Microblogging Is Not For Losers

When people talk about microblogging they usually mention twitter. That has a distancing effect on me, because I don’t take twitter all that seriously. (Quick explanation: microblogging is blogging, but with more frequent updates of very little text - less than 200 characters.)

So, I hear “microblogging”, and I think, “that thing I can’t relate to.” Or, when I’m feeling darker, I think, “that thing that serves as yet another indicator of the degeneration of our society’s communications and eventually, society itself.” (Kind of like this comment and the one below it on flickr’s Atrocious Apostrophe’s [sic] group.)

But I can be slow sometimes, it’s true. No, really. Yesterday, while perusing my many RSS feeds, I saw the word “microblogging”, had one of my above thoughts, and then resumed surfing. Saw a link I liked, and clicked the delicious add-on button in my Firefox browser. (Quick explanation: delicious lets you save Web sites and share them with other people who use delicious.)

And as I began to enter text in the notes field of the “add bookmark” popup, I finally realized:

I’m a microblogger, too.

:-)

**Update: Russell Buckley of MobHappy writes an interesting roundup of the Web 2.0 Expo that I attended last week. He muses on twitter’s version of microblogging, and, incidentally, includes a spot-on critique of conferencing techniques that I, too, find to be not useful at all.

Connecting The Disconnects At Harold & Kumar 2

After an intense and fun week at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I played dumb yesterday. Slept in a meadow at World’s End, and capped off the day with “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay“.

I LOVED “Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” - watched it five times. Not only were the jokes hilarious, the entire movie flowed like a well-choreographed dance. Guantanamo Bay was, unsurprisingly for a sequel, lame. The experience revealed two disconnects that I feel like noting.

1) A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times leaves you wondering if he liked it or not, but clear that he saw something of substance in it. The movie was not good (though not unenjoyable), and it lacked substance. That indicates to me that Mr. Scott hedged, reluctant to dismiss the film outright for fear of being uncool, or perhaps to compensate for his publication’s having neglected the brilliance of White Castle (lackluster “review” — or, rather, plot summary — here). Or both. Disconnect #1.

2) When Neil Patrick Harris first appeared on the screen at the Harvard Square theater, I hooted, confident that I’d trigger a hearty response in the pleasantly energetic audience. But no. Silence. I’ll admit that I first thought this told me something about the uptightness of Harvard students, who appeared to predominate. But then it dawned on me that if my memories of Doogie Howser are hazy, theirs don’t exist. That NPH currently appears in the sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother,” is unremarkable, according to my 17-year-old cousin (and aforementioned silence). Disconnect #2.

So “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay” has college-age humor, cameos for thirtysomethings, and an ancestral mystique that gets it top-level press. All the right ingredients to get us in the theater door and help the movie do what sequels do best: Make more money without having to make more ideas.

Santa Monica and Los Angeles

A few weeks ago I stayed with friends in Santa Monica. I covered a lot of ground in a short period of time.

This travel-log cata-logs the shops, restaurants, parks, and other things I encountered, some of which you might want to encounter too, if you live there or visit.

Murdoch Makes A Difference, One News Article At A Time

John read this passage about the Dalai Lama in The Times of London in an article entitled, “Defiant people yearn for the ‘political monk in Gucci shoes’”:

When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 he described himself as “a simple monk from faraway Tibet”. His existence as a symbol of the struggle for freedom have won him a huge following in the West. But his position is complicated; he has been described as “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes”.

John then wrote the following letter to The Times:

Interesting that the journalist does not mention that the person credited with the “monk in Gucci shoes” remark is none other than the proprietor of The Times, Rupert Murdoch. Mr Murdoch is hardly the most objective commentator given his considerable efforts to curry favour with the Chinese leadership while trying to expand his media empire into China.

I feel the journalist is being a little disingenuous with this omission, especially as the quote is used in the title of the piece…

– John Grant, Cambridge, MA

The BBC attributed the quote in question to Mr. Murdoch back in 1999. What’s striking about the Times reporter’s omission is that this remark did not pass quietly into obscurity. It’s still a favorite for watchers of the media mogul and his Buddhist nemesis.

What’s also striking — and amusing — is that both Murdoch and the reporter in his employ attribute the quote to nameless, faceless others (albeit in the way that a child closes her eyes and thinks no one can see her):

Murdoch, 1999: “I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.” (I can’t source the original Vanity Fair interview where Murdoch reportedly said this because, as with much of our cultural heritage, it’s buried in some paid archive management service.)

Reporter, 2008: “…he has been described as ‘a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes’”.

Murdoch is known to strongly influence the coverage of the media properties he owns. But it’s always a little shocking to see that influence in action. Nice catch, John.

Tufte’s Sparklines In The Service Of Retail Discount Efficiency

I attended Edward Tufte’s “course” on information design a few weeks ago. The hundreds in attendance were clearly hungry for answers to the problems of everyday life. (It reminded me a bit of the time I saw Sri Sri Ravi Shankar when my friend tricked me into it by failing to correct the natural assumption that a Ravi Shankar at a performance hall in Washington, DC, would be bringing his sitar.) Tufte stokes their hunger by titling his events “Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course Taught by Edward Tufte” and by styling himself as professor-guru. He holds “office hours” during breaks. He does not invite questions from the audience, nor does he acknowledge those that are occasionally blurted out anyway.

I sat between a guy who designs machines that cut steel, and a woman who works in medical informatics for a hospital. They wanted to learn how to make their presentations better. Instead, they learned that the Napoleon took his soldiers on a death march through Russia and that Boeing engineers were afraid to sound the alarm when astronauts’ lives were on the line.

Ok, I’m being a little snarky. I actually have a lot of respect for what Tufte has done. His beautiful books are full of examples that show the artistry and breadth of information design. But his course is little more than a book tour that participants get to pay to attend. It’s fun, but it’s not a course.

Tufte spent a little too much time on a pet idea of his called sparklines, “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” Actually, they’re pretty cool. My only concerns were that they pack *too* much information into too small a space, and in the wrong information intake context. If I’m in a text-reading rhythm, will I — or can I even — break that rhythm, switch to a graphics-reading mode, and then switch back again? I wasn’t so sure, though I remained open to the possibility.

When I got home that evening, I did a bit of online retail therapy to wind down. As ever, I visited RetailMeNot before closing a purchase. And there I saw sparklines, used perfectly.

I’ve never quite understood why a coupon code with a 30% success rate would work for me, and why one with a 90% success rate wouldn’t. I still don’t understand it, but with sparklines, I get a better picture of that strange phenomenon. Because I can see where in the sequence the successes and failures are, I also have a better sense of which coupon to try first. That appeals to my desire for efficiency in the service of optimum discount achievement.

What I like about this usage of sparklines is that it doesn’t break my rhythm. On RetailMeNot, I’m not in a fluid text-reading mode. I’m scanning the page and evaluating several different color, graphic, numeric, and textual indicators to decide which coupon code to try. In that context, the sparkline graphic fits right in.

Now, enough about consumerism. Can sparklines save the world? (At a discount?)

When a New Englander Hears a Texan Make a Torture Joke

Overheard while strolling down Main Street in Santa Monica:

Guy with clipboard: “Stop torture?”

Woman entering cafe: “I like torture.”

Me, to myself: (Tee hee.)

Woman: “I’m from Texas.”

Me: (She was kidding… right?)

Yelp, Part Two: Not So Feel-Good After All

The day after I posted this essay on Yelp’s four-star leanings, I was reminded that Yelp, like all online communities, has its darker side.

While researching that previous essay, I came upon the listing of one of my all-time favorite stores. Filled with home decor, jewelry, and clothing, it’s the kind of gift shop where the gifts often end up being to myself. I’ve been there many times, and the owner has become a friendly acquaintance. I would have expected five stars — or four stars at least ;-) — but it had 3.5. Something was off: some reviews were simply untrue, even if one accounts for subjectivity. So I wrote my own review.

Soon after, I was wandering Boston’s North End, and inevitably made my way to this store. When I entered, the owner walked over to thank me for the nice review. I asked her about the bad ones, and a cloud descended. You know when you’ve been singled out for negativity and you don’t know why? You know that feeling of being misunderstood but not wanting to sound defensive or petty? That cloud.

For said reasons, the owner didn’t go into details. Basically, someone created multiple Yelp profiles and used them to bring down the store’s ratings. This reviewer also sent harassing messages to other reviewers and the owner herself. The owner said she contacted Yelp repeatedly, but the negative reviews remain. Knowing that it’s one person, and that this person has targeted other businesses as well, is little comfort to this store’s owner. Not only is it devastating to encounter unwarranted hostility, she worries about her store’s online reputation and, she said, her own personal safety.

We all know the Web is full of bad apples. Nothing new. But early on, we wrote this off as the downside of online anonymity. Now, Web pundits talk about how we are leaving anonymity behind, that our online and offline personas are merging into one, “authentic” identity (think Facebook).

But online identity is rarely verified. There are still fakers, and there are freaks. Young people are particularly vulnerable, as we know. But so are seasoned pros, like this blogger and these law students. Add some Google grease and the effects can be rough. Reputation management is a buzzphrase because real reputations are affected by online activities.

No one has figured out how to completely shield against the bad apples and the gamers, not even eBay. So while Yelp is not alone in hosting a community of good and bad, it could set itself apart by innovating ways to care for it. It’s not an impossible problem. It is irresponsible to invite people into a forum and then not moderate it well. And Yelp knows its power. The Business FAQ has some interesting moments, such as a warning not to “lash out” at negative reviewers or risk “vigilante justice” and a link to a First Amendment protection site for business owners considering a libel suit.

The conclusion from the previous post still holds: Online ratings systems can be useful and fun, but take them with a grain of salt. And, as in real life, trust the people you know more than those you don’t.

All Babies Are Famous on the Leap Year

Just the other day, my friend B. and I were watching a segment on French TV5 about a conference for carrier pigeon enthusiasts. B., a French expat, commented that American news neglects the joys of everyday life and ordinary people. While I wouldn’t rest my case on pigeons (nor would she), I completely agree. American news, especially television news, is functionalist with a slant of fear: dangers to your health, your finances, your personal safety. Public media like NPR occasionally tune into subcultures, but less so in their core programming.

But now I offer a glimmer of hope! The Leap Year Baby endures to lighten up an otherwise depressing news menu!

Early yesterday morning, my friends gave birth to a little boy named Beni. That took 29 hours. Not long after, a local news station stretched the Leap Year part into an entire 2.5 minutes (about 2 minutes too long). Watch it here, if only to hear the phrase “strict Februarian” used in context. And, of course, to see Beni and his dazed but happy parents.

When I arrived at the hospital later that day, several other news crews were on hand. The hospital’s five Leap Year Babies were swaddled in blankets, stripes all in the same direction, and arranged on a bed, surrounded by cameras.

Having watched the above video, I tried to coach Beni’s parents on better sound bites. They smiled sweetly and dismissively. But, five minutes later, while trying to get a glimpse of his new son over the heads of the cameramen, Beni’s dad turns to me and says:

“Of course I thought he was famous when he was born… but then all these people with big cameras show up and it turns out he really is.”

I hope someone got that on tape.

Feeling Good With Four Stars On Yelp

The other day, a friend asked if I knew anything about Aqua, a restaurant in San Francisco.

My response: “Don’t know it, but I’ll bet it gets 4 stars on Yelp.”

Sure enough, it does. How did I guess that? Because nearly everything I’ve searched for gets four stars on Yelp.

Of course, individual reviews vary. But I’ve always been curious about why listings in many star systems end up with nearly the same average rating over time. With Yelp, I became curious as to why these averages are so high. Looking first at the individual reviews, I saw some psychosocial reasons for this. The site encourages positivity by allowing you to tag other reviews as only Useful, Funny, or Cool. (More than once I’ve been tempted to write a review just to call someone else’s Really Dumb.) Reviewers sometimes compensate for a lackluster review with a higher number of stars. Some examples:

- “I’d easily give this place a 3 star [sic], but it gains one star for being the only place to get Sushi in Lincoln Square.” Four stars.

-”Not sure how the hostess sleeps at night with that gigantic stick lodged up her ass.” Four stars.

-”[T]he “scone” was so dry you could sand paint off the walls.” Four stars.

-”I have to say that the drinks I ordered were BAD. My Margarita was so sour and bitter that I had to return it. The vodka tonics must have been made with grade Z tonic water as it tasted like dirty soda water. I won’t even get into the dirty martini.” Four stars.

(Forgive me for taking these clips out of context, but it’s more fun that way.)

The prevalence of positive reviews might also be due to the site’s social networking element, which displays your (ostensibly) real name next to your reviews. Some of these people also get together in person. Do you really want to be the jerk who got all negative over an overcooked burger at the struggling mom-and-pop?

I initially surmised that many in the Yelp community had had those empowered childhoods where criticism was considered demoralizing.* But as I dug further into the reviews, I became impressed by their thoughtfulness. Which suggests another bias: People on Yelp — and elsewhere — tend to review places they like. Farhad Manjoo provides some supporting evidence so I don’t have to.

And yet, individual reviews are not the only cause of high average ratings: Yelp has built the bias into its search engine. At the category search level (e.g. sushi, bars, or salons), “best match” is a weak concept. Lots of results will be highly relevant to a search for sushi. So, what’s the secondary sorting logic? A combination of most reviewed, highest rated, and other special sauce criteria alluded to by a Yelp exec I once spoke with.

When you privilege the most reviewed, highest rated businesses, what happens? Logic indicates that the more reviews there are, the more likely things will average out… and in a community that evaluates matters of high subjectivity with a skew towards positivity, four stars is where the average will land. (Interestingly, All Songs Considered’s now-defunct Open Mic area had anonymous ratings. The song ratings all migrated to a similar average, but they landed more in the middle of the scale.)

In addition, the most reviewed will become more reviewed because they appear more often in the top search results, while the less reviewed will continue to lag. Weirdly, the result of this power law distribution is that Yelp falls behind the coolhunters. If Acme Grill had a moment in the spotlight 6 months ago and got tons of reviews, even when its popularity dies down, it will appear higher in Yelp search results than a newer, hipper thing. People will be more inclined to review it, and the situation is perpetuated.

I’ve long relied on word of mouth and online reviews to make purchase and entertainment decisions. When review communities first reached critical mass on Amazon, they paralyzed me. I treated any bad review, even when among other good ones, as a veto. By now, however, many of us have learned how to extract what’s useful. I’ve also come to understand that reviews are not just useful for consumers, but fun (and cathartic) for the reviewers to write. That said, Yelp does have a lot of influence, for better and worse. So it’s important to remember that a Yelp star is no Michelin (that’s not entirely a bad thing). And that all stars should be taken with a grain of salt.

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*There are likely other variances as well. Geographic, for example: People in the Washington, DC, area seem to me more faux polite than those in New England.

Email Forwards And The Oral Tradition: Dinner With The Family

At some point during our holiday dinners, the entire extended family finishes eating and turns to group conversation before food coma sends us to the couch. My beloved grandfather used to fill this time with jokes. I don’t know where he got them, but he always had new ones.

Grandpa is no longer with us, but last Thanksgiving we got a fresh infusion of humor from someone I’ll call “Chaplain Tim”. He wasn’t at the table, but his jokes were: a stack of printouts, rubber-banded together. They were printouts of email forwards, raw and uncensored, including lines and lines of email addresses of previous senders and recipients.

Chaplain Tim knows my parents but not their email address. A minor obstacle for someone with a printer and uncommon levels of motivation. It was in this way that dozens of emailed jokes — among the most weightless media objects known to man — broke their chains of virtuality, and entered the physical world to continue their march toward world domination.

We each took a bunch and sifted through, reading aloud only the jokes that seemed the funniest and not too inappropriate. (I don’t know what kind of chaplain this Tim character is, but it’s not the kind that spurns dirty humor). I have always disapproved of this very genre of email, but I must admit they worked much better in our synchronous communal context (emails being asynchronous and communal). In other words, we had a lot of fun.

With the oral broadcast of these printed email forwards, my Media Theory Moment was complete. I couldn’t believe the social and technological channels that these rabbi-priest, husband-wife, and doctor-patient jokes were traveling: email to print to voice, from a distant professional acquaintance to a close-knit group of family members.

When my Aunt D. innocently asked my mom to xerox them for her, my head almost exploded.

Mom said: “Rekha, you should email Chaplain Tim, he’s a really nice guy.” Oh, I’m sure he is. But I’m going to lay low and hope he never figures out how to reach me.

A Recipe Problem Becomes Much More, Then Much Less

Like anyone interested in food and cooking, I have cookbooks, I have a few issues of cooking magazines… and I have recipes. Recipes clipped and torn from magazines and newspapers, scribbled on scraps of paper, and printed from an email or a Web site.

These recipes comprise a tattered pile perched atop the cookbooks in my kitchen. The pile comprises a tiny but constant space in the room of my memory palace that is furnished with other personal organizational directives — photos, pantry, clothing, computer files. That room is, naturally, painted a light shade of guilt.

A recent blog post by a foodie friend brought this room to the front of my mind:

…I bought a sturdy-looking accordion file and began going through all the mags to clip out my favorite recipes. It was a herculean task that had to be done over a number of sittings, spread out over several months to allow sufficient recovery time after each brave plunge…

Organizing recipes is what people do, right? I bought an accordion file at Staples, and considered the taxonomy I would use.

• Appetizers, Entrees, Desserts?
• Vegetables, Grains, Meats?
• Sweets and Savories?
• Large Meals and Small Meals?
• Quickies and Time-Takers?

I couldn’t commit to an organizing logic. The problem nagged at me, and I began to resent that so much thought was going into a common and ostensibly minor problem. I blamed my difficulty on the years of immersive computer use that had eroded my ability to place items into silos. Online, I search by keyword or browse by tags. On my computer, I keep folders that are loosely structured and highly imperfect because it’s easy enough to copy the same file to several places or (gasp) use the Windows Search when desperate.

But I remained convinced that the physical realm still needs categories, and that the mental exercise of creating them would somehow make me stronger. Until recently, when I had dinner with a few friends and submitted my organizational problem for a collaborative solution.

One (John) has a few tried-and-true recipes that he makes from memory. One is a food blogger, who knows where her recipes are because she turns to them all the time. Both were sympathetic to my organizing drive, but neither seemed compelled to do the same. Their empathetic distance from the issue was rather surprising, as I had not expected the discussion to call the problem itself into question.

Two other friends had no sympathy at all for my recipe problem. One is a core mover in the development of the semantic Web; the other would greatly benefit from its widespread use, judging from his current endeavor. Now, the semantic Web is a complex concept. (Overly) simply put, it’s a way to connect similar types of data across dissimilar digital contexts. One result of this, true believers claim, is that organizing things into categories is a waste of time and shuts information retrievers off from results that might actually be relevant but are in a different category. For example, if a recipe Web site relied on categories alone, an item in the Entree section might make a perfectly nice Appetizer, but the person looking for appetizers would never know.

Fine. I get this, and over the past few years my digital information management methods have shifted significantly from categorizing and browsing to search.

But what about my clippings, my tangible, physical, natty clippings? The semweb’s got nothing for me here.

Their response: ‘You don’t have that many recipes. If you bother to categorize them, you’re going to end up going through the entire accordion file to get ideas or find the recipe you were looking for, anyway. So why bother filing them in the first place?’

At this point, the brief and powerful manner in which a fundamental assumption of mine — recipes must be organized — was dismissed had an interesting effect: utter acceptance on my part. I also felt a little lighter. That’s one less piece of clutter in the room of personal organizational directives.

The conversation then took a telling turn towards other examples of mild obsessive-compulsive disorder in our lives. I did resent that a little bit. But, I could see their point. What if the desire to organize by category is not a cleaner kitchen, but rather a prison with guilt-colored walls?

I mulled over this for a few days after that fateful dinner. I came to a couple of other realizations:

-If we took a little survey of the semantic Web developer community, we’d probably find they don’t organize their recipes, they don’t put their photos in albums, I’d hate to see their closets, and they ripped all their CDs and got rid of them as soon as it was technologically possible. They likely have a general aversion to categorizing and culling, but the digital realm is more conducive than the physical realm to a workaround. (If only this crossover fantasy could be a reality without RFID tags everywhere!)

-My obligatory need to organize my recipes emerged, at least in part, from a fear of forgetting. I am not a chef or a food blogger, just a reasonably good occasional cook. I will never have enough recipes to lose track of the ones I have. And they’re kept in two places - in that pile in my kitchen, and in my head: There is a recipe clippings room in my memory palace that I hadn’t realized existed. What brings me there is sometimes rational (I need an appetizer) — but more often it’s emotional and sensual. When I think of my beloved grandmother, and I think of her matzo ball soup, I think of the page I wrote it on in a little book given to me by friends on my 22nd birthday. When I remember one of the best dinners I’ve ever hosted, I remember the lamb kofta recipe on its glossy magazine stock in that tattered pile. My pumpkin bread, made hundreds of times, still seems like the perfect thing for every occasion.

In any case, if a recipe does disappear from my memory palace, is that really such a tragedy? It might turn up the next time I rifle through the clippings, or it might not. I’ve always thought of food as experience and memory. So I’ll let it behave like those, fading in and out, establishing, or going away to make room for something new. Here, I finally understand, I do not need a closed system that scales.

Don’t Tell Me, Tell My Dopplr

I just overheard a visitor to my office saying into his phone:

“Right, I saw that on your Dopplr.”

(Translation for the uninitiated: “Yes, I already knew where you are, because you and I are friends on a new Web site called Dopplr that lets you share your past, present, and future locations.”)

This was a Media Theory Moment, and naturally I turned to this blog for an outlet.

So if we all broadcast our locations and our statuses to our friends and our “friends”, what will we talk about? Will we talk less? Or just repeat ourselves less?

The phrases “Was it you I was talking to about…” and “I already told you about ____, right?” take on new meaning as “tell” takes on new meanings. My Facebook status and my Buddy Beacon update and my Dopplr log are telling you something, but it’s not the same as when I tell you in direct conversation.

Because in the latter, I first have to remember that you exist. In one of many scenarios, you and I are talking, and I mention I’ll be going somewhere, and you tell me, “Gee, so will I! Let’s meet up!”

In the former, I remembered once, a while ago, when I made you my “friend” or you made me yours. From then on, I’m reminded about you by the site we’re friends on. In one of many scenarios, the guy in my office later told me that sometimes he sees in Dopplr that several of his “friends” will be somewhere he’s going to be. Only then does he contact them to meet up.

So we might all see each other more, but we think about each other less. Hmmmm.

I’m sure there’s more theory to consider, but it’s time to go home.