Have you ever watched a friend or family member work frantically, almost in panic to do some task, while you inexplicably seemed to want to just get out of the way and do as little as possible, although you know you should be helping? Have you ever asked yourself why you might be doing this?
I am convinced there is a strong tendency, in every social group, be it family members, freinds, a project team at work, the local reading club, to keep an acceptable level of excitement or placidity, acceptable by all. No one likes people dancing on the tables at the book club or people reading a book, sitting quietly in a corner at a night club. That part of our brain that wants only safety does not like extremes.
You can call it acceptable behavior or whatever you like, I will call it the Excitment vs Placidity Index (EVPI). All is well while the EVPI stays glued to the commonly accepted level. However, life has is not as predictable as some fantasize and sometimes things don’t go as planned.
And so you get the family meetings when the self-labeled black-sheep defends an idea that is completely opposite to what everybody else think they believe in, a group of coworkers in which one person depicts with such energy and fury some idea that the rest seem to shrink in their chairs. Or the reverse. A group of friends at a concert, excited and jumping, and the one guy who seems more bored of attending concerts that a cow is of chewing grass.
What goes wrong here? What’s with this differences? And what happens when the group is faced with this discrepancies. As I see it there are two outcomes:
- conflict
- equilibrium
You either get somebody stand up, usually a power figure in the group, and say ‘Geroge, just sit down and stop making a fool of yourslef’ or, the group works toward adjusting the EVPI to the usual value or a new level of acceptability for this EVPI is considered, at least temporarily. Big words for simple things. If somebody starts dancig on the tables the rest will wither make that person feel emarassed and come down, they’ll follow the example or they’ll get into a fight and put the wild dancer outside the boundaries of the group. Check out this guy (it gets interesting after around 1 minute):
Read Seth’s comments about this clip, written from the perspective of his book Tribes.
I believe there is a very strong social force, in every group, that fights to preserve the usual acceptable level of the EVPI. Not too much excitment, not too much placidity, just enough to make you be part of your group. A Rock concert is heavy on the excitement, a bus ticket line is high on placidity.
Next time when somebody, maybe from your friends, family or coworkers seems to be more than usually excited and you seem to be sitting in you chair and beeing more quiet that usual ask yourself, what are you doing? are fighting to keep the acceptable level of Excitment vs Placidity? And if yes, why? And should you?
The same force is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to move a group of people with a very well established level of acceptable excitement vs placidity entwined into the very fabric of the group. I believe that understanding this is hugely important if you want to bring change inside a group.
Have you noticed how close the words start-up and up-start are? Is there a link between them? If not, it should.
Some of the greatest start-up of the past decades have been up-starts. Think Starbucks, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and so on. What do you think? Is there a link between them?
I got the idea by listening to Tuned In, a good book with some interesting ideas. They were taking about the up-start Starbucks.
Scopului postului este sa prezint o idee mai veche (adica matura) si sa o inscriu la concursul baietilor de la BroHouse.ro.
Acum doi ani lumea mea s-a schimbat cand a venit pe lume nepoata mea, Clara. Am inceput sa am o noua perspectiva si sa ma gandesc la lucruri pe care le abandonasem de ceva ani, precum povestile.
Inarmat cu noua perspectiva, cu ajutorul lui Catalin, a aparut idea unui site care sa fie de folos parintililor atunci cand trebuie sa-si culce pruncul. Acum cateva zile a venit si idea numelui perfect – MosEne (.ro). Da, domeniul este al meu si nu e nimic pus inca pe el .
Intrebarea este urmatoarea: Ce faci atunci cand iti pregatestii copilul de culcare (excluzand situatiile cand il legani pana iti pica mainile):
- ii citesti o poveste, daca este mai marisor
- ii canti un cantecel sau ii pui sa asculte un cantecel, daca n-ai voce deloc
- daca este foarte mic poate ii pui sa asculte sunete albe, vezi aici
Plecand de la cele trei puncte ne gandeam sa facem 4 sectiuni ale site-ului, cam in ordinea asta:
1) Povesti personalizate – sa dam posibilitatea parintilor se personalizeze povestile prin inlocuirea numelor personajelor cu numele copiilor, parintililor, bunicilor. Idea este similara cu cea ce vor sa faca cei de la Story Something (vezi prezentarea de la TC50). 2) Povesti cititie – Aici parinti si copii sa aiba posibilitatea sa urce povesti citite sau scrise si citite de ei. 3) Cantecele pentru copii – Aici parinti si copii sa aiba posibilitatea sa urce cantecele de leagan si pentru copii cantate sau scrise si cantate de ei. 4) Sunete albe – Aici sa fie puse sunete albe ce pot fi descarcate rapid, atunci cand e nevoie.
Posibile intrebari si probleme:
a) Drepturile de autor ale povestior si cantecelelor. Daca este vorba de povesti gen Andersen, atunci operele lor fac parte din domeniul public. Exista o lege care reglementeaza durata de viata a dreptului de autor ai aceasta este cam 90 de ani, daca nu ma insel. In aceasta situatie cel care citeste cartea are drept de autor pe interpretare. Bineinteles, carti gen Harry Potter nu pot fi citite si facute publice decat cu acordul autorului. La fel si la cantecele.
b) Moderarea continutului: Ca site-ul sa aiba relevanta este nevoie sa fie moderat tot continutul urcat ca sa nu existe situatii cand cineva urca povestea Capra cu trei iezi ft. Freddy Kruger, cu tot ca versiunea originala nu e prea departe .
c) Sectiunea cu sunete albe e probabil cea mai grea de realizat pentru ca e nevoie sa fie inregistrate sunetele respective.
Cam aceasta e idea. Ca echipa suntem doi programatori (eu si Catalin) si inca doua persoane care ne vor ajuta cu continutul.
Daca te intereseaza idea noastra si vrei sa dai o mana de ajutor, sau ai vre-o recomandare, obiectie, injuratura, incurajare, lasa un comentariu, da un e-mail, sau apeleaza la orice alt mod de comunicare. Suntem interesati!
The web was built as a way for scientists to communicate and not for running ads. However John Quelch hits the bulls eye by pointing out in this Harvard Business School article that the top most common activities on the web (searching for information, reading news, paying bills, watching a video, researching a product) are in one way or the other supported by advertising. And it’s hard, if not impossible, to argue against this.
So the question is – how much money is the web worth? I came across a few attempts of quantifying the web
Quelch mentions 3 in his article (the values are for the U.S. per year):
1. Employment value – look at how many work with something that has to do with the web =>$300 billion
2. Payment value – value of payments made across the web => $444 billion
3. Time Value – how much the time spent on the net is worth => $680 billion
Another interesting idea was that of Kevin Kelly who made an estimation of how much it costed to build the web as it is today. He made a calculation starting from the number of pages indexed by Google – 1 trillion and estimated that for every page a certain amount of programming and content creation is needed. The result is number 4 on our list
4. Take into account all the work from the last 6000 days, which is the rough age of the web, for the creation of the Internet as we know it => 1 trillion pages => ~ $5 trillion.
Yet a wilder estimation was made by Jason Kottke from Kottke.com who calculated the value of a tiny portion of the web, which is Facebook, in burgers, starting from a Burger King campaign. Read the details here. The result is number 5 on our list.
5. Value of Facebook = $12/user X 150M users = $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook.
That’s what I’ve come across until now, do YOU have anything else to add to the list?
Posted on September 2, 2009 by Liviu in Geek Stuff, Web
Twitter, FriendFeed or any other real time stream is like taking a walk in your neighborhood. You have a lot of neighbors, with some you talk, some you’ve just seen a couple of times. When you take a walk down the street you get to see what your neighbours are doing – one is walking the dog, some are chatting, some have been shopping, another guy is cleaning the yard and so on. Maybe you stop and say hi to a few of them. In the same time those neighbours see what you are doing: you are walking the dog, going shopping, washing the car.
That’s how Twitter is, you build your neighborhood (that’s those people that you follow) and take walks from time to time to see what’s new, because you can’t be up all day walking all over the place. And for sure you want to keep those spammers out!
I finally got myself to record and upload one of the presentation I’ve shown this spring at a conference. At the moment these were made I was quite proud of them.
Without further ado, I give you the presentation of my paper called “Online Advertising As A Promotion Mechanism, A Way To Monetize And A Source Of Information“.
The paper was presented at at the conference <Conferinta anuala a doctoranzilor in stiinte economice, “Schimbari de logica dominanta la nivel european în condi?iile crizei economice mondiale”> held by the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania in May 2009.
This is the second conference I ever attended as a speaker, the presentation I gave at the first conference will follow in the next few days.
If you take the time and watch the presentation and you have an opinion about it (it sucks big time, it’s ok, you should be ashamed of littering the web with such crap, etc) please leave a comment.
The text of the paper is available in both Romanian and English. If, for some reason, you want to use these paper somehwere, drop me a line about it.
When you set up to build something, be it a new company, a great service, a product that the world can’t live without, one of the greatest barrier you hit is made from stereotypes. Let’s take luggage as an example. It took us so many years to put the tiny wheels on it yet people knew what the wheel was for many a year. And every year hosts of designers were thinking on how to make the next great bag and didn’t think about it. Why is that? Because a bag should look like this and this and that and doesn’t have wheels. So go wild boys and put flowers on those bag but no wheels. Luckily something snapped and they figured it out, after all.
But what if you took a guy that had never seen a bag yet knows what wheels are and you tell him to build some contraption for moving his belongings from point A to point B? Is he more likely to make a box with wheels on it than something that you have to brake your back to carry around? Probably.
Stereotypes kill ingenuity. Not because people are stupid, nor they lack creativity, it’s just hard to make a different sort of bag when you know what a bag should look like.
That’s why interdisciplinary approaches sometimes give incredible results. See Gary Vaynerchuck, who is a wine guy that started using the web tolls that were available in a way he thought it would work, and it did work! Look at Loren Feldman from 1938Media. Comes from outside the whole web geek culture, takes a different approach, which made sense to him, and nails it.
So next time when something you don’t know how to do comes your way, don’t run the other way, just do it the way it might seem natural to you and maybe you will do it differently then the rest and your way will be better.
Have you noticed how everything, these days is about getting data from as many places into one central location? Look at FriendFeed, look at uberVU, and the likes of Apture. Even Google Reader and other RSS readers do the same. Different methods, same idea. Get data from many places into one space, for you to happily engorge. I call this the Funnel Effect.
These are all agregators, but there are other examples out there. There are companies like smartHOTEL, that do something amazing, yet not that complicated. They spare hotels the hustle of crawling around 10 different websites belonging to 10 different tour operators and updating their prices everywhere. Instead, they use their system an voila! The idea is yet so simple the implementation so hard. And the benefits so great.
But if we keep stuffing more things in the funnel, won’t we get to the point when it will mutate into an waterfall?
There is probably a limit to the human capabilities, out there, that will force us to shape these tools into something we can digest. An by the way, isn’t user usability and good design an good example of how we must shape our tools to fit our abilities, be those mental or physical?
When I started using Twitter, not so long ago, only in October, last year, I did it because I was curios, but the last push was given by @valentinaneacsu who recommended me to try and see what’s it all about. After some time I became hooked on it, then I tried to cut back a little and now, I think that am reaching what is a balance for me, or at least for the time being.
During my first twitter days I read a lot of “advices” and how-to’s about Twitter, and among these there is one that I consider most valuable, and it is, as many good advices, quite simple.
Take it slow!
That’s it! I don’t know where I’ve read it, probably in more then on places. It could of been TwitTip or some other place. Maybe these are not the exact words. But it is so true! All you have to do is to take it slow, start small, then look at what people are doing. Don’t follow 1000 people, start with you friends, or people you’ve heard about. See how they interact with the community. Add people slowly and this will give you the opportunity to find your own voice, to adapt and see what’s fun and OK for you and what’s not.
There’s one more think I would add to this great advice, and that is: Use your common sense!
If you read tips about Twitter, that’s great, but do things your way and use your common sense. It will tell you how you should interact with the others. You are who you are, you are unique and that gives you the right to have your own voice. But in the same time use your common sense and respect the others, this way it will be more fun for everybody.
If you want, you can find me on Twitter as @LiviuLica, see you there!
I don’t know what Google is up to lately, probably survival, but it’s mojo is going away, fast. At least for me it is.”Don’t be evil” – my ass. Nobody even questions that they are a gigantic corporation, a monopole is search and online advertising, but until not so long ago they were trying to put on this cool “I’m just a giant start-up” show. OK people, game over, nobody believes this anymore.
So why is Google evil? Well, let’s stat with the latest thing. They’re trying to get this incredibly hard to replicate preferential agreement with various network providers. Basically they want their content to go faster in the web. Web Neutrality begone. See here for more details. They say “Anybody can do the same”. Let’s get real Anybody = Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?
Their the new big monopoly, the new Microsoft. Remember when Google backed down on the Google-Yahoo deal? Check here for more info. The main idea was that they backed down because they were afraid no to go down the Microsoft road with this.
For me, as a developer, there are few things about Google more iconic then the famous 20% time for personal projects thing. Maybe even more famous then their cook… maybe not, but anyway. It is so exciting to
David vs Goliath (source ZDnet)
hear how every programmer can have this wacky idea and maybe one day see it become THE thing. Maybe they still give the 20% but they are now focusing at a big level only on the really promising projects, the ones that can bring some… value. This is part of their financial crisis plan (more here – article in Romanian). Wait a minute, this ain’t startupy anymore.
By the way, is Google in a hiring freeze or a firing meltdown (I want to get all the credit for the bad word play, thank you)? Nobody seems to know. Officially no, in off the record, probably.
So google is not David anymore it grew into Goliath. It’s normal for Google to do what any big company has to do to survive – walk on the bodies of their competitors but the change is a little bit too sudden. Maybe the so much talked about crisis is contributing to this, who knows.
But I must give them this – they’re aplications rock, and as long as this is so I don’t care who they act as.
LE: Google tries to answer the Net Neutrality issue on it’s blog – see here.
A little out of place?
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