communication. community. cognition.
Quick note:
I’ll be presenting at the Ragan/PRSA Social Media Conference this coming March, the 11th through the 13th in Las Vegas.
If you register here by January 30th and use the code “SPK9”, you can get a $350 discount. After that date, it’s only a $250 discount.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Ragan, PRSA, Social Media Conference, social media[/tags]
I started “blogging” a little over five years ago. I was leaving the daily grind of television news, and didn’t want to lose my chops as a writer. I also needed to process some of the angst and trepidation that comes from a career shift, particularly for a person that many assumed would die in a television studio, conveniently just after signing off.
This is the first piece I posted, and it was intentionally vague. I was expressing notions and feelings and impressions, and I wanted it to be as relevant to the future me as it was to the present me. I don’t read it very often, but it still seems to hold some value. I also had to be careful, as I was trying to preserve my anonymity online.
I reprint the piece here, and over the next week or so may republish a few others. Especially the ones with insights into the state of communications and broadcasting, just to see how they measure up to today’s reality.
There’s an awful lot of work that goes into building a boat. Most people who care about sailing, and have the time, also have the disposable income to just lay out the cash and buy one.
Who builds boats these days, anyway?
Those trapped on islands.
Desperation breeds ingenuity, resolve, and all of those other positive character attributes that boy scouts require, since the organization doesn’t offer ship-building merit badges.
Badges — we don’t need no stinking badges. Just give me some tools, or some sharp rocks to make rudimentary tools, and let me chip and chop some bamboo and coconut trees. If Gilligan can make a raft, I can make one with shade. I’ll lash the posts together, boil my own rosin, and make this sucker seaworthy.
So. Why am I so crazy?
Turns out, there’s boatload after boatload of people trying to get onto my island. So many people, eager for their day in the sun, and ready for the life of splendor and luxury that goes with it. It’s only after a four-year cruise they find out it’s a one-way trip, and the locals pay you with sand.
Sand. Nothing but ground quartz. If there was a way to heat it up, you could make some glass, or maybe a mirror. Then all of the self-made refugees on my island might figure out what they really look like, instead of relying on their own absorbed self-images.
Poor kids. They spent so much time trying to beach themselves, they can’t bring themselves to ask whether they should be trying to go home, or someplace more fulfilling. Because island life is hard. You can only live for so long on cocounts and weed salad. And Tom Hanks made spear-fishing look easy.
The recent arrivals marvel at my survival skills, but I dare not show them the boat I am building. I’m not worried about anyone taking it for a spin — It’s just easier to deal with the rest of the lost if you don’t remind them how lost they are. They just get angry at you.
Building a boat isn’t easy — and it’s even harder when you have to do it in quiet.
The key is concentrating on the boat. You can’t look out at the waves, because there’s another fear that grips you. The fear your boat somehow won’t handle those waves. The fear you’ll find little to eat and less to drink out there than you’ve got right here. The fear the others will laugh at you when you float back to shore, in your red shirt and white Gilligan hat.
I made up my mind that I was going, but hadn’t put a when on that plan.
The siren did that for me.
Now, I really was worried about my boat, because the siren called my name before I was ready. At least, before I thought I was ready. All those fears, all those insecurities, all those doubts… you know what the hardest part was?
Smacking the ship.
Because when you do, you have to give the craft a name. It becomes a relationship. It becomes personal. If it fails, you’ve failed.
Don’t ask me how, but I wound up smacking my ship anyway. And I launched. And I’m off. And I’m relieved. And I can’t thank the siren enough.
I’ve still got a little owing to do.
I’ve still got a little rowing to do.
I’ve still got a little growing to do.
But at least I’m off the island.
Tomorrow (Friday the 16th) is the fifth anniversary of my last day in television. I’ve never looked back, and time has done the broadcast industry no favors. Look for a piece up at Media Bullseye if you’re interested.
In the meantime, a couple of notes about connections. The Google Engine post got a lot of traffic, and while tracing those messages back I saw a familiar name on the Twitter timeline of a total stranger. Trent Armstrong worked for me back in the mid-90’s at the old Channel 33 in Tuscaloosa, and he is now the first person that I already knew that I “accidentally” discovered through a social network.
Also, my friend Ron Brown joined me on Facebook. He added a picture of his celebration after accepting a national Murrow Award for feature reporting.
Please go back and read my account of his Accidental Murrow. And pray that Ron’s wife doesn’t give him hell over the fact that I was his first Facebook friend, and she was his third.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Murrow Awards, social media, networking, Facebook, Twitter[/tags]
If you stare at the lines in the road, you’ll never see where you’re going.
While the Devil might be in the details, if you want to know where he’ll be you need to look for the pattern. Pattern-recognition is one of the trickiest pieces of programming, partially because we know very little about how our brains work, and partially because humans make it look so damned easy. Our brains are designed to spot and record patterns.
Sure, it takes a long time. Evenutally, enough memories gel to enable us to look back and assign confidence of some correlation (if not causation.)
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.
That won’t hold up against the very best prediction engines we have, but it got us down that path. You go back and examine what happened before an event to determine what contributed.
Meanwhile, 200,000 people died at the end of 2005 because no one made the correlation that a big underwater earthquake might pose a problem. There was no warning for the tourists who were trapped by the wall of water. There was a warning for the Indonesian natives who knew that a sudden and unexpected ebb tide was a sign of a huge wave coming in. Many of the animals knew it, too.
It always seems far simpler when you know what the trigger is, instead of drowning yourself in a myriad of probably inconsequential details.
This post is more straightforward than I wanted it to be. It was originally envisioned as a short story describing the greatest effort in the fictional history of programming. Only I am not so sure it is fictional. It is too possible to not be probably, and world domination is potentially at stake.
I rush this essay into publication because of a fractured discussion with Steve Rubel, who tracks all things technology. Google has announced it is shutting down several of its free webservices, and Rubel mentioned in passing that Google Reader might not survive the next round without showing some value.
Reader is an RSS feed reading application. You ‘subscribe’ to blogs and content that you like online, and Reader ‘delivers’ it to you. Instead of clicking links and folders and bookmarks, the Web you like comes to you in one quick and tidy place. You can also subscribe to feeds of news searches, or mix and match your own sources.
Google Reader offers a couple of very useful features. One, all the feeds I subscribe to are searchable using the Google indexing and algorithm. I don’t have to ‘file’ things in my Reader, I can always find them later. If I choose, I can add whatever tags and descriptors I deem relevant. Second, I can share links with people I know. Real-life friends, business acquaintances, or those I network with online. I actually get ‘feeds’ of what my network of people found interesting, and we can add notes to each other pointing out key facts or summaries.
What makes this interesting is Google’s role throughout. In the course of the content, Google plays several key roles. Not a monopoly, but it is a player in:
No one else is a significant-enough player in all these aspects of the Information Age to track what is said to whom, and when it happens.
If you’re Google, you have Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket: the map to the influencers. There’s a huge debate raging among the marketers and the public relations people and the politicos over just who has influence, and how you locate them.
Finding Influencers is important, because it allows you to target your message or your plea to only those people that really matter for a given function or moment. Those Influencers can change over time or given a different objective, but locating them is the key.
From the instant someone creates a video or a blog post, Google knows what is in it. (Again, there are other services, but Google gets enough of the video and blog business to make this scale.) Google also knows:
…and the cycle continues. From Soup to Nuts, Google can know which people start the online tremors that lead to popularity of content. ‘Viral’ is no longer a marketing mystery – Google has the data to find the epidemiology.
Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket wasn’t the prize itself – it was the step you had to clear to get to the prize.
Sure, Google could sell some of those results. It could offer up premium information to advertisers, or even offer direct targeted ads at the highest of most high Influencers. We’re not talking about the Pete Cashmores or Steve Rubels of the world – we want the people who are more likely to seed them with inspiration and information.
But even that isn’t the prize. Stay with me here.
Get several million people on Blogger, a large contingent of content producers. Get a couple of million more on Google Reader, and then sit back for about five years while they share data like no one’s business.
Except it is your business. You need to understand who the Nodes are, and how much time elapses between certain events. You need to learn how to look beyond the tiny pieces of data as individual bits, and instead look at the whole. Big picture, a bunch of water droplets becomes a cloud. And under certain atmospheric conditions, that cloud looks red.
Google isn’t going to drop Reader, because it needs us to keep feeding the data beast. It will take a good five years of collection (and maybe a couple of more concentrating on the data visualization to make it feasible, but isn’t that why Google hired all those engineers and algorithm people?)
Once you know what a ripple looks like, and the content of that ripple, you can track it. And you start to see the others. And eventually, you start to identify the ripples that preceded a discrete event instead of the ones that followed.
Google is building the world’s largest prediction engine. It’s now in a learning phase, and an early one at that. It’s building a new Vocabulary of Influence, not to sell us products but instead to tell the future. All you need is a series of similar events that you can compare, and look for correlating ripples that came before. Certain punctuated events would have no meaning, like outcomes of Super Bowls. But something like, say, a quarterly stock report, would be easy to parse.
It would be regular enough (and have a large enough data mine of its own) that you could put the most powerful computers to work just looking for the pattern. And as the owner of the ONLY data set that traces complete ripples of influence, there is no break in the chain to cloud the data.
Maybe the predictions will come with just a few hours notice, like a tsunami warning system. Maybe it will evolve into a longer-range forecasting tool for economics or finance. What could Larry and Sergey do with the Ginormous Google Gigawatt Crystal Ball? Other than promise us they Won’t Be Evil?
The truth is right there in your Google Reader, and the Devil is in your details. And that is why the High Holy Priests of Mountain View will never bring Reader to the sacrificial altar.
Let’s talk about identity for a little bit.
Do you know me? And if the answer is yes, let’s ask how you know me.
There are many degrees of knowledge, but when you get right down to it there are big cracks in the picture. Psychologically, we want to gloss over them because it’s uncomfortable to be with a stranger.
Enter John Goldman. John is about as off-the-grid as you can get. There are faint traces of him in my first high school yearbook: a picture here or there, and never any decent shot of his face. Some faculty members at Tuscaloosa County High School were quite worried when he didn’t show up for the 1984 graduation rehearsal. He never picked up his cap, gown, or any of his supplies.
John Goldman didn’t walk with his classmates. He couldn’t, because he was a creature of a total fabrication. Members of the yearbook staff made him out of whole cloth. (Full disclosure: I was not on the staff, but know the mastermind and those intimately involved.) It was a germ of a joke that sprouted legs, joined civic clubs, and failed to pick up its graduation paraphernalia. It was a deception and a conspiracy guided by an unusually light touch, and lasted longer than by rights it should if not for the discipline of those involved to keep the joke on the down-low.
It was identity theft, without an identity.
Which brings me to today.
I have several circles of friends in my Facebook. There is my high school crowd from Alabama. There’s my junior high crowd from Idaho (which has graciously granted me dual citizenship, if my alma mater once again forgets to invite me to a reunion.) There is a clique of former coworkers in Red Cross, my brothers and sisters in Kung Fu, and various communicators and marketers I’ve been privileged to connect with on various projects or to brainstorm. And there’s family.
These groups, these subtribes, are not created equal. Some know me as Ike, some know me as Isaac. Some have seen me cry, some have seen me bleed. Some have been over to my house for holidays, and some have been able to jump into a conversation with me as though 25 years had not flown by.
Some don’t know which foods I hate, nor which teams I root for, nor which movies I will never watch no matter the offered bounty. Some have no clue I grew up in Idaho, and many of them might have nominated me as least-likely to ever teach a martial art. It’s a good thing we’ve got profiles online to help us fill in the cracks, right?
Unfortunately, we’ve now got these online profiles that help other people fill in the cracks.
Case in point: I have two friends on Facebook that I have worked with in the past. I worked with them in very different capacities on stories and projects years ago. As it happens, they are both affiliated with the same Bible college. Which means now my “People You May Know” box is filled with people that they know, and there is an assumption that I do as well. In my case, this is merely an annoyance.
Second case: Half of the graduating class in Idaho went to a different junior high, so I really never knew them at all. Seeing people with 31 mutual friends might be a strong indication that this indeed is one of my classmates, and with so many women using married names it can be really difficult to keep up. I find myself asking some rather rude questions, just to ensure I’m not adding a complete stranger and granting access to my private information. (Not that there’s anything salacious or dangerous there, but you see where this is headed…)
Which got me to thinking: What if John Goldman started friending people from the Tuscaloosa County High class of 1984? How many would add him? After all, he is in the yearbook, right?
And how many would add him after three mutual friends showed up? What if it were five? 12? 21?
The vast majority of online theft is not hardcore math or data-hacking. It’s human hacking. It’s gaining human trust, and abusing that trust to trick us into handing over the keys. The numbers game of social networking has made it even easier to exploit, because now you don’t need to scam but a couple of people to see the rest start to tumble like dominos. The inherent peer pressure, combined with the desire to not admit that you might have rudely “forgotten” someone can be a powerful motivation toward a single click of the mouse.
As the threshold of “friendship” continues to degrade, mostly through the abuse and dilution of the term by social networks, we need to be smarter about how we connect. We now compile vast banks of data with little regard to who might see it. We pretend like we’re surrounded by a wall of “friends,” but increasingly there are cracks in that perimeter, the banks are breached.
And even if Willie Sutton didn’t really say it, the banks will be targets because that’s where the money is.
{{myquote|If you never have to revert to Plan B, you’re not reaching high enough.}}
Dave Dix, over on Facebook, asked me the following:
Ike, if you were writing a letter to your 25-year old self (you were in TV then? or still school?) — what advice would you dispense? Kung-Fu sayings, sound bites, and movie clips welcome, with big bonus points for anything that helps with personal epistemology.
So, here was my answer.
My name is Ike. I am you in the future. (Don’t be alarmed when the new boss asks you to change your name. I promise you won’t lose your identity. And it will make it easier to know your friends when they call.)
Boy, you’re in for some big surprises, and I’m not going to spoil them for you. Other than to tell you that you made it to at least 39-1/2, which statistically your arrogant math-brain already knew. (Don’t try anything stupid to test fate, though.)
Here’s my advice to you, young whipper-snapper: