Social Media Musing

Answering the existentially frightening question of “what are you doing?” is requirement for someone making consistent facebook or twitter updates.

Often these questions are easily answered: “Buying plane tickets” “Writing a paper” “or even “Making a sandwich” Trivial, maybe, but hey, it seems like other people are interested.

One cue to look at how social media will develop is see where I get benefits from it. Social media is a tool after all. It helps me stay in touch with friends, colleagues, professional contacts, even family on occasion, who otherwise wouldn’t know what I’m up to and vise-versa. The concern comes in where you decide to draw the boundary between your physical interactions (phone/skype calls would be a hybrid here) and through the net.

To use myself as an example, my boundaries are set in making email replies within 24 hours. This is occasionally subject to change, in the case I’m traveling/without access to a computer where I could set up an auto-reply or something similar. I also don't add people as facebook friends that I haven't met before in person, or know someone I trust can vouch for them in some way.

The key is setting expectations for the people you are constantly in touch with. At some point, everyone I know, knows that it's easier to get a hold of me through email than facebook. Being open about this can also be another way to set the expectation immediately.

In Clive Thompson’s I’m So Digitally Close to You he makes the remark that:

"growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world”

Once the hype of expressing yourself to everyone you knows settles down however, what is left is the actual value the service can provide. The people who don’t realize the benefit I just don’t get.

Intellectual Capital Giveaway

“In the industrial age we went to school, in the communications age, school comes to us." –Andy DiPaolo, the Stanford Center for Professional Development director.

One of the interesting developments in the information technology and the Internet has been access to education.

In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) pioneered a model called OpenCourseWare (OCW). The mission, considered by many revolutionary at the time in its apparently non-profit motivation, was to give everyone access to educational resources.

With a few clicks you can navigate published teaching materials, syllabi, lecture notes and exams to any course at MIT. The only catch? You can’t get credit for taking them. However now, almost anyone with an interest in subjects that range from biological engineering to linguistics can learn on their own or update their knowledge base. Donations are of course encouraged.

This trend has continued with other schools following suite. Through venture funding by Sequoia Capital, Stanford currently has made available 10 online courses through a program called Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE). The current offering includes basics in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics with the possibility of future additions in nanotechnology, bioengineering and energy/environment. Check it out.

Wisdom of the Crowds

If you’ve ever watched the show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” you know that one of the most reliable lifelines is asking the audience. With above a 90% chance for a successful answer out of 4 choices, what is often called the wisdom of crowds can be directly applied to leading to a correct final answer.

The wisdom of crowds has been widely documented in both economic and psychological literature. One of the fruits of this is a small company in Ireland that you might have heard mentioned on CNBC or Bloomberg. It is called Intrade.

With registered members from 162 countries and a 82,000 membership, the website brings together a broad audience which a lot of predicting power potential. In a book appropriately titled The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki points so some of the requirements for a crowd to possess a “collective intelligence.” Surowiecki argues that questioning a crowd can often, as in the case of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” lead to correct answers; answers that are much more reliable than had an “expert” been in charge. Intrade brings in all of Surowiecki’s preconditions such as (1) diversity of opinion; (2) member independence; (3) decentralization and (4) a good method of aggregating opinions. While the results can often be incredibly accurate, what are the members motivation to participate in making accurate predictions? For profits of course.

The exchange works in a way that is similar to options trading. You deposit some funds into an account with Intrade and with this deposit are able to purchase contracts and make a bet on certain events occurring (each that is valued at $10 USD). These events can be from anything, from how long the recession will last and political events to American Idol winners.

Take the event on the front page of Adam Lambert winning American Idol. As of today, the contract is selling (bidding) at 65.5. Each point on a contract is actually .10 cents, so if you had decided to purchase a contract at 65.5, you would be putting down $6.55.

In the event that Lambert wins American Idol, the contract will close at 100 points, making you a profit of $3.45 ($10-$6.55). If he looses, the contract expires at 0 and you lose your margin of $6.55. Another element that plays in, is that you can sell your contracts at any point before the event actually occurs, as long as you have a willing party on the other side of the contract. Low trading contracts then have the potential for a lower investment outlay and a high potential return.

This potential of this technology can even be expanded to other areas such as hedging taxes or other better forecasting decisions. In the case of the next American Idol winner, my mom has faithfully watched the show for the past 6 seasons and predicted each winner correctly. My money is on Adam; definintely a way to make the show interesting.

The Internet Audience

The rules of "normal" pen to paper writing, just don't apply when you're publishing on the web.

Studies by John Morkes and Jacob Nielsen in the late 90's have made a number of telling observations about the different ways the audience of web-users read and process information. This has implications on the ways in which authors of internet texts should transform their presentation styles to meet their audience’s needs.

One aspect to always keep in mind about web readers is that they are content driven. Using revised websites based on a presentation that were concise, scannable and objective, the researchers found that respondents had better (159% improvement) of overall usability defined by:

• Task time
• Task errors
• Memory
• Subjective satisfaction

Instead of jumping into the more difficult to navigate content, links provide ways for author’s to reduce clutter and organize material for easy access. You want to do the opposite of what this Japanese site has done. Links lend a kind of internet credibility as long as they are well positioned. Content hungry users don’t want to waste their time reading inaccurate or flashy material and you will be rewarded for giving them what they want.

Also, the internet audience is likely to scan your material instead of reading word-by-word. And even then, the material that is scanned is read 25% slower than it would have been in a physical text. To combat this, information can be set up into a multimedia form. Concisely put together text should be complimented with relevant images, video, audio and interactive content that are designed to meet an a user's content needs.

Nobody is happy..

College Textbook Profit Inflation?

One growing concern for college textbook publishers has been recent scrutiny regarding elevated prices. In a widely publicized report released in January 2004, a public interest group (CALPIRG), found textbook prices to be unnecessarily high. A follow up study showed prices of U.S. textbooks to be significantly more than those in other countries. This is just another addition to the inflating costs of education.

Instead of money going to students, a lot of it appears to be going directly to professors. The main Physics professor at ASU actually wrote his own book with labs attached to the back of the book. The book itself is a customized fit for his course, but having labs just make the book useless for future students and therefore resale. This is similar to the adding of additions where newer books have supposed "needed" updates.

With these kind of margins and the average student according to CALPIRG spending between $775 to $875 per year, it is little wonder why many are looking for better options. Services are now available where books can be rented at sites such as Bookswim which claims to be "netflix for books." Investors are being attentive and a recent B-series round by KPCB and Foundation Capital of $25 million was confirmed in February for Chegg.

At this point, most of us prefer books to digital sources, although this is changing. Looking at Amazon’s Kindle 2, the screen is made to work like ink, with “no glare or backlight.” It is only through this kind of change that professors will not be discouraged from producing quality textbooks. Instead, costs associated with paper, retail and shipping (55.6%) could be eliminated for the most part (you still have the original fixed cost). So in actuality, while student costs will drop in the short-term, the overall solution could be a while.

Extended Mind and My Generation

Given its size (sometimes called "echoboomers") and consumer mentality, it’s not hard to understand why Generation Y is one of the most desirable targets for corporate marketers. It also is the most digitally active generation yet, with most being born plugged into internet and grown up around mobile technology. As Gen Y matures, it can be interesting to look at the question: “How will internet technology influence the way we think?” This question can be more complicating than it seems.

Some, such as Nicholas Carr have argued that being able to process the preceding question in its online form is a lot different than it would be if it were written down. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr brings up some relevant points about the altered way most of us process and interact with information on the internet.

Instead of the slow and “deep” thinking that book reading fosters, Carr brings in a recent study of online research habits through the University College London which suggests that we are in a period of change in the way we process information. Researchers found that people jumped from one source to another of digital information. This is similar to the process of our own daily research, where we interact with a hyperlinked web with distractions that flash us from one tangent to another. Carr argues, it is this that leads us away from developing our own deep personal associations and ideas.

And actually, changing the form of what we process is likely to have a deep impact, rewiring the very circuitry of our brain. After all, speech is more of an instinctive skill. Studies in reading show that symbolic characters are like an additional layer, first decoded by the occipital lobe and then taken to be associated to certain signified objects. Here meaning is finally translated in the normal route - through the temporal and frontal lobes. As an example, variation between languages that have an alphabet and those made up of ideograms (such as Chinese) have shown structural changes that extend across many regions of the brain – including those that govern memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. This all goes to suggest that the changes that come through internet reading can be even more different that those woven through book reading.

While reading on the internet is likely have changed the build up of how we think, in many ways it isn’t a bad thing for our generation. In an opposing argument titled How Google Is Making Us Smarter, Carl Zimmer has the last word. He cites philosopher’s Andy Clark and David Chalmers who in a paper titled The Extended Mind argue that we are all “natural born cyborgs.” The brain’s plasticity is a natural endowment that allows us to extend our mind into the tools we use – it doesn’t matter if that tool is a rake, a book, or access to the world wide web.

Instead of being some kind of hindrance, the net is a tool we can use to help us get a hold of more data. We are going through a process of adapting to this new environment. So while the output might change, it’s more likely to lead to the kind of results that the technology of the past such as the written word, or the printing press produced. In our postmodern world, we are faced with information that doesn't require us to process it in the same way as before - skimming is okay, even in "serious" research. An interesting study would be to look at if this glut of information has allowed American society overall to better question information than to accept it as truth. In the end, an algorithm is only as good as its programmer. It is up to us, and I’d prefer that option.

In The Economist We Trust

Someone with economic interests is always looking for sources of information that achieve the right balance between relevance and accuracy.

In the internet space, alternative forms of media such as Blogs keep you abreast by aggregating information with a personal touch. Sharing an approach to specific audiences are Zines, which broadly defined, encompass any magazine published online. This can be found represented in the larger online presences, as seen in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times or even more a niche zine such as Investopedia.

As I write, Internet technology and market fluctuations have been able to continue to catalyze competition in this industry leading the larger publishers continue grow even more lean. Although alternative media forms can provide great supplemental information, the search for information and trends should be centered around a diet that of the more established and reliable sources.

One of the most influential has this as its mission:

“to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

With these lofty goals in mind, The Economist puts out a weekly journal distributed every Friday and an editorial stand towards free trade and globalisation (yes, that's with an "s"). One aspect you might notice about the publication is that you won’t find an author in any of the articles. This anonymity of it authors causes its editor to be:

“not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

It can also be noted that this magazine’s moral tone was not meant to be moralizing. Instead, The founders ideas for The Economist were based on reason and would allow “us to sit in judgment of the dictates of our feelings.”

And the proof is in the results.

Some of the fruits of this have been the memorable Big Mac Index which gives insight into the cost of a Big Mac burger – almost anywhere in the world. As of February 4th 2009, the cheapest Big Mac can be found in Russia at a cost of $1.73 compared to $3.54 in the U.S. or up to $5.60 in Switzerland.

And a final point on their ownership structure, something always good to know. Since 1928, half the shares of The Economist Group have been owned by the Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson, the other 50% by a group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff. The editor's independence is guaranteed by the existence of a board of trustees (who have no economic interest in the company), which formally appoints him and without whose permission he cannot be removed.