Making Sense With What You Got

Last Tuesday I asked readers to suggest 10 ideas to incorporate into a single story for Tuesday, which happens to be Story Day on a friend's website. I'm always ready to steal a good idea when I see one (credit due, of course), and I thought it would be an interesting design challenge.

Here's what 9 individuals contributed as elements to be incorporated into the story (read the original comments for the full treatments):

1. A bee facing management challenges.
2. Bee dancing and finding new pollen sources in the face of two suns, which makes the dancing pretty difficult (there's BEE SCIENCE behind this one!)
3. Einstein & Relativity.
4. An overachieving college student with height issues.
5. A Hamster seeking Lettuce and Bee Companionship.
6. Gojira on the loose.
7. Some kind of “meta-pun”
8. A flower in a field of flower. The coastline of an ocean. Both or either.
9. The French.

At first glance the list seems pretty daunting...how the hell am I going to integrate all these elements into a single cohesive story? On the other hand, this is exactly what I love about design: the challenge of finding the underlying themes that make the ideas cohere together. It's not unlike dealing with regular clients; if it's challenge you want, lead a client meeting with the heads of engineering, sales, and marketing at the same table. The contradictions in need of resolution are awe-inspiring in their scope. You'll need to go through the same process of identifying underlying common themes and principles, so that the overall strategy makes sense to everyone; I can see the relationship between creating a story from semi-disparate elements and what I wrote about story-based design.

Sometime late Tuesday I'll post the story, written quickly in first-draft form. No promises whether it will be good. I've been reading some children's books lately for fun, so doubtless whatever I come up with will have a similar vibe. We'll see what happens... I'm a little bit nervous, but also excited by the challenge.

READ MORE

Part I of the story is posted!

Scanner, or ADD?

When clearing out my RSS reading list, came across this post on Talent Develop on Scanners:

• "I can never stick to anything."
• "I know I should focus on one thing, but which one?"
• "I lose interest in things I thought would interest me forever."
• "I keep going off on another tangent."
• "I get bored as soon as I know how to do something."
• "I can't stand to do anything twice."
• "I keep changing my mind about what I want to do and end up doing nothing."
• "I work at low-paying jobs because there's nothing I'm willing to commit to."
• "I won't choose a career path because it might be the wrong one."
• "I think everyone's put on this earth to do something; everyone but me, that is."
• "I can't pay attention unless I'm doing many things at once."
• "I pull away from what I'm doing because I'm afraid I'll miss something better."
• "I'm too busy, but when I do find time I can't remember what I wanted to do."
• "I'll never be an expert in anything. I feel like I'm always in a survey class."

"If you've ever said these things to yourself, chances are good that you're a Scanner, a very special kind of thinker. "

"Unlike those people who seem to find and be satisfied with one area of interest, you're genetically wired to be interested in many things, and that's exactly what you've been trying to do. "

That sounds like me. The excerpt goes on to provide some insight into the problem of being expected to conform to the "one skill, one direction' mindset that most people have. I myself have struggled with this in the definition of my own specialty, gravitating toward fields that have very broad problem spaces where being multi-interested in things pays off.

Cold Case: Carl Friedrich Gauss and the 100 Integers

Remember the story of that kid who was given a class assignment to add the first 100 integers together, and solved it almost immediately to the astonishment of his teacher? That was Carl Friedrich Gauss, famed 19th century mathematician. A lot of us have heard this story in school, but American Scientist editor Brian Hayes got to thinking about its inconsistencies: was the story really true or even that amazing? Hayes writes:

The story was familiar, but until I wrote it out in my own words, I had never thought carefully about the events in that long-ago classroom. Now doubts and questions began to nag at me. For example: How did the teacher verify that Gauss's answer was correct? If the schoolmaster already knew the formula for summing an arithmetic series, that would somewhat diminish the drama of the moment. If the teacher didn't know, wouldn't he be spending his interlude of peace and quiet doing the same mindless exercise as his pupils?

This article has also clarified something to me: the essential aspect of academia is documention.

When I was in grad school, the vibe I got from academia was that the process was a sort of hazing ritual you undergo, before you're allowed "in the club" and can get your degree. However, the academic process, once you subtract the research lab drama and interdepartmental politics, is critically useful when it comes to "debugging" long-held assumptions. Without that paper trail of insight, we'd be doomed to repeat our mistakes or re-discover concepts the hard way. A true scholar has a deep understanding of his chosen field, and thusly stands on the shoulders of those who came before. The result: we can reach a bit higher than before.

The issue I have with academia is similar to the one I have with organized religious organizations: dogmatic, organization-centric protectionist thinking. This is perhaps inevitable when the academics (rich with generations of carefully documented theory) meet the street implementors (rich with what actually is working). Both camps circle the wagons when they encounter each other:

• The academics, stung by how years of research have caused them to lose touch with working reality on the street, cling to the tradition of scholastic rigor as their prime differentiating factor. "We've got the discipline and the minds" they assure themselves. "We don't just make stuff up and hope it works. This is valuable, and this approach is the very foundation of our modern civillization. Even if these guys who are making more money than us think otherwise."

• The street implementors, practical nuts-and-bolts people who have apparently rediscovered the classics, are stung by the academic position that, yeah, it's been done before, and we've got a jargon-rich citation trail to prove it...what is your degree in again? So the street implementors, vaguely threatened by these claims and yet unimpressed by them (they've been scammed by such claims before) , cling to the idea that "what works is what matters". But secretly...they wonder if they just aren't smart enough.

Although I started out on the academic path, I became disenchanted with its emphasis on credentials and lineage within the school...when human selfishness to "work the system" for personal gain obscured the "purer mission". In other words, I let the bastards get to me, both in organized religion and in academia. This is a second, significant personal datapoint. How many babies have I tossed out with the bathwater?

My takeaway from the article (and this is just something that is occuring to me as I type) is at a very minimum, it was academic process and organization---the libraries, the use of citation, and old-fashioned research---that allowed Hayes to even start to answer his question. As he uncovered citations and references, the search became more than "what's the literal truth". He came upon the natural human tendency to tell stories and embellish events that unintentially cause deviations from the source; these are the dirty pawprints of undeclared agenda. These are the very forces that the acadmic process seeks to minimize; through documenting a line of reasoning and stated assumption, transparent to all who would take the time to follow it again, academia does keep ideas moving forward.

There's a parallel idea in journalism: the reporting of fact, citation of sources, and documented first-hand accounts is very similar in that it keeps our understanding of our society moving forward. However, the mainstream media has shifted to news as content, as opposed to news as documented reality. Consuming "news as content" is the equivalent of imbibing nutritionally-empty calories, temporarily satisfying our sweet tooth but ultimately killing us in the end.

We are doomed to repeat our mistakes when we don't have a sense of history. Even worse, it's far too easy to insert fabrications into the continuity of events because no one is checking up on them. It takes too much effort for the average citizen to work through the news media channels to verify a story, so the news media catches a break due to its unresponsive Jabba-the-Hutt like mass. And this makes the news media subsceptable to manipulation...witness the role of P.R. agencies that can insert news into tired journalists newstreams. Or the power of lobbyists in Washington, knowing that if they can inject their issues directly into the sensorium of the politicians themselves, they have the jump on the rest of America. And the system is fragile: in shows like 24 and Prison Break, we can see this illustrated dramatically, as "evil government agents" casually corrupt the information stream by subverting the systems that allegedly record it. It's only possible because these systems---the organized media, corporate accounting systems, and government agency---are not transparent in a way that is accessible to the individual. We instead must observe by proxy. And we've learned to distrust the old proxies, because we know they are at best incomplete. At worst, they are incompetent. If this seems preposterous to you, just think of a more local example: spreading a rumor based on a half-truth. While ideally we can have a system where there really is an emphasis on trust, pragmatically speaking you can't have trust without a means of verification. Yeah, I know..."trust but verify".

In this atmosphere, it's not surprising that blogger-journalists are on the rise. Though the "real" reporters poo-poo the lack of professional standards, they miss the point: the real journalists have already lost credibility because their organizations can't compete with the new medium's ability to transparently provide meaningful continuity. The blogosphere is self-documenting and self-validating, thanks to the low threshold of entry and concentrated fact-checking power of the Internet. We have Google, pings, trackbacks, and services like Technorati, we do have the infrastructure to rebuild our foundation of trusted sources. We can even incorporate old media sources back into the validation chain through hyperlinking, digital imaging, and audio sampling. We can finally follow the trail again. I am starting to believe that while Content is sexy, it's Continuity that reigns in the long run.

AdSense Revisited

I've been running AdSense for about 6 weeks, and appear to be making enough to cover my monthly hosting bill or a dinner for four at the local McDonalds. So that's great...actual passive income! This was just with ads appearing on 10 or so specific posts that had retail possibilities.

Here's what I've noticed about the effectiveness of the placement on this site, and how I'm trying to figure out how to best optimize ads without being overly commercial.

The big tradeoff, in my opinion, is having terrible advertisements appear that were out-of-context with the content. That sucks. I had to test each post to check whether "good ads" would appear. Sometimes the results were surprising. One of my favorite posts, "Crafting for Manly Men", is all about awesome tools and gear I want to buy; I figured I'd get some neat tool ads. But no...instead Google served up "men in high heels". So no AdSense for that post. Posts that were specifically about product, such as the one about my light saber replica, did much better.

Last week, with the introduction of QuickPosts, I thought I'd put advertisements on each of the permalinked pages. My reasoning was that these were very targeted posts, so they might serve up more traffic. I created an AdSense channel for this so I could isolate the specific traffic that these ads got. After a week...nothing. I should really run it longer, but I really hate the way they look and have removed them, but here's one last ditch effort to use that channel...

Heh :-)

This week's experiment is to put advertising on some of the Printable CEO pages. It also has its own advertising channel. I had avoided putting ads on these pages because I think of them as being "all me", a service to the world that is also a testbed for my own design experiments. But recalling Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #109: "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack", I thought I should see if I can derive additional revenue from that. My justification is that more revenue from the site means more resources I have to actually pay for some prototyping I'd like to do. In any case, it's worth running this experiment for a week or so to see if any clicks are derived from it.

My biggest complaint about AdSense is its inability to serve relevant ads for the kind of writing I do. Clever headlines rank you lower than literal headlines. Anecdotes diffuse the search relevancy of your content, or confuse the AdSense service into providing completely inappropriate ads. Long articles that explore the boundaries between different disciplines and ideas also end up confusing AdSense. I've heard that Yahoo Ads allow you to choose the category of advertisement, but I haven't tried it.

Typing Out Loud

I was just reading about a trio of grad students who, using nothing but a 10-minute audio recording of a person typing, were able to recover 96% of what was typed. Very cool. It turns out you don't even need to have a calibration pass to match the subtle variations in sound of each key.

Since there is one key for every letter, I'm guessing the students are doing a type of frequency analysis, a cipher-breaking technique dating back to the 9th century. It works like this: though at first you don't know what key makes what sound, you do have a lot of sounds collected. For the English language, we know that certain letters are more likely to appear than others. This information is found in a "letter frequency table", and you can make your own by counting letters in enough text. So see which letters seem to be occuring most often, and you can guess that those letters correspond to the top entries of the letter frequency table. Plug 'em in and see if it makes sense.

Also, in two- or three-letter words, we have a good chance of guessing that they're words like THE, A, and IN. And once we have those letters matched, we have a good chance of uncovering other letters through context...if you're good at "Wheel of Fortune", you get the idea. Now imagine a computer doing this all for you. Scary!

BTW, there's a cool collection of maritime posters at the American Merchant Marine at War website.

Via Freedom To Tinker...quite some time ago :-)

When Google Fails, Try the USPTO

One of my side projects involves the crafting of a custom binder, preferably one with more then three rings. Usually, my search strategy is to use Google to learn about the subject on-the-fly, further refining my keywords as I go until I get what I want. However, with esoteric specialty items like this, it's a little more difficult to get past the cloud of "me too!" sites and get to sites of real substance.

Getting around the cloud has been this weekend's adventure. Notes follow!

Why Google Isn't Working For Me

To recap, this search strategy applies to the case where I am unfamiliar with the field I am searching and therefore need to build some expertise to help refine the search keywords.

My goal is to find the best sources. The challenge is to become more of an expert so I know what I should be searching for, by searching for content that will make me an expert...the situation is something of a Catch-22.

When the topic is not one that attracts passionate writers, finding the "expert" sites becomes much more difficult. By comparison, it's easy to find top digital camera sites, because there are lots of them and they all tend to point to the same place. However, try to find who makes the best bare CMOS digital camera single-chip sensors...you're sunk unless popular hobbyist sources like Make have already covered this field. And "best" is a hard term to quantify, unless you know more about the problems people face. Catch-22, again.

Why does this fail? It's because the Google PageRank Algorithm is basically a popularity contest: when a particular site has a lot of "good" links to it, it is voted "more popular" and will show up near the top of search results. Google's algorithm is a lot more complex than that, of course, but that's the general idea. The ranking works better when there are a lot of participants. For example, the huge number of digital camera and gadget sites create a fertile field for Google's PageRank algorithm to work its wonders.

However, I'm interested in Business-to-Business (B2B) sites that hardly anyone links to. I want to find out about manufacturers, processes, raw material suppliers, and experts in rapid prototyping...stuff like that! The GoogleBrain doesn't have enough link mass to make a good recommendation without very specific keywording...which again, requires expertise in the domain you are searching.

Compounding the problem is that B2B companies tend to have awful websites. There tends to be little information about the company, the writing is unclear, and the product offerings (if any are there) are hopelessly incomplete. The only sites that link to them are private intranets (unsearchable) or B2B directories, which themselves are so eye-scorchingly bad that that only industry people look at them out of necessity. [update: Seuss points out asiannet and thomasnet as the good resources...thanks dude!]

Do the industry guys have time to blog about these resources to put the word out? Hell no...they're too busy making actual money. Which leaves me up the proverbial creek, informationally speaking.

The standard Google search, using noob keywords like "binder 5-ring" and "custom binder" returned hundreds of results of little apparent authority. The first two-dozen hits didn't give me a good sense for who ran a quality shop; I really want to know who's on top of the industry, and my impression was that most of these places were just using pre-built ring mechanisms with some in-shop tooling.

Pondering this problem for a while, I figured I could grow old looking at all the sites and form a tentative opinion, or I could look for another authority on the web. As it turns out, the U.S. Government had what I needed all along: the enormous patent database!

Going to the Patents!

I did a patent search at the United States Patent and Trade Office(aka USPTO) on "ring binder". If you didn't know this before, the entire patent portfolio from 1790 onwards is searchable online. You can type in a few keywords, and get matching search results in a few seconds. This includes scans of the original application, complete with diagrams, at a resolution high enough for printing, like the 1847 patent for this Machine for Exercising Children (left).

Now, how are patent results good for me? First of all, a patent application includes information like the name of the inventor, the company sponsoring the invention, and a description of how the invention works: this is exactly what I need to re-feed back into Google! In about 30 minutes, I quickly found that there was one company in Hong Kong (World Wide Stationery and Manufacturing LTD) that seemed to be a leading "innovation in ring metal binding equipment" manufacturer. They had a web site with some information about their products, and lists of retailers and other suppliers. The Patent results also included related inventions by other companies. One was "Specialty Looseleaf" who took great pride in their ability to actually manufacturer rings in-house (they say 99% of other companies have to outsource to Asia). Another outfit in London had patented a very cool high-end presentation system, and they had some really interesting products.

So the gist of what I'm saying is this: if a company is motivated enough to file a patent, they're probably serious about maintaining their competive edge through innovation. And that's a company worth looking at first.

Secondly, when you read the patent applications themselves, you get some insight into what the problems are, from at least the inventor's perspective. That's part of becoming an expert, and problems are exactly what I want to avoid :-)

Also cool: Every application also has a list of related patents. This creates a historical record of the invention, which can be used to further research key people and companies through Google. If you know the name of a company or the name of a key inventor, Google might reveal to you what industry that company is in, and that will lead you to trade journals and other specialized sources of information. Plus, it's cool to see how everyday objects have evolved: if you've got Donald Norman's writings on your shelf, you also should have some Henry Petroski; his history of the lowly paper clip, for example, is a fascinating anecdote.

Anyway, I'm happy again! The patent database gave me a quick shortcut to an online "authority", and that gave me a new jump on Google search terms. I've updated my Oblique Searching Strategies article too, so I don't forget.

The Printable CEO Revisited

It's been about a month since I made my Concrete Goals Tracking worksheet, aka The Printable CEO. In that month, about 8000 people have visited the original page, and about 1700 have actually downloaded it. Another 500 enterprising folks have downloaded the editable Excel version. Cool!

But does it work? I've been using it for the past four weeks; here's my report.

What was The Printable CEO Again?

In case you missed it before, The Printable CEO is just a tracking form I made to keep my focused on growing my freelance business. It's a paper-based, using a carefully chosen list of of tasks coupled with a motivational point-based tracking grid. My past interest in game design and development--and acknowledgement of my slacker-perfectionist tendencies--led me to structure it as reward bonus system as opposed to a completion tracking system. In other words: it's good feedback when it has relevance in the game system; in my case, that's "making money", "maintaining connections that lead to opportunities" and "making assets that will make money later". Whenever I do something on the list, I know it's one of these things, and that those things contribute directly to the growth of my practice.

I think To Do lists are fine tools for managing tasks, but they're somewhat cumbersome when it comes to motivating personal or business development. If anything, they are demotivators, because things that aren't on the To Do List still have to get done. I am a company of one, and I have to deal with unexpected client interruptions, computer issues, fleeting business opportunities and other small fires every day. The Printable CEO is my reminder that yes, I must develop assets that pay off in the form of new creative business opportunities. And money--crass as that sounds, I need to make sure I'm making enough money so I maintain creative independence.

So How Has It Been?

I've been, as they say, eating my own dogfood by using the Printable CEO for the past four weeks. My personal experience has been pretty positive; observations follow:

• Filling in the bubbles is still strangely satisfying, even after four weeks. The experience isn't as spiritual as it used to be, but I just like using the No. 2 pencil to fill in that bubble. There's a fun doodling feel to it; perhaps it triggers a similar reflective frame of mind, activating the right side of the brain?

• I found the Notes Area quickly became a kind of pseudo-todo list, because the form was generally handy. Put important information where your eyeballs can find it easily!

  I tended to list things that I wanted to do for the day, and then add the points with a "+5" or "+2" modifier as they got done. I also wrote some phone numbers on it. Developing this into a full task tracking system on the side is a new project I'm undertaking to extend the concepts.

• If I didn't write down the tasks I did right away, I would forget them. So it was very important that I wrote down tasks as they happened.

• The weighted list of goals was absolutely critical in making this work. I found that there were days that I looked over the list to find something to do that would bump up my point count for the week.

  I also found myself looking at every task to see whether or not it was worth points. The beauty of this is that this is exactly the mentality I want to inculcate: thinking about business development activity all the time! Ordinarily, one might think of "spinning" every activities to be worth points as being a form of cheating, but in this case it's not. It's resourcefulness and adaptability instead.

  Choosing the right goals, of course, is the tricky part. Your goals should all have concrete results; if the fruits of your labor can not be counted like money or shown to someone else, then your goals are not concrete.

• Counting weekly points at the end of the week gave me a feel for what a "productive" week should be. A good week runs about 50 points, which includes talking with people and posting a few blog articles. That works out to about 7 points a day (including weekends). Add billable work to the mix, then the points double. I add +10 points for each project performed as billable work, so if I do two projects in a day, that's a +20. However, if the billable work was under an hour, I would score it as a +5. My best week was 107 points, which included about 3 days of billable work.

• The original ten goals covered every situation except for one: measuring qualitative return on investment. Following the original list, I got points only when I made something, counted something, or did billable work. However, I realized I should also record when an asset pays off again without requiring further work on my part. I had forgotten to account for this in the system; proof of an asset bringing in revenue is cause for celebration, because it means it's out there working for me. For example, say that someone wants to hire me because they read an article on my blog. Although I had already earned +2 points for the article writing, I give myself another +2 points because someone actually noticed it. Likewise, if someone wants to hire me because of some artwork I did, I would give myself another +5 points. Every time that artwork works for me, it should give me another 5 points. This reinforces the importance of creating good assets; they are worth way more points in the long run, and I believe this is important to the long-term viability of my business.

• Now what to do with these points. They're useful for getting a quick qualitative measure of how busy one is, but I also have the desire to redeem them somehow. Like, for every 1000 points, I get to do something fun or buy something cool. This could work well in a school setting. Choosing the reward, of course, should follow the principle of good asset purchasing; if you buy something, make sure it can help you make MORE assets. I think that's called a "capital investment".

Summing Up

So is it working? Yeah, it is.

I know I'm making progress because I can see the numbers every day. The overhead of tracking these tasks is very low because it's bubble-based, and the concrete goals list makes it easy to focus on something productive to do. What's really cool is that these forms help maintain continuity in my daily goal-directed actions; that's another prerequisite for good feedback in a game system.

For the past two weeks, I've been more busy with billable work, and have found I've had to go back and make some To Do lists after all; like I said, they're great for managing tasks. I found myself starting to use the Printable CEO Notes area for keeping a small To Do list since I was always looking at it. I will probably incorporate this into Version 2.0 of the Printable CEO in the weeks to come.

I was also talking to some friends over lunch, and it occured to me that The Printable CEO has a strange appeal to procrastinators. One of my friends is the Anti-Procrastinator. She just gets things done, and a To Do list is a great tool for her. Another friend is a procrastinator-perfectionist; he doesn't start those big personal projects because he doesn't have the time to do them right. I can identify with that myself; I have no trouble planning out a project in terms of hours, resources, and manpower, but I just would rather not do it for something I love to do. I want it to flow more naturally. As I type that out it seems a little silly, but that's the way things are for me. The Printable CEO is not a To Do list. It's an I DID list, rewarding productive behavior when it happens to happen. That's an important distinction to note. And because it only rewards the correct actions, it is also a kind of conditioning tool.

So that's how it's going for me. How's it going for you? You might find The Making Of The Printable CEO useful if you're adapting it to your own purposes.

Update: Task Tracking

Now that you have your task direction established, check out Part II of The Printable CEO for Task Progress Tracking!

Making It in Salem, Massachusetts

I almost never do touristy things. When I lived near Orlando, Florida, I didn't go to Disneyworld once. But my cousin is in-town and we wanted to see uniquely East Coast things, so we did a day in Boston and Salem. I wasn't sure if I was going to have fun, but what doesn't kill ya...

I wish I'd done this before. It was very enlightening to experience two different tourist-based businesses; it's given me some insight in the mentality I need to have to generate recurring income.

We went to the Salem Witch Museum. I wasn't sure what to expect for our $12 bucks/person, as there were different "showings" every half hour and you couldn't see what was going on. We booked our spot and waited in the chintzy gift shop until it was time. When the moment of reckoning burst upon us, we were ushered into a large, dark room with a glowing red circle in it. The guide suggested we gather around the circle, but everyone opted to sit on the benches. One little girl got scared and left. When we were all settled, the guide welcomed us and then...left the room! She said something like "enjoy the show!" on the way out. My mind was already appending the word suckers when the show began.

An audio tape started to play, and a somewhat Vincent Price-ish voice began setting the tone for the story: The Witch Hysteria of 1692. The room, about the size of a small barn, was basically a kind of diorama; each wall had several life-sized scenes with mannikins depicting the story of how a bunch of little girls got 19 people hanged (and one was pressed to death). The sets, though only somewhat lifelike, were nicely lit by hidden lights that faded in and out in time to the soundtrack. ; I'm guessing it was controlled by some kind of ancient audio-tape control system. I couldn't help but think that this kind of presentation was very old...maybe this is what got Uncle Walt so hooked onto audio-animatronics? Multimedia before the dawn of computers!

After about 30 minutes, we were released into the second exhibit by a second tour guide, who walked us through the Witches: Perceptions portion of our visit. There were three main set pieces that showed different perceptions of witches, from the pre-Christian "Midwife" to "Green Skinned Devil Worshipper" to "Modern Wiccan". The tour guide could press a button on the wall that played an audio track that spoke from the witch's point of view.

I was not-quite disappointed by the whole experience. I later found out that this museum has remained essentially unchanged since the 70s. The takeaway: Some people built a big theatrically-lit diarama, wrote about 30 minutes of script, hired a few voice actors, synch'ed the up to a light and tape show, and have been charging people 12 bucks per head for the last 30 years. AND THEY HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT! My mind...reeling!

After the Witch Museum, we took a night walking tour of Salem with Hocus Pocus, an independent tour guide company. We had passed by their booth before, and I had been impressed by the front man's friendly and non-intrusive pitch. His pleasant demeanor made me think that the tour itself would actually be pretty good...he seemed seemed invested in the business, and wasn't just some flunky making beer money for the night. Anyway, for our 12 bucks, we got a 90 minute evening walking tour with about 25 other people, lead by a tall red-haired woman in a long black dress. It was quite enjoyable to walk the town, taking in the sights and listening to the stories. By the end of it, I felt I knew the town and its history better though I already been here several times before. My 12 bucks had been well spent.

This got me to thinking...

• The tour guide had her original copyrighted program and a route (no videotaping allowed!).

• She had delivered a good product that didn't require any capital or fixed location except for a tiny portable booth, albeit in a good location near the Peabody Essex Museum.

• On the money side, they run both nighttime and daytime tours nearly every day of the year. Say they run 50 people a day at 12 bucks a head...for 2-3 people, that's not a bad income to do something that they clearly love and care about.

And so...I am wondering how I can make this happen for me. I have been thinking that getting out of services is the way to go, but until now I really didn't have a close-up look at how other people had done it outside of software. This is content generation at its most basic: people packaging and sharing their knowledge at a market-conscious price point**.

Is New Media so complicated that this approach would not work? Is the key element having a clear definition of what you are making instead of what you are doing?

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

Barry just forwarded this quiz to me:

The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare's PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the "corporate psychopath" -- the nonviolent person prone to the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others." Does your boss fit the profile?

He said that he hypothetically scored me as a "0", which on this metric is good. Just the sort of thing my inner-psychopath likes to hear...Yessss...the facade is working! Soon, the world will bow before me and tremble! Mua ha ha!

Happy Friday! :-)

Tracking Eyeballs

The mysterious S. pointed me to Eyetrack III, a study that used eye tracking equipment to record exactly how people viewed a web page. When I was in grad school, I knew a couple of Cognitive Science guys who spent time in the labs programming eye trackers for their experiments. The machines capture the rapid eye movements both voluntary and involuntary, making it easier to see exactly what is being looked at for how long.

I'd thought then it would be useful for understanding Graphic Design, so it's cool to see that someone has done this. The study made use of EyeTools, a company out of San Francisco that uses eye tracking gear to provide viewing data on web pages. You can actually do your own study over the web for $100/person. A particularly neat feature is the heatmap, which shows what parts of your page are attracting more attention.

A word of caution: this data tells you what people are looking at and for how long, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what they're thinking. Mistaking observations for conclusions is dangerous, and I could see this kind of information in the wrong hands leading down a horrible path. I would read the article with that in mind before you go stripping out all your photos and put ugly headlines right in the middle of layout so eyes trip over them. I would get a design professional, knowledgable in the Ways of Gestalt, to help interpret that data. It wouldn't hurt to really study Understanding Comics too...it is a fantastic treatment of visual communication in a form we're familiar with.