Month: November 2009
-
Invisible = Impotent
In other words: Out of sight, out of mind. Ever wonder why Sally Struthers needs to show us little Ethiopian babies before we’ll give away a bit of dough to them? Easy; it’s because we don’t care– until it’s right in front of us. Would those Ethiopian babies need feeding if their plight was broadcast…
-
What is Your Blind Spot?
I have a tendency to ignore the stuff around me. I wouldn’t say that I’m extremely focused, but I have been this way for a long time. Just now at the bank, the teller called my name three times before I looked up from my iPhone. Part of that is my hearing, but not everything.…
-
Being the Tortoise
The way I see it, there are only two directions– up and down. I used to say that it didn’t matter how fast you were going, as long as the direction you were going was up. Keep moving up, as slowly as you want, and you’ll get to a good place in your life. Don’t…
-
“Trust, but Verify”
It was a phrase my father used to say when I did chores around the house. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t trying to get away with something (like phoning it in or doing a half-assed job). I never did want to do the work, so he was right to do it too. Over…
-
Stuck at the Blueprint Phase
I’ve been getting called Don Draper a lot recently. That’s probably a compliment. Never mind that it’s a guy with two different identities, who’s largely alone in the world– it’s also someone that people identify with (maybe for those same reasons). One of the reasons we identify with these people is because the ad men…
-
Killing the Yes Men
Do you see your friends as fellow conspirators? It’s weird to think that your friends might be hiding something from you, or that you might be doing the same from them. But you do, and they are. You and your network are a system. You keep the good stuff and let it be spread through…
-
Community vs Currency
In The Nature of the Graph earlier this week, I talked about friction– ie, transaction costs– inside groups and how they impact the efficiency of groups. A transaction cost within a financial relationship can be a lot of things: from a broker taking 10% to a lawyer drafting a contract. We have to pay these…
-
Ouroboros
Have you ever noticed that, on almost all of the popular websites, the link colour is blue? Have you ever built a web page from scratch? If not, you may not know that blue is the default colour these links appear in. You may also not know that blue links convert better, cause people to…
-
The Nature of the Graph
Have you ever been asked to sign an NDA? Non-Disclosure Agreements exist because of lack of trust between parties that need to discuss a subject– in fact, that’s the nature of any contract– to provide legal recourse in the case of non-compliance. Here’s the thing though. You introduce a contract because there’s friction in a…
-
Level It Up
If I was creating a website right now that was designed to become popular, it would be The Oatmeal. It’s utterly brilliant. It combines interesting factoids with tons of illustrations. Each page is evergreen content, and will probably still be looked at years in the future. Remember those Top 10 List sites a few years…