CourseSmart E-Textbooks Track Students’ Progress for Teachers: Using electronic textbooks mean the professor can essentially look over your shoulder to make sure you’re doing the reading.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.

[…] In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia’s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.

The Times was able to post an actual report on a student as an example of what the professors are looking at.

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop: Here’s the analysis of how the winner of the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year apparently faked the image.  It’s an interesting look at image forensics.

Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various regions spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.

What surprises me, however, is that anyone thought it was legit.  Look at the image – it almost looks like a painting to me.  I feel like the perspective is all wrong too.  Is it just me?

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data: A computer might write your next movie.

[…] a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

San Francisco Is Building A Social Network For Emergencies Only: This is another idea down the line of recovers.org – a social network and communications system to be used when a disaster of some kind occurs.

What’s become clear over the last year is that there’s is a need for disaster and crisis coordination online, beyond hashtags. And San Francisco, the earthquake capital of the country, might have the solution.

In collaboration with the design firm IDEO, the city is creating a social networking website and app to connect people who want to help with those who need it. Through the SF72 platform, you will be able to preregister your home, supplies you have — say, an emergency generator — and relevant skills, such as emergency first aid. Instead of scanning hashtags, people will be able to simply log in to a preexisting community, knowing there will be specific offers for help organized by neighborhood.

An E.V. That Wraps Around a Wheelchair: This vehicle is essentially an exoskeleton that goes over a wheelchair, and “wraps” it so it’s able to travel on the road.  It’s a great idea.

The Kenguru is seven feet long — nearly two feet shorter than the dinky Smart Fortwo — and five feet high. There is, of course, no room for a passenger. The car weighs just 900 pounds, batteries included.

[…] As a neighborhood vehicle, the Kenguru has a top speed of about 25 miles per hour and generally cannot be driven on highways. Travel range is estimated at 45 to 60 miles, with a charging time of eight hours.

Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet: After this article was published, Shodan went offline, which is probably for the best, because Shodan is a search engine that scours the Net looking for control interfaces for various hardware objects and real-life systems.

He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city’s entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put into “test mode” with a single command entry. And he also found a control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each.

Fixing E.T. for the Atari 2600: E.T. for the Atari 2600 was one of the worst video games of all time.  In fact, it may have sparked the 1983 meltdown in game console sales.

Well, this guy wanted to fix it, so he did.  He hacked the kernel of the game, and made some necessary changes.  Along the way, he explains quite a bit about why the game is the way it is, and why other games aren’t.

The myth: A lot of people blame poor collision detection for this problem. That is simply not true. The collision detection in E.T. is perfect. There are no bounding boxes like in more modern games. Collision detection happens at the pixel level. You can’t get any better than that. If you fall in to a well, it’s because your player character visually overlaps it.

The actual problem: We don’t want pixel-perfect collision detection!

The reason that people so easily fall in to wells is that they don’t expect to fall when, for example, E.T.’s head overlaps a well. After all, his feet are clearly on solid ground!

I’m working on a survey with a research team from my alma mater – Augustana College (we made the Final Four, baby!) – on the topic of organizational journalism.  This is a high-fallutin’ word for all the news and updates people post to their websites.

I’ll be discussing the results in part at the Now What Conference in about three weeks, and we’ll be writing a white paper on it for release in May.

To this end, I have a survey that I want you or someone you know to take.  If you manage the news for your company, or you know the person who does, please go to this link and take this survey.  It’s short – will take 3-4 minutes at most – and you’re welcome to provide a name and address at the end to get a white paper with the results.

Enough jabbering.  Take the Organizational Journalism Survey

If you have greater interest here, I’ve written about this before.  It’s a subject in which I’m keenly interested, and which I feel is vastly misunderstood in today’s organizations.

• Rivers, Not Trees: The Challenge to Organizational IA
• The Information Needs of the Indoctrinated Audience
• The Psychology of News

At some point, the words “blog” and “post” got all mixed up, and now “blog” is used for everything.  This remains a pet peeve of mine, so this post is a last gasp of protest before I shut the hell up about it.

A “blog” is a publication comprised of multiple installments.

A “post” is a single installment in that publication.

Therefore, a blog is a collection of posts.

This single post is not a “blog.” This blog, in fact, is comprised of 7,000 posts over 10 years.

Therefore, this is incorrect: “I wrote a new blog today.”  No!  A thousand times, no!

And do not say: “Come look at my new blog,” unless you mean the site in general, not a specific post.  If you mean a specific post, then say “Come look at my new blog post.”

Saying “I wrote a new blog today” is only correct if you create a new blog, wrote a bunch of posts for it, and then shut it down.  To use “wrote” in the past tense implies that the blog is finished and has been shut down, and the word “new” implies that it was just created, so somehow the lifecycle of that entire site/publication/platform got rolled up into one day.

Someone who just wrote an article doesn’t say: “Check out the magazine I wrote today.”

(However, an opinion columnist does say: “Check out the new column I wrote today.”  In that case, the group and the singular is the same, which is problematic.)

For the last time: “Post” is a singular noun.  “Blog” is a collective noun.  You did not “wrote a blog.”  You may “write a blog,” meaning you continue to post updates to a specific website, but the only thing you “wrote” in the past tense was a “post.”

(Finally, “pedantic” is an adjective.)

I gotta say, I was pretty amazed to find this article over at XKCD that attempts to answer the question “How many unique English tweets are possible?”

This is interesting, primarily because I’m just coming off a very brief but intense fling with information and communication theory.  In the span of three weeks, I read the following:

• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
• An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise
• Information: A Very Short Introduction 

In all three, I got introduced to Claude Shannon, a mathematician who invented the field of information theory – the science, essentially, what what comprises information and how that gets communication.  He wrote a paper in 1948 which more or less defined the field.

This field necessarily got all mathematical in the early 20th century when the telegraph showed up, because the goal was to cram the most information into the least amount of bandwidth – communicate the most with the least.

This necessarily leads to very philosophic questions about what information actually is and how it goes from random data to coherence.  Think about: random data is communicating…random data.  Not meaning.  Not information, really.  From the article.

For example, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is a grammatically valid sentence if your name happens to be Mxyztplk. (Come to think of it, it’s just as grammatically valid if you’re lying.) Clearly, it doesn’t make sense to count every string that starts with “Hi, I’m …” as a separate sentence. To a normal English speaker, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is basically indistinguishable from “Hi, I’m Mxzkqklt”, and shouldn’t both count. But “Hi, I’m xPoKeFaNx” is definitely recognizably different from the first two, even though “xPoKeFaNx” isn’t an English word by any stretch of the imagination.

It also depends greatly on the context of the receiver – how much do they know about what you’re going to say?  What can they extrapolate from the data to form meaning?

information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and their ability to predict it in advance.

Anyway, the XKCD article is interesting, and information theory is worth looking into.  I wish I could recommend the books I mentioned above, but none of them really got at the core philosophy of information in the way I wanted.

Powering Down Google Reader: Well, this is unfortunate: Google is killing Reader.

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

I load Reader at least a half-dozen times a day.  It’s one of the first links I hit when I log on in the morning, and checking it is part of my standard routine when I return to my machine after lunch or a meeting (email, Reader, Twitter, USA Today Big Page…okay, the world is still around).

The demise of Reader is really just a manifestation of the decline of RSS in general.  Somehow, RSS just slowly slid off the radar, done in by Twitter and social media, I guess.  A pity, really, as RSS still has so much to offer.

Man behind ‘Carry On’ shirts watches his company crumble: This is either funny or sad.  I can’t decide which.

Fowler says he wrote a computer program script that would take “Keep Calm” and randomly pair it with a verb and pronoun. He gathered 700 verbs and imported them en masse — but says he didn’t carefully go over the list.

Fowler imagined phrases like “Keep Calm and Nurse On.”

He got those but also the disastrous results that also included “Keep Calm and Knife Her” and “Keep Calm and Hit Her.”

By Fowler’s account, the shirts never existed. Only computer-generated images did.

Bonobos opens stores that don’t sell anything: Some websites have started to showroom themselves.

Bonobos Guideshops are men’s clothing stores that basically don’t sell anything. Customers can try stuff on for size, put outfits together and get advice from salespeople. But if they like it, they’ve got to order it on the Bonobos website.

Half of Destructoid’s readers block our ads. Now what?: This is an important post to read, from a gaming site that found out almost 50% of its visitors were blocking ads.

BlockMetrics was easy enough to set up and monitor. At first, it was about 10%, then 20-something. When I dared to blink it just increased faster. Over a few days it never got better, averaging at an ominous 42-46% block rate. I thought their tech might have been flawed, so I performed my own tests and contacted another company who returned a similar result.

This means that we’re working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company, as if keeping a group of game writers fed isn’t difficult enough. We see gaming sites shut down or selling out so often these days. Feeling my pain yet?

I realize that many people run ad blockers without a second thought, but think through what that does to advertising-supported sites.  With media, there’s an unspoken social contract – you trade a tiny sliver of your attention span to consume the content.  Yet people still consume content while finding a way around their side of the tacit bargain that everyone knows is required for most free content sites to survive.

And don’t talk about intrusive ads either.  I know these exist, but in this case, the were sensitive to this:

Destructoid does not allow ads that play automatic audio, and also doesn’t allow ads that automatically expand without your interaction. If you ever see any of those, please report them. Also, if you stay logged in on our existing free accounts, you’ll never see a full-page interstitial advertisement (the skip to continue kind). We’ve also moved most of our new videos to YouTube, which allows ad skipping in most circumstances.

Yes, yes, I know – ad blockers make you feel clever and powerful.  I get it.  They also make content suck more.

Rolls-Royce unveils its fastest car ever – the Wraith: Wow.  Just…wow.

The car’s 8-speed transmission gets information from a GPS unit so that it can select gears based in the road ahead. For instance, it can downshift the moment a hill or curve is approached. That helps with both performance and fuel economy, Rolls says.

Did Steve Jobs Pick the Wrong Tablet Size?: Interesting discussion over at Slashdot.

Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7-inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung’s Galaxy, as being ‘tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7-inch diagonal] iPad,’ adding that ‘the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival.’ A year later Jobs was dead, and the iPad Mini, with a 7.9-inch diagonal screen, was rolled out under his successor Tim Cook in October, 2012

Given the wild success of the iPad, it’s hard to say Apple did anything “wrong,” but I think the market is clearly stating that smaller tablets are better.

For me, the iPad was too big.  My 7” Kindle Fire HD is perfect – it will fit into the front pocket of my North Face jacket (even zipped up), or into the inside pocket of a sport coat.  I even have a pair of jeans that will fit it in the front pocket.

I can take it anywhere, without having to really be “carrying” anything, and if there’s some detriment to the smaller screen, I have yet to find it.  If you have a 10” tablet, I’m going to suggest that you could switch to a 7” with zero negative loss in functionality or experience and a huge upside in portability. The smaller size will change the very nature of the device for you, and how it fits into your life.

(My kids have an original iPad, and I was teaching them how to play Solitaire last night.  We were passing it back and forth between us, and it just seemed archaically huge, like my big laptop from five years ago feels now.)

What’s even more interesting is that Apple may have gotten the size of their phones wrong too.  The iPhone is an undeniable success, but they’re getting bigger, as are all phones.  The iPhone 5 went to 4”, but Samsung is making a killing with the Galaxy Nexus (4.65”), the Galaxy S3 (4.8”), and the Galaxy Note II (5.55”).

My next “phone” will be so in name only.  What I need is a small tablet that will work as a phone when I need it to, which is rarely – maybe 1-2 times a week.  I take and make virtually no phone calls.  My primary means of communication from my device is texting, but I use it mainly for email.

Hello, Galaxy Note.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog: Hard to believe this cartoon is almost 20 years old.  Almost harder to believe it was published in 1993, when not a lot of people knew what this “Internet” thing even was.

The New Yorker published a cartoon by artist Peter Steiner on July 5th, 1993, which featured an illustration of a dog seated at a computer telling his canine companion that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (shown below). Years later on December 14th, 2000, The New York Times published an interview with Steiner in an article titled “Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet,” noting that the cartoon did not receive much attention initially, but steadily grew in popularity over many years

New Technologies Aim to Foil Online Course Cheating: Interesting article on how online courses are using technology to combat cheating.

But now eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A. can remotely track every mouse click and keystroke of test-taking students. Squads of eagle-eyed humans at computers can monitor faraway students via webcams, screen sharing and high-speed Internet connections, checking out their photo IDs, signatures and even their typing styles to be sure the test-taker is the student who registered for the class.

I’m quite interesting in the typing analysis method.

Students also type a short phrase, which is analyzed by a software program. It takes note of the typing rhythm and other characteristics, like how long the keys are pressed down. Then, when a student submits homework or takes a test, the algorithm compares a bit of new typing with the original sample. (And if you’ve broken your arm, there’s always your photo ID.)

Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office: Interesting move from Yahoo here.

[…] Yahoo has made a surprise move: abolishing its work-at-home policy and ordering everyone to work in the office.

A memo explaining the policy change, from the company’s human resources department, says face-to-face interaction among employees fosters a more collaborative culture — a hallmark of Google’s approach to its business.

I can’t say I disagree. I know, I know – virtual employees are the hip thing and all, and I must be a stick-in-the-mud for wanting everyone in the same place, but I truly think that you lose something by not being face-to-face.

Incidental contact throughout the day gives birth to collaboration opportunities that you just don’t get when all contact is proactive, deliberate, planned, and task-oriented.

I flew into Boston in the wee hours of the morning to film a segment for CMS Connected tomorrow morning.  It airs live at 12:30 EST, so if you like listening to me drone on and on here on Gadgetopia, just imagine how great the video version will be!

Again, 12:30 EST at cms-connected.com.  I’m the featured expert talking about intranet technology, a subject that I absolutely adore.

What’s the ultimate purpose of a CMS in your organization? Is it to manage content? Or is it a tool to drive revenue?

The answer to this necessarily depends on the organization. If your organization is built around content — a museum, for example, or the technical documentation of a product — then the purpose of the CMS is clearly to manage all that stuff.

But for a lot of organizations, the existence of the CMS is almost incidental — it merely exists to help drive conversions, to increase revenue, to impact the bottom line. If it contributes to those goals, then it’s successful. If it doesn’t, then it’s not.

You don’t buy a power drill because you want a drill. What you really want is a hole — the drill just happens to be the most efficient way to get that.  Same with a CMS — you don’t want the CMS, rather you want a conversion of some kind.  The CMS is just an tool to help you do that.

But, to what extent can a CMS actually drive conversions? Meaning, to what extent can a CMS be the sole difference between a conversion happening on your website or not?  To get more granular, what is the effect of one single feature of a CMS on the bottom line of an organization?  And are CMS vendors concentrating on the right features?

To break this down, let’s put the people affected by a CMS into some buckets. This is going to be a coarse grouping, but bear with me on it for a minute.

We’ll put them in four groups.

1. First, we have CMS Developers. These are the folks that work with the architecture and templates to make the CMS do what an organization wants it to do.
2. Then, we have CMS Users. These are the editors and content producers that use the CMS to manage content for the organization.
3. Then, we have the CMS Consumers. These are the people that come to your website to consume the content that the CMS manages — these are your customers, subscribers, or the general public.
4. Finally, we have what I’m going to call the CMS Stakeholders. These are the people who benefit from the results that the CMS enables. This is your CEO, CMO, or ultimately your shareholders.

This means that the CMO is clearly a stakeholder in your CMS implementation. They need to derive some benefit from the fact that you spent umpteen thousand dollars and several months buying and implementing the thing. They are accountable for the results of it, and those results would logically mean impacting revenue and profit.

With these four groups in mind, let’s consider a single feature for a CMS vendor –

Say the people behind CMS X are trying to decide whether or not to include a new content modeling feature — the ability to repeat fields, for instance.  So, instead of a single field for “Author,” for example, we can now have multiple fields to gracefully handle situations when we have more than one author.  (I can tell you from experience that this would be a fantastic improvement for many systems.)

Let’s look at our four groups and see which ones would benefit from this:

CMS Developers? Absolutely. I can think of so many instances in so many implementations where this would have been extremely helpful. Additionally, as a former developer myself, I just love the idea — being able to repeat fields represents freedom from constraints, reduces the need for code hacks, and makes the data model more pure.

CMS Users? Sure, in some cases. There might be some situations where it would be helpful for me to have this. I might be working around something, and this would remove my need to do that. It could make things easier for me, and while I’m not excited about it on a visceral level or anything, I’m certainly all for it.

CMS Consumers? Um…tougher, but perhaps. If we examine the needs of our audiences, we have probably found places where the ability to repeat fields might result in a better interface and experience. However, knowing implementations like I do, we probably found a workaround to make this happen anyway, even if it would be kludgy from the backend. Perhaps our editors have to do some backflips, but whatever. In the end, the CMS Consumer might benefit incrementally.

CMS Stakeholders? Well, not so much. In the end, there’s probably not much of a benefit here for the CMO, and if there is, it’s pretty far removed.

For evidence of this, let’s define the sequential chain of events that would have to occur for our new feature — the ability to repeat fields — to have an end benefit to the CMO:

1. There would need to be some uncreated aspect of the site which is standing in the way of a conversion.
2. We would have to know about this aspect of the site, meaning we would have to be aware of this deficiency that needs correction.
3. There would have to be no workaround for this (or else we would have likely done it already, kludge be damned).
4. Our new CMS feature would have to allow this missing site aspect to be created in a cost-effective way.
5. This new aspect of the site would now have to be found and used by potential customer.
6. The use of this new aspect of the site would have to be the single thing that pushed the customer over the edge and caused them to convert. Meaning, they would not have converted without this new thing we build with our new CMS feature.

I will concede there are some other ways to impact the bottom line –

The ability to repeat fields will likely lower implementation costs in the short term, since workarounds cost money.

The ability to repeat fields will also probably result in some happier editors, since they care about elegance too, and they would likely be happier with the end result of their content. I can tell you from experience that a bad CMS can have a devastating effect on morale.

Additionally, it’s not quite fair to look at this one feature in isolation. A CMS is a bundle of features, all working together, and it must be evaluated with regard to their synergistic whole, and their ability to vault that CMS over a tacit “bar of functionality.”

But, the core principle is this: the “distance to benefit” for any one CMS feature is much longer for the CMS Stakeholder than it is for any other group.

A CMS Developer can look at that feature and say, “Hell yeah, let’s upgrade!” because the distance from feature to benefit is very short, from their perspective.  A CMS User can also be convinced of the same thing — though probably not quite as quickly because the distance from feature to benefit is a bit further removed.

But the CMS Stakeholder — our CMO — likely doesn’t care about the elegance of the content model. He or she cares about conversions and the bottom line. And the distance between this feature and those goals is much greater. For the CMS Stakeholder, the chain of causality which allows that feature to provide actual, tangible value is long. It can be a real stretch to envision a scenario where all the dominoes line up and fall in such a way that we can say – incontrovertibly – that this new feature of our CMS clearly resulted in an appreciable impact to the operating numbers of the organization.

So, what’s my point?

This “feature disconnect” is where I see clear divergence in the development curves of the commercial and open-source CMS offerings. In the open-source world, you often see features added to systems for their own benefit.

Why are we adding the ability to repeat fields? Because it’s the right thing to do, dammit! Data needs to be pure. Workarounds are bad! Let your neckbeard fly!

In the commercial world, the process of adding features is a little more…mercenary. Why are we adding Feature X? Who wants it?  Does that person make the decision?  In what way will this encourage that person to buy our product?

In many cases, the answer is no. With a commercial CMS, the buying decision isn’t going to come out IT, but out of marketing. Immediately this has muted the influence of our first audience — CMS developers. The CMS Users may still have some influence here, but if we’re dealing with the marketing group then we’ve vaulted right up to the CMS Stakeholders. They’re not thinking about content modeling, they’re thinking about conversions, and how is our CMS going to help them with that?

Here’s a current trend illustrates this: the rush into marketing automation.

More and more, commercial CMS systems are abandoning traditional notions of content management — content models, permissions, and workflow — and are charging headlong into higher-level marketing features. We’re seeing the lion’s share of development being spent on all the things that happen after someone hits the publish button. The “management” portion of the CMS suite is almost incidental now — it only exists to serve the marketing side.

I’ve given several conference talks about this trend. In researching it, I interviewed the CTOs of many commercial content management companies. To all of them, I made the following statement:

Content management is largely a solved problem. Almost all of the advances in the field are happening in the delivery/marketing space.

Development on our repository is strictly to support our delivery services.

[...] The majority of our development effort is focused outside our core management product.

[...] The focus on the management side is now on strictly reducing implementation costs.

We build our product 100% for marketers. The idea of a ‘content editor’ is an antiquated notion.

You see, commercial content management companies know how their bread gets buttered: they have to sell the product. And the person making the decision to fork over the money is not gonna be impressed with its content modeling capabilities.   Overwhelmingly, the decision makers are not in the CMS Developer or CMS User groups.  They’re CMS Stakeholders.

Sure, core management capabilities might be part of an aggregate set of capabilities which demonstrate some required proficiency.  But that playing field is getting more and more level by the day.  Hell, if Drupal or WordPress can do something, then that thing is a commodity, and you can no longer pitch that thing as a feature.

Perhaps the most telling: I sell CMS for a living, and no competent CMS demo these days begins with “Here’s how you edit content…” These days, demos start with “Here’s how you can segment users…” or “Here’s how you can run an A/B test…”  If editing a page is the high point of your demo, you have a very big problem.

Why is this so different in the open-source world? I think it’s because decisions in adding features to open-source CMS are driven much closer to the CMS Developer group. Generally speaking, open-source CMS projects are developer-driven, not consumer- or stakeholder-driven. They’re projects that originally sprang forth from a single developer (a marketer does not build a CMS, after all), and that developer-centric vibe has stayed with the project and hasn’t been eradicated by a driving need to sell licenses.

Thus, features are included because they make development easier. These features then to contribute towards things like elegance, orthogonality and modularity, which developers love. Developers see these features as logical and sensible to the task of managing content. Sadly, they’re often not logical and sensible to the task of driving conversions.

So, what’s the purpose of your CMS: is it to manage content, or drive conversions? If you’re a museum, or the Library of Congress, or some other content-driven organization, you might honestly say that managing content is your number one goal. Wonderful.

But for most organizations, the answer is clear: the CMS only helps us inasmuch as it can drive conversions. If a feature cannot help us — directly or indirectly — get a website visitor to convert, then it is not worth doing, technical sophistication be damned.

So, CMS vendors, developers, users, buyers, and everyone else, you need to ask yourselves: this cool feature I’m looking at — what is the chain of causality that bridges this feature with a conversion? How long is that bridge and how easy is it to cross?

And perhaps most importantly: are we building the right bridges?

How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets: Netflix is tapping into metrics that TV will never be able to touch.  Some DVRs are getting close to this, but the future of television is not television at all, but data-driven, analytics-heavy programming where the program is constantly sending back data to the mothership about what you’re doing while you watch it.

Netflix might not know exactly why I personally hit the pause button — I was checking on my sick son, home from school with the flu — but if enough people pause or rewind or fast-forward at the same place during the same show, the data crunchers can start to make some inferences. Perhaps the action slowed down too much to hold viewer interest — bored now! — or maybe the plot became too convoluted. Or maybe that sex scene was just so hot it had to be watched again. If enough of us never end up restarting the show after taking a break, the inference could be even stronger: maybe the show just sucked.

Even the casting of the show was driven by data:

Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher. Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.

The other day, I complained about this:

If you buy a book, shouldn’t you get the audiobook for free? Buy paper book, get ebook? What are we buying: the content, or the medium?

(I know, I know – Kindle has text-to-speech.  Never used it, and I can’t image the robot voice would be that good.)

But the point is valid: when does the content of something transcend the medium? When are we buying the content of something, rather than the medium of it?  When I buy a book, I feel like I’m buying the knowledge in the book – it just happens to be in a book.  I feel like I should get this content in every possible medium.

Of course, this isn’t going to work because there’s a creation cost for different mediums.  It costs something to have someone read the book to me, just as it would cost something to fly the author to me to have him give me a personalized seminar on it.

Despite this, however, Amazon is making headway down this road.  I just saw this on my Kindle Fire HD the other day: Immersion Reading.

The idea is that you buy the audio with the text, and it reads along – you can watch the text highlight as the voice reads.  Here’s the video:

The video isn’t great in the sense that it makes the voice seem terrible, but they keep saying “professionally narrated,” so I assume it doesn’t sound like HAL from 2001.

I kept asking myself, “If you’re looking at the Kindle, what help is it to have someone read along?”  But when I got to thinking that it might be helpful.  This is the “immersion” they’re going for in the title of the feature, I suppose.  Would it draw you deeper into the text?  Yeah, I’m guessing it would.

Additionally, it gives you some flexibility in terms of medium.  Sometimes maybe you want to read, sometimes you want to listen, and maybe sometimes you do both.

The question comes down to cost.  That book was $10, and adding the audio was another $10, so the benefit there is questionable.  But, if Amazon can bring the price down so that you could effectively buy a “bundle” of mediums cheaper than buy them all separately, then they might really have something.

New hardware may be game changer for video game sector: This is a fairly non-descript article about the current state of gaming consoles and the introduction of next-gen consoles this year.  But it included this bit, which bothers me a little:

Today, the Xbox 360 is entering its eighth year on the market, while the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii have been out for more than six years.

“Developers have really squeezed out every last bit of innovation they could out of the current hardware,” says Jesse Divnich, analyst with Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. “Both developers and consumers are screaming for new technology.”

This annoys me. What does new hardware get you?  More processing power.  What are game developers hungry to use that for?  Better graphics.

When this guy says that developers have “squeezed every last bit if innovation,” does he really mean that?  Or does he mean that we’ve just topped out on graphic power, and new and better graphics is the only new a great thing game developers could use right now?

I’ve been bitching about this for a while. This is from a post about seven years ago:

Say you doubled the intelligence of the enemy AI. How much processing power would you need to do this compared to the power required to run the graphics? My guess is that it’d be inconsequential.

So what this means is that the entire…point, of making a new system is graphics, graphics, graphics. Think about it, when the ads tout “better games,” what do they mean? More mentally challenging? More thought-provoking? More…what? No, they mean “better graphics.” It’s the be-all and end-all of systems these days.

CrowdSearching: This might be the first time I have ever posted anything directly off a press release someone sent me, but I have to admit to being a little smitten with this idea.

CrowdSearching is an online community that connects the lucky with the unlucky, the mindful with the forgetful and the responsible with the irresponsible. Aimed at helping people around the world find their lost belongings, the site uses the power of social media to spread the word about lost and found items.

Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs: The Associated Press claims that technology has forever changed the job market.  It’s obviated a ton of jobs from the middle class, and the few that have come back are low-paying jobs.  And this trend will never reverse.

A lot of people are denouncing this headline as alarmist, but it comes on the heels of Kevin Kelly’s article about machines nipping at our heels in the working world, and I tend to think there’s more truth than myth here.

An example of the (very real) problem:

Thanks to computerized machines, Webb Wheel hasn’t added a factory worker in three years, though it’s making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase.

[…] Start-ups account for much of the job growth in developed economies, but software is allowing entrepreneurs to launch businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s.

[…]Entrepreneur Andrew Schrage started the financial advice website Money Crashers in 2009 with a partner and one freelance writer. The bare-bones start-up was only possible, Schrage says, because of technology that allowed the company to get online help with accounting and payroll and other support functions without hiring staff.

This isn’t the first time this has come up. The Motley Fool had an article a couple of months ago inventively-titled Technology Ate Your Job.

Since peaking in 1979, total U.S. manufacturing positions have fallen by 40% — a loss of some 8 million jobs. Real (inflation-adjusted) manufacturing output, however, has increased75%.

They quote an example from a New York Times article:

In 1950, the United States Steel Corporation employed 30,000 workers at its plant in Gary, Ind. Today that factory employs only 5,000 workers. But they produce more steel: 7.5 million tons a year now, compared with 6 million tons then.

No answers here. Just questions.

My company, Blend Interactive, is having a conference on April 18 in Sioux Falls: Now What 2013.

When we decided to put on a conference last year, we wanted to make sure it was relevant and actually gave people information they could use. I go to (and speak at) a lot of conferences, so I’ve learned what makes a good one and a bad one.  And, honestly, then are far more bad conferences than good.  If we were going to do this, we were going to do it right.

So we surveyed people who manage websites, and we asked them: what do you want to hear about?  The result was an overwhelming theme – don’t talk to me about building websites, talk to me about the one I have and how I can make it better. Tell me what to do about it.

And that’s where the title came from: you have a website…now what?

Another thing I was determined to do: get good speakers. The lineup that we put together is just fantastic: Lisa Welchman, Seth Gottlieb, Melissa Rach, Cathy McKnight, Molly Malsam, and that’s to say nothing about Corey and myself.

It says something that only two of the speakers are from Blend – we didn’t want to make this a Blend joint.  It’s our conference, sure, and there’s obviously some marketing benefit there. But the goal was for this to be as marketing neutral as realistically possible.  We want good content and a good event that helps people do their jobs better.  If there’s marketing value beyond that, wonderful, but I can honestly say it wasn’t our first thought.

Profit wasn’t either. Whenever we discussed pricing, the only question we had was: how affordable can we make it?  We’re paying speakers, flying them in, renting a venue, and buying lunch, so there are expenses involved. But we did everything we could to essentially make this a non-profit venture.  (In fact, if you include the otherwise-billable time we have into it, there’s zero chance we’ll turn a profit on it.)

So, if you’re in Sioux Falls, within driving distance, or just feel like jumping on a plane, I can promise a fantastic day of great information and networking.

The early bird registration is only $200.  It expires in a week, and then it’s $250 up to the week before the conference on April 18.

Register here.

The Great American Signature Fades Away: An interesting treatise on the lost art of the signature.

In recent years, however, as computers and keyboards have become more prevalent, the art — and the necessity — of penning one’s name has gone out of style. The opposable thumb is used more for clicking a button than gripping a pen.

The signature has become a rushed and atavistic formality. We haphazardly scrawl our ways through checkout lines and mortgage refinancings. We don’t write — or sign — as many handwritten notes as we once did because we send emails and e-messages. We don’t write — or sign — as many checks because we pay bills online.

And no one seems to care anymore if our signature is legible or consistent or even our signature. We might as well all be a doctor dashing off an unreadable prescription.

A New Chapter? A Launch Of The Bookless Library: The library continues to evolve.  San Antonio is launching a library without books.

In keeping with technological advances, the county will house a library of neatly arranged LCD screens and gadgets instead of the traditional banquet of dog-eared print and paper books. The public library will be one of the first digital-only libraries of its kind.

With 50 computer terminals and a stock of laptops and tablets on-site, the building will also offer an array of preloaded e-readers available for the card-carrying customer to take home.

Another library tried this back in 2002, apparently, and immediately ran into a pretty big problem.

And the biggest issue? Most content is simply not available digitally to license and purchase.

“So your selection of best-sellers and popular media just went down the toilet because 99 percent of that is not available to libraries digitally,” she says

Related: Librarians and the Book: A Marriage of Convenience

When your Axure prototypes are too good: Molly talks about a problem I’ve seen more than once: is what I’m looking at a high-fidelity wireframe, or a really crappy design?

I’ve built or helped to build very high-fidelity prototypes, both from a visual and interactive perspective. They could easily be mistaken for actual web sites, and therein lies the problem. I’ve been asked more times than I can count whether the prototype is working code, and despite clear communication I’ve had developers try to use the code to develop from (and then complain to me that it’s hard to work with).

What’s morbidly funny here is that it becomes awkward to ask: “Is this just a wireframe, or do you just suck at design?”  I mean, if you treat it as a wireframe and ask when the actual design is going to be ready…whoops.

Molly talks about it in the context of Axure, which produces HTML walk-though wireframes, which causes another problem when developers pull that code and start trying to work with it.

In Code Complete, Steve McConnell says that prototyping is great, but the biggest danger is that the prototype with sorta kinda end up being the actual thing. This happens with wireframes too, apparently.