipated. It evolved organically, maybe because of its use at Flickr and other social networks, and soon enough the guys behind the curtain wired it up so that that all replies appeared behind their own special tab, and the tweet itself was hotlinked back to the tweep who tweeted it.

So here’s the problem: You’re not replying in kind. Which, even worse, makes it look like you’re not listening.

It’s possible of course that, when folks talk to you, you’re sending them a direct message, which no one can observe. I’m gonna take a wild swing, based on my own experience tweeting to you, and guess that that’s not what you’re doing.

Either way, you’re missing a great opportunity. Because eavesdropping is another one of the things that makes Twitter work. Listening in on conversations, picking up information that people exchange in the public stream: Think of it as one long streaming Town Hall meeting. Folks want to hear from you. Want to ask you questions. Want to hear what you have to say about things that matter to them.

Directly. Not filtered through media coverage. Right here. Live. In 140 characters or less.

Tell us more than just where you’re speaking right now and where we can listen live -- all well and good, but not enough.

Tell us where you’re going next. Give us time to get there. Send @replies to all your tweeps who are near where you're going to be -- invite them directly. Ask them to invite their friends. Work the groundswell. Generate excitement.

More importantly: listen. Encourage @slashkevin. Talk economics with @ralphmwhite3. Did you see that spot on CNN? Let @Leebo_buzz know what you think.

And don’t just listen to the folks who love you: talk to the folks who don’t. Challenge those who knock your experience. Clear up misinformation where you can.

You need to get this right -- so you can put things right.

Si se puede,
suttonhoo

go miniman go

Video: Go Miniman Go

Lego's 30 years old.
Come. See. Get a Tee.

separate but equal?

Illus: Letterpress from Blue Barnhouse

Rushmore Drive ... offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens.

But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.

Bob Tedeschi reporting on the release of Rushmore Drive, a search engine “meant to give the black audience a quick way to find information that other search engines -- including IAC’s own Ask.com -- might bury beneath pages of less relevant results,” in this morning’s New York Times.

A few weeks back in my official capacity in life outside this blog, I had a chat with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who was interested in knowing whether or not the e-commerce consultancy that I work for designs sites with gender in mind.

I responded that we design site experiences around user personas in which we identify 1) who will be using the site and 2) what they hope to do; that personas are largely task and role based -- and in that way were influenced in a broader way by gender -- but that no, we don’t sit down and say: “This site is for women -- let’s give them features A, B, and C,” and “this site is for men: let’s give them features C, D and E.”

And while I cited recent research from the Wharton School (warning: PDF) that indicated there might be a gender bias to the way men and women shop online -- I was quick to point out that if everything the Wharton research said was true, then I was actually a man.

I also referred to Barry Schwartz's conclusions regarding Maximizers and Satificers.

My comments didn’t make the cut, and I suspect it was because they didn’t support the underlying hypothesis, which was enthusiastically in favor of gender-biased shopping.

Why does this make me a little uncomfortable? Because even though yes, I think engines (search or otherwise) that can read the implicit and explicit behaviors of shoppers online means that we can give them a message that is much more relevant to what they’re looking for -- which in its turn makes the online experience richer and more relevant for all of us -- it makes me a little queasy to chunk folks into broad racial and gender categories and feed them info accordingly.

As frightening as it may be to some, behavioral marketing does hold the promise of meeting the consumer where they are -- and lets the site's host speak to them on a highly individualized basis.

Reducing that down to gender or race -- the thing we’re so good at doing as a discriminatory society -- undercuts the real opportunities that the technology affords.

Which is true plurality and regard for diversity.

To do so implicitly -- in which it isn't revealed to the user that we know X, Y & Z about you and are behaving accordingly -- also crosses lines of privacy for some.

A recent piece in Metropolis, Sizing China, touches on this delicate topic from another direction -- the compilation of a massive anthropometric database of Asian head shapes that took shape as an outgrowth of a helmet design project for Burton.

The metrics reveal why helmets designed for European and American heads don’t sell well to Asians -- they simply don’t fit -- but it was met with great un-ease when the designer, Roger Ball of Paradox, presented it to a “stony-faced audience in Austria” whose collective memory of the Nazi’s eugenics movement is still all too fresh.

I have no answers to offer -- just wanted to post because this has been niggling at me. I don’t believe the question is: are we different? Because I agree that we are -- it’s part of what makes human culture so interesting and alive.

I don't think the answer is to deny the fact that the computer user interface can be responsive to its audience -- and that responsiveness is in part what makes emerging online experiences so effective at doing what they set out to do.

The larger question is whether, given our diversity, our compulsion to cluster and chunk these divisions into easily understood categories will do us any good -- or instead invite us into the discrimination that we’re historically so well practiced at.

so busted.

Video: Dove Onslaught Exposed

where the boys (and girls) are

In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise.

In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

As reported in Sex and the Internet: Devices and Desires, in the 19 April issue of the Econimist.

For anyone who's interested in traffic patterns online, the news that porn sites have been usurped by anything online is a possible indicator that, as the Economist suggests, the Internet is maturing as a medium.

It could also simply mean that the porn has picked up and moved shop to the sites that are beating it out in the traffic rankings -- social networking sites like MySpace, Flickr and SecondLife.

speaking of pasties

January's not yet in the can but I don't care -- this Google query wins the "most interesting traffic driver to detritus" of the month award -- nobody's going to top it. It reads:

is business license required for dominatrix business in nyc

(Could it be litwit, looking to diversify her work experience, now that she's made her move to NYC?)

more thoughts on stuff

Now that Amazon the online megastore knows everything there is to know about their customers through the stuff they buy, I propose that they introduce a dating service in which they would match customers through their material affinities.

The algorithm could be straightforward: Title for title -- and once a certain critical mass of overlap is reached a match is made.

Or it could be more complementary: You bought a Weber from Target -- I bought a grill spatula. We're made for each other.

Many of us have already been privy to Amazon's extraordinary affinity matching -- I, myself, while going through a difficult divorce and loading up on titles designed to get me through the worst of it (it was only after checkout that I realized the irony of purchasing Miles Davis' Kind of Blue recording alongside "surviving your divorce" titles) -- received one of Amazon's "People who bought also liked..." email promotions.

The title they recommended to me at a time in my life when I felt like I was taking it in the *ss?

The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women.

True story.

hometown pride

AdAge named OK Go's homemade treadmill video the number one viral video for 2006. (Yes, okay, I spent too much time reading AdAge today [see previous post]. I find it a fascinating expression of American culture -- much the same way I find bottle blondes with boob jobs fascinating.)

As any WBEZ junkie knows, OK Go has been gigging for our local cerebral celebs for the last half a dozen years or so.

What a bunch of cuties.

If you sign your life away to AdAge's marketing list you can log in and see the other nine top ten viral videos »

situational context

Don't you and your hands have better places to be?

Banner ad tagline for Ford Motor Company's "Bold Moves" campaign, which ran in close proximity to "internet photos of the private parts of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and others", according to an article in today's online edition of AdAge.

Ford Motor Company denies any knowledge of the strategic placement and is "investigating the situation thoroughly to determine exactly what the facts are."

on the auction block

Now the plane will be put up for sale on eBay.

The plane in question is a $2.692 Million Westwind II jet purchased by the former governor of Alaska, Frank H. Murkowski. The new governor, Sarah Palin, wants nothing to do with it. As reported in this morning’s NYT.

No sign of the jet as yet under the State’s moniker “stateofalaskasurplus” on eBay. Palin would be wise to heed research by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management which showed that, in online auctions, lower starting prices lead to higher final prices – reversing the anchoring effect that drives general haggling in which “value is judged (or misjudged) by the first number mentioned.”

Gallinsky’s research (based on eBay data) shows that:

Low starting prices reduce barriers to entry, tempting even idle browsers to place bids. The increased traffic then generates higher final prices as more buyers bid against one another. Psychological forces play into it as well.

Low starting prices entice bidders to invest time and energy in the auction, and while every M.B.A. student knows it’s dumb base decisions on sunk costs, the eBay bidders did just that, escalating their commitments to their previous bids.

Finally, the researchers showed that traffic begets more traffic because later bidders take the number of earlier bidders as proof of an item’s worth.

Originally published in the June 2006 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and recapped in the NYT Magazine’s 6th Annual Year in Ideas published last weekend.

Update: The jet sold for $2.1 Million -- a loss of half a million from the original sticker. That's some serious depreciation.

Additional Update: Turns out the plane sold, but not on eBay. Here's the Washington Post story »

as cited

For those dear friends who showed an interest -- and who I suspect might even show up to see me in a parade in the rain (god bless you guys) -- here’s a link to the Bob Tedeschi piece as promised, which ran in this morning’s New York Times:

Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web? by Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times.

Regrettably, the sound bite isn’t up the high-quoting quality standards subscribed to by this blog, so you won’t see it here – but it’s in there. Promise. (Of course, you’ve gotta know my name to get at it, now don’t ya?)

And I sound just a little bit more like a windbag than the last time Tedeschi asked me what I thought about something. (Which is probably not a good thing.)

Tedeschi writes about online accessibility for the blind -- the piece was spurred by a lawsuit against the Target Corp by the National Federation of the Blind, who claim that Target.com isn’t up ADA accessibility standards.

Much of online accessibility, just like real-world accessibility, is about Universal Design – making sure that everyone who wants to can get through the front door, navigate through the property and conduct their business there. Many times it’s as simple as choosing door handles over door knobs (metaphorically) – because more folks can operate door handles than knobs.

Other times it’s like adding Braille to signage (alt attributes behind img src html tags) or building a ramp to the front door (skip Flash intros; install a “skip nav” option for the long haul).

Online access for the blind means designing a site that can be easily read by a screen reader like Jaws; for some visual impairments it means being presented with a site that is high contrast or takes well to their operating system’s high contrast mode, and also allows for upping the display size of type; for the motor impaired it means being presented by a site with accommodating clickable footprints; for the deaf it means being able to access transcripts of audio components – I could go on, but you can see it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. All of whom should be kept in mind when the site is initially architected and production standards are defined because retrofitting can be time consuming and costly.

The U.S. government’s Section 508 requirements lay out what’s required by law under the ADA (anyone doing business with the government is required to abide by these) – and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative goes the extra mile to define a slew of nice-to-haves that make things even more accommodating.

Stepping down off my soapbox now. Have a nice day. May it be accessible in every possible way.

;)

Update: Curtis Edmonds gave the piece a nice mention at Northbound: Google is Blind.

Update on 11.07.06: More commentary on the NYT piece at Blind Confidential: Web Access Questions and My Current Ennui

all grown up

When you grow up, you have to do certain things. The Internet has matured to a place where traditional marketers — companies that have been spending much more money on television and print — are asking the questions that they would ask for the print side. I see that to be very positive because it does legitimize the Internet.

Mainak Mazumdar, NetRatings’ vice president of measurement science and product marketing, commenting in this morning's New York Times on an announcement by Kimberly-Clark, Colgate-Palmolive and Ford Motor Company that they will be auditing the online ad and viewer counts provided by their marketing partners (e.g. Google) beginning in 2007.

Does this mean we get to stay up later? Cool.

squishy

Originally uploaded by deborah lattimore.

The largest, well-connected part is the outer mantle of the jellyfish, the little nucleus is the brain, and the tendrils hanging down are the least connected features that have to send their messages to the nucleus before being fed out.

Scott Kirkpatrick, EVERGROW scientific coordinator, describing the topology of the internet as mapped by the EVERGROW project team, in Monster jellyfish? Mapping the global Internet, Information Society Technologies

[Photo credit: Deborah Lattimore]

drafting

I am what Barry Schwartz calls a “satisficer”[1]:

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

Fortunately for me, one of my dear friends is a “maximizer”:

Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given option is the best possible? The only way to know is to check all the alternatives.

Three days ago my friend the maximizer went camera bag shopping – thus began a thread that is now 38 emails long, complete with many, many links to online reviews and product details. Hours of work. My time commitment to wade through all those threads? I’m guessing maybe 15 minutes.

I’ve had a vague idea in my head that I’ve wanted a different kind of camera bag for awhile now, but I hadn’t gone hunting for it. Lazy, maybe. Or maybe I knew that my maximizer would eventually come to my rescue.

She did: the link came through this afternoon around 2.03 (her pick: the 7 Millions Dollar Home Crumpler – niiiiiice). I got mine shortly after that (my pick: the Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home[2]). Brown.

‘Cause we satisficers are middle of the road kinds of folks.


[1] Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
[2] For what it's worth, I picked mine up at Crumpler.com, but they've done everything within their power to build a site that WON'T LET ME LINK TO A PRODUCT PAGE. Sheesh.

myspace is...

A platform for self-crafted identity projection.

Myspace.com according to John Deighton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, as cited in an interview with Mr. Deighton in Working Knowlege.

surreal cross-selling

Things have gotten a little surreal for me over at Amazon since I checked in on the Tuscan Whole Milk reviews. (Which are now clocking in at 670, btw.)

Current recommendations include Prada shoes. Used textbooks. Men's watches. Project Runway miscellany.

Iceberg lettuce.

Not my usual fare.

tuscan whole milk: the reviews are in.

I was in Tuscany recently, and despite my sincerest efforts was unable to sight any Tuscan Wholes. Given the rarity of this creature, I find it hard to believe that anyone one has managed to domesticate them, let alone convince them to give milk.

Alexander Strommen "The Z" -- one of over 575 (at this writing) reviewers on Tuscan Whole Milk, in Amazon's new grocery channel.

It seems the folks at ytmnd.com are responsible.

(But they ain't got nothing on the Choka.)

puppies sell product

I worked for a VP of Marketing once upon a time who would punctuate every third conversation with his firm belief that: “puppies sell product”.

I found it curious at the time, because we didn’t use (or have a good reason to use) puppies in our advertising. But today I’m reading Rob Walker’s column Consumed in the NYT Magazine, and it appears that my old boss would have been very successful selling wine:

According to ACNielsen, the market-research company, 438 viable table-wine brands have been introduced in the past three years, and 18 percent — nearly one in five — feature an animal on the label. ‘Combined with existing critter labels,’ the firm said in summation of its research on this matter, ‘sales of critter-branded wine have reached more than $600 million.’

I supposed they haven’t discovered anything that the folks over at Cute Overload didn’t already know. (Thanks, and eternal damnation, to litwit for turning me on to the C.O.)

For the critter-curious, here's a link to Walker’s column »