Recently I’ve started a new job where my work is focused around the internal social collaboration² of work, enterprise search and how to identify strong influencers within the organization. This has led me to viewing and examining many personal profiles in our growing intranet.

I noticed that my profile on our internal workspace, written 6 months ago now, sounded a little naive and was not consistent with what I had actually been working on, nor was it in sync with my personal site, Quora, Facebook, etc.

Writing ‘About’ sections of profiles is hard for me. I’m not a man of much hubris and always feel a little silly writing about myself. Not to mention I often try out various new applications and re-create my profile in new ways each time, leading to hundreds of permutations.

That’s when I thought, “What if I were to ask someone else to write a brief description of me?” Then I realized that sounded far too narcissistic. But it did bring up the question, “What could someone find out about me, given only my name, location and access to the Internet?”

Using Mechanical Turk, I created a job (called a Human Intelligence Tasks or HiT) and asked the following:

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I hate filling out the “About Me” sections of social sites (including my own site). I always feel like I sound corny, I’m a terrible writer and I can never remember to keep it consistent across the various places where I’m asked to ‘describe yourself’. So I thought I would mix things up a bit.

How would you describe a person you’ve never met, given only the information publicly accessible on the Internet?

Using Google (or a search engine of your choice) find out about me and write a brief bio.

• My name is Chris Koerner – As far as I know, the only one that lives in St. Louis, MO, USA.
• That’s it, all the information I’m giving you.
• Please use clean language and be polite in what you write.
• Feel free to be funny and creative. The more unique your submission, the more likely I’ll accept it!
• Length isn’t super important, but to keep things fair I’d like a minimum of 300 words or 8-10 sentences.

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I then provided two open text boxes for Turks to submit their description and any feedback they have.

What the Hit looked like.

The results are quite surprising. The range in voice between each description, the information one person found and others did not and even the particular facts of my life that, through this unique lens, somehow come out a little off.

Here’s a link to the Google Doc with the all the results I accepted.³

Some choice quotes:

 ”… A great turn around happened in my life when I blessed with a baby child and the same year I graduated. I learned a lot about computers related to programing, server architecture and web designing in different working places or seminars. I see the new technology development in different perspective by empowering people in digital media with very user friendly tools…”

Well, that’s close.

“… I am 28 years old and have a wife named Clara and a 3 year old son named Spencer…”

That’s all inaccurate. Perhaps there’s some not-so-evil doppelgänger Chris out there?

“… He is a photographer, a movie buff (and reviewer), and a music lover. Most notably, he is an advisor to the world…”

A totally different voice in this one. I like that I’m “an advisor to the world”. I’m putting that on my resume.

“… I am lucky to be in the place I want to be: St. Louis, where I have lived all of my life and am lucky to have a wonderful wife and adorable daughter to keep me healthy and focused on all of the right things in the right time – the moment…”

That’s deep.

“… Did I ever excel on my newspaper route while in high school; having the opportunity to read the newspaper everyday, and converse with some of the regulars on my newspaper route, lead me on my path to journalism law and the legalities. Now I am on the other side. At age 34; even though I still have many questions to ask, I am ready to also answer them…”

What is this I don’t even.

“… If you are looking for Chris and you cannot find him, you can try looking at Vallarta Mexican restaurant in Wildwood or at the zoo with his family…”

I’ve been to that Mexican restaurant once. Out of all the information they could find they picked that?

Once again, you can read the rest, including the full versions I quoted above in this Google Doc.

The Stats – or how I would end up paying lower than minimum wage and feel bad about it.

I set the variables for accepting HiTs using Andy’s project as a template. I didn’t want to spend too much money on something that I wasn’t sure would work, so I limited myself to 10 accepted HiTs at $2.50 apiece. Adding in Amazon’s fee, this came out to a total of $27.50.

I was expecting about 30 minutes of work to pull together enough information for a few sentences. Using Andy’s advice I gave each Turk one hour to complete the task.

I received 13 submissions⁴ through Mechanical Turk, three of which I declined only because the submissions were either a direct copy and paste from my own About page, or gibberish.

In the end it took 4 days to gather submissions. The average time of completion was 24 minutes and 43 seconds with an effective hourly rate of $6.07.

Which, may I remind you, is far below the United States federal minimum wage of $7.25⁵. This was not intentional, nor is it entirely accurate. Turks can be working on multiple HiTs in parallel, thereby raising their individual hourly rate. I think $2.50 was rather high for a HiT, but given my lack of experience in this area I could be mistaken.

Tips for Turk Requesters

Be clear in what you’re asking. In my case I was asking for submissions, but wasn’t clear if I was paying for all legit attempts, or just those that I preferred. I was contacted by a few turks who were polite in asking questions about my acceptance policy.  All made a valid point – that rejections, even if it fit the instructions, still negatively impact Turks ratings.

I accepted 10 out of the 13 submissions. Those that didn’t meet the above description were asked to resubmit if they so chose.⁶

Turk Feedback

I allowed the Turks to provide feedback to me via the submission form. A few chose to do so. Here’s their responses.

“I hope you like my work. You are an interesting person and it was fun to put pieces of someones life together from snippets to form a web bio. Is this a secret web project, Chris? ”

This Turk was on to me! I wonder if they read my Tweet.

“This was an interesting assignment. Its positively disturbing how much info I was able to find.”

Disturbing indeed.

How are you perceived online?

At the university where I previously worked, part of the new student orientation was a brief message about how to handle yourself online. After that, the awareness on how to present yourself online was left up to the individual student.

Working in higher education it was frequently a point of discussion of how young people present themselves online. On occasion you’d hear about students (and often directly from students if you were friendly with them.) not getting a job or loosing face when potential employers or graduate schools would find information that didn’t reflect well on their character with a few simple Google searches.

I’ve always been intentional in what I put online. I put a lot of information out in the public space, but stay out of many topics and discussions that may be sensitive. I keep those for polite offline conversation.

This has been an interesting experiment in seeing how intentional or unintentional public information about one’s self could be used to provide a unique, and in this case slightly erratic, portrait of a person.

Narcissism & Laziness

My goal was not to cheaply create a well-written, accurate and descriptive bio of myself, but rather to better understand the public nature of the information we put out in the Internet. As the results show, even a serious attempt to have someone write about you would cover a large gamut in voice and quality. It should be noted that the Turks fulfilling this HiT were most likely attempting to spend just the right amount of time on a submission to get accepted. More time spent could create a deeper and more accurate profile of an individual.

Conclusion

I doubted this would actually work. It’s not the normal kind of thing you’d see Mechanical Turk being used for and I wasn’t sure that anyone would attempt to fulfill the request. Additionally, while I was certain I hadn’t put anything dangerous or harmful to myself online, I was a little hesitant to see what people would find. My wife thought that I was crazy. While that may be the case, the Turks didn’t say anything!

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¹As Andy notes in the comments of his other Turk related article, the name of the service is a reference to the fake chess-playing automaton from the late 18th century.

²Look at all those buzz words. I should go unsuck myself.

³Here’s a Google Spreadsheet with the full submission results exported from Amazon Turk.

⁴One person didn’t see the rule of having a good record as she was new. She was nice enough to actually email me her completed work

⁵Minimum Wage was $5.15 when I was 16 and got my first job.

⁶One person submitted two words, poorly spelled. Another wrote a bio about himself. Which was close and entertaining, but not what I had specified.

Instagram, for the uninitiated, is an application for your smart phone that allows you to take pictures, apply an optional filter to stylized the photo, and then share said photo with other people via Instagram’s own social network or sharing to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

There are a few curmudgeon who think that Instagram is useless or in some extreme cases ruining the art and profession of photography.

Anyone who’s ever tried to take a photograph with even a minuscule hint of creativity are artists. Framing a shot, choosing certain lenses, lens filters and post production all modify the reality of the thing being photographed.

Another thing about this progression of art (and by association, photography) is how prior works influence new works. I can take a picture of Yosemite just like Ansel Adams, but that’s only because his work came before mine. I could even use my much more technically sophisticated tools to duplicate the style of Adams – to evoke the same feelings. Does it make my photo art?

All art builds on prior art. Even if your purposefully attempting to be contrary to existing art or a particular style. Opposing that which came before it means you’re cognitively aware of its influence and history! No art exists in a vacuum and therefore the work of people using Instagram is just as valid as someone earning income, a professional, using his high-end Nikon D800 to capture a certain look or emotion with lens, lighting and Photoshop.

Instagram is art and the people using it are artists – with, or without, the filters.

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So what if I’m wrong? What if this entire essay is inaccurate in claiming that users of Instagram are artists and the resulting images, modified or not, are art?

If Instagram isnt art, then it’s just silly fun – a game. Relax. If you’re going to get upset over fun, then I’d love to hear you talk about how Scrabble is not writing, and is deserving of equal flack.

See Also:

• Why Instagram is Art
• Instagram is the best, Instagram is the worst

In no particular order, my favorite and most useful WordPress plugins.

Advanced Blogroll- For links to other sites or other online presence (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) you create links in what’s called a blogroll (The name is a holdover from the early days of WordPress.)y The default WordPress configuration displays them in alphabetical order. This plugin allows you to arrange them as you see fit. You can see how “Latest” comes before “Elsewhere” on the navigation to the right. ->

Jetpack – What once was a gathering of separate plugins is now a super kung-fu collection of some great features. Two of my favorite features are the Wordpress stats and After the Deadline. The stats gives you near real-time feedback on traffic to and from your site. Popular pages, keywords and links displayed automatically in your dashboard. After the Deadline is a super grammar, style and spell checker that uses artificial intelligence to make you sound more-than artificially intelligent. That’ just two of the many features of Jetpack.

Akismet - Comment spam blocking magic. Spammers target popular content management systems like WordPress in an attempt to trick site owners into allowing spammy comments. Akismet sits in the background and filters these fake comments without any interaction. According to my stats it’s blocked over 17,000 spam comments with a 99.87% accuracy over 6 years. Not too bad.

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is the most powerful web tracking tool out there. Coupled with WordPress and a good email campaign tool (like MailChimp) you can track your readership with great detail. I could hours just going over how useful good web metrics are!

WP Super Cache – This is just incase you suddenly get hit with a million visitors. Normally, WordPress dynamically generates each page and post which causes a lot of requests for information in the database and all the pictures and styles in  your theme. This plugin uses a complex set of rules to create a static version of your page, making the load on the server much less. There by allowing for many more visitors at the same time.

One last recommendation is not a WordPress plugin but a web service called if this then that. ifttt allows me to glue things I do online together. For example, when I post a photo to Instagram ifttt automatically creates a new post on my site and posts the picture. It can greatly help in automating posting to a lot of other web services, which allows you to spend more time writing content and growing your business than messing with tech stuff.

I hope this helps you firm up your WordPress site and please leave a comment if you have a suggestion of your own.

The secrecy part, in large, is described as a strategic way to have an advantage over other companies. Companies who would love to beat Apple to market with their knock offs interpretations. Secrecy prevents Acme Company skipping the months or years of development and research, in which Acme saves a ton of money and beats Apple to market with an, admittedly, mediocre product.

Apple is often heralded (and mocked) for its claims of delight and surprise. Upon its initial unveiling, Apple described the  iPad as being “magical”. Apple products continuously rank high on Consumer Reports and other customer satisfaction charts.

There’s another part to secrecy that I think ties into the idea of delighting someone. In our hyper connected age where sharing information is approaching diarrhetic levels, the idea of being surprised about anything is becoming rare. Running robots? Boring. Traveling to the depths of the ocean? Yawn.¹ Apple uses their secrecy to actually deliver the delight and surprise, not just predict and pontificate on what might happen. Most product launches are quickly followed by the product being available. Not a watered-down version of a prototype, but the actual device down to the silicon.

There’s something to be said for the emotional impact a surprise party has over one that has been known about for months. Don’t get me wrong, a good party is still a good party, but a good party is overshadowed by a good surprise party.

Part of the secrecy that Apple holds helps to heighten the delight. For many people, getting an Apple device at launch is an experience. Ordering as soon as humanly possible or standing in line on launch day, you know that your new Apple device literally came straight to your home mere hours after being minted. You didn’t have weeks to prepare for its arrival. Half your fiends didn’t even know a new device was being released. That’s how new it is. Only Apple can deliver on that delight and experience and largely because of their secrecy.

Nintendo, Sony, Intel, Microsoft and many other consumer tech companies share their product roadmaps months, if not years ahead of time. There’s still delight, but it’s similar to reading the Plot to a movie on Wikipedia before watching it. You might still enjoy the film, but you kinda know what to expect. Apple could do the same, but if they were to do so I think it’s no secret that we’re so jaded that no one would be delighted or surprised.

¹I’m being a little tounge-in-cheek-in-cheek here. I, in fact, find these examples to be quite awe-inspiring.

From Apple,

“When you use earphones or a headset, Siri reads back text messages and email messages that you’ve dictated before you send them, and it reads back the subjects of reminders before you create them. This is especially helpful when you’re driving and can’t see the iPhone 4S screen.”

I wish this option was the default behavior. There have been numerous times when I’m walking between buildings or to the car and want to send a note without looking at the screen and I’m not wearing headphones.

¹In my case my phone was plugged into the aux jack in my car.

Like most citizens of the Internet, I’m a heavy reader. RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Draw Something (Wait, does that count?) I’m a reader of many personal blogs of people I find to be interesting and who have good things to say about the work they do. The simple act of consuming the thoughts and ideas from people whom I respect and admire acts as a fuel to create and share the things that I have in my own world.

I know I’m no Gruber or Kottke, but that’s OK. I’m not writing for them or anyone else on the Internet. I write for myself and my close friends and family.¹

Seth Godin has this to say about blogging, “what matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.” in such that the mere act of putting words to paper (or screen) is why you should write. It helps you form your thoughts around an idea or concept that empower you when conversing with others around the topic.

Writing for me is also about the enjoyment of life, the understanding of my short trip here on Earth and how lucky I am to be working in a profession that allows for such excitement and intrigue. I write because I love life and work and all the other wonderful experiences of being human.

Even if you don’t love to write, you do love something and there’s no better way to show that you love something than to tell the world about it. So write.

¹OK, maybe a few other people who float by via some random Google search. I like to help people.

We’re technologists, the antithesis of the marketing person ,right? A large majority of folks working in corporate IT have more technical backgrounds which, I think, lends itself to the kind of person that either 1) doesn’t value marketing or 2) considers it a ‘soft’ skill set that 3) they often don’t feel comfortable doing.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the past paints IT folks as not being the best people persons. Now that is changing thankfully, in large part to the influx of young startups and entrepreneurs in the tech sector – people who were born into a part of the culture of sharing, collaborating and the Internet.

The “If we build it, they will come.” mentality does not work for any IT initiative. The result is adoption lacks, people don’t see the value to spending the time on ‘yet another thing’ and leadership often doesn’t put their full weight into it.

Marketing needs to be first, if we’re to operate like a business and need to be in the black.² I think it’s tantamount that we invest in clearer communication and a little panache when talking to people about the stuff we’re working on. The value we bring as it were.

I keep hearing about this idea of commercialization of IT services as being something big shops are looking at, and while I’m not sure I buy it, let’s assume it pans out. Well, in order to get people to buy in to the service you offer you have to be able to sell them on the idea that choosing your company is a wise idea. Same thing applies to our customers – our fellow co-workers. I think some people have the idea that “we’re the IT department, we have a captive audience. They  have to deal with us.”

As we know, consummerizaiton, cheap cloud solutions and BYO movements prove that wrong. In order for IT to survive as a valued and important part of the business of any organization – regardless of size – it’s important to leverage the marketing of our services to remain relevant.

As Seth Godin puts it, “Successful people have discovered how to be better at self marketing.” the same applies to successful IT organizations.

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¹Not to say this only happens in IT, other business functions are just as bad. The beef I have with IT is that I work it in professionally and feel that IT is ingrained in almost every other part of the business in some capacity.

²As a mental construct, not necessarily a literal one. Trying to get an IT shop to operate in break even or profitable revenue is like trying to figure out how to get a ROI on lightbulbs. Technology is another cost of doing business.

As someone who’s played the earlier games, the controls take some getting use to. Even the option to use ‘classic’ controls isn’t an exact 1 to 1 to the layout of Tricky or SSX 3.³ The true classic controls would let you use the digital d-pad to pre-wind your flips and spins ahead of a jump. Holding right on the d-pad would lock your character in as you approached a jump. In order to maximize the effect, you’d also hold down on the jump button (X on the PS2/3) as you approach.

In SSX, the default controls heavily leverage the analog sticks, which I’m sure seemed like a good idea on paper. Left for spin/flips when in the air, left and right movement on the ground. In practice, it becomes rather frustrating. For movement you’d want to have the gradient of control analog gives you, but for precise input, such as tricks, it seems a little too loose and muted.

Another small change that is related is the pre-wind for jumps, spins and flips. In the previous games you’d have to line-up ahead of a approaching jump many seconds before you actually reached the apex of the ramp. In SSX the pre wind is not as necessary and if you try to pre-wind too soon your character will veer off course 9 times out of 10.

For an old-timer to the series I would love to just have my digital d-pad, face and shoulder buttons for tricks, spins, boost and jumps. Let me use the left analog for steering and leave the right analog out of it.

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My second biggest beef beyond the controls (which I hope I can adapt to over time) would be the addition of the Deadly Descents.

From what I understand, during development the title was “SSX: Deadly Descents” and the element of ‘deadly’ was to be a prime focus for the game. There were to be these super harsh tracks with all sorts of obstacles. They changed the title during development and the ‘deadly descents’ became 8 boss peaks, each with a kind of hokey and unnecessary gimmick along with taxing and honestly un-fun tracks. These 8 peeks, all required to enjoy the single-player ‘story’⁴ detract what the game is about. Undoubtably EA spend lots of money on these tracks and as they progressed away from “Deadly Descents” to just SSX they couldn’t just cut them. I wish they would have.

One deadly descent has you press an additional button every few seconds in order to keep oxygen flowing to your player. Doing this on some of the more tame tracks would prove an additional challenge. Doing it on the unforgiving and frustrating “Deadly Descents” proves to be maddening. These tracks are not SSX tracks. It’s not easy to create a solid line downhill during a race, or to create a series of never-ending tricks in trick events. It’s sadistic when you add in the super dark tracks that need headlamps or wingsuits to glide like a flying squirrel.

To compound things, instead of having a reset button to reorient your character in the occurrence of falling off the track (which you will do often as these tracks have more blind spots than an 18 wheeler) you have the ability to rewind time. This time rewind feature has multiple penalties rendering it totally useless and just as frustrating as crashing. First you rewind time, but your opponents continue on unabated. Second, you can rewind, but will break whatever combo you had going. Third, the severity of the slope in most tracks will have you rewinding numerous times, compounding the existing two penalties. In most cases it’s better/easier to just restart the race from the beginning.

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Another design decision is the absence of synchronous or traditional multiplayer. No jumping on Xbox Live to play head-to-head against your friends – much less any form of local multiplayer.⁵ All multiplayer features amount to racing ghosts and best times of other people. It’s not all doom and gloom with the multiplier. There’s a very primal competitiveness to besting your friends times and scores, but in 2012 I would think generic old multiplayer would be a given. Like windshield wipers.

The other hokey aspect of multi-player (and single player as well, the line is blurred as far as levels and unlocks are concerned) is the progression mechanism for unlocking new equipment. New boards and suits appear randomly in the store upon each visit, and even with minor loading times, it becomes tedious to determine if what you’re buying is any better than what you have. To add the illusion of customization, outfits for your characters offer nothing more than palette swaps. None of which appear that appealing and none that impact gameplay.

The unlocks are a little Zyngafied as well. You unlock stuff by earning gold and the crap you unlock is random, so you can’t save up to buy cool gear, you just have to get lucky in the store with random stock.

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That said, I do like it. It’s not as good as 3, most of the tracks are either too frustrating to be enjoyable or to bland to be memorable as in Tricky and SSX 3. As a long-time fan it’s a solid game and so close to it’s predecessors that I can taste it.

It’s apparent that there’s an influence from the Call of Duty generation to make games more gritty, dark or realistic, but SSX is the last game where this makes any sense. This is a series that has been all about being over the top with crazy characters, crazy tricks and crazy tracks. None of which exist in this game. Well maybe the tricks. Barely.⁶

It’s SSX in HD, it could be better, and I hope they make another with some lessons learned.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/ssx

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¹Which is the second in the series and to some the best of the series.

²My personal favorite was, and still is, SSX 3. Tight controls, logical level progression and some of my favorite tracks.

³Which is weird. Why call something classic when it’s not. Psudo-classic would be more appropriate.

⁴The story is less believable than the idea of people jumping out of helicopters to snowboard down the side of Mt. Everest rocking out to Foster the People.

⁵An unfortunate trend that continues. Sigh.

⁶I love grinding on rails as much as the next guy, but in SSX there is no need to balance while grinding and there are rails freaking everywhere.

I’m not sure, but it looks like I was running a 32bit version of Adium and the update pushed me into 64bit territory. I’m totally fine with that, but the SIPE plugin was 32bit.

This morning I found this ticket in which some intrepid individual posts a complied 64bit version for our enjoyment.

Uninstall the old via the Adium Xtras Manager (From the Adium menu) and double-click the new plugin contained in the aforementioned .zip file. Voila, back to chatting on the corporate Microsoft Communicator/Lync network.

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There been this idea floating around that computers should have scalable modes. An “easy” or beginners mode for people new to the environment. As their skills and comforts develop the software would somehow adjust to open new interfaces like advanced menus or shortcuts.

Well, this isn’t coming to fruition. It’s nearly impossible to predict and implement. But you know what is close? Familiarity and simplicity – both things OS X has been trying for years to do and (In my humble opinion) iOS excels at.

As for the worry that Apple devices will become nerfed consumption machines where no one can produce anything of value (the written word, art, programs) is a bit dramatic. Things in life are rarely black and white.

As someone who could be considered a power user, I’m not in the least bit worried. The command line is still there, a plethora of 3rd-party apps that aren’t “dumbed down” still (and will continue to) exist and frankly most of the design decisions have been positive for users of all types. (Unified conventions, consistent app names, gestures, etc.)

iOS-ification sounds scary because certain mindsets see that as a negative thing. What isn’t being discussed or recognized is the judicial use of iOS ideas. If Apple wanted to make OS X just like iOS they could in a second. They chose however, to select the best ideas and are starting to integrate them across their product line. No longer is the iOS devices over here and the OS X devices over there similar in little ways, but in big ways.