I really liked this explanation of the changes in the role of manager over the last few decades from the NYTime’s article about brainstorming over the weekend:

Dev Patnaik of Jump has his own answer to the [innovation] why-now question. He contends that advances in technology over the past three decades have gradually forced management to reconceive its role in the corporation, shifting its focus from processing data to something more esoteric. “My dad was a midlevel manager for I.B.M.,” Patnaik explains, “and I remember him in the ‘70s, sitting there with plastic 3M transparencies, by hand, with marker, to make presentations. For years, the good manager was one who had data at their fingertips. What’s our sales in Peoria? ‘It’s actually 47 percent above last year.’ People say, ‘Oh, he’s a good manager.’ ” By the early ‘90s, though, companies like Microsoft and SAP were selling software that digitized this task. The days when a manager at, say, the Gap could earn a bow just for knowing how many sweaters to ship to Seattle were over. “When that happens, what is the role of the manager?” Patnaik asks. “Suddenly it’s about something else. Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision. Those are the differentiating things, right?” Patnaik draws an analogy to painting, which for centuries was all about rendering reality as accurately as possible, until a new technology - photography - showed up, throwing all those brush-wielding artists into crisis. “Then painters said: ‘Well, wait, you can tell what is but you can’t tell me my impression of what is. Here’s how it looks to me, like Seurat. Or the Cubists who said, ‘You can’t capture what is going on from multiple angles.’ ” Technology forced painters to re-evaluate, which transformed their work. Something similar has happened in corporate America. As Patnaik puts it, “We’re in the abstract-expressionist era of management.”

I was telling a few folks about a talk I gave in Singapore last year and decided to just throw the deck up. The audience was a bunch of media people and essentially I went in and told them content doesn’t matter … At some point I’ll write the thing up in essay form, but until then, here’s the deck.

So it turns out Quora, the new question/answer service that keeps popping up, has set up Twitter accounts for most of its popular topics. That’s not necessarily revolutionary, except for the number of feeds they have and the way they’re setting them up. Turns out they’re using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create new accounts, as there is no way to do it programmatically. This is interesting to me for two reasons: First, I’ve been obsessed with Mechanical Turk for a long time and second, it speaks to what I think the service has eventually become.

I first learned of the service in this 2007 Wired article about the search for Jim Gray, who was lost at sea. “Launched in 2005, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a service that enables employers to hire online workers for short-term tasks that computers don’t do well. If a city government wants to count its utility-pole inventory, for instance, it can pay netsurfers a pittance (in dollars or rupees) to click through thousands of street-level photographs, tagging the poles they see. Spotting Tenacious [Jim Gray’s boat] in a sea of gray seemed like the perfect test of MTurk’s ‘artificial artificial intelligence.’” This was forever etched in my mind as the perfect use of MTurk: Giving people a task that computers couldn’t easily handle.

However, I’ve since read (can’t seem to remember where at the moment), that many are struggling to get useful results out of the service as people come on to game the system and just rush through tasks like looking at a picture and identifying an object. If someone needs to go back and check work the service obviously loses value. Which leads us to what Quora is doing, which is essentially something that is programmatic (setting up new accounts), but isn’t available via Twitter’s API (for very obvious spam reasons). So essentially they’re hiring a bunch of people to go solve CAPTCHAs (which is the one part of the sign up process a computer can’t do). The beauty of this sort of task in the MTurk system is that it’s binary: The account is either set up or it’s not.

I’m not quite sure what my point is with all this other than to say that I think it’s fascinating that the two most interesting uses I’ve heard of for the service are art (where there is no right answer and no need to check work) and tasks like setting up accounts. Hmmm …

I was struck with the Hunch Gifts.com recommendation engine much better.

The real problem, it seems, is that Hunch’s algorithm is more sophisticated than Gifts.com’s stuff selection. The universe of gifts dominates the software’s ability to find good presents within it. To be a little unfair to Gifts.com, it’s like being taken shopping at Spatula City with the world’s most sophisticated personal shopper. At the end of the day, you still end up with a spatula.

As good as an algorithm is, and Hunch’s seems pretty damn good, it’s ultimately a slave to the data (or in this case gifts) it’s working with. As the author notes later, “If you go into a well-curated place like. say, Gravel and Gold in San Francisco, it would take an anti-miracle to purchase something that wasn’t better and more interesting for my girlfriend than a sake set.” I suspect the answer is somewhere in-between.

Hey, I’m around SF for the week and am going to get some folks together for drinks on Thursday night. You should come. Here are the details:

Where: Rickhouse Bar, 246 Kearny St. SF, Ca 94108

When: Thursday, November 18 @ 6:30pm

Come down and have a drink. It will be fun.

Some thoughts on the need to rethink the content management system.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about content creation on the web lately. Like more than usual. Which is funny, because It’s also a time in which I’ve created less content than any other in the past six years on the web.

One of the big things I’ve been thinking about is the role of the CMS. With Six Apart (Movable Type & Typepad’s parent company) and Video Egg merging to make Say Media, Gawker ditching “blog format” (aka reverse chronological) and Tumblr growing like … something that grows really fast, it seems that blogging, as we knew it in the last decade at least, is at a bit of a crossroads.

The most obvious reason for this is the focus on the short-form stuff. Earlier this year Robin at Snarkmarket talked about stock and flow, which nicely frames the two modes of content creation that are competing for our time:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.


Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type were the tools we used to create stock. But where are the tools on the flow side? Tumblr feels like an interesting middle ground, a brilliant platform that’s not quite stock or flow. Twitter and Facebook are less tools for creating and consuming content as they are extensions of ourselves (in the McLuhan sense). If blog platforms were basically just simplified CMSes then where is our FMS (flow management system)?

In a very interesting piece, Danah Boyd helps contextualize the question:

We need technological innovations. For example, we need tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing, and we need tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don’t think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get in flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are and whatever they’re doing. They need tools that allow them to easily grab what they want and to stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.

In a comment on that quote (on Tumblr no less), Ted Rheingold wrapped up the central need: “I’ve been trying hard to imagine how a blended push/pull of content will work.” Google tried this a little with Google Reader and shared items/notes, but RSS was never going to win as a consumer format without a better subscription mechanism, which was graciously provided by Twitter and Tumblr.

Anyway, the basic question is what it would look like if you started to build a CMS from the ground up for the flow side of the web. A CMS is traditionally about creating content, and that would be part of it, but, as Danah Boyd said, it needs to get people in the flow. This is not really a problem we’ve ever had to design for, outside maybe finance or producing live television (as two examples off the top of my head). In fact thinking of flow creators as brokers is probably a better metaphor anyhow, since so much of producing is about consuming and creating in equal parts: Redirecting the action to the appropriate places.

Which I guess leads to an obvious question which I’m not going to dig in on right this minute (because I’ve already reached my paragraph quota): What does a tool built for content brokers look like? Not quite sure yet, but I know it would look a lot different than the last generation systems (including blogging), which were built out of the needs of media companies to manage large bodies of their own content and include the regular roles of editor and writer. Lots more to think about.

Last Friday at a conference called Planningness I tried to do something I’ve been thinking about for awhile: Teach a bunch of non-coders how to make things on the internet. I’m not positive how successful it was, but it was fun and I figured I might as well share the presentation, code examples and general story here. (Disclaimer: I’m no programmer myself, so there is a definite possibility some of the stuff in here is incorrect. I did check things with a few programmers beforehand, however, so I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.)

The story goes something like this (if you’ve been hanging around this site : A few years ago I heard about how Microsoft was interested in buying Yahoo! for an insane amount of money ($47 billion I believe). I said to myself, “what the hell is $47 billion? How am I even supposed to comprehend that?” And my self answered, “maybe you should build a site that shows you how many iPhones you could buy with that sort of cash.” (This is a dramatization of the events.) Anyhow, I had played around with Wordpress setup and had looked at some PHP and so I figured I’d see if I could do it. I bought a domain and started Googling.

The first important thing to understand is that every web app, more or less, is just a form and a submit button. Think about it. Sometimes that button sends an email, or posts a Tweet, but it’s still the same basic behavior: You capture some user input and do something with it when they hit a button. (Increasingly you capture it before they hit the button, but that’s another lesson).

The first big barrier to understanding how to build this thing was how the hell you actually get something someone types into a form to another page so that you can do something with it. That’s when I discovered HTTP GET. That’s also when I realized that I already understood how GET works. That’s because we are all familiar with it. GET is just a method of passing data between pages by using a URL. Put simple: Every time you call up any page on the web through a browser by typing in a URL you are making a GET call.

But there’s also an even simpler way to explain GET: Go to Google and search for something. Seriously. Search for noah brier and then look at the URL. What you’ll see will look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=noah brier (there may be some other stuff stuck in there as well). If we pull that apart and just focus on the part that matters we get: search?q=noah brier. That, there, is the key to passing things between pages using GET. Essentially the elements break down like this:

• search: The page that is processing the data


• ?: Start of a query string


• q=: Field name (basically every form element is given a name so that later, when you’re doing stuff with the data, you can easily access it)


• noah brier: The query (whatever someone typed into the form field)

Once you understand that basic idea the next big question is how the hell do you get stuff down from the URL? It’s sitting up there and you want to do something with it (whether it’s a little math like How Much Does it Buy? or an incredibly complex operation like searching billions of search records on Google. To do that you need some sort of server-side language. The one I use in my presentation (and for my projects) is PHP. Every language has some simple syntax for getting at the stuff you’ve stored in the URL. In PHP’s case that syntax looks like this:

Where field_name is replaced with whatever you named the field. So if you made a form like this:

Your PHP to grab the person’s name on the page dosomething.php would look like this:

Anyway, I’m just repeating a lot of what’s in there. Give it a try yourself. Go download MAMP or WAMP (which allows you to run PHP/MySQL locally) and start playing. I’ve even put together a little zip file with all the code samples. Have fun.

Oh, and one other important thing: The beauty of the internet is that it’s most abundant resource is information on how to build the internet. Use that. When you want to know how to do something just Google it and try whatever code you get. See what happens. Learn that way. It’s fun, I swear.

A few years ago I moved to a format that put the comments on the right side of the posts. I can’t remember what site inspired me, but I did it because I believed (and still do) that comments on a blog should be equally important to the post they’re commenting on.

Anyway, I mention this because I was happy to read John Borthwick supporting my theory:

Bob [Stein] told me about a test he had run at the Institute for the futureofthebook.  In the test they placed comments on a blog to the right of the posts / articles.  The result was meaningfully more interesting discourse.  The comments werent placed at the bottom, hidden away, like a letter to the editor, they were part of the body of the post.    Think about it this way.  If you took TechCrunch and placed the comments to the right of the posts and let them stream live (most recent first) wouldnt it look like a mirror image of the new Twitter?   Stream on the right - media on the left - Twitter is stream on the left, media on the right. Interesting.

[Via James]