Dunbar's Prison
Jimmy Kimmel has a point. The talk show host declared a week from today, November 17th, as National Unfriend Day. Those of us with Facebook accounts are supposed to "weed out" those people we're connected to on Facebook who aren't really our close friends. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar made a simple observation: we can only have so many meaningful friendships. The number hasn't been precisely nailed down, but's commonly cited as 150. Any more people than...
Amateur Hour
"Markets are conversations." So begins the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the classic books about marketing in the age of the Internet. It was written about ten years ago, and since then, I've heard lots of people quote the maxim above in their own writing about marketing. The idea: you can sell people something if you can get them talking about it, or get them talking with you. About ten years later, they released...
Leave the Arguing to Machines
A programmer named Nigel Leck got a little tired of arguing with global warming denialists. For years, he's been debating climate change with people on the Internet, and more recently, it dawned on him that he was making the same arguments, and referencing the same resources, over and over again. So what did he do? He automated it. He built a bot and gave it its own Twitter account. Every five minutes, the bot sweeps...
Literary Goal
In my mind (in other words, this is arbitrary), books fall into three different categories: 1. Storytelling - all fiction falls under this umbrella, for example. 2. Educational - meant to instruct or teach. Textbooks. 3. Ideas - almost all nonfiction is written with this as its currency. In my very limited experience as a reader, the most insightful and interesting books are the ones that manage to achieve a blend of all three of...
The Fundraiser
Raising money for a non-profit is very, very hard work. We live in a world where the economy is governed by transactions. People give something, they get something in return. Usually this involves the exchange of goods, services, or currency. Asking people to donate money while getting nothing tangible in return, then, seems counter to what we expect. It doesn't feel right. And since we all have this feeling to some degree, even people working...
Will You Let Me Know?
Restaurants that take reservations have always had problems with no-shows. And on busy nights, when you have a lot of walk-ins, and you're juggling people showing up late for reservations or not at all, then it becomes a terrible headache to manage. So how do you make sure that people will let you know they're going to cancel their reservation instead of just abandoning it? Simple: ask. A study found that, after booking each reservation,...
Choice Architecture
There a tremendous amount of power that lies in default choices. And so, the person who gets to control the default choice has a lot of power. Organ donation is opt-in in California. That means that when you register for a driver's license, if you do nothing, you don't get put onto the donor list. You have to check a box to say you'll participate in the program. So, because of inertia, the numbers are...
Copycatting
If a movie is really popular, sometimes you can buy the screenplay. It's neat. That means you can take a hard copy of a movie you really love to a coffee shop and read it. When I was a kid I took copies of Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Swingers on a road trip across the country with my parents. Reading the words and the brief descriptions of the scenes works really well when you've already...
Cinematic Decompression
I'm not a big fan of going to the movies. This is a pretty common trend among young people...the experience of going to the theater and paying $10 to see a film ($13 if you have to see it in the obligatory 3-D) is not really worth it. Having to sit for two hours in an uncomfortable seat, possibly surrounded by loud people, and devoting all of your attention, undivided, to a movie that might...
Remembrance
I was walking through Borders the other day and I overheard an old lady asking one of the employees if they had a book in stock called "Shit My Dad Says". (It was little strange to hear an older woman asking a bookstore clerk for the title.) I had heard of the idea before: guy on Twitter in his early 30's lives with his parents, and starts sharing the stuff that his grumpy old dad...