Viewing Category: Patterns
I'm surfing instead of working, so to win back some productivity, I'll describe my basic searching strategy!
When Google doesn't find what you want, it's because you are probably using an overly-general search query, or one that has been polluted by e-commerce junk information. Argh!
To get to the real opinions on the Internet, you need to search for words that people use, as opposed to the lifeless copywriting you see in a lot of "professional business communication."
Look for reviews and opinions. For example, I've been looking for information on a particular computer peripheral, something called the DAC-100. So I do a search on DAC-100 review, DAC-100 opinion, and even DAC-100 compared. I'm using the words you're likely to see in a review, as opposed to marketing copy.
UN-search for marketing copy. I remember looking for reviews on a particular ricecooker (the Zojirushi NS-KCC05), and the entire search result space was saturated with Amazon and Amazon.com feeder microstores: basically, the exact same information over and over again. Use this against them! Find a unique phrase in the copy and ignore it in the research results by adding a - in front of it. For example, if the ad copy says something like, "re-heats rice to the perfect serving temperature", do this search: zojirushi NS-KCC05 -"re-heats rice to the perfect serving temperature". You'll not see any results that contain that phrase. Thank God.
Try Model Numbers or other ID. This sometimes helps to isolate a particular product. Use Amazon or Epinions to narrow down which model number you're interested in. However, as models are often quickly replaced, you might not have much luck finding the dirt on a specific generation of unit. Sometimes Shelf Keeping Units (SKUs) are helpful--those are the numbers on the barcodes you see on retail packaging, and eCommerce sites sometimes list them in their online catalogs.
The more specific you can make your search terms, the better your search results will be. There are also nifty advanced search options at Google that can filter your results by date range, file format, and so on.
When all that fails, it's time to go to the mattresses. Try other information sources on the Web to learn more about the topic, and search on the cues that point to expert commentary.
Search eBay. When you can't find information or photos on some object, you might actually find it on eBay, which is not indexed by Google. I spent days looking for a reference photo of a Hebrew keyboard, eventually cobbling one together out of scraps of information from programming reference articles. Just yesterday I searched eBay and a dozen photos of the keyboards were there. Sometimes the sellers write a great deal of personal history about the items in general. Don't forget to search past auctions, and it may be worth looking at other specialized auction sites (gunbroker.com, for example) that cater to specialty markets. In either case, you might find a seller who is willing to tell you want you want to know about the item.
Search Wikipedia. Wikipedia entries don't often get ranked high in Google results, so go there first. Chances are, someone's written something about what you're looking for, and some high-quality links have been already researched for you.
Search The Top Specialty Information Sites. For nerd stuff, that means going to Slashdot. For digital photography, that's Digital Photo Review. And so on. You'll probably start to get a sense who's on top once you've visited a dozen sites, particularly smaller ones that have lists of links to other informational sites. They are usually the same, so eventually you will see who they all point to.
Search USENET. USENET was the primary Internet discussion system, a kind of global bulletin board system, until the World Wide Web balkanized the infosphere into millions of website-states. Prior to the mid 1990s, USENET was our primary community-driven information database covering thousands of topical interests. It still lives on at Google Groups. USENET will often deliver pieces of insight you will not have found on the Web.
Search The Blogosphere. Technorati, for example. [UPDATE] Google has added blog searching. Try that!
Search FAQs. One byproduct of the USENET era was the creation of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) post. Groups like comp.graphics were often inundated by newcomers to the group who asked the same questions over and over again. Over time, the FAQ postings have become quite comprehensive. While not all of them are actively maintained, they represent a trove of practical information on a broad range of topics. A lot of them are archived at faqs.org. You can do a full-text search.
Search Magazine Indexes. Sites like FindArticles.com index articles in magazines that may not always float to the top of a Google search. Worth a try.
Search Amazon. Type in your search subject, and see what books pop up. The titles alone, the people mentioned, and the commentary left by other amazon shoppers are immensely useful when mapping out a new information space. You can then use that information to narrow down your search on Google. Searching the Wishlists for a particular book title can also help narrow down the search field.
Find Secondary Information Sites. There is often useful commentary on the smaller personal websites. They don't rank high on Google, so use a blog indexer like Technorati and see who's linking to that major blog you like. Use Google to find sites that link to two or more other good sites you've found. Are there people out there who read both Dooce and Crossroad Dispatches, and feel strongly enough to provide a link? That might be an interesting person to read.
Look for Color Commentary. Sometimes you really just want to get some random guy's opinion. I like to search for terms like "really sucks", "I think", "I would", "technically speaking", and other phrases that someone giving your their opinion might say. The general principle here is to mix the topic of your search with some kind of "biased phrase." Slang that's in use by a particular generation can be useful too. For example, "friends with benefits" versus "casual sex" versus "free love"...all used by different generations (20-somethings, 30-somethings, hippies...) Likewise, if you are looking for negative opinions, try words like "stupid", "dumb" and "sucks". Use your imagination, and you'll be rewarded.
Look for Expert Cues. The relative obscurity of a word can help narrow down the results. So instead of searching for best plasma tv television, which will turn up crappy e-commerce websites, look for color balance reproduction fidelity plasma tv television...you're more likely to get an article that's written by someone who edits Audiophile magazine on the side. Or if you're looking for something more academic, use academic words or titles. "Ph.D.", "professor", "research", and "bibliography" might slant the results more in that direction.
Hunt by lineage, not by category. Sometimes, keywords fail to reveal useful search results because the keyword space is heavily saturated by another meaning or by common-place daily use. If you're looking for the rare and the exceptional, you need to search for topical anchors: key people, key philosophies and key innovations that shaped the field you're searching. You first may have to read a general history of the topic you're searching to get an idea of what those key anchors are. People who are learned in their field will often reference key principles as a statement of their belief; following these chains of beliefs and the sites that they link to will help you form an alternative search topology that Google is unable to provide through keyword techniques.
Search Patent Databases. When you're looking for a utilitarian or specialty item that isn't directly used by the average consumer, the trail often goes cold, or is polluted by unrelated commercial offerings. Find out who holds key patents by searching the US Patent Office Database. There are other patent registries online too, so just look around.
The wealth of information you can gain from patent applications can put you back on track: names of inventors, manufacturers, and related patents--not to mention the description of the apparatus itself--can give you more to Google. Or look for the patent number on an actual object you're interested in (if there is one) and look it up online. That can save you buckets of time.
Don't Neglect Your Local Research Librarian! If you are lucky enough to live near a university library, or even a decent public library, go check it out. The good libraries have people trained in navigating piles of information...librarians! The specialist ones know where everything is. You can also find out how to access the library's card catalog over the Internet, which might save you some legwork. In a pinch you might go to Barnes and Noble or Borders or a decent independent bookstore, and ask someone where the books on XYZ are.
Look for Accessibility / Required Policy Markers. I just read someone complaining about trying to find the "real" website for a hotel; there are so many two-bit hotel portal sites that they drown out the real sources. I noticed that most of the hotels include the phrase En Espanol, whereas the portal sites tend not to worry about that kind of accessibility because it's expensive to implement for relatively little gain. Likewise, including a phrase like Section 508 (a requirement for government sites) might narrow down search results. Try slogans associated with the company, if you know them...a portal site is unlikely to completely parrot the corporate line, but you can bet that the corporate web team had that requirement tattooed on their butts before they started the project :-)
Search Flickr. Those photo sharing websites, with their full keywording and text descriptions, provide a secondary image databank in addition to stock photo and Google Images. I've found some pictures of pretty obscure stuff much more quickly on Flickr than I have through Google. Try it!
Search 9rules. 9rules is a blog network of several hundred sites that emphasize quality of conent. They've recently added 9rules search, which is a quick way of seeing what some thoughtful writers have said about a topic of interest to you. It also searches through a new other services like YouTube, so this is an interesting alternative search you can try. Full disclosure: This site is a member of the 9rules Network.
Search Social Bookmarking Sites. Sites like Del.icio.us are filled with links to the web content that people find useful; they are therefore much more likely to be interesting than general search, and the collections of links may reflect a theme or approach to the topic that you hadn't considered. And even better: you may actually discover someone who has relevant interests that you can contact directly...you never know!
Of course, all these techniques can be mixed together. This will give you raw data to work with, from objective and subjective sources. Determining whats's useful and what's not is up to you. Have fun!
I don't know why this fascinates me so much, but Global Branding has been on my mind a lot. Today's diversion was this Wired article on Samsung's Transformation from cheap manufacturer of crappy TVs 10 years ago to design and technology leader, with twice the market capitalization of Sony.
Here's a list of the top global brands, as reported by Interbrand. The Brand Channel site that hosts the list has some pretty interesting articles, like how global companies successfully localize, such as the defunct Singer corporation, an American company:
By the early twentieth century the German public so widely accepted Singer sewing machines that they were purchased by the German army—to the embarrassment of Singer's German competitors. Later, during World War II, German aviators avoiding bombing Singer's European factories because the pilots thought the factories were German-owned.
Fascinating.
I think ultimately, the appeal of brands is that they mean something to people. I'm sure the study of brands is related to the study of semiotics in some way, and I bet that following brands on either the local or global scale will teach you something about human nature you didn't know.
Someone told me about Dr. Temple Grandin, an assistant professor at Colorado State University who is a high-functioning autistic. She recognized her strengths at an early age with the help of a mentor, and is now a designer of livestock handling systems. She's one of those bridge individuals that has provided insight into the autistic frame of mind, and by extension the mind of animals. Her latest book, Animals in Translation, describes the world from an animal's point of view. Her previous books, Thinking in Pictures and Emergence describes her experiences with autism. I've just added these to my Amazon wishlist :-)
I did, however, just listen to a fascinating Interview on NPR with Grandin and Terry Gross. Although I'm not autistic, I found a lot of relevance in her description of the autistic frame of mind and design process.
In an online article, she describes her design process, which is based on her mental thinking process:
Now, in my work, before I attempt any construction, I test-run the equipment in my imagination. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. Doing this enables me to correct mistakes prior to construction. Today, everyone is excited about the new virtual reality computer systems in which the user wears special goggles and is fully immersed in video game action. To me, these systems are like crude cartoons. My imagination works like the computer graphics programs that created the lifelike dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. When I do an equipment simulation in my imagination or work on an engineering problem, it is like seeing it on a videotape in my mind. I can view it from any angle, placing myself above or below the equipment and rotating it at the same time. I don't need a fancy graphics program that can produce three-dimensional design simulations. I can do it better and faster in my head.
It reminds me of how I run interactive simulations in my head; I don't generally need to prototype to know if something will work or will be awkward. It's a combination of running the sim and recalling the feeling of motion and convenience, though it doesn't happen as detailed structure as Grandin describes.
I'm also reminded of Cayce Pollard, the protagonist in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, who intuitively knows whether a marketing brand concept will work or not. It's not years of design experience that gives her that power; she's actually learned to control her fear of bad branding to harness it professionally; Grandin describes fear as a prime motivator in her early years in that NPR interview.
It's all interesting stuff, if you are the kind of person who likes diving deep and dark into the workings of human consciousness.
Brad forwarded me this link to Creating Passionate Users, a neat blog from the people who created the Head First series of computer books; I'd picked up one of them before. The blog itself covers a lot of issues relating to design and user experience: topics I am very interested in these days.
Specifically, Brad forwarded this post on The Difference Between Japan and US, which showed an ugly U.S. manhole cover versus a cool Japanese example:
Beauty and attention to design detail... everywhere I turned during my two week stay (Tokyo and Kyoto), I saw it. Every--and I mean every Japanese restaurant (including the fast-food sushi joints) had an architectural bent. A sense of style. An aesthetic sensibility you just don't see throughout the US!
Check it out.
I came across a newspaper article called Did You Catch That. The gist is that some of us are talking too fast for other people to understand. For many people, quickness of speech is associated with quick thinking. So those fast-talking New Yorkers tend to look at Midwesterners as plodding bumpkins instead of thoughtfully intelligent. Conversely, the Midwesterners don't think that highly of fast-talking either.
And internationally, it seems that slower-speaking people end up being the butt of jokes. From the article:
All over the world, speakers from some geographic regions tend to speak more slowly than those from others. And in every country that has been studied, people from the slower-speaking regions are stereotyped as stupid. This pattern was uncovered by Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, who had reason to be interested because Finns are thought to be slow and dull by neighboring Swedes.
Lehtonen and Sajavaara suspected that the Finns' characteristically slower rate of speech -- and greater use of silence -- might have something to do with the stereotype. So they investigated and found similar attitudes where one ethnic or regional group tends to speak more slowly than others: in Germany with East Frisians, in French attitudes toward Belgians, among the Swiss toward residents of Berne or Zurich, and among Finns themselves toward their compatriots from a region called Häme (pronounced HAH-may).
I had always wondered why the Belgians got made fun of in Europe, having first become aware of this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally I know why!
I was talking to Jeff last week about journals as they relate to artistic process. He mentioned that Craig Frazier, the well-known illustrator / graphic designer, started putting up a few pages every day at 98pages.com. I saw him speak at an AIGA Boston meeting once, and he also showed a few of these pages. Now everyone can see!
I find Artistic Process to still be a mystery: though I do create artwork from time to time, I think my mentality is more like that of engineering. I generally know what I want to make, and then I make it. From what my more artistic friends have told me, this isn't how you do things. You think on the paper, you play, you dream with line and shade. Me, I tend to think in words and flashes of inner light, and the act of putting things on paper is slow and awkward. However, I'm gradually coming to accept that working in the visual plane also should involve more of my senses. The things that matter to me are in the real world, after all.
Milton Glaser said something regarding sketching versus computer-based work in his "Design Ambiguity" lecture in Boston. Paraphrasing from my fading memory: computers aren't very good at being "fuzzy", and therefore it's hard to see the possibility in a machine-created line. You just see the line, and it looks finished, and then the drawing becomes a tedious act of finishing. When Glaser showed slides of his sketches compared to finished work, there was a marked difference. Some sketches were closer to the finished work, but none of them were the same.
So the point? Thinking doesn't happen purely in the head in isolation. Jungian personality type theory comes to mind, in which he describes how we have several "ways of apprehending reality": (a) Sensation, (b) Intuition, (c) Thinking and (d) Feeling. Furthermore, these four ways can be either Extroverted (directed toward the outside world) or Introverted (directed primarily toward the inner world / self). This is the basis of the popular MBTI Personality Test, though it is not the same thing.
But I digress. I mention this stuff primarily because of the notion of Introverted / Extroverted function: I tend to find myself looking at the outside world for patterns to bring back inside my head; the world is a stimulus for the synthesis of inner ideas. I think to be more of a visual artist, the world is where the idea synthesis occurs. It will take some practice until that notion becomes habit, if I want to be more freely expressive in other media.
I just read an interesting article by Paul Graham about how PR firms work. For small companies looking to generate some attention, hiring a PR firm will gets them into the press and by extension the public consciousness. Graham relates how a "good" firm charged $16,000 a month, and was worth every penny. Ever wonder why "suits are back" this year? Because some company paid a PR firm to say so. Is it coincidence that this happens to be the advertising slogan for The Men's Wearhouse?
If you want to sell, people have to know/remember you exist and provide a product they desire. You can advertise, or you generate word of mouth. A Public Relations (aka PR) firm does the latter by packaging your "content" into a form that is readily digested by the News Media: reporters, editors, and other journalists. A good PR firm will package your meme in a manner that is not only credible, but reportable. The law of authorative referral comes into play: if you can get a person to repeat something you've planted, the relayed information attains the same level of credibility. PR firms "game the system" by targeted the influential mouthpieces of society that we still, more or less, take at face value.
It's an interesting article...well worth reading if you enjoy discovering the root causes of trends and how the power of persuasion is used to influence your every opinion. Paul Graham also says something really useful to remember:
Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
That's part my own triumvirate of framing questions: Intention, Expectation, and Motivation. If you can figure out those three things about a given action, you have a good chance of developing an appropriate response on your own.
Via Slashdot. One of the threads there reminds me that William Gibson's recent book Pattern Recognition is a good look at the world of professional trend watching / making.
Continuing on the Libertarian thread, I just read this interview with Neil Stephenson. Stephenson is the author of the seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, which I hadn't realized could be considered a "parody of a libertarian future"...
Here's an excerpt:
Reason: Snow Crash is almost a parody of a libertarian future. Do you think the affinity-group-based societies you outline in that book are on their way? Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state we’re progressing toward?
Stephenson: I dreamed up the Snow Crash world 15 years ago as a thought experiment, and I tweaked it to be as funny and outrageous and graphic novel–like as I could make it. Such a world wouldn’t be stable unless each little “burbclave” had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology. So I think that if I were seriously to address your question, “Do you see that as a warning note, or a natural state…?,” I would be guilty of taking myself a little bit too seriously.
Stephenson's latest trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, spans something like 2500 pages of 17th century historical fiction. What's particularly fascinating about Stephenson is that he's a pattern person who follows up his inquiry with research. He then writes an interesting piece of fiction about it. 10 years after Snow Crash, he's even more insightful with respect to the forces behind modern information society all the way back to its roots well established in the 17th century. The scope of his research gives his insight compelling perspective. For example, he makes an observation about the success of the modern United States:
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. [...]
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
It's a good interview, covering many topics.
I find Stephenson's writing voice not to be detached or political as one might expect from the topics he covers. This is not a sheltered academic or policy wonk talking, pushing some abstract theory. Stephenson reveals the patterns in the context of human achievement and desire, which is much more satisfying and strangely inspiring.
Via BoingBoing.
I was browsing Language Log after seeing a mention on Slashdot. Linguists use Google to track how contemporary written language use is changing; you can enter in a phrase or expression that you're interested in, and see how many hits show up, and try to come up with a pattern of use. It's cool stuff, trying to establish the sources of language trends as they evolve.
For example, there are spelling anomalies that crop up in online writing. This post on the use of "deep-seeded" as an expression, as in "deep-seeded hatred" is one such example. Or the existence of "eggcorns".
There are also cultural differences that lead to the Norwegians being surprised at Barbara Bush's salute to satan during the presidential inauguration (apparently, the gesture is a University of Texas salute to their sports teams).
Fun stuff.
Continuing my previous thread of thought:
In response to the original laments about Wikipedia's growing pains, Clay Shirky's "Rebuttal" points out the organizational issues, calling it "governance", and comments that (my paraphase here) the academic process is one of collect-filter-publish by experts; academia values this process to the exclusion of Wikipedia's group-filtered process.
Shirky makes the prediction that a "core group" will develop to combat the hoards in an attempt to maintain some kind of academic-ish credibility, but realization that the hoards just will keep jumping in will eventually follow. Acceptance will come that freedom brings what freedom will bring.
Personally, I think this is contigent whether Shirky's description of Wikipedia as a "real time reference / resource" is accepted as its primary identity. Wikipedia is different things to different people: to academics, they classify it as a reference-wannabe. To Netizens, it's proof that the collective will and effort will lead to further democratization of information. To Students, it's the easiest way to get a school report out of the way. These are not incompatible views. It's only when one puts the expectations of one group over another that until you start to impose group standards, be they philosophical or methodological, across all users of the service. And that's when governance becomes an issue; the number of issues scales with the number of viewpoints and people wielding power and influence.
From a pure project perspective, you can look at Wikipedia as an example of the conflict between the "do it now" versus "do it right" schools of thought. The "do-it-now" people always get something out first, irking the hell out of the "do it right" naysayers who are still formulating what "right" is. And usually, they're the ones who ultimately are correct, given a particular viewpoint. Then they will all argue which "right" or which "now" is the most important and bicker bicker bicker.
No one will be happy until the "do what is right" people, those adroit individuals with charisma, vision, and contextual intelligence, are able to clarify the viewpoint that should be and can sell it to the whole team. Assuming that there is a problem in the first place, and it passes the "for the project, not the person" test.
I have a horrible feeling that I've made a case for the existence of politicians. Oh well.
