Market Research, Design, and Choices

I was writing a contact in the marketing world and I realized why I do not want to do market research for some types of companies, and why I prefer to work in the social media world.

I do not want to work at a research firm where I would have to do research for a fast food company, a tobacco company, or a soda company. I think one important aspect of good marketing, and good understanding of the market, is to make a good product that fits consumer need. This does not mean you make products that manipulate people's brains on a chemical level (fats, sugars, nicotine, empty calories) . Good design is important to me, products that harm people's health are defective by design and I do not tolerate treating people like that.

One reason I like social media is because it can make people's lives better, and it needs to be designed well to do that.

Good design makes life better. Some products are designed to enrich some at the cost of others, but are marketed in quite a different way. For more on fast food, read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.

100 Year Old Griefing

Susan Douglas (one of my PhD advisors), in her 1987 book Inventing American Broadcasting, detailed a 1907 New York Times story about a young man who used wireless. Although the precursor to modern radio, it was not at all like today's radio. There were no stations playing music, it was Morse code, and it was all individuals sending and receiving messages. These individuals could be some young guy in New Jersey, or the radio man on a ship, or a commercial "station" of sort (such as a newspaper contacting ships at sea for news), or the navy.

For the most part (probably exclusively), it was young and technologically-savvy men. But, it was also anonymous, since there was no automatic way to identify people. And, when you have a communication technology and anonymity, you have griefing. Douglas wrote how, in about 1910, “deliberate interference... began to get out of control, and to the military, in particular, it ceased to be in any way innocent or amusing.” (p. 207) Congestion of the airwaves, and general interference, was increasing, but so was “malicious interference” (p. 208)

Some amateurs deliberately sent false or obscene messages, especially to the navy. The temptation to indulge in such practical joking was enhanced by the fact that detection was virtually impossible. Amateurs would pretend to be military officials or commercial operators, and they dispatched ships on all sorts of fabricated missions. Navy operators would receive emergency messages about a ship that was sinking off the coast. After hours of searching in vain, the navy would hear the truth: the “foundering” ship had just arrived safely in port. (p. 208)

Sending navy operators “profane messages” was something else that the amateurs did. The navy, trying to assert some control over the airwaves, would issue “statements about the grave danger posed by the amateurs, and cited many instances of unpatriotic interference.” (p. 210)

Much like today, anonymity played a large part in people’s behavior. “The anonymity made possible by wireless had a leveling effect on the status and power of naval officials: in the airwaves, rank was irrelevant; only technical strength mattered.” (p. 210)

Crowdsourcing Confusion

Crowdsourcing is usually used in either one of two incompatible ways, or in a way that is an odd mishmash of both. One the one hand, it can mean throwing some problem out to the crowd, that is, everybody, and everybody solves it. The second is that you throw a problem out there, and the experts solve it. Experts are not everybody, and everybody, as a whole, is not expert at everything. Most people are experts at perhaps one thing, or less.

The recent Netflix improvement competition, to improve movie recommendations, is one such example. One Wired writer said how "the Netflix Prize competition has proffered hard proof of a basic crowdsourcing concept." The NYTimes Bits blog writer, Steve Lohr, wrote "this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges."

Well, no. The winners of the Neflix prize were not at all the same "crowd" as, say, the Wikipedians (and given that the majority of edits come from a minority of users there, that's not really a crowd either).

The point is that you throw a problem out and hope the get the experts interested in it, you don't care about the crowd one whit. The problem is you don't know where the experts are, and you don't have the capability to approach them (perhaps you lack the time, or the social capital to talk to them directly).

The Netflix prize instead shows the well-known point that teams with diverse backgrounds can come up with better answers than groups where all the people have the same background. As Lohr wrote, the winning team "is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel." Not all computer scientists. Not all statisticians. Not all from the same country. If all you has is a hammer, you'd better hope you only encounter nails. (Van Buskirk got this correct in Wired, "Arguably, the Netflix Prize’s most convincing lesson is that a disparity of approaches drawn from a diverse crowd is more effective than a smaller number of more powerful techniques.")

Even the TV show House played with this idea recently. An annoyingly Internety guy blogs his medical problems and offers a reward for them. The person who solves his problem, it turns out, is not just some guy from "the crowd". It is a medical expert. Not just any medical expert, but Dr. House himself, the uber-expert.

My Google H Score

H score is the crossing of the number of publications you have in journals with the number of cites each one has. The H is where you have N number of pubs that have N or more citations to them. When you have your first pub, your H is zero since no one has cited it yet. My Google H=4 as of this post, as I have four pubs that are each cited at least four times. My solo Google H is only 2. Although age of the article clearly relates, I'd say that popularity of topic is relevant. (Edit: Slashdot was hot for a while, as was online Public Sphere stuff, but that article doesn't get a lot of cites lately. Here are the Google scholar pages.)

Article (short title)	Journal	Author(s)	Year	Cited
Mechanisms of an online public sphere	JCMC	Solo	2005	*25
To broadband or not to broadband	JoBEM	Co	2004	9
Honey, I shrunk the world!	MCS	Co	2006	8
Playing Internet curveball...	Convergence	Solo	2006	7
A cross-national study of computer news sites	TIS	Solo	2007	1
Copyright notices...	JCMC	Solo	2008	*1
Global citation patterns...	IJoC	Solo	2009	0
Stratification and global elite theory	IJoPOR	Co	2009	0

H values as of 9/10/09.

* indicates one self-cite, relevant, honestly!

Neither self-cite affects the Google H value.

The numbers fluctuate from time to time, up and down.

Emojicons on Your iPhone

(What, you don't have an iPhone?)

Emoji (Japanese emoticons, and these ones are very Japanese) are on your iPhone, but activating them, not so easy. I'm not sure what the technical details are behind all of this (I'm curious about it, but not so that I'm going to kill myself Googling), but I just did this on my 3GS and it works.

You need to get this (free) app and follow the directions. There are, apparently, other apps that work as well, so I assume the app makes a call (software call, not phonecall) to the Japanese emoji character set, so the phone then makes it available, but that's just a guess. Some of the emojicons are a little strange, but there are a lot of them. Make sure you use the "updated" number, not the one in the illustrations. No idea why you need to enter those numbers in that order, but it worked.

30k Years Ago...

As you can see from the lonely "History" tag, this has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is about a 30,000 or so year old bear skull, that some pre-historic person placed on a rock in a cave and left there. And there it sat. For a few years. And a few more. A century. One-thousand years. Another thousand years. Ten thousand years. More! Until we modern humans found it, in Chauvet cave in France. (Click on "Visit the Cave", then in the upper right of the map find the green dot that is "The Chamber of the Skull". Click it.)

This is pretty cool. Why? Don't we find old bones, well, not all the time, but, museums are full of them. Yes. But, usually they are in the ground, surrounded by datable strata, or maybe a tar pit, or, like a mammoth, frozen in ice (or like The Ice Man). Granted the bear skull was underground, in the sense that the cave is under the ground, but it was not in the ground, it was sitting on a rock the entire time. Yes we find rock paintings, but those are painted onto rocks. You can't move them.

Typically when we find things that old they are not just sitting there. King Tut's tomb was amazing because it was fairly, but not completely, undisturbed, and is a little over 3,300 years old (so The Ice Man is about 200 years older). Stonehenge is about 4,500 years old. The Egyptian pyramids, which are also stone structures that have been out in the open, are about the same age. But our little skull friend was already ancient when all of those were built.

Second Life, eh?

As part of my current research, I checked out Second Life on and off for about two weeks. There is some interesting stuff there, since it is almost entirely community created content and user generated content, but let's face it a lot of people are creepy when you give them anonymity.

A lot of businesses had trumpeted their entry into the brave new world of Second Life, then silently withdrew when they realized they had been snookered by marketing fear-peddlers yet again. So, lots of Google results for "company name" and "Second Life" which give you articles on their awesome new presence in-world. Ha. Nothing for when they leave, though, but I did finally find one article--thank you, Rupert Neate at the Telegraph. There are so many good quotes in it, you can read it and choose your favorite, since I can't choose just one to print here to entice you to go read it.

Ok ok, here's one, but the entire article is full of win (that means it is all really good).

While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte’s director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been “virtually abandoned” by “normal” people and businesses.

Eventually I decided I needed a haiku, encouraged by some work about craigslist. Here it is:

Second Life presence!
The press releases blooming!
Silently we leave.