Akkam’s Razor

Any voter who is demographically reflective-of or self-identifies as a Reagan-Democrat (coined by political consultant and Hillary pollster Stan Greenberg) will be referred to as a Bush-Democrat.  Although they are many, they must be constantly reminded of their legacy in perpetrating the Revisionist Reagan haigiography, and of the failure of their particular brand of conservatism.  If these Bush Democrats (or as Pat Buchanan rightfully observes, Hillary Democrats) decide to vote against their own economic self-interests and switch to McSame, let them reap the ‘rewards’.

Once again, there is a discussion spanning multiple disciplines that requires attention regarding the importance and relevance of experience.

I’ve been reflecting how trust works on the internet, and specifically the blogosphere.When people discuss ‘trusted computing’ online, it’s usually in terms of ‘being ‘an authenticated user, meaning that they are who they say they are.  Since much of the activity online is either anonymously (although no one is ever truly anonymous) or pseudonomous, then  reputation is based on what you do (or don’t do) and what you contribute to your given group.

To quickly sum up what this means, here are some of the reputation metrics that I scribbled down:

One of the cranky old men (Morley Safer) on tonight's 60-Minutes covered Millennials in the workforce.

The usual ground was covered - they're narcissistic, dependent on praise, and they don't know how to be 'professional'.

They also brought out a trio of experts, namely a Stepford-Wife that teaches twentysomethings to use utensils, two twentysomethings who appear to confirm the espoused stereotypes, and the cranky near-boomer WSJ columnist.

Although I am technically a Gen-Xer, I certainly feel closer to Gen-Yers /Millennials. These formulatic "damn kids today" rants bore me to tears.

The concept of "flare" is inspired by the seminal 90s movie, Office Space, where Jennifer Anniston's character gets berated by her employer at a Fridays-Bennigans-Houlihan's knockoff for not having the required amount of "flare" on her uniform.  The "flare" is supposed to be the equivalent of a sticker filled bumper or the backpack covered with band patches and buttons.  What does it all mean in terms of webculture?

There's naughty language here, but as usual, Penn and Teller are correct, and Frank Luntz is an asshole.

…particularly when challenging the establishment and disrupting the status quo regarding journalism… or at least he was, right up to the point where his world view, purporting the existence and the benefits of a political center , is challenged.

There seemed to be a point at BlogPhiladelphia where everyone seemed to be grasping for what should be the obvious - what is the business model?  How do I make money?  How do I convince my boss that we should be blogging? What is blogging worth?  Typically, the value of a web site was dependent on it's number of PageViews, at least as far as advertising was concerned.  All of that is about to change.

One of the subjects briefly mentioned at this month's BlogPhiladelphia unconference was the death of the PageView (wiki) as the prime page metric for internet sites.  As explained by Mel "Toxic" Taylor, the metric, which is based on the amount of times a page is viewed, is being replaced by another existing metric, the time-spent-on-site, a move initiated by A.C. Nielsen - an Old Media company. This presents a challenge to scores of existing internet properties as well as new opportunities for sites that are still in the planning stages.  Simply put, this recalculation changes everything, and throws the most prominent business model, that of pay-per-click advertising into doubt.  At the same time, the move to mobile platforms, geolocation, the presence of AJAX and client-side refreshes versus server-side reloads, social networking, widgetized (syndicated) content, and the increasing utilization of RSS makes the PageView largely obsolete, as detailed by Evan Williams (aka evhead). For scores more on the topic, see this del.icio.us search for "PageViews".

It's humorous that this conversation occurs as Time Magazine contemplates pulling the plug on "Business 2.0" and as Businessweek showcases the LOLCATS meme (as in ICANHASCHEEZEBURGER), as well as a slideshow on what other bloggers make (which I first saw this morning on Mashable).  As Joe Sweeney joked at BlogPhilly, "What is it with these cats and the internet?"

There will be changes based on this refocus, some bad, some good, with the changes on balance being mostly neutral.  As Jakob Nielsen (no relation, I think) said, bloggers should write articles, not blog posts.  If the goal was to deliver timely and relavent content, to deliver increased page views, than yes, shorter posts would be appropriate.  However, if the goal is to engage the reader and get them to spend more time on your site, spend more money (if you sell goods or services), or to build relationships of trust, then longer articles would be ideal, buttressed by social networks and embedded media.

A renewed focus on writing and editing, a sharpening of writing skills, and the cultivation of an audience have always been the goals of many bloggers.  But now, the business environment has changed, de-emphasizing SEO, ad placement, text ads, pop-ups and -unders, embedded ads and towards the amount of attention someone pays to your site.  A cynic might say that Old Media is trying to drive a stake through the heart of the new media, as the core competencies of blogs, such as external links and blogrolls, will all be disincentives to the generation of revenue.  This may be another artifact of Western Societies post-Enlightenment obsession with Reductionism and Time-Studies, the trying to make Old-World measurements work with New Media properties.

Although this change will most seriously impact the phenomenom-based sites where short bursts of traffic generate the revenue, the big sites have certainly taken notice and are looking at ways to make their sites properties and destinations as opposed to landing pages from search hits. 

For example, Facebook has replaced a 3-page process for befriending with an AJAX process where everything is done sans page reload.

One of the benefactors of the change to time-spent-on-site will be social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, the resurgence of the internet portal (like Yahoo), and embedded/streaming media portals such as YouTube.  Any sites that are dependent on sticky relationships with viewers are "teh win", including flash games, audio, video, feed readers, and the like.  Site valuations are also very-much in jeopardy - analysts and VCs take the pulse of a site, and assign the valuation based on PageViews…what happens now?  Does the "worth" of the property decline preciptously?  Even Google's own model, the search engine, will be in jeopardy.  Does this maybe even show promise of a revenue model for Second Life and in-game advertising?

For sites still in the planning stages, building-in code, processes, and layouts that maximize time-spent-on-site will be essential.  This might include sidebar territory typically reserved for advertising being repurposed for the highlighting of popular content, recent content, tags, or recent comments, taking advantage of the F-shaped eye-tracking patterns inherent to web usage.  Although a morally gray are, SEO-folk may want to move away from pagination as we know it (with each page view resulting in a higher total view count) towards content being displayed, scrolled, and refreshed inside of an AJAX (or Flash) window.  Any changes that are made need to focus on one thing - the changing of your site from a destination to a property.  It also places a premium on the relationship between writer and reader, creator and consumer, and the connections between the two and the attendant ad hoc networks that can develop based on those interactions.  Once again, the value is in the network.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a WaPo story on Mitt Romney's successor application to the GOP's Voter Vault.  The developer of the program, Alex Gage, provided his services to Ken Mehlman, then chair of the RNC, and Karl Rove.

His pitch was simple: Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most important.

[…]

As a test, Gage was asked to produce targeted messages in several Pennsylvania judicial races in the fall of 2003. Why? The state offered a diverse mix of geography and ethnicity, and it almost certainly would be a battleground for both parties in 2004.

When the election was over, the Republican National Committee commissioned a poll to figure out whether Gage's suppositions about why people voted were accurate. Gage's models predicted voters' tendencies with 90 percent accuracy, according to Dowd, and Gage was hired to microtarget the 16 or so battleground states in the 2004 election.

This is an interest that is near-and-dear to me, inclusive to my academic, professional, and political interests. 

When I worked for Saturn (at a local retailer) I was dismayed by the Automobile Dealers' idea of successful marketing.  The typical ploy went like this - go to your marketing firm, pick a geographic area, set a range for desirable credit card scores, refine the population list by score, design and drop a mailing, and go.  The typical mailing promised some kind of schmeeke, where you got some worthless trinkets or a chance at winning a car (which I'm sure was run in a fair and transparent manner) and maybe, maybe, some small percentage of the people walking through the front door would buy a car.  See, the point of the advertising wasn't to find people who want to buy a car - the point of the advertising was to increase floor traffic.  The standard maxim is that you can close (get someone to agree to buy 33% of the time).  So, if you get 300 people through the door, you should sell 99 cars.  If you want to sell more cars, you need to get more people through the door.  Supply side economics at it's finest.

The whole arrangement seemed wasteful to me, and I was sure the better information was available that could be used in different ways.  In my position as Financial Services Manager, I maintained my own databases, and often manipulated the data to reveal trends that might normally escape notice.  In looking at these, comparing it with what I had observed in my interviews with customers, viewing credit reports, and aggregated loan and credit bureau information, an increasingly clear profile of our customers became clear.

Concern trolls on the right are quick to point out the 'hypocripsy' of the left. I suspect this scandal will be no different. As someone who thinks sex is not filthy and that our opinions on sex in many ways creates the problems of rape, abuse, and prostitution, I don't have a problem per se with a private citizen's interaction with a presumably legal use of an escort service. A judicious examination of Randall Tobias' account that he only received 'massages' doesn't hold water. A visit by an escort to a condo and a $300 bill for back strain is not the same thing as a visit to the chiropractor. The problem isn't the sex or the prostitution, it is the hypocrisy, or more specifically how an official who demanded others to take anti-prostitution pledges found himself a customer of a call-girl service. Via Thinkprogress:

Former U.S. AID director Randall Tobias, who resigned yesterday upon admitting that he frequented a Washington escort service, oversaw a controversial policy advocated by the religious right that required any US-based group receiving anti-AIDS funds to take an anti-prostitution “loyalty oath.”

Those of us on the left-leaning side of politics (or just the non-right side, in some cases) tend to think that the great unwashed aren't intellectually equipped to see through the muck kicked up by the John Gibsons, Ann Coulters, Melanie Morgans, Glenn Becks, and Bill O'Reillys of the right (and further enflamed by the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post and Foxnews).  Case in point, the media character-assasinating mob-hit on Barrack Obama by "some people" (stating he attended a madrassa as a child, he smokes, he had used drugs in the past, his middle name is Hussein, questioning his loyalty, Christianity, etc.) breathlessly worded as a psuedo-attack via Hillary Clinton and an attempt to get the mouth-breathers to reject him via kneejerk reaction, thinking he is the "Mesapotamian"Mohammaded Candidate".