Archives / October 2007

Bit Literacy now has 58 reviews on Amazon. I appreciate all of them - reviews like this, below, make it worth all the effort it took to get the book out.

Superb Book

October 31, 2007

By Kenneth Shubin Stein

This is a superb book. As a doctor and an entrepreneur I have read many books on time management and being more efficient, and been disappointed by most of them. This book is by far the best I have read.

It has just enough theory to help the reader get the big picture, but nothing more. Unlike a lot of books that are twice as long as they should be, this short book respects the reader by delivering the information in an efficient and easy to digest manner.

I especially appreciate the clear instructions on how to implement the author's suggestions. I gave the book out to all my co-workers and several friends. Recently, our entire team talked about how each of us has implemented the book's ideas. Some of us are using all of them, and some are using a few of them, but no one decided not to use any of them. Given how challenging it is to change human behavior, I think this is amazing.

I give this my highest possible recommendation without any reservations at all.

If you haven't checked it out yet - here's Bit Literacy.

Scott Heiferman on New York vs. Silicon Valley:

13 years ago, I was 22 in Iowa with 2 job offers: 1 in Silicon Valley,  1 New York.  I chose New York because New York created SNL, MTV, and VU. This was BNGEE (Before Netscape Google Ebay Etc), and while I worshipped Apple, I placed my bet on the creative hotbed with the best track-record: New York.

Now SNL & MTV are irrelevant. ... Silicon Valley invents the future of everything but hedge funds.

It's a shame because New York really is a great place to live. Thankfully, you can escape New York's finance-media-advertising obsession. The Bay Area & technology is like LA & entertainment: Inescapable. I can leave the office, escape those industries, and be surrounded by the U.N., art, food, and 1000 other worlds.

Right on, Scott.

In an airport the other day I spotted Entrepreneur magazine's current cover story: "Get Rich 2.0" was the headline, in enormous type. Just under that, "The Fast, Cheap & Easy Way To Make Money Online."

I couldn't help but remember that I had seen similar headlines in late 1999 and early 2000, just weeks before the dotcom crash.

Now, I'm no market predictor (no one is, really), but I can at least observe that the phrase "2.0" is stretching the limits of its usefulness. Now that it's been reduced to promising cheap "get rich quick" schemes, it raises the question...

What happened to Web 2.0? (And what was it supposed to be, anyway?)

"Web 2.0" originally referred to a conference cofounded by publisher Tim O'Reilly, to celebrate the rebirth of online business after the dotcom crash - but it soon gained currency as a buzzword in the press, blogs, and (yes) conferences. Depending on the context, it might refer to...

• websites that act more like software (like Gmail)
• user-generated content (like Wikipedia and YouTube)
• new ways of sharing data (like Flickr and del.icio.us)

...but as the press covered more and more stories of overnight millionaires, "Web 2.0" began to take on the meaning alluded to by the Entrepreneur magazine cover story above: easy money.

The thing is, there really is something to the Web 2.0 trend; it's just not as big as the hype promises. Stripping away the nonsense, I'd state Web 2.0 as such:

• users do appreciate software-like aspects of websites, in some cases

• users do want to learn from other users' contributions, in some cases (i.e. reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor, entries on Wikipedia)

• users do want to share their data with other users, in some cases (i.e. mostly advanced users posting photos on Flickr or bookmarks on del.icio.us)

• users do want to network with other users, in some cases (i.e. businesspeople on LinkedIn, music fans on MySpace, and a mix of people on Facebook)

The key phrase is "in some cases," and this is what I believe is so hard for techno-utopians - to accept that there are limitations to what users actually want from technology.

Take the idea of sharing. Do you really want to turn EVERY aspect of your life into data to share with thousands or millions of people you've never met? For example, there are several financial sites now that allow users to share their net worth (anonymously or not) with all the other users on the service. Other companies promise soon to analyze your DNA and allow you to share it publicly with the world.

All of these will be helpful to some users; I'm only arguing that there's a line somewhere beyond which it's not helpful to share. In other words, sharing in itself - one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 - isn't an ultimate good. Rather, sharing is good as long as it's good for the user; user-generated content is good as long as it's good for the user; and so on.

And this is where I break with the boosters of Web 2.0. They say that sharing, user-generated content, and tactics like AJAX and tags will usher in a new online utopia. I say that the game hasn't changed since the Internet started: in every context, a tool must either serve the user or be abandoned. The user is what's important, not the technology.

It's worth keeping an eye out for the rare counterpoint to Web 2.0 hysteria. I saw two recently: first, the Economist wrote on October 18 (article, reg. required) that "there's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye"... since "social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size."

The second piece, a blog post called Flickr Huh?, in which a thirtysomething blogger admits that he doesn't understand why photo-sharing services like Flickr are so popular:

More puzzling to me is the fact that there are evidently tons of people who see fit to invite strangers to comment on their photos. (I don't want any strangers looking at my photos at all. That's why I prefer to email my digi-pix around.)

These are just counterpoints - I enjoy using both Facebook and Flickr - but I think it's useful to keep an open eye to people who question the usefulness (that is, to USERS) of these tools, rather than promoting them just because they're part of a trend, or heaven forbid, for the dumbest reason in the world to claim to like a tool, which is that someone got rich by selling the company or taking it public. (Unless you were that someone. Then of course you like it.)

Finally, one clip not from today's buzzing media environment. This is a good counterpoint to the Entrepreneur magazine article: a clip from Cecil Roberts' memoir "The Bright Twenties" (taken from this page - I'm assuming it's an accurate quote):

The stock market hysteria reached its apex in 1929... Stocks soared dizzily. I found it hard not to be engulfed... Everyone said, "Hang on - it's a rising market". On my last day in New York I went down to the barber. As he removed the sheet he said softly, "Buy Standard Gas. I've doubled. It's good for another double." As I walked upstairs, I reflected that if the hysteria had reached the barber-level, something must soon happen.

Time to think clearly.

See also:

• The Web 2.0 question - and Grandparents.com

• What Is Web 2.0, by Tim O'Reilly himself

• Web 2.0 movie

• Simplicity and Goovite

(Thanks to Zimran for the 2blowhards link)

Lots of resources about lodging complaints with corporations: Consumerist's guide to fighting back.

One other resource I'd suggest is Gethuman.com, which lists toll-free phone numbers of many companies, helping you bypass the computers and get a human on the phone.

(thanks, bb)

Simplicity in airline pricing can increase profitability:

"The bottom line," says Jack Foley, the New York-born executive vice president of Aer Lingus, "is that our revenues are up and our costs are down. At least so far, the market is telling us we got it right because we made it simple."

Okay, the "revenue is up" part, I can understand. But "costs are down?" How does a simplified fare structure drive down costs?

"I don't think anyone in the business fully understands how much it costs to support the old pricing," Foley explains. "It's all kinds of little things. Do you know how many return seats go out empty because we used to force people to buy roundtrips to get the lower fares? Do you know how much money we spent doing [corporate] contracts with the old fares? Now doing a contract takes no time at all because the fares are so simple."

(Thanks, Paul)

The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam is proud of its "so bad, it's good" customer experience... go to the site and click on Other Stuff, then History, to view its long-running ad campaign. In their words, the campaign "takes honesty to the extreme." (At left, one of the images from the campaign - specially designed silverware!)

See also: How Ryanair succeeds with poor customer service

(Thanks, Sebastian)

Have you played 20Q yet? The online game has a brain that learns the "right" answers to the game of 20 Questions solely through players playing the game. No one person taught the game the right answers; it just looks for patterns across the thousands of played games. (It's a true "neural net," for AI fans out there.)

Especially fun - newer additions to the themed games include The Simpsons, the Old Testament, and Harry Potter. Definitely worth a look.

The inventor, Robin Burgener, spoke at Gel 2007 - here's a video clip.

(I linked to the game awhile back on Good Experience Games but wanted to make sure everyone had seen it.)

Play 20Q

A Cornell study suggests that "the apparent origin of [a] wine affects the perception of a restaurant's food and even the probability that the customer will return":

The experiment, conducted by Cornell professors Brian Wansink and Collin Payne, was fairly simple. A group of diners in an Illinois restaurant were served a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon with the same fixed-price French dinner. All were told the wine came from Noah’s Winery (a non-existent brand), but half were told the origin was California and the other half North Dakota. In fact, all of the wine was “Two Buck Chuck,” a very inexpensive but brisk-selling wine from Charles Shaw Wines. Predictably, the “California” wine was rated as being better than the “North Dakota” wine.

Here’s the interesting part, though: the diners who received the free glass of California wine also rated the food higher, ate 11% more food, and were more likely to make a return reservation.

See also: Wine, charlatans, and good experience

What does Web 2.0 mean to people over 50 years old?

Put another way, what do grandparents do online? (Do they blog? Do they tag? Do they "Facebook"? )

These are important questions for Grandparents.com, a Web startup aimed at those very users. I recently worked with the company, with a team from Creative Good, to answer those questions and help the Grandparents.com team chart its way forward.

I should note that many companies face some version of "the Web 2.0 question" right now. Everyone these days seems to want to build social networking into their business. I've recently observed a number of well-established e-commerce sites change their strategy from merchandising and selling products to "connecting customers with each other"... as though buying spatulas (or whatever) gets better after you create a buddy-list of fellow spatula lovers. Some sites should stick to what they know.

There are, of course, other sites that do benefit from these features. Chief among them are the social networking sites themselves. Facebook.com currently gets the most attention; previously it was Myspace, and before that it was Friendster (remember them)? But there are other sites, too, that make good use of linking users to each other. For example, TripAdvisor.com is a travel site focused primarily on customer reviews; booking travel is a secondary feature.

The challenge for a new company like Grandparents.com, in creating a customer experience strategy, is to discern which (if any) elements of the hyped-up Web 2.0 trend are worth investing in. That requires considering various inputs.

What sources do executives listen to? Here are a few:

• the technology press, whose job it is to report on the newest and flashiest trends, not necessarily what actually works in the long run

• bloggers, many of whom are technophiles who enjoy playing with, and writing about, Internet trends and gadgets

• investors, who often want quick results, and look to the press and bloggers to point the way

• technology conferences, which tend to invite speakers who will draw attendees from the three groups above

It's no wonder that the spatula site wants a social networking feature: today's executives face tremendous pressure to follow the herd.

Another voice, by the way, is that of industry colleagues, who (depending on the context) can be very helpful, or in the other extreme, may indulge in one-upmanship about whose business has gotten more exposure. (The "helpful" context would be something like the Councils.)

One voice not on the list, ironically enough, can point the way forward, both in the short term and the long term. Who is it?

The customers.

Most companies still don't conduct meaningful research with the people who they're ostensibly working for. No customers, no business; and yet the customers are often nowhere to be found when strategic decisions are made.

It's to Grandparents.com's credit that they bucked the trend. The team reached out to listen to customers in order to build their strategy. "The Web 2.0 question" becomes a much easier task when you have good data.

Within one day of listening labs, we found that grandparents do want certain features in the website, and Grandparents.com can have a viable business in the Web 2.0 world. The grandparents we talked to didn't say, "I want this particular feature," but their descriptions of how they relate to their grandkids, and their demonstrations of how they use the Internet, revealed what sort of site Grandparents.com should be.

Perhaps more importantly, we learned what the customers do not want, saving the company from making needless investments of time and money in the wrong features. For example, I won't give the store away by revealing that grandparents are not sprinting to set up blogs. Nor are they prone to tag photos and bookmarks.

If you think these are common-sense conclusions, take a look at what the press is saying. A New York Times article last month announced a new trend of Web 2.0 sites for aging users:

"Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users. ... They look like Facebook - with wrinkles."

Facebook with wrinkles. Maybe that's a great investor pitch, but I didn't see anything in my direct exposure to customers that suggests it's a good strategy. I'd guess that most of the companies in that article listened to the bulleted sources above, and never invested in meaningful research with their customers.

How do your organization chart its way forward: by following the herd, or by listening to customers?

- - -

See also:

• A related but better NYT story, Tailoring Messages to a New
Audience: Wrinkled Baby Boomers

• Another column on "the Web 2.0 question," What I learned redesigning del.icio.us (from July 2006)

• You DO talk to customers, don't you? (from September 2004)

• Creative Good, my customer experience consulting firm

Try out this tool: AskWiki. Type in a question, get an answer drawn from Wikipedia entries.

Question: Why is the sky blue?

Answer: The light from the sky is a result of diffuse sky radiation which results in a light blue color being perceived by the human eye. On a sunny day the earth sky usually looks as a blue gradient — dark in the zenith, light near the horizon (due to Rayleigh scattering). It can turn a multitude of colors such as purple (especially near sunset and sunrise) and black at night. Scattering effects also partially polarize light from the sky.

(thanks, bb)

I'll be speaking this Friday at the CMA Digital Marketing Conference in Toronto... hope to see some readers there!

(Here's my speaker's bureau, if there's another event I should be at :)

Our thoughts are with all our friends in southern California. Stay safe! And may the winds die down soon.

At left, the Google Maps view of the fires and evacuation centers, by KPBS.

More info on the fires at the NYTimes site.

From the Stay Free blog, a funny captcha from the Ticketmaster site:

The submitter wrote, "even the church wouldn't tack a $9 surcharge on top of a $35 ticket purchase..."

Fun Stuff: Some items I'll probably put in the next e-mail newsletter...

• CBS video about an unusual blind person (thanks, 37sigs)

• What *really* happened to the X-Wing fighter from last week (thanks, bb)

• A bizarre round of "The Clapper" TV ad. (thanks, kottke)

• Maps of "top ten countries that..." (many different categories)

Happy weekend,
-Mark

One reason many websites have bad designs is because they're optimized for the Google search engine, not for users.

MeanGene asks, What would happen if Google itself was designed for listing within Google?

(Thanks, Laurie)

Charlie Todd and Improv Everywhere ran their latest prank at Abercrombie & Fitch, a trendy retailer on Manhattan's 5th Avenue. The store fetishizes the shirtless male - with murals, a bronze statue, and a live model at the entrance - so Charlie brought 100 shirtless males to the store. (These were fans of Improv Everywhere who answered Charlie's call to enter the store and remove their shirts at a certain moment.)

Store security didn't appreciate the commentary on their employer's brand. Charlie writes:

After about 15 minutes, the Abercrombie management decided it was time to kick us out. Security employees started approaching all of our men and asking them to either put a shirt on or leave. They informed us that the model was a paid employee and his state of undress didn’t justify ours. So despite the fact that the store constantly bombards you with the image of the shirtless male, Abercrombie still maintains a “No Shirts; No Service” policy. Some agents protested that they were trying to buy a shirt, but the staff countered with the not-so-logical, “If you put on a shirt then you can buy a shirt.”

... Two agents were actually stopped while in the process of checking out! They were waiting in line for 10 minutes to buy some $45 shirts, only to be grabbed at the register. One of them was in the process of handing over his credit card as he was nabbed and informed he wasn’t allowed to make a purchase!

No word yet on plans for a prank at Victoria's Secret.

Here's the video:

See also:

• Charlie's full report

• Video clip of Charlie at Gel 2007

• Abercrombie & Fitch home page, featuring an image of, you guessed it...

Chip Conley is CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the world's second- largest boutique hotel company. After a severe downturn in his business after 9/11, Conley read Abraham Maslow's works as inspiration for his turnaround plan. It worked: Joie de Vivre is again thriving, and Conley has written a book about what he learned - not only from Maslow, but from companies like Nike, Apple, and Harley-Davidson, which follow Maslow's thinking. Chip's book is Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.

Chip will also speak at Gel 2008 in April in New York (sign up here).

Q - What's the main idea of "Peak"?

The main idea is that we're all humans in the workplace - whether employees, customers, or investors - and those companies that succeed and become peak performers touch us as people in the workplace, by focusing on higher needs, as opposed to base needs.

Q - How is Abraham Maslow significant?

Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs in the mid-20th century. There's no psychologist or psychiatrist quoted more in business schools or corporations than Maslow. Drucker, Covey, Bennis, and Collins all write about him in their books - they mention him in two or three pages, mostly talking about the hierarchy of needs.

What's interesting is that the psychology profession - including Freud, Skinner, and others - commonly looked at the worst practices in behavior in defining the human condition. Maslow says, let's look at best practices - people who are fulfilled or self-actualized, who can "be all you can be" and have clicked in to doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Q - Describe the pyramid containing the hierarchy of needs.

There are five levels in Maslow's pyramid. At the base are physiological needs. Then come safety, social belonging, and esteem, and at the top, self-actualization, which is where people are more likely to have peak experiences - what ought to be, is, and life feels great. Reading Maslow woke me up to the idea that if there are self-actualized people in the world, then maybe there could be self- actualized companies, since companies are just collections of people.

So in "Peak" I break down Maslow's pyramid and apply it to key relationships - employees, customers, and investors. I took Maslow's five levels and turned them into three levels: the first two levels, physical and safety needs, are just survival. Levels 3 and 4, social and esteem, are just success needs, how the world sees you. At the top of the pyramid, self-actualization, is a transformative state, where you've moved beyond your own ego. So I created the "transformation pyramid": survival on the bottom, then success, and transformation at the top. I then applied those three levels to the motivations of employees, customers, and investors.

Q - OK, what do you say about employees?

For employees, what's the survival need? Money, compensation. Sure, some CEOs are almost exclusively motivated by money. But for most people, it's just a base need. Every survey I've seen shows that money is not the primary motivator for employees. As nonprofits will tell you, the base foundational need is important, but the differential from one company to the next is not huge. Money as a differentiator isn't important.

The success need is being recognized. Marcus Buckingham's book "First Break All the Rules" showed that the number one reason people leave their job is their relationship with their direct supervisor. People join companies, but they leave their bosses.

The top of pyramid is something different, intangible - in the pyramid we're moving from the tangible, to the physiological, to the very intangible. For an employee, it's meaning. This is somewhat blasphemous for companies; it's hard to measure what's intangible. Yet MasterCard says what's true, that what's most important is "priceless," and that's intangible.

How do you put your attention on the top of the pyramid? The three levels represent money, recognition, and meaning: let's translate each to a word that describes a person's relationship with their work: a "job", a "career", or a "calling." Employers that move their employees up the pyramid get more happy and fulfilled and productive employees, who are much likelier to stay longer, and a positive spirit in that workplace. The fact is, I have 3,000 employees, and 1,200 of them clean toilets for a living. So it's a challenge for me to create that with my employees.

Q - What's the customer pyramid?

For a customer, the survival need equates to having one's expectations met. If you don't meet their expectations, you haven't met their survival needs; you've created buyer's remorse. It comes down to the difference between expectation and reality. Most companies get very focused on the base; that's what customer satisfaction surveys are about. "Was your check-in process efficient?" Well, sure it was, but I hated this and that other thing, which the survey won't ask me about. We most notice the intangible. Pure customer satisfaction is at the base of the pyramid.

The success need is having desires met, which companies deliver either via technology or training. Good examples of using technology are Amazon and Netflix, which use mass-customized technology. The more I use them, the better they know me and my desires. Similarly, Four Seasons hotels are more high-touch. Through great training, the people there know my desires. That creates customer loyalty - and this second level is where it builds, not at the bottom of the pyramid.

Now for the top of the pyramid. Henry Ford said, "If I listened to my customers, they'd tell me to get a faster horse." By meeting the unrecognized needs of a customer, which the customer may not be able to articulate themselves, you create a customer evangelist. So there's customer loyalty in the middle, and evangelism at the top. A self-actualized customer is so thrilled you've met a need they didn't know they had, that they become believer. Companies that do this include Apple, Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue. You get on a JetBlue flight and find your own TV at your seat. More importantly, you have some control at a time you'd otherwise feel out of control. Companies that do this well create not just loyalty but a marketing machine.

Q - What are some best practices of companies that use the customer pyramid to great effect?

There are four qualities that define companies that are creating these customer evangelists. First, they help their customers meet their highest goals - allowing a customer to achieve their ideal goals from using the product. Apple enables its customers to go out and exercise their minds. Nike encourages customers to "just do it." Google gives you exactly what you're looking for. These companies are helping customers meet their highest goals.

Second is giving your customers the ability to truly express themselves. By buying a Harley-Davidson, a middle-aged accountant from the Midwest can feel like a rebel. In the case of boutique hotels, you might say, "You are where you sleep." If a hotel has a personality that represents an aspiration for you, then hopefully when you check out it will have rubbed off on you a little bit. Similarly, there's a halo effect of being an Apple user; and Starbucks has tried to become a curator for a lifestyle for its customers. These are customers who feel like they can express themselves through the purchase of a product or service.

Third is making customers feel like they're part of a bigger cause. Hummer buyers may feel that connection, but most people would say that it's lacking a socially responsible element. Patagonia - the company, not the region in Argentina - runs its "1% for the planet" campaign, and its loyal customers are "Patagoniacs." They love being associated with Patagonia because it's part of a bigger cause. For people who buy from Apple, it's not just "I'm an iconoclastic rebel," but "I'm part of a bigger cause," the anti-Microsoft attitude. At Whole Foods Market, you may go there because you love the product, but lots of people buy there because they love the sustainability cause. People like buying a Toyota Prius because it makes them feel good about both buying a car and doing something for the planet, even though that's a rather oxymoronic thought.

The fourth quality is offering customers something of real value they hadn't even imagined. That's what JetBlue did with the TV screen. That's what FedEx did when they created overnight delivery. It was a remarkable thought, 25 years ago, that you could send something overnight. But that innovation became a commodity over time. A lot of people entered FedEx's market, and Fred Smith, the founder, said, "I thought I was in the transporting goods, and then I realized that I was in the business of creating peace of mind." So he created a logistics program to allow customers to track packages. Now the innovation, what people wanted, an almost unrecognized desired, was: if I'm sending it overnight, the person on either end wants to know where it is. FedEx went from being an also-ran to going to the top of the pyramid again and taking market share away from its competitors. FedEx's innovation in terms of tracking was addressing that peace of mind that customers were looking for.

Q - How can any company start to put these principles into practice?

The easiest way is to consider how Maslow's hierarchy can be applied to your customer. For example, for a hotel customer, the physical level is a clean and comfortable bed. Safety might be offering an electric card-key instead of a regular key, and making sure there's good lighting in the parking lot. And so on. Just remember that there is a hierarchy of needs of employees, customers, and investors, and you can help people around you understand that.

- - -

See also:

• Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, by Chip Conley

• Wikipedia entry on Abraham Maslow

• Musings, Chip's blog

• Gel 2008 conference, where Chip Conley is scheduled to speak

• More Good Experience interviews

Life bits are coming. Long-time readers of Good Experience will know that I've railed on this topic for years now - almost five years, in fact - and a few months ago I included a small essay about life bits in my book Bit Literacy (Chapter 13, if you have it).

If you've missed the previous notices, here's the news: Pretty soon we'll be able to record every waking minute of our lives. It will change our work, our social life, our legal system, and it will be yet another challenge for those who never learned the skills of bit literacy.

For now, the trend is taking the shape of seemingly everything else online these days - yet another Web 2.0 startup - at Justin.tv. The technology is pertinent, but the business model, in my opinion, is not. Life bits are not TV, and no one wants to wants every minute of someone else's life.

But I could be wrong, and in this NYT piece, Silicon Valley luminary Stewart Alsop weighs in with a counter-argument:

The future, he hopes, will bring more and better choices. “If there are 6 billion people in the world,” he said, “imagine one million people broadcasting live, 999,000 of whom are boring — but the other 1,000 are really interesting.”

Either way, the hardware for life bits is on its way:

... Subsequently, the Justin.tv team was able to redesign its system so that a special camera is no longer needed. A tiny Webcam, easy to affix to a shoulder strap, hat or eyeglasses, can be connected to any lightweight Windows laptop with an Internet connection. A 3-pound laptop is still too heavy, however, to be carried everywhere one goes, day in, day out — assuming, of course, that the lifecasters have a destination other than their own home or office.

Still, watching life bits as a stream is boring. Thankfully for the NYT piece, there is one art celebrity with whom to wrap up the story:

... Andy Warhol, were he still with us, would enthusiastically embrace lifecasting, not because it enables everyone to become world-famous for 15 minutes, but because the medium is perfectly suited to Mr. Warhol’s taste.

“I like boring things,” he once wrote, and his experimental films deliberately tested his audience’s appetite for tedium. His 1963 classic, “Sleep,” was a black-and-white silent film that had a single actor, single scene and single plot point: the poet John Giorno sleeping — for 5 hours and 21 minutes. When it was shown for the first time in Los Angeles, an audience that was 500 strong began shrinking even before the 45-minute close-up of Mr. Giorno’s abdomen was complete. Still, 50 people lasted for the full 321 minutes.

See also:

• SF writer on life bits (May 14, 2007)

• Life bits via mobile devices (April 30, 2007)

• Life bits, tracking, and bit literacy (December 4, 2006)

• The Good Experience Review of Bits, 2002/2003 (January 10, 2003 (!))

Speaking of counterfeit wine labels that make wine taste better, how about this: Study: Food in McDonald's wrapper tastes better to kids. Put a vegetable in a golden-arches wrapper and suddenly it wins taste tests - at least with kids who eat at McDonald's frequently.

(Thanks, Courtney)

Just below the piece on a cat competition, Yahoo's homepage links to a piece on e-mail overload, yet another article reporting on the handful of companies trying "email-free Fridays":

Like the others in the series, the article seems to be saying, "Where oh where can we find a solution to the problem of e-mail overload? For now, let's just turn it off one day a week."

That may address the symptoms, one day a week, but it doesn't cure the disease. Those companies should teach Bit Literacy instead.

Also, I love that Yahoo ranks a cat competition above e-mail overload!

(Thanks, Pete)

See also: USA Today misfires on e-mail overload

Lots of people are talking about the new album from Radiohead, since customers can name their own price when they download it.

One major problem, which I haven't seen mentioned in the press, is that the user experience on the site is really confusing. Imagine the popularity of the album if Radiohead had just launched a simple, easy to use website!

Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo and frequent Gel conference attendee, gives a quick demo of the problem, from the user's perspective:

(Thanks, Amit)

This normal-looking surge protector has, printed on its box, the promise you'd expect:

"Protects Against Lightning Strikes and Line Surges."

The only problem is the note on the other side of the box (emphasis mine): "It's not a lightning arrestor, so it won't afford protection while lightning strikes nearby the Power lines, house, Service entrance or Antenna."

(Thanks, Julia)

What makes an experience "good"? For functional things like tools, business software, and most websites, "good" means allowing the user to get through the task as quickly and easily as possible.

But for more aesthetic or sensuous experiences, "good" is often in the eye of the beholder... or the nose, in this case. A recent New Yorker article suggests that the experience of drinking wine is determined less by the wine itself and more by the consumer's own expectations for the wine.

For example, a student at the University of Bordeaux ran a study with some interesting results:

... he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux from a bottle with a label indicating that it was a modest vin de table. A week later, he served the same wine to the same subjects but this time poured from a bottle indicating that the wine was a grand cru. Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle “simple,” “unbalanced,” and “weak,” they found the wine from the second “complex,” “balanced,” and “full.” Brochet argues that our “perceptive expectation” arising from the label often governs our experience of a wine, overriding our actual sensory response to whatever is in the bottle.

Wherever people are paying money and can be fooled in the process, charlatans are never far off. There's apparently a brisk business in counterfeiting wine labels, and putting cheaper wine into older bottles. Some people pay a lot of money for wine ... especially in Las Vegas:

... Rajat Parr, a prominent wine director who oversees restaurants in Las Vegas, told me that several years ago some of his customers ordered a bottle of 1982 Pétrus, which can sell in restaurants for as much as six thousand dollars. The party finished the bottle and ordered a second. But the second bottle tasted noticeably different, so they sent it back. The staff apologetically produced a third bottle, which the diners consumed with pleasure. Parr closely examined the three bottles and discovered the problem with the second one: it was genuine.

Here's a thought experiment for the day. Notwithstanding that outlandish story from Las Vegas, is it still a good experience if you have to fool your customers to give it to them? Stated another way, is it better to give customers the real thing, even if they won't like it as much? Or is it better to give them the fake thing, and call it real, in order to save lots of money, even while your customers are none the wiser (or even prefer the fake thing)?

I'm genuinely interested in your responses, as this is a question I've wrestled with since founding my company, Creative Good. We try our best to create a good experience for clients, and their customers, even at the expense of hyping ourselves - which has probably cost us some exposure and business over the years. What's the best way to resolve this tradeoff?

Right around the corner from my office...

(Thanks, Cat)

The Google vanity ring:

"Update of the ring as a status symbol. It shows the number of Google hits you get, when you search for the name of the person who wears it."

(via)

Today is 1010, a date for fans of all things binary!

Here's my inbox for the occasion...

Anyone else want to share on 1010?

A few weeks ago I posted this:

In Bit Literacy, Chapter 10 (page 124, if you have a copy) talks about the inevitability of technology companies wanting very much to mediate our access to our own health record. I propose a simple (and private) text file called " health".

Microsoft's entry is now up and running, at Microsoft HealthVault. The site proclaims itself "The revolutionary and FREE way to collect, store, and share your health information with Web sites and doctors." The last time I heard "revolutionary" applied to incremental Web services (and much of HealthVault is an overlay on Microsoft's live.com search engine) was in 1999 and early 2000. Deja vu.

I still think that people should learn how to store the basics of their own health log by themselves. It's private, secure, and FREE, and people can choose what to share with their doctors. What a concept! (See Bit Literacy for more.)

See also:

• Health information and bit literacy

• Clip - Microsoft and health care

• Positive review of HealthVault on The Medical Quack, a health blog

(via Kevin Kelly, who I'm surprised would sign up)

P.S. Shown at left: much of the text on the HealthVault site is small and gray on a white background (which needed to stop years ago, but I think I've lost that battle).

A recent Dartmouth graduate sends up Facebook, saying that most young users are comfortable with social networking in person already, so they input false information for fun:

Facebook administrators have since exiled at least the flagrantly fake profiles, the Greta Garbos and the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butters, in an effort to have the site grow up from a farce into the serious social networking tool promised to its new adult users, who earnestly type in their actual personal information and precisely label everyone they know as former co-workers or current colleagues, family members or former lovers.

But does this more reverent incarnation of Facebook actually enrich adult relationships? What do these constellations of work colleagues and long-lost friends amount to? An online office mixer? A reunion with that one other guy from your high school who has a Facebook profile? Oh! You get to see pictures of your former college sweetheart’s family!

Here's an article I see every month or so: "E-mail overload is everywhere! Where oh where could our solution be? Oh, it's such an awful problem, too bad we have nothing but the following random tips and tricks..."

The latest version comes from USA Today, which suggests "e-mail free Friday," an answer to Casual Friday, and then goes on to suggest the self-defeating tactic of "e-mail bankruptcy." From the story:

Prominent techies are tackling the problem individually by declaring "e-mail bankruptcy" -- deleting or archiving an entire in-box and starting over.

As though prominent techies doing it makes it somehow less irresponsible.

And then this:

E-mail overload is caused by the sheer volume of messages zipping around the globe. Each day, about 39.7 billion person-to-person e-mails, 17.1 billion automated alerts, and 40.5 billion pieces of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) are sent worldwide ...

D'oh. That's a measurement of the problem, but not the cause. Incoming e-mail is a fact of life now; measuring it isn't going to point to a solution. The cause of the problem is simply that people don't know the skills of managing digital information.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I'm hopeful that future stories on e-mail overload will strike a more positive (and accurate) note: "This awful problem now has a solution - a new philosophy for dealing with always-on, always-chattering technology: it's a set of skills called 'bit literacy'..."

(tx, Mary)

Jan Gehl, an urban planner based in Copenhagen, was one of the most dynamic speakers at euroGel last year - here's the video.

New York City planners are now working with Jan to create a new bike path in Manhattan.

(thanks, Lars)