Bernardo A. Huberman has been, so far, the most impressive speaking in a very impressive series. and, lucky you, they just just posted the video of his talk.
The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that was never possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of several studies of social dynamics in the web, as well as mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences with digital content.
Monday I listened ot a pretty terrific forum, a radio program on my local PBS station. Because their site behaves in a way I can best describe as erratic, here are the relevant links:
The show discusses the lure of "the dark side" with Philip Zimbardo. What makes good people do bad things? Where is the line between good and evil, and where does this line become blurred? Can we curb this seduction to commit immoral deeds?Philip Zimbardo , professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
Download (MP3)(Windows: right-click and choose "Save Target As." Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose "Save As.")
I've long been fascinated by the Stanford Prison Studies, and the effect they had on research, but more so on the learnings they gathered so very quickly and so very deeply. In this talk, one thing I couldn't help but fixate upon was the details-- his choice of military-style outfits for the guards, including reflective sunglasses, or the hospital-gown style uniforms for the prisoners.
Because I spend most of my time considering which features affect community behavior, I wondered what is the online equivalent? What are those aspects of the fixtures of our design that create or dissuade evil (and how could it have affected the situation that led to Kathy Sierra's life threats) Is anonymity on the web something we want to discourage? How can we continue on without flagging (which obviously PublicSquare has.) I've been told that people feel more kindly to me and respond more gently when my avatar includes my baby. How can photos change our communications? Does a icon carry the same weight as a photo, does a photo carry the same weight as a photo of a face?
Good and evil are not something we as designers think of all that often. In fact, fairly often we hand wave and point to Leni Riefenstahl as our icon of beauty in the face of evil (beauty as the face of evil?). But we are not just recorders of life who can choose to do so with or without style, we are the architects of life, just as much as architects of buildings or urban planners.
I think every design choice in PublicSquare is built with conscious or unconscious implications on user behavior. You are responsible for your actions. Your bio carries every comment, every story you write. Your photo hangs out next to your words, as does your reputation. The reputation on each comment reflects passer-by's reactions. People don't approve when you make a snarky comment, or even when spelling errors are publicly mocked. The community decides what's acceptable and what's not, if you give them the tools to do so.
I wonder what tools create abuses of power. The theory in Zimbardo's book is most people have the capacity of evil within them, they just need the right situation to bring it out.
We can't hand wave if there is even a slim chance he is right.
If we design community spaces, we must design with community mores, be it a small community or the community of man.
Rouxbe claims to be "The Recipe to Better Cooking" but is it?
The concept is simple: technique is better communicated by video than text. Recipes only workif you know what you are doing.
It is beautiful, no doubt, with a dean & delucca-like clean and airy design. In many ways it is a shining example of desing best practices - recipes are broekn out step by step, so you can watch each part once or twice before tyring to coopy. And the food videos are gorgeous, shot in that soft-porn style that has made food-peddlers from saveur to rachel ray sucesses.
But of course they have their weaknesses, disguised by elegant user expereince and a lightweight airy desing that owes as much to Getty Images as it does to Dean and Delucca.
First off, I don't want to cook from my laptop any more than I have to. I have a small enough machine and a big enough kitchen (barely!) my laptop can come onto the counter. But this is bad news:
A simple solution might be just to unpack the videos into printable recipes with screenshots. But this raises the real problem of Rouxbe. They are too pretty.
Those video recipes are gorgeous. They will take too long and cost too much to light, shoot and cut (not to mention the need for a 'food stylist'.) The addition of making illustrated text versions will further drive up cost. This is an unhealthy proposition for a start up.
It also hurts their ability to gather user-generated content. They set the bar too high-- how am I going to feel posting my "how ot prepare fava beans" shot on my digital camera with its video feature? Boom, they've just locked themselves out of both a source of free content and a way to deeply engage their audience.
Design is not enough. But for now... look at that sexy halibut, scantily glad in frisee. Oooh, baby!
Today is a not atypical dinner problem: I have a guest coming over so I don't want to utterly wing it, the car smells bad (Amelie spilled milk all over everything yesterday.) so I don't want to shop, and I have a gorgeous boneless leg of lamb in the fridge. I have a recipe for roast shoulder of lamb, from my cordon bleu cooking class, but philippe just expressed distain for the results of it. Now what?
My first step is usually to form a vague vision of the end result-- I want to do a roast leg of lamb, I've decided, probably butterflied and rolled. The Cordon Bleu one was stuffed, but I am not going to go shopping for the sausage and chicken liver mixture it was stuffed with.
Now I research how others approach this task, startign with my most trustworth adviser, jaque Pepin, then moving out to Julia Child and a few cooksbooks that look like they might have recipes in that vein, such as anthony bourdain. And I hit up epicurious.
BONELESS LEG OF LAMB STUFFED WITH SWISS CHARD AND FETA
LEG OF LAMB STUFFED WITH WILD MUSHROOMS AND GREENS
HERB-STUFFED LEG OF LAMB
So far Julia has the best recipes, so I will use her book as the base approach.
Next I read a bit of McGee to get my head around the advantages of searing and slow roasting, and what might cause dryness or toughness.
Now I have theory, and examples. I look for patterns-- how do most folks tie up a raost? What stuffing is recommended? What temperature/time? Trusting Julia more than other sources, but listening for interesting ideas.
I'm seeing that there seem to be two kinds of stuffing-- stuffing for flavor layers, and stuffing that has its own presence: for example, a herb stuffing you would not notice, while the previously mentioned chicken liver/sausage stuffng you would. Julia mentions an olive paste stuffing, and i have some Trader Joe's tapenade in the cupboard, so I'll go that way.
Next I like to print out the recipe I'm goign to follow-- if it's Julia, I'll still print out the epicurious recipe because its' easier, and make notes on it based on what Julia says. Then I'll cook.
I'll let you know how it turns out. My final step is usually to publish the final recipe on my recipe site.
So why did I categorize this post as Strategy? Because this method, I realized, is how I approach business concepts also.
Set a vague goal
Research space
Get expert advice, weighing trusted advisers over unknown
Set a specific goal
Execute
Record learnings
"YouTube has been thriving with Comedy Central content -- probably the most widespread TV brand on the site-- so this will be the most noticeable content removal to date. "
As far as I can tell from the stories, Comedy Central has wisely left the YouTube phenomenon alone. I suspect it was not them who asked for it to be taken down. The mysterious "third parties" who asked for the material to be removed... could that be Google's legal department?
In any case, I was at a Baychi the other day watching a panel discuss emergent architecture (panel included the completely clueless, the out-of-date, the deeply misinformed and the single one who had a clue... I'll leave it unnamed, so all four can pretend they are the fourth.) A discussion arose about why YouTube succeeded when its rivals, some with "better" designs did so well. Many panelists waved their hands and said, if we knew we'd be rich. But listening to the audience, which happily included YouTube designers, I think I got a small suspicious of what can help.
DARE TO BE DUMB
Conventional wisdom, conventional best practices lead to conventional solutions. When I worked on Shockwave/Atomfilms so long ago with Carbon IQ, choosing a media player was important (we believed). Having content live on the site in order to build traffic and increase impressions was important. But YouTube stripped away all those worries, made it not only easy to upload and view, but also increased their traffic by not worrying about traffic. Think about how many sites tell you to copy an image to your hard drive, and upload it (are you listening, Amazon?). YouTube brazenly gave away the benefit (traffic) and took the downside (bandwidth cost) to their very great success. Looking at it now, it seems so obvious. But at the time, it took a leap of perspective, a new framing of the problem to achieve.
Flickr enjoyed another such leap. Any user testing you do in the photos space will inform you that "private" should be the default. Yet they defied this point of view (while still allowing users to keep images private as they wished) and built up something no photosite has seen up to now: a community.
In art school we used to say "Understand the rules in order to break them." We've taken the first part to heart; time to consider the second.
So now Comedy Central, who had been enjoying breaking the rules has suffered a loss of an easy promotional device. Who is the fool, the one who gives away content, or the one who doesn't?
I love the The New Yorker. I read it as much as I can; I subscribe despite my aversion to weekly magazines (the opress me, the way they tend to stack up.) When Amelie was born, my sole refuge from the turmoil of transforming into a mother was to hide in the bath with a New Yorker.
Newyorker.com is a endless source of bemused frustration for me. Why do they have a website? Why do they promote it in their magazine? It's a trainwreck of a site; much like the magazine it's hard to keep up with it. The archives are not online -- you can't have them for love or money. If you aren't there the week of the magazine, you cannot send the articles to freinds or business folks who need to read them. Compare to New York Times and Harvard Business review, who seem to know 8 ways to make dough off their past.
They barely host advertisement, and then mostly for their limited set of products: the magazine, the "complete collection" on DVD, the online store and perhaps some random other company. Their media kit is bizarrely placed in between ads; their ads often badly crushed and oddly kerned.
The site seems to have been laid out for a monitor from 1998; the warning about correct browsers in teh footer harkens back to those days as well.
I picture the webstaff, a lonely guy or perhaps a Kate Hepburn like woman doing their best to keep the site alive and viable; yet constantly running into problems with a creative director who wants everythign in gifs, and a CEO who wants to know why the ads are cut off on his monitor? I know nothing about the staff, this is just idle speculation.
I would kill for the job of Product Manger for the New Yorker Online. There is a large amount of money to be made from that website, money that could be used to keep great writing alive. I would be web strategy officer for a fourth of my last salary, if I could only get to realize the dormant potential of America's finest content. I would cut gifs and write css, if I could only help newyorker.com be the destination I know it could be.