I throughly enjoyed this video from Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, (via RSA) on how a networked view of the world is better suited to explain the complex relationships between things than the past “tree” view.
I feel a little vindicated as a person who is not very “T” shaped in the sense of skills or specialty. I’m much more of a polymath – knowing a little bit about many areas of knowledge – and perhaps that’s an asset, not what I’ve worried about being a negative thing.
After reading Andy Baio’s enlightening post about how to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to transcribe audio1, I’ve kept thinking back to the novelty of the service and tucked it away for further pondering.
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:
—-
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.
—-
I then provided two open text boxes for Turks to submit their description and any feedback they have.
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!
Photography has struggled to be considered a form of art since its inception. Technological advances have led to more accessible tools with enhanced capabilities for the everyman. It has evolved from being complicated and time-consuming to becoming an easy and popular medium consumed and, more importantly, created by many, many people. This existential argument of the validity of photography as an art form persists to this day and is most recently manifested in the numerous rantings of individuals over the validity and usefulness of the mobile app Instagram.
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.
—
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:
Recently I was asked to consult with someone developing a website for their small business. We discussed their goals, developed requirements and at the end settled on WordPress for the content management system. As the individual was developing the site they became familiar with the feature of plugins and asked what would be some essential ones to include in their site. I sat down and put this list together and I’d like to share it with you.
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.) 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’s just two of the many features of Jetpack.
Update: I can’t recommend Jetpack highly enough. It’s continued to become the most awesome plugin for WordPress that I’ve ever used. The just recently added a CSS editor that lets you customize your site design without modifying your theme, new comment capabilities (including login using Twitter or Facebook) and Retina support for images!
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 spend 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.
Update: Two other great plugins I’ve come across since writing this list:
Admin Quick Jump – From the horse’s mouth, “Admin Quick Jump is a very simple plugin that adds a drop down list to the admin edit-post area.” Very handy for moving between posts while editing. Here’s a little screenshot showing how simple it is.
Advanced Custom Fields – This one is definitely more on the geeky side of things (if that could be possible given the topic we’re discussing) but it’s pretty amazing. This plugin allows you to create super extensible custom fields that can contain any number of things. I friend of mine showed me how he’s using it for a site with staff profiles. Each element in the profile (position, title, and other bio information) can easily be edited in a custom field and populated into a formatted template. Easy for users to manage.
Two of the major talking points about Apple as a company and the products they create are their near CIA-level of secrecy and their unabashed predilection to create products that delight those who use them.
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.7 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.