Lazy Bastards
How we read online.By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 1:00 PM ET
You're probably going to read this.
It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.
To really get your attention, I should write like this:
Bulleted list
Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
Short sentence fragments
Explanatory subheads
No puns
Did I mention lists?
What Is This Article About?For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?
It's a Jungle Out ThereThat's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)
Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.
Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)
Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.
Screens vs. PaperWhat about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?
When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.
The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:
Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
Minimize reflections.
Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
Avoid MySpace.
Back to the JungleNielsen's apt description of the online reader: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone.
And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer:
One idea per paragraph
Half the word count of "conventional writing"! (Ouch!)
Other stuff along these lines
Nielsen often sounds like a cross between E.B. White and the Terminator. Here's his advice in a column titled "Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy": "A good editor should be able to cut 40 percent of the word count while removing only 30 percent of an article's value. After all, the cuts should target the least valuable information."
[Ed. Note: Fascinating asides about the writer's voice, idiosyncrasies, and fragile ego were cut here.]
He's RightI kid about Nielsen, but he's very sensible. We're active participants on the Web, looking for information and diversion. It's natural that people prefer short articles. As Nielsen states, motivated readers who want to know everything about a subject (i.e., parents trying to get their kid into a New York preschool) will read long treatises with semicolons, but the rest of us are snacking. His advice: Embrace hypertext. Keep things short for the masses, but offer links for the Type A's.
No Blogs, ThoughNielsen may be ruthless about brevity, but he doesn't advocate blogging. Here's his logic: "Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easier to write. But they don't build sustainable value."
That's a debatable point. My experience has been that a thoughtful blogger who tags his posts can cover a subject well. But Nielsen's idea is that people will read (and maybe even pay) for expertise that they can't find anywhere else. If you want to beat the Internet, you're not going to do it by blogging (since even OK thinkers occasionally write a great blog post) but by offering a comprehensive take on a subject (thus saving the reader time from searching many sites) and supplying original thinking (offering trusted insight that cannot be easily duplicated by the nonexpert).
Like a lot of what Nielsen says, this is both obvious and thoughtful.
Ludic ReadingNielsen focuses on how to hold people's attention to convey information. He's not overly concerned with pleasure reading.
Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading." Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:
When we like a text, we read more slowly.
When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.
Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.
I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.
Final Unnecessary ThoughtWe'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."
Moby Dick has become a spa.
Slate is Grand Central Station.
OK, you may leave now.Michael Agger is a Slate senior editor. You can reach him at slate.browser@gmail.com
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2193552/
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Here Come the Millennials By BOB HERBERT
Here Come the Millennials By BOB HERBERT
An important aspect of the presidential race so far has been the generational divide, with Barack Obama doing very well with younger voters and Hillary Clinton drawing strong support from those who are older. A similar split can be expected in a general election race between Senator Obama and John McCain.
However the election ultimately turns out, the Obama campaign has tapped into a constituency that holds powerful implications for the future of American politics. The youngest of these voters, those ranging in age from roughly the late teens to the early 30s, are part of the so-called millennial generation.
This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.
A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.
We know that the generation immediately preceding the Millennials is struggling. Men who are now in their 30s, the prime age for raising a family, earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age. In 1974, the median income for men in their 30s (using today’s inflation-adjusted dollars) was about $40,000. The figure for men in their 30s now is $35,000.
It’s not hard to understand why surveys show that overwhelming percentages of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The American dream is on life support. Polls show that dwindling numbers of Americans (in some cases as few as a third of all respondents) believe their children will end up better off than they are.
The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.
According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”
The Demos study pointed to the very difficult employment environment confronting young adults. Fewer jobs offer the benefits of paid vacations, health coverage or pensions. And moving up the employment ladder is much harder.
As the study noted, “The well-paying middle-management jobs that characterized the work force up to the late-1970s have been eviscerated.”
The longer-term outlook is depressing.
Except for the expected continuing demand for registered nurses, the occupations projected to add the most jobs over the next several years do not offer much in the way of pay, benefits or career advancement. Demos listed the top five occupations in terms of anticipated job growth: registered nurses, retail sales, customer service reps, food preparers and office clerks.
Often saddled with debt, and with their job prospects gloomy, young Americans feel their government ought to be doing more to enhance their prospects. They want increased investments in education, health care and initiatives aimed at expanding the economy and fostering the growth of good jobs.
The American Progress study found that Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any other age group over the past 30 years. By huge percentages, they want improvements in health coverage and support for education, even if it means increases in taxes.
The landscape is changing before our eyes. Younger voters struggling with the enormous costs of a college education, or trying to raise families in a bleak employment environment, or using their credit cards to cover everyday expenses like food or energy costs are not much interested in hearing that the government to which they pay taxes can do little or nothing to help them.
Whether young Americans can shift the balance of the presidential election is an open question. But there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power.
An important aspect of the presidential race so far has been the generational divide, with Barack Obama doing very well with younger voters and Hillary Clinton drawing strong support from those who are older. A similar split can be expected in a general election race between Senator Obama and John McCain.
However the election ultimately turns out, the Obama campaign has tapped into a constituency that holds powerful implications for the future of American politics. The youngest of these voters, those ranging in age from roughly the late teens to the early 30s, are part of the so-called millennial generation.
This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.
A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.
We know that the generation immediately preceding the Millennials is struggling. Men who are now in their 30s, the prime age for raising a family, earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age. In 1974, the median income for men in their 30s (using today’s inflation-adjusted dollars) was about $40,000. The figure for men in their 30s now is $35,000.
It’s not hard to understand why surveys show that overwhelming percentages of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The American dream is on life support. Polls show that dwindling numbers of Americans (in some cases as few as a third of all respondents) believe their children will end up better off than they are.
The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.
According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”
The Demos study pointed to the very difficult employment environment confronting young adults. Fewer jobs offer the benefits of paid vacations, health coverage or pensions. And moving up the employment ladder is much harder.
As the study noted, “The well-paying middle-management jobs that characterized the work force up to the late-1970s have been eviscerated.”
The longer-term outlook is depressing.
Except for the expected continuing demand for registered nurses, the occupations projected to add the most jobs over the next several years do not offer much in the way of pay, benefits or career advancement. Demos listed the top five occupations in terms of anticipated job growth: registered nurses, retail sales, customer service reps, food preparers and office clerks.
Often saddled with debt, and with their job prospects gloomy, young Americans feel their government ought to be doing more to enhance their prospects. They want increased investments in education, health care and initiatives aimed at expanding the economy and fostering the growth of good jobs.
The American Progress study found that Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any other age group over the past 30 years. By huge percentages, they want improvements in health coverage and support for education, even if it means increases in taxes.
The landscape is changing before our eyes. Younger voters struggling with the enormous costs of a college education, or trying to raise families in a bleak employment environment, or using their credit cards to cover everyday expenses like food or energy costs are not much interested in hearing that the government to which they pay taxes can do little or nothing to help them.
Whether young Americans can shift the balance of the presidential election is an open question. But there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
April 17, 2008
Basics
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
THE first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com Web site that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad. “I thought I needed to have a stiff drink for the end of my career,” she said.
The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.
Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their Web site.”
Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.
What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.
The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Ms. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”
She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.
Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press (www.picturiapress.com), says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the color, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”
One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.
“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Ms. Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”
Scrapbookers have long been haunting sites that sell or give away digital designs, templates and illustrations. The book creators find them useful as well. Some of the most popular are theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some offer free samples while charging for more elaborate versions. Digitalfreebies.com, for instance, distributes a number of free files each Friday while charging $24.95 a year for access to the archives of past releases.
Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.
Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.
Much of the material can only be described as artsy-craftsy and might not work as well for a self-published book on Bauhaus architecture. One set selling for $2.50 comes with images of the alphabet as if it were cut out of felt and sewn on top of red felt apples. Another set selling for $3.99 includes silhouettes of leafless tree branches and spooky birds, “just in time for Halloween.”
A buyer can take these 300-dots-per-inch images and mix them together with their own images or words, cutting and pasting digital versions much as someone would cut and paste actual scraps of fabric and paper.
“What’s popular is creating scrapbook pages that look like they were done with paper,” Ms. Pertiet said. “They get the effects of regular scrapbooking with no mess, no clean-up, no running out of the letter E. They can reuse them over and over.”
Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.
There are also a number of crossover tools that straddle the line between printed works and multimedia presentations. Smilebox.com, for instance, specializes in scrapbooks and photo albums that can be sent by e-mail or printed on paper. Basic templates are free, but the company also licenses premium versions from professional artists. Customers can either purchase a single license or join Club Smilebox, a monthly all-inclusive subscription that costs $4.99 a month.
Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their Web sites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.
Even with those do-it-yourself tools, the services of a professional might be needed. And they can also be found on sites like www.blurb.com/blurb_nation or www.lulu.com/budgetbookdesign. Many have their clients’ work on display. Editors who make simple grammatical corrections start at around $300 while more thorough editing and rewriting can cost more than $750 and up. Simple formatting and cover design can begin at $200. Prices vary widely depending upon the designer and the amount of time that a project might require, but it’s not unusual to hear of projects that cost more than $5,000.
Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”
Sorry, but they don’t help you find an agent or a publisher.
Basics
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
THE first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com Web site that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad. “I thought I needed to have a stiff drink for the end of my career,” she said.
The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.
Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their Web site.”
Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.
What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.
The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Ms. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”
She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.
Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press (www.picturiapress.com), says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the color, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”
One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.
“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Ms. Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”
Scrapbookers have long been haunting sites that sell or give away digital designs, templates and illustrations. The book creators find them useful as well. Some of the most popular are theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some offer free samples while charging for more elaborate versions. Digitalfreebies.com, for instance, distributes a number of free files each Friday while charging $24.95 a year for access to the archives of past releases.
Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.
Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.
Much of the material can only be described as artsy-craftsy and might not work as well for a self-published book on Bauhaus architecture. One set selling for $2.50 comes with images of the alphabet as if it were cut out of felt and sewn on top of red felt apples. Another set selling for $3.99 includes silhouettes of leafless tree branches and spooky birds, “just in time for Halloween.”
A buyer can take these 300-dots-per-inch images and mix them together with their own images or words, cutting and pasting digital versions much as someone would cut and paste actual scraps of fabric and paper.
“What’s popular is creating scrapbook pages that look like they were done with paper,” Ms. Pertiet said. “They get the effects of regular scrapbooking with no mess, no clean-up, no running out of the letter E. They can reuse them over and over.”
Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.
There are also a number of crossover tools that straddle the line between printed works and multimedia presentations. Smilebox.com, for instance, specializes in scrapbooks and photo albums that can be sent by e-mail or printed on paper. Basic templates are free, but the company also licenses premium versions from professional artists. Customers can either purchase a single license or join Club Smilebox, a monthly all-inclusive subscription that costs $4.99 a month.
Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their Web sites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.
Even with those do-it-yourself tools, the services of a professional might be needed. And they can also be found on sites like www.blurb.com/blurb_nation or www.lulu.com/budgetbookdesign. Many have their clients’ work on display. Editors who make simple grammatical corrections start at around $300 while more thorough editing and rewriting can cost more than $750 and up. Simple formatting and cover design can begin at $200. Prices vary widely depending upon the designer and the amount of time that a project might require, but it’s not unusual to hear of projects that cost more than $5,000.
Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”
Sorry, but they don’t help you find an agent or a publisher.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office By LAURIE J. FLYNN
April 9, 2008
MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office By LAURIE J. FLYNN
AS online social networking weaves itself more extensively into the fabric of everyday life, a new class of technology vendors has set out to make the social Web relevant in the workplace, too.
These companies, with names like InsideView and Genius, seek to integrate broad Internet searching with social networking and business intelligence software to give workers access to interrelated pools of information.
“There’s a value in who knows whom that companies are trying to unlock,” said Antony Brydon, co-founder of Visible Path, a social networking company acquired by Hoover’s, a publishing and market intelligence company, in January.
Despite the huge popularity of networks like MySpace and Facebook, they have had a slow start in the business world, where I.T. managers and executives remain leery of them. But that is starting to change as the technology is becoming more integrated into corporate software applications.
“The enterprise segment is trailing the others significantly,” Mr. Brydon said. “But it’s getting traction like never before.”
These days, more companies are starting to appreciate the potential benefits of social networking programs like Visible Path, as well as communications programs, like SelectMinds, that put workers, clients and others in touch with one another. “Social networking solves a lot of problems in the enterprise,” Mr. Brydon said. It can, for example, relieve overburdened corporate e-mail systems by moving much of the group communications to another realm.
As social networking technology has become a more familiar part of the landscape at many companies, it has brought a new buzzword: “socialprise,” referring to the mash-up of social networking features and standard enterprise computing applications.
“In its basic form, companies using social networking are trying to help employees put a face on the other people in the firm,” Mr. Brydon said.
Visible Path is a sort of corporate version of LinkedIn, the popular networking tool that maps the connections among people, providing them with a view of who knows whom among their contacts. Visible Path performs a similar function for the corporate world by working with the existing software infrastructure, giving employees in a company a map of their contacts and their contacts’ relationships. Dun & Bradstreet has used the technology to add relationship mapping to its Hoover’s online catalogs of corporate and executive information.
Further movement of social networking into business appears inevitable. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, among others, are increasingly adding social networking features to their corporate software applications.
Late last year, Oracle announced an on-demand version of its sales-automation software, CRM On Demand, that includes social networking features similar to those found in MySpace or Facebook, like the ability to create and join groups through its Sticky Notes and Message Center functions. Likewise, Microsoft is adding social networking to its SharePoint program, a Microsoft Office tool for letting groups work together. And just last month, Cisco Systems announced it was buying Tribe.net, a small social-networking site that will allow it to help clients bring their customers together online.
Today the battle lines in corporate social media are being drawn between established technology companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, social media companies like Facebook and MySpace, and start-ups focused from the beginning on business. Corporations are eager to find out the sources of more of these applications — and when they are going to arrive. For them, the true “killer app” remains to be seen.
“It’s an open question who’s going to win this battle,” Mr. Brydon said. “As a whole, the question the Fortune 500 is asking is where is the Facebook for the Fortune 500 that can do for us what Facebook and MySpace have done for consumers?”
Some businesses have adopted social networking to better identify job candidates, in part by helping them maintain relationships with former employees who could serve as an informal recruiting network. SelectMinds works with a company’s enterprise software to create an electronic water cooler where former employees and managers can keep in touch.
“Companies are looking at the knowledge loss and wondering if they can do something to retain it better,” said Mike Gotta, principal analyst with the Burton Group.
Social networking is also finding its way into the sales department, as something of an automated prospecting tool. Programs like InsideView’s SalesView help sales teams identify leads and target customers by scouring more than 20,000 information sources, from the most popular social-networking sites to job boards, blogs and news sites.
For example, a salesman for a financial services company might use SalesView to get information on a prospective client, from her job history and education to her hobbies and favorite restaurants. “The guys who are using this information think of it as a competitive advantage,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer at InsideView, based in Foster City, Calif. On the other hand, there is what Schulman calls the “creepy factor” behind the ease with which companies could use this new class of programs to peruse personal information.
For the past year, Joe Busateri has been looking for a better way to tap into the collective intelligence of his company, MasterCard. Mr. Busateri, a senior business leader in the Global Technology and Operations business unit, has turned to social networking technology to create a system to get employees talking, brainstorming and cooperating across departments.
“The goal is to try to stimulate innovation, to share information and collect ideas,” he said. He has established blogs and wikis, including a site called Priceless Ideas, where employees can broadcast their latest inspiration.
After spending the past few years snubbing the social networking craze as a time-wasting hobby for teenagers (more than 11 percent of online time is spent on MySpace, according to a new study by Compete, a Web analysis company), even the largest companies are beginning to see value in using Internet technology to foster employee communications. But that’s not to say that all enterprises are ready to embrace social networking.
For some corporate managers, the prospect of investing in something that has long been seen as consumer technology is nerve-racking, given the hard economic lessons of the Internet era. For others, promoting unmoderated communications among employees and customers is scary. And then there’s the notion that social networking’s potential to waste employees’ time might outweigh its benefits.
“A lot of companies had been looking at social networking the same way they were looking at the Internet 15 years ago,” said Denis Pombriant, a consultant and technology analyst at Beagle Research Group. “They saw that the Internet could be useful, but in the meantime a lot of investment dollars went up in smoke.”
MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office By LAURIE J. FLYNN
AS online social networking weaves itself more extensively into the fabric of everyday life, a new class of technology vendors has set out to make the social Web relevant in the workplace, too.
These companies, with names like InsideView and Genius, seek to integrate broad Internet searching with social networking and business intelligence software to give workers access to interrelated pools of information.
“There’s a value in who knows whom that companies are trying to unlock,” said Antony Brydon, co-founder of Visible Path, a social networking company acquired by Hoover’s, a publishing and market intelligence company, in January.
Despite the huge popularity of networks like MySpace and Facebook, they have had a slow start in the business world, where I.T. managers and executives remain leery of them. But that is starting to change as the technology is becoming more integrated into corporate software applications.
“The enterprise segment is trailing the others significantly,” Mr. Brydon said. “But it’s getting traction like never before.”
These days, more companies are starting to appreciate the potential benefits of social networking programs like Visible Path, as well as communications programs, like SelectMinds, that put workers, clients and others in touch with one another. “Social networking solves a lot of problems in the enterprise,” Mr. Brydon said. It can, for example, relieve overburdened corporate e-mail systems by moving much of the group communications to another realm.
As social networking technology has become a more familiar part of the landscape at many companies, it has brought a new buzzword: “socialprise,” referring to the mash-up of social networking features and standard enterprise computing applications.
“In its basic form, companies using social networking are trying to help employees put a face on the other people in the firm,” Mr. Brydon said.
Visible Path is a sort of corporate version of LinkedIn, the popular networking tool that maps the connections among people, providing them with a view of who knows whom among their contacts. Visible Path performs a similar function for the corporate world by working with the existing software infrastructure, giving employees in a company a map of their contacts and their contacts’ relationships. Dun & Bradstreet has used the technology to add relationship mapping to its Hoover’s online catalogs of corporate and executive information.
Further movement of social networking into business appears inevitable. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, among others, are increasingly adding social networking features to their corporate software applications.
Late last year, Oracle announced an on-demand version of its sales-automation software, CRM On Demand, that includes social networking features similar to those found in MySpace or Facebook, like the ability to create and join groups through its Sticky Notes and Message Center functions. Likewise, Microsoft is adding social networking to its SharePoint program, a Microsoft Office tool for letting groups work together. And just last month, Cisco Systems announced it was buying Tribe.net, a small social-networking site that will allow it to help clients bring their customers together online.
Today the battle lines in corporate social media are being drawn between established technology companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, social media companies like Facebook and MySpace, and start-ups focused from the beginning on business. Corporations are eager to find out the sources of more of these applications — and when they are going to arrive. For them, the true “killer app” remains to be seen.
“It’s an open question who’s going to win this battle,” Mr. Brydon said. “As a whole, the question the Fortune 500 is asking is where is the Facebook for the Fortune 500 that can do for us what Facebook and MySpace have done for consumers?”
Some businesses have adopted social networking to better identify job candidates, in part by helping them maintain relationships with former employees who could serve as an informal recruiting network. SelectMinds works with a company’s enterprise software to create an electronic water cooler where former employees and managers can keep in touch.
“Companies are looking at the knowledge loss and wondering if they can do something to retain it better,” said Mike Gotta, principal analyst with the Burton Group.
Social networking is also finding its way into the sales department, as something of an automated prospecting tool. Programs like InsideView’s SalesView help sales teams identify leads and target customers by scouring more than 20,000 information sources, from the most popular social-networking sites to job boards, blogs and news sites.
For example, a salesman for a financial services company might use SalesView to get information on a prospective client, from her job history and education to her hobbies and favorite restaurants. “The guys who are using this information think of it as a competitive advantage,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer at InsideView, based in Foster City, Calif. On the other hand, there is what Schulman calls the “creepy factor” behind the ease with which companies could use this new class of programs to peruse personal information.
For the past year, Joe Busateri has been looking for a better way to tap into the collective intelligence of his company, MasterCard. Mr. Busateri, a senior business leader in the Global Technology and Operations business unit, has turned to social networking technology to create a system to get employees talking, brainstorming and cooperating across departments.
“The goal is to try to stimulate innovation, to share information and collect ideas,” he said. He has established blogs and wikis, including a site called Priceless Ideas, where employees can broadcast their latest inspiration.
After spending the past few years snubbing the social networking craze as a time-wasting hobby for teenagers (more than 11 percent of online time is spent on MySpace, according to a new study by Compete, a Web analysis company), even the largest companies are beginning to see value in using Internet technology to foster employee communications. But that’s not to say that all enterprises are ready to embrace social networking.
For some corporate managers, the prospect of investing in something that has long been seen as consumer technology is nerve-racking, given the hard economic lessons of the Internet era. For others, promoting unmoderated communications among employees and customers is scary. And then there’s the notion that social networking’s potential to waste employees’ time might outweigh its benefits.
“A lot of companies had been looking at social networking the same way they were looking at the Internet 15 years ago,” said Denis Pombriant, a consultant and technology analyst at Beagle Research Group. “They saw that the Internet could be useful, but in the meantime a lot of investment dollars went up in smoke.”
Betting to Improve the Odds By STEVE LOHR
April 9, 2008
Betting to Improve the Odds By STEVE LOHR
CORPORATIONS live and die by ideas, and many enterprises have used Web-based technologies, like blogs, wikis and social networks, to gather thoughts and hasten their way into new services, products and cost-saving steps.
Now executives say they are harnessing a new Web tool, called prediction markets, to transform the idea pipelines inside their companies. Companies like the InterContinental Hotels Group, General Electric and Hewlett-Packard are using prediction markets to try to improve forecasting, reduce risk and accelerate innovation by tapping into the collective wisdom of the work force.
Like blogs and wikis, prediction markets can spur communication and collaboration within a company. Yet they add rigorous measurement to business forecasts, like estimating the sales of a new product or the chances that a project will be finished on time.
Corporate prediction markets work like this: Employees, and potentially outsiders, make their wagers over the Internet using virtual currency, betting anonymously. They bet on what they think will actually happen, not what they hope will happen or what the boss wants. The payoff for the most accurate players is typically a modest prize, cash or an iPod.
The early results are encouraging. “The potential is that prediction markets may be the thing that enables a big company to act more like a small, nimble company again,” said Jeffrey Severts, a vice president who oversees prediction markets at Best Buy, the electronics retailer.
The store chain has experimented with prediction markets on everything from demand for digital set-top boxes to store-opening dates. For example, Mr. Severts said that in the fall of 2006, the prices in a prediction market on whether a new store in Shanghai would open on time — in December 2006 — dropped sharply from $80 a share into the $40 to $50 range. Players made yes-no bets, and the virtual dollar drop reflected increasing doubt that the store would open on time.
Indeed, Best Buy’s first store in China opened late, in January 2007, but the warning signs from the prediction market helped prevent further slippage.
Mr. Severts noted that prices in a current prediction market — betting whether new offerings from its Geek Squad service will be introduced on time in June — are in the $90 range, an encouraging sign.
Best Buy plans to move beyond pilot projects in prediction markets to involve more workers throughout the company, starting next month. “It helps on two fronts, the speed and accuracy of information, so that management can move faster to deal with problems or exploit opportunities,” Mr. Severts said.
For years, public prediction markets have been used for politics, like the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade, where buyers and sellers bet on which candidate will win a particular race. And there are prediction markets where people place bets on news events (Hubdub, among others), video game sales (simExchange) or movie box-office receipts (Hollywood Stock Exchange).
These markets have often been more accurate than professional pollsters or market researchers. The idea is that the collected knowledge of many people, each with a different perspective, will almost surely be more accurate than an individual or small group or even experts. The concept has been championed by academic economists and was popularized by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds.”
Robin D. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, proposes a “futarchy,” a form of government enhanced by prediction markets. Voters would decide broad goals of national welfare, but betting in speculative markets would determine the policy steps to achieve those goals.
Few in the corporate world go that far. An important issue is whether prediction markets are mainly an innovative way to gather information from employees or a font of reliable answers. “It’s still an open question whether the wisdom of crowds is really wise,” said John Kao, a consultant and the author of “Innovation Nation.”
So far, most of the companies using prediction markets are doing so in limited ways, in one or two departments, testing the concept to see how it goes. But in the last few years, corporate experimentation has moved beyond high-tech businesses into other industries, including retailing, consumer packaged foods, hotels, health care, steelmaking and telecommunications.
Today, analysts say, there are dozens of major corporations testing these markets. The companies include Google, Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, General Mills, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, and Swisscom, a large telecommunications company.
At the same time, a network of software and service suppliers is developing to cater to corporate prediction markets. The vendors include H.P. and smaller specialist firms like Consensus Point and NewsFutures. The field is attracting start-ups as well.
In 2006, for example, Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny left Accenture, the consulting firm, to found Inkling Markets. Mat Fogarty had been director for financial planning at Electronic Arts, where he experimented with prediction markets, before founding Xpree last year.
“Prediction markets are starting to move into the mainstream, and they will really change the way companies are run in the future,” said Emile Servan-Schreiber, the chief executive of NewsFutures.
At InterContinental Hotels, Zubin Dowlaty, vice president for emerging technologies, decided to create an online market last fall to “harvest and prioritize ideas” from within the hotel’s 1,000-person technology staff. “We wanted to tap the creative class that may not be able to voice their ideas,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
With InterContinental’s prediction market, players were asked to submit ideas anonymously, with a description and the benefit to customers and company. The bettors were given virtual tokens, each receiving 10 green ones to be placed on the best ideas and three red for bad ideas.
There were no limits on the number of times bettors could change their wagers as new ideas came to market, and the market was open for four weeks. The five top ideas (most green tokens), five bottom ideas (most red) and the top five bettors (most accurate, according to market consensus) were listed regularly.
The winners got $500, while second- and third-place finishers received $250 each. The winners, Mr. Dowlaty said, were engineers, analysts and contractors, not managers.
More than 200 people participated, submitting 85 ideas. One person proposed bringing back quarter-operated vibrating beds. “That one got beat down really fast,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
The winning ideas were suggestions to improve searching the company’s Web site to find and book hotel rooms. Two projects have been started as a result of the market, Mr. Dowlaty said.
Next, he said, prediction markets may be opened up to InterContinental’s customers, probably beginning with members of its Priority Club loyalty program. They could bet in markets for improving service and offerings, with points redeemed. “It’s the next frontier and the natural progression for this,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
Setting up corporate prediction markets can be tricky. Public markets for presidential candidates will attract thousands of bettors, but a company may want to run a market only for people with expertise in a certain product or project. At Hewlett-Packard, researchers have been working on techniques and software to make even small prediction markets efficient.
“We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people,” said Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the social computing lab at Hewlett-Packard. Among the techniques, he said, are preliminary tests to assess the “behavioral risk characteristics” of participants to shade predictions from people who are inherently risk seekers or risk averse.
Starting a year ago, a group in the purchasing unit at H.P. began prediction markets on the price of computer memory chips three and six months ahead. The prediction markets, Dr. Huberman said, were up to 70 percent more accurate than the company’s traditional forecasting models. The more accurate predictions, he said, can be used to finesse purchasing, marketing and product pricing decisions.
The H.P. research project has become a service offering called Brain, for Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks. The service is now used in pilot projects by H.P. clients that include Swisscom, which is trying it to predict demand for new services like Internet television on cellphones.
At GE Healthcare, Steven Linthicum, manager for advanced prototyping and innovation, has recently managed prediction markets projects that have generated ideas for software products for the hospital and health care market. Based on that work, patents have been filed and projects are under way.
“These markets bring not only ideas, but what your organization thinks of the ideas,” Mr. Linthicum said. “That’s what leadership needs to know.”
G.E. is also evaluating how broadly prediction markets could be used in the health care division, a $17 billion-a-year unit, and elsewhere in the company.
“We’ll know a lot more at the end of the year how much this becomes part of the decision-making process,” Mr. Linthicum said. “We’re at the crossroads right now.”
Betting to Improve the Odds By STEVE LOHR
CORPORATIONS live and die by ideas, and many enterprises have used Web-based technologies, like blogs, wikis and social networks, to gather thoughts and hasten their way into new services, products and cost-saving steps.
Now executives say they are harnessing a new Web tool, called prediction markets, to transform the idea pipelines inside their companies. Companies like the InterContinental Hotels Group, General Electric and Hewlett-Packard are using prediction markets to try to improve forecasting, reduce risk and accelerate innovation by tapping into the collective wisdom of the work force.
Like blogs and wikis, prediction markets can spur communication and collaboration within a company. Yet they add rigorous measurement to business forecasts, like estimating the sales of a new product or the chances that a project will be finished on time.
Corporate prediction markets work like this: Employees, and potentially outsiders, make their wagers over the Internet using virtual currency, betting anonymously. They bet on what they think will actually happen, not what they hope will happen or what the boss wants. The payoff for the most accurate players is typically a modest prize, cash or an iPod.
The early results are encouraging. “The potential is that prediction markets may be the thing that enables a big company to act more like a small, nimble company again,” said Jeffrey Severts, a vice president who oversees prediction markets at Best Buy, the electronics retailer.
The store chain has experimented with prediction markets on everything from demand for digital set-top boxes to store-opening dates. For example, Mr. Severts said that in the fall of 2006, the prices in a prediction market on whether a new store in Shanghai would open on time — in December 2006 — dropped sharply from $80 a share into the $40 to $50 range. Players made yes-no bets, and the virtual dollar drop reflected increasing doubt that the store would open on time.
Indeed, Best Buy’s first store in China opened late, in January 2007, but the warning signs from the prediction market helped prevent further slippage.
Mr. Severts noted that prices in a current prediction market — betting whether new offerings from its Geek Squad service will be introduced on time in June — are in the $90 range, an encouraging sign.
Best Buy plans to move beyond pilot projects in prediction markets to involve more workers throughout the company, starting next month. “It helps on two fronts, the speed and accuracy of information, so that management can move faster to deal with problems or exploit opportunities,” Mr. Severts said.
For years, public prediction markets have been used for politics, like the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade, where buyers and sellers bet on which candidate will win a particular race. And there are prediction markets where people place bets on news events (Hubdub, among others), video game sales (simExchange) or movie box-office receipts (Hollywood Stock Exchange).
These markets have often been more accurate than professional pollsters or market researchers. The idea is that the collected knowledge of many people, each with a different perspective, will almost surely be more accurate than an individual or small group or even experts. The concept has been championed by academic economists and was popularized by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds.”
Robin D. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, proposes a “futarchy,” a form of government enhanced by prediction markets. Voters would decide broad goals of national welfare, but betting in speculative markets would determine the policy steps to achieve those goals.
Few in the corporate world go that far. An important issue is whether prediction markets are mainly an innovative way to gather information from employees or a font of reliable answers. “It’s still an open question whether the wisdom of crowds is really wise,” said John Kao, a consultant and the author of “Innovation Nation.”
So far, most of the companies using prediction markets are doing so in limited ways, in one or two departments, testing the concept to see how it goes. But in the last few years, corporate experimentation has moved beyond high-tech businesses into other industries, including retailing, consumer packaged foods, hotels, health care, steelmaking and telecommunications.
Today, analysts say, there are dozens of major corporations testing these markets. The companies include Google, Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, General Mills, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, and Swisscom, a large telecommunications company.
At the same time, a network of software and service suppliers is developing to cater to corporate prediction markets. The vendors include H.P. and smaller specialist firms like Consensus Point and NewsFutures. The field is attracting start-ups as well.
In 2006, for example, Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny left Accenture, the consulting firm, to found Inkling Markets. Mat Fogarty had been director for financial planning at Electronic Arts, where he experimented with prediction markets, before founding Xpree last year.
“Prediction markets are starting to move into the mainstream, and they will really change the way companies are run in the future,” said Emile Servan-Schreiber, the chief executive of NewsFutures.
At InterContinental Hotels, Zubin Dowlaty, vice president for emerging technologies, decided to create an online market last fall to “harvest and prioritize ideas” from within the hotel’s 1,000-person technology staff. “We wanted to tap the creative class that may not be able to voice their ideas,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
With InterContinental’s prediction market, players were asked to submit ideas anonymously, with a description and the benefit to customers and company. The bettors were given virtual tokens, each receiving 10 green ones to be placed on the best ideas and three red for bad ideas.
There were no limits on the number of times bettors could change their wagers as new ideas came to market, and the market was open for four weeks. The five top ideas (most green tokens), five bottom ideas (most red) and the top five bettors (most accurate, according to market consensus) were listed regularly.
The winners got $500, while second- and third-place finishers received $250 each. The winners, Mr. Dowlaty said, were engineers, analysts and contractors, not managers.
More than 200 people participated, submitting 85 ideas. One person proposed bringing back quarter-operated vibrating beds. “That one got beat down really fast,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
The winning ideas were suggestions to improve searching the company’s Web site to find and book hotel rooms. Two projects have been started as a result of the market, Mr. Dowlaty said.
Next, he said, prediction markets may be opened up to InterContinental’s customers, probably beginning with members of its Priority Club loyalty program. They could bet in markets for improving service and offerings, with points redeemed. “It’s the next frontier and the natural progression for this,” Mr. Dowlaty said.
Setting up corporate prediction markets can be tricky. Public markets for presidential candidates will attract thousands of bettors, but a company may want to run a market only for people with expertise in a certain product or project. At Hewlett-Packard, researchers have been working on techniques and software to make even small prediction markets efficient.
“We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people,” said Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the social computing lab at Hewlett-Packard. Among the techniques, he said, are preliminary tests to assess the “behavioral risk characteristics” of participants to shade predictions from people who are inherently risk seekers or risk averse.
Starting a year ago, a group in the purchasing unit at H.P. began prediction markets on the price of computer memory chips three and six months ahead. The prediction markets, Dr. Huberman said, were up to 70 percent more accurate than the company’s traditional forecasting models. The more accurate predictions, he said, can be used to finesse purchasing, marketing and product pricing decisions.
The H.P. research project has become a service offering called Brain, for Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks. The service is now used in pilot projects by H.P. clients that include Swisscom, which is trying it to predict demand for new services like Internet television on cellphones.
At GE Healthcare, Steven Linthicum, manager for advanced prototyping and innovation, has recently managed prediction markets projects that have generated ideas for software products for the hospital and health care market. Based on that work, patents have been filed and projects are under way.
“These markets bring not only ideas, but what your organization thinks of the ideas,” Mr. Linthicum said. “That’s what leadership needs to know.”
G.E. is also evaluating how broadly prediction markets could be used in the health care division, a $17 billion-a-year unit, and elsewhere in the company.
“We’ll know a lot more at the end of the year how much this becomes part of the decision-making process,” Mr. Linthicum said. “We’re at the crossroads right now.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)