Jay Goldman » google http://jaygoldman.com Technologist, Designer, Speaker, Author, Generally Swell Guy Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:25:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 WSS09: Avinash Kaushik on Web Analytics 2.0 http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 16:20:49 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=540 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>
  • Avinash is the Evangelist for Google Analytics and writes the Occam’s Razor blog
  • Web Analytics in An Hour a Day
    • Wiley called a few months into writing the blog to turn it into a book
    • “People like paying for free stuff”
    • Donate all the (meagre) proceeds to DWB and the Smile Train
    • About $60k to date
  • Accountability
    • The web has infinite amounts of accountability
    • Didn’t learn much from President Bush, other than “faith-based initiatives”
    • Magazine ads are faith-based initiatives
      • Can’t measure actual impressions other than subscribers and news stand sales
    • Web advertising isn’t at all because you can measure it
      • Number of clicks
      • Relevance (shown along with search results for the term)
      • Measure effectiveness based on subsequent activities on the clicked-through site
  • The web gives you more data than God intended
    • Very good at giving you “The What”
      • You can spend your life doing path analysis and end up with no real conclusion
    • We don’t spend as much time analyzing “The How Much” or “The Why”
      • Clickstream: The What
      • Multiple Outcomes Analysis: The How Much
      • Experimentation and Testing, Voice of Customer: The Why
      • Competitive Intelligence, Insights: The Goldmine!
    • Not in the business of generating pageviews — in the business of generating revenue for your business (Clarity of Purpose!)
  • HITS: How Idiots Track Success
  • Bounce Rate
    • Not an aggregate — an actual measure of behaviour
    • Translates into: “I came, I puked, I left”
    • Very easy to understand: 70% = suck. 30% = good.
    • 20% is a fantastic rate (you always get traffic that’s not relevant to you from search engines)
    • Only seen less than 20 on high-end video porn sites, and the best still had a 4% rate (you made it all the way here and left?!)
    • Look at traffic sources and click the bar chart to compare sources to bounce rate to find your BFFs
    • Magazines are in trouble because they follow the “Selfish Lover Strategy”
      • Their ads take precedence over your content
      • Not the New Yorker, which is almost all content
      • Bounce rates are reflective of this — more ads and nav, higher bounce rate
  • We think our site traffic is all the same person coming, but it’s really a huge mess of different people with different goals
    • Segmentation and deep diving gives us the right view
    • Pageviews, etc. are all aggregated data, no segmented
    • How to improve the Reader’s Digest Advice and Know How page?
      • ~320 links on a single page
      • 10,158,033 pageviews, 9 average pageviews
      • Look at the Depth of Visit stats though — 33% of people only looked at the homepage
      • Go into segmentation and create a segment of people who’s depth was greater than four pages
      • Use that segment throughout to figure out who is driving those people to the site, which keywords, what they looked for
    • Analyze the amount of content on your site made up by each section then compare it to the total percentage of visits for it
      • Might discover that you’re spending a lot of time and money to produce content that people aren’t as interested in
  • Ecommerce
    • Average conversion rate for top ecommerce websites was 1.72%
      • What happened to the other 98%?
      • They might be offline conversions, tire kickers, etc.
    • Measure the conversions on your site for actual revenue, but also everything else
      • These are ‘macro-conversions’
      • What else does your website do to drive sales?
        • Create profiles
        • Research
        • Coupons
        • These are ‘micro-conversions’
    • Example: Avinash’s own blog
      • Set four goals: all posts, about, speaking engagements, RSS subscribers
      • “If you read two posts I’ve written, you will be convinced of my greatness”, so driving people to the “All Posts” page means they will probably read two posts
      • The last is a macro-conversion, the other three are micro
      • RSS is the ultimate form of permission marketing — I can push “any damn thing I want” to you with your permission
        • Can measure the value of that by finding out how much it would cost to purchase them as leads
      • Speaking engagements value can be measured by asking organizers how much traffic was driven to them and who registered
      • Can now measure the value in ‘fake dollars’ every month
  • How do you measure conversions on something like a drug website where you can’t actually sell the product?
    • You can measure things like watching videos, using calculators, surveys, etc.
  • Facebook measuring success by the number of active users is stupid
    • They should measure engagement
    • Look at Visitor Loyalty
      • Reconstructed data: most users came once in last 30 days, but a crazy high percentage came between 9 and 200 times
    • Look at Visitor Recency
      • Reconstructed data: 66% of people were on the site between now and 0 days ago
    • Loyalty + Recency = Profits
  • You should listen to the voice of your customers
    • How do you do it?
      • Not by looking at top content viewed — doesn’t show what they wanted but couldn’t find
      • There’s no pageview if I can’t find what I want
    • Surveys to the rescue!
      • Not like NPR: 35 question survey in a giant scrolling page
      • Greatest survey in the world has 3 questions:
        • Why are you here? -> Primary Purpose
        • Did you complete your task? -> Task Completion Rate
        • If you were not able to complete the task, why not? -> Segments of Discontent
        • Compare Primary Purpose and Task Completion to find low hanging fruit
        • Look at distribution of data to find out how many people fit into each category
          • Probably a small percentage (e.g.: mid-30s) who are there for your primary purpose
      • Perceptions, Montreal-company, created an exit survey with 4 questions to do this
      • Five Second Test: simple usability tests
      • Ethnio: remote conversations with people who are on your website right now
  • Most websites suck today because they’re created by HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
  • One of the greatest gifts the Internet gives us is the ability to learn to be wrong quickly
    • Magazines or television ads take a long, long time to produce the content and learn from it
  • A/B testing is great
    • iPhone has shown us that you can sell an object of lust to a CEO and she will force her IT staff to support it so that hers works
      • BlackBerry Storm page is horrible and creates no lust
      • Palm Pre is all about creating lust
      • Do an A/B test! You’ll quickly see that you can measure passion
  • Competitive Intelligence
    • Google Ad Planner lets you set up a very specific demographic then analyze which sites they go to
      • Can add sites those people have also visited
      • Site Profiles let you analyze the traffic and stats to specific domains
  • Questions:
    • We do a lot of work in the public sector and there’s sometimes resistance to accountability. How can public sector organizations with no bottom line tied their site use analytics?
      • The Obama administration is the best thing that could have happened to the web from an analytics perspective. Sometimes it takes a generational shift to get the old people out and new people in. Worked with a security agency to measure how many people were downloading things and found that it was 19 clicks to get to a download. Blatantly embarrassing them is a great way to get them to make changes. This is an agency America doesn’t acknowledge exists but they have a website with a Kid’s Club! Their bounce rate was 96% when we started looking. Use tools like compete.com to look up share of traffic you get for top terms (e.g.: “enterprise software” for large software companies -> top entry got 40m visits, being 44th got 3,976).

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/05/05/wss09-avinash-kaushik-on-web-analytics-20/feed/ 0     8 SEO Tips and Tricks http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:03:34 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=457 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> A client recently asked for a quick overview of good SEO practises, so I thought I’d share them with all of you at the same time. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but following these items will definitely make a difference to your site’s performance in major search engines. These are roughly in order of priority (the first items being the most important):

    • Landing Pages: It’s impossible to do a good job of optimizing your homepage for every possible term people might use to find your site. Think of it as a town fair full of criers who are all yelling their own messages: the end result is a din of roughly equal volume in which nothing stands out. Plan instead to add a page to your site for each search term, heavily optimized for that term using all the tips below, so that page becomes the top organic search result for the term and therefore the page that visitors land on when coming to your site. It’s important to make sure that these pages aren’t islands (i.e.: not linked from any of the site’s main content), because otherwise web crawlers may not find and index them.
    • Titles: Some of the most overlooked SEO real estate in the world is staring right at you from the top of this very window. The <title> tag, which sets the text displayed in the title bar of the browser window, is very highly rate by search engines as being indicative of the page’s content. The engines differ in how much of the <title> they index, but the general rule of thumb is that the first 60 or so characters are the most important. This dictates that the search term should come before things like a company name, so it would be better to have “8 SEO Tips and Tricks » JayGoldman.com” rather than “JayGoldman.com: 8 SEO Tips and Tricks”. Luckily, this also tends to be more useful to users when they view their browser history or bookmarks in a narrow window or menu that cuts off the text, since the name of the page they want is more likely to be visible. I use the WordPress SEO Title Tag Plugin to swap the order around on this blog.
    • Repetition: The search term should be repeated in an <h1> as close to the top of the <body> as possible. We saw a difference for some of Radiant Core’s clients between having text at the top of the HTML and moving it down for presentation using CSS and just putting it at the bottom (e.g.: the list of SEO links at the bottom of the TargetVacations site actually occurs at the top of the HTML and is moved down through a combination of CSS and JavaScript since the page’s length is variable). The term should be repeated again in a <p> following that <h1>, ideally surrounded by <strong> tags.
    • Font Replacement: A necessity if you’re particular to a specific font and want to make sure your text is rendered in it. Since HTML doesn’t yet support embedding fonts (though it’s coming in CSS3 as WebFonts), specifying a font in CSS will only work if the person viewing your site has that font installed on their computer (and could still look strange if they have a different font with the same name). There are two popular routes: image replacement and sIFR for Flash-based replacement. Image replacement is much more limiting in that it requires you to create an image for each piece of text, while sIFR can be really difficult to get working, requires Flash for display, and can really slow down page rendering. I use a mix of the two on the homepage of this blog, rendering the header using image replacement since it never changes and rendering blog titles in sIFR to get Futura without having to manually create images for each post’s title.
      • Doug Bowman of Stopdesign (and now the Visual Design Lead at Google) has a great overview of using background-image to replace text. My preferred method was originally outlined by Mike Rundle and has gone on to be the favourite used widely by web designers (and is even linked to by Doug): Accessible Image Replacement.
      • The concept behind sIFR is really elegant: create a very lightweight Flash movie that has the font embedded and then pull in the text it replaces and render it using that font. The accronym stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, named after Shaun Inman who came up with one of the original CSS-based image replacements. sIFR was originally created by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben but hasn’t been updated by them in a long time. There’s a sIFR Lite available from AllCrunchy.com, though it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while either.
    • Domain  Names: Most of the things search engines look for center around trying to determine the content of a page based on the text it contains and the meta information that surrounds it. The more difficult it is to fake the meta data, the more stake placed in it. Some of the hardest to fake are the domain name and URL of a page, which makes them two of the more important tweaks you can make. It’s harder to optimize the domain name since you only have one for your whole site, but if you sell You Won’t Believe it’s Not Tuna you should grab a domain like tunareplacement.com rather than chickenofthesea.com. The age of your domain name does factor into the calculation, so it’s generally better to renovate a site and keep the old domain than it is to start entirely from scratch. It’s also worth noting that some search engines, particularly Google, treat subdomains as different sites, which means things like blog.jaygoldman.com and www.jaygoldman.com don’t necessarily share PageRank. Unless there’s a stronger-than-SEO reason to go with a subdomain, consider a directory instead (www.jaygoldman.com/blog). You should also consider that www.jaygoldman.com and jaygoldman.com (without the www) aren’t necessarily the same, so you should decide early on which you’re going to use and be consistent in promoting the site (I use jaygoldman.com). You can configure mod_rewite (see below) to remove the www if you choose to go that route.
    • URL: The search term should ideally be part of the URL, using -s for spaces (e.g.: www.tunareplacement.com/recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad). This is much, much better than the default URL that your blog sofware or CMS probably produces (www.tunareplacement.com/recipe.aspx?id=23), so you should absolutely switch over if you have that control (WordPress users should take a look in the Permalinks section of the Settings in their WP-Admin). I’ve always prefered avoiding file extensions in URLs entirely (e.g.: .jsp, .php, .asp(x), etc.) since it exposes part of the site’s implementation into the URL and then into people’s bookmarks, web crawlers, and the like. You’ll break all of those if you later rebuild the site on a different technology, so it’s better to abstract to a higher level earlier and just change the rewrite destinations later. Human readable URLs also kick machine generated URLs butt when it comes to things like analytics or emailing links to friends. I much prefer using URL rewriting, which allows the clean and human readable /recipes/tuna-and-marshmellow-salad to get rewritten to /recipe.php?title=tuna-and-marshmellow-salad behind the scenes. If you’re running Apache and don’t mind some server config, take a look at mod_rewrite, but be warned that it’s like black magic, ninjas, and awesomeness mixed together in a very potent but incredibly tricky potion. If you’re running IIS, take a look at IASPI ReWrite, IIS Rewrite, or Mod Rewrite for IIS. I’ve got no experience with any of them so that’s about all I can say on that topic.
    • Sitemaps: Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being representable on a map, but they’ve found a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change. You really don’t want to have to do this manually since it has to be updated every time a new page is added, so take a look at automated tools that will do it and submit the update (I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress for this blog). More info at Sitemaps.org.
    • Inbound Links: You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site. Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of ones from things like known link farms, but you really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text. If we’re trying to optimize the Recipes page of our Tuna Replacement site for the search term “tuna recipes”, it’s much more valuable for outside sites to link to that page with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">tuna recipes</a> as the link than it is for them to link with <a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">recipes</a>. If you have the kind of site where people might want to feature your content elsewhere (with, say, a Tuna Recipes Widget of the Day), consider developing an embeddable form that includes links formatted to match your SEO priorities.
    • Meta Tags: These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to your porn site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description meta fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results. I use the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin to automatically add them to all of the pages and posts on this site.

    Following all of those steps should make a considerable difference in the performance of your organic search engine results. I haven’t touched on the importance of selecting the right keywords and terms, which is a whole topic in and of itself, but these will make a noticeable difference if you’re fairly savvy in that regard.

    What’s your favourite SEO Tip? Disagree with what I’ve said here or have one I missed? Add it to the comments!

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/02/08/8-seo-tips-and-tricks/feed/ 12     Mr. Mobile Episode 4: Google Earth http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/16/mr-mobile-episode-4-google-earth/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/16/mr-mobile-episode-4-google-earth/#comments Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:40:44 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=434 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Check it out Mr. Mobile fans! Episode four is up with a review of Google Earth for iPhone.

    Likely-related posts:

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/16/mr-mobile-episode-4-google-earth/feed/ 0     Mr. Mobile Episodes One and Two http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/03/mr-mobile-episodes-one-and-two/ http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/03/mr-mobile-episodes-one-and-two/#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:40:42 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=334 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]>

    Table of contents for Mr. Mobile

    1. Mr. Mobile Episodes One and Two

    The first two episodes of Mr. Mobile, my new video podcast show for Butterscotch.com, are now up on the site! Episode One is a review of the FizzWeather iPhone application:

    And Episode Two is a review of the Jawbone Bluetooth headset:

    If you work for a company who make mobile apps, devices, or accessories, get in touch and we’ll arrange a review in an upcoming episode.

    Likely-related posts:

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2009/01/03/mr-mobile-episodes-one-and-two/feed/ 0     Malcolm Gladwell Talks About Outliers at Rotman School of Management http://jaygoldman.com/2008/12/02/malcolm-gladwell-talks-about-outliers-at-rotman-school-of-management/ http://jaygoldman.com/2008/12/02/malcolm-gladwell-talks-about-outliers-at-rotman-school-of-management/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:21:10 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=235 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Malcolm Gladwell on stage with Roger Martin

    Malcolm Gladwell on stage with Roger Martin

    I really enjoyed last night’s conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Roger Martin. I knew Malcolm was Canadian but had no idea that they had grown up together in Waterloo and that one of Malcolm’s best friend, Terry, is Roger’s younger brother. Their on-stage chemistry was great and they shared a number of stories about their childhood that really gave the evening a familiar and warm feeling. Note the giant Windows desktop behind them, which was showing a title card about the talk until the computer auto-restarted itself (accompanied by much laughter from the audience and some anti-Microsoft humour from Malcolm and Roger). Extensive notes are below.

    Intro

    • Things you probably don’t know about Malcolm:
      • Was once the Canadian record holder in 1500m run but is not the fastest Gladwell in his family
      • 10,000 hour rule: takes 10k hours to be expert at something. He’s an expert at playing Risk.
      • Was a student activist of an odd sort. Organized a march to prevent principal being transferred to another school.
      • Was in Reach for the Top. His aspiration was to be a pastry chef (though he doesn’t remember it)
      • First major assignment was for Ad Hominem, a high school newspaper
    • Malcolm and Roger Martin have known each other since way back. Gladwell was friends with Martin’s younger brother. Once showed up at Wood Gundy to see Martin dressed like slobs.

    Conversation

  • Martin: Relationship between effort/reward and persistence/doggedness. Did yours come from hanging out with all us Mennonites in Waterloo?
    • History full of ethnic groups who thrive despite persecution and aggression
    • Ethnic Chinese, Eastern European Jews, etc.
    • Mennonites were a perfect lab to grow up in. They have a ‘particular attachment to work’.
      • It’s a product to their outsiderness
      • Also a result of what they do: farm. As long as you farm it’s the same but when you leave it all changes.
  • Martin: You have to have a certain amount of opportunity in order to be successful. How does parenting go down the middle of adversity and opportunity?
    • Four boxes:
      1. Advantages that are advantages (parents teach you that work is good)
      2. Advantages that are disadvantages (parents are billionaires, you end up on a beach snorting coke)
      3. Disadvantages that are disadvantages (grew up in the South Bronx, one parent in jail)
      4. Disadvantages that are advantages (a high percentage of entrepreneurs are dyslexic and learn to create a team around them to help them succeed early)
        • 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captains of their sports team in school
        • Wayne Gretzky is dyslexic
        • (Jay: A list of Famous Dyslexics)
    • A lot of Jewish lawyers finished school and couldn’t work for Wall Street so they had to go out and practice the law Wall Street wouldn’t touch, which was takeover law.
    • Compare Asian kids to Western kids and they vastly outperform
      • Asian classrooms are 45 kids vs. 25 kids
      • This is a disadvantage that turns out to be an advantage
      • Produces a level of self-reliance they wouldn’t have otherwise
    • Capitalize on strengths vs. compensating for weaknesses
      • Negative relationship between IQ and success as NFL Quarterbacks
      • Give them a standardized IQ test (Wonderlic)
      • (Jay: a number of studies documented at NFL Quarterback Wonderlic scores though the site was down so try the Google Cache)
      • Eli Manning, Dan Marino, David Garrard have all done very poorly
      • It’s not that you don’t have to be smart — 5,000 page playbook — but the guys who don’t score well compensate harder rather than capitalizing on their success (which is too easy)
      • This is a beautiful experiment because we have all of the data
      • Dave Barry analyzed data and saw that the QBs drafted in the 50 – 100 order do a little better than the 1 – 50 drafts
      • (Jay: some more stats about draft order of QBs vs. performance at Advanced NFL Stats: Drafting QBs)
      • Ryan Leaf, one of the most promising draft picks ever, didn’t feel the need to go to practice. Claimed he had a hurt wrist and then was seen on golf course.
  • Martin: So what explains Peyton Manning? Number one draft pick, had the 5,000 page book memorized, but performed at the expected level?
    • We don’t know because people like Peyton are incredibly rare
    • “If we just try hard enough or smart enough we can uncover what we need to uncover about human beings” is false. No advance test will prove if someone will be a good NFL QB until they do it
    • We have increasingly fallen in love with proxies for performance and have fallen out of love with performance for performance. I’m a big foe of streaming kids into gifted programs for that reason.
      • Looking at a thing, IQ, to measure ultimate performance.
      • Lewis Terman tested 250,000 elementary students in California, picked the 1,500 with Genius level IQs, followed them for their lives, and discovered he hadn’t located the leaders of America. Wealthy ones did well, middle did middle, poor did worst.
      • Hunter College Elementary School in NYC does the same: finds highest IQ students among seven year olds and places them in the school. They’ve only produced one Nobel Prize Winner in 50 years. These kids are so smart that they early recognize that they’ll have to work really hard to be successful and so they say no.
    • Martin: the biggest problem is that they’re told that they’re gifted.
    • A friend went to a school in LA and they put out a pamphlet on their 50th anniversary and the best person they could put on the cover was Crispin Glover, who played the Dad in Back to the Future
    • (Jay: Looks like this might be the Mirman School based on Glover’s biography)
  • Martin: 30% of any outcomes can be correlated with general intelligence, 20% with conscientiousness?. If we just need to keep hacking away will we figure out the mysteries?
    • Where does it come from environmentally?
    • In order to be conscientious, you have to believe the effort gets you somewhere.
    • For 1000s of years, peasants in Western Europe got nowhere by the application of effort alone. If you’re at the bottom of the ladder, you don’t get twice as much back for working twice as hard.
    • Pre-modern Chinese culture creates a relationship between effort and reward (chapter on rice paddies in the book). 12th century rice farmers got to keep their surplus after they paid their rent. Profoundly different attitude towards work. Not sufficient to get China to the modern state it is now, but it vests in things like Asians being good at math now (if I invest 2 more hours in Calculus I’ll be better at it).
    • Martin: this is an equity-state: you get the upside residual of your effort vs. a bond where you always get a fixed percentage.
    • When I was writing that chapter I started randomly calling historians and asking them if they had to be a peasant in the 12th century somewhere in the world, where would you choose? Almost uniformly rice farmer somewhere in Asia (and definitely not in England)
  • Martin: Community looms large in the book. You derive happiness from your community.
    • The book opens with this story of a small town in which no one dies. I learned about it when I first arrived in NYC so I rented a car and went to see it.
    • Despite smoking like chimneys, eating the worst diet, etc., they were so close knit that they all hung out together. If you did well you hid it, if you did poorly the community supported you.
    • The outcome was that you live forever. We think of health as a function of the decisions you make, but these guys saw it as having nothing to do with their own decisions
    • In the 70s, when everything dissipates and they start living like normal Americans, they start dying like them too
  • Martin: What advice would you then give to mayors to pay attention to parts of the community?
    • It’s important to point that much of what we can do about occupational success or achievement we can’t do individually
    • We’re at the boundary of what we can do as individuals to help ourselves
    • Most of the really valuable things we can do to help each other can only be done collectively
    • We have to start thinking of success and the distribution of opportunity as a collective
    • What messages does your society send? Roseta sent a message saying you can relax and live longer
  • Martin: < missed the question >
    • James Flynn, a psychomatrician, writes the most extraordinary books (What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect, Where Have All the Liberals Gone?: Race, Class, and Ideals in America, How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity)
    • He proposes capitalization: how efficient is a given society at benefiting from its members?
    • Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game is all about an orphan found in the streets of New Orleans by a wealthy white family and turned into an NFL superstar. He says that if everyone he grew up with got a chance to play professional football, they’d need another league. Lewis asked school admins how many kids offered scholarships take them: 1 in 6 for a whole variety of reasons (can’t meet academic standards, get shot before they get there, etc.)
    • I would have said pro sports was the thing we were most efficient at doing and it turns out our capitalization rate is horrible. The rate for pro athletes is 16% and I would have said 85%. The rate for Canadian hockey players is also really bad. Teams are filled with kids born in January, February, and March due to the age cut offs. You pick the ‘biggest’ kids who are usually the oldest. This means we’re leaving something like 40% of our hockey players behind.
    • We go through all of these complicated reasons to come up with why African nations do so well at some sporting events. Their cap rate is really high! There are a million boys in Kenya who run 10 miles a day. If your cap rate is 95%, you’re getting the best of the best. You can only compare them genetically to us if we got to a cap rate of 95% and then compared the result.
    • Lowest cap rate is professional success of African American males in America. There are 1m missing African American men in America. Not in the workforce, army, education, or dead. They are completely off the map until they die. Their cap rate is 0%. How impoverished is your country if you can lose 1m people?
    • Martin: is this because we’ve got so much richness lying around?
    • No — we could use a lot more. But we’ve been lulled into thinking we have it all.
  • Martin: what is it about the outliers you’ve looked at that makes them willing to tackle the mysteries of the day and solve them?
    • You need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice of something to be an expert
    • (Jay: I believe this stat comes from extensive research by K. Anders Ericsson (see, for example, Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition). First paper on the topic was The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance published in Psychological Review in 1993. Confirmed for musicians (Sloboda et al., (The role of practice in the development of performing musicians, 1996) and chess players (Charness et al., The role of deliberate practice in chess expertise, 2005). More info at Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice)
    • There are remarkably few exceptions to the 10k hours rule. We knew you needed to work hard to be good at something but the number is interesting. 10 years at four hours a day (which is at least eight hours a day of work to get four of deliberate practice).
    • You must have an institution backing you and be able to work on it uninterrupted. You need a whole network backing you.
    • Such a demanding hurdle that few people ever get to overcome it. Medical residency periods get doctors there quicker but how many other professions would take it on? Investment bankers, lawyers.
    • It’s not the cognitive demand that cuts people out, it’s the effort demand.
    • I got to 10k hours because I spent 10 years at the Washington Post where I wrote almost a story a day. I had a squadron of senior editors standing over me and forcing me to do better. That’s what’s missing from the contemporary blogosphere.
    • Martin: I would guess that lots of people who get to the 10k become rote and just do the same thing over. There’s a tension between mastery and originality. The world of business favours mastery over originality.
    • Terry Martin has this exact quality. Once he mastered something he wanted to tear it apart. I met him in Biology class in grade five or six and we did an experiment together and then he wanted to tear it apart and start over. The minute he learned a game, he wanted to change the rules. After we had learned the rules, we would deregulate one rule at a time by altering or discarding them.
    • This is not something that comes naturally. You have to learn this thing that prevents you from falling prey to the deadening effect of mastery by having originality inserted into it
    • This is a form of subversion or childish mischief that never goes away for some people
    • Martin: if you can’t point to the one thing a week that you did to improve your originality, you will become rote
    • Tiger Woods changes his swing whenever he has a record-breaking streak because he can’t let himself think that he’s the world’s best golfer
  • Martin: what’s next?
    • I was talking to Brian Eno, producer of the new U2 album, who was terrified that they would use ProTools (the Photoshop of music) on it because it doesn’t solve any real problems. The problem is not that notes are imperfect. It removes focus from the gestalt of the song and focuses it on the minutiae.
    • How many solutions are there to things that aren’t problems?
    • Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen an incredible improvement in the technology of golf clubs but scores have remained the same. As a society, we fix clubs instead of swings.
    • ProTools isn’t useless, it’s only useless at the high end. It’s an egalitarian technology that brings the bottom up and the top down. So are oversized tennis racket heads.
    • If you and I [Ed: Malcolm and Roger] started a band, we would be horrible. ProTools could make us a lot better and bring us up closer to U2s level but it brings them down closer to our level.
    • Is Google an egalitarian technology? Google’s not making most us stupid but is eroding the competitive advantage of those of us who wanted to go the library. I’m a library rat so it’s infuriating.
    • Is the benefit you get from spreading the wealth greater than the cost of bringing down the top end? Google it obviously is, ProTools is questionable, golf clubs it’s not
    • We rarely stop to think is this solving a problem?
    • VCs are regularly pitched solutions without problems, even now. We don’t learn this lesson.
    • Also in the middle of writing a long defense of John Grisham, who has been slighted by snooty reviewers and critics. 250m books sold. Most important storyteller of the post-war generation. Almost no academic coverage of his work at all. Are we that snobby when it comes to cultural influences? We discard him because he sold 250m books? A lot of our ideas of the legal system come from his books or the TV shows that are inspired by him since most of us never have personal contact with it.
    • Recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird and discovered that it’s actually a reprobate story about a girl who cried rape because she wanted it and didn’t get it, and about disregarding the KKK. This is connected to Grisham in a way that will become obvious later.

    • Questions for Malcolm

    There wasn’t time for questions at the end of the talk so I thought I’d put my questions here and see if I could entice Malcolm to come and answer them here. We’ll see how that works out! My questions:

    • You talked about how your experience at the Washington Post made you the writer you are today, largely due to ten years of writing basically a story a day with a squadron of senior editors watching over your shoulder. If I understood correctly, you said that you didn’t think there was a similar venue today for the young writers to have the same experience. I would say that a conscientious blogger with a reasonable following has as much deliberate practice and oversight even if it’s not from professional editors. Is this another example of the web replacing a traditional medium, or has the opportunity really disappeared?
    • Speaking as a kid who was assessed as gifted and moved into a gifted stream, I can say for certain that the program saved my academic career. I was bored and inattentive in regular classes and only became more focused and connected to education when I moved into a stream that taught the way I needed to learn. Although I agree that it caused social problems and that being told you’re gifted imposes expectations and assumed status, I can also say that those classes largely made me who I am. You later questioned whether egalitarian technologies were worth taking away from the top line to feed the middle — how is that different than opposing programs for academically gifted students?
    • I’m not entirely sure I follow the full idea of egalitarian technologies affecting the top end performers. Using golf clubs as the example, has advancing golf club technology made Tiger worse or just made everyone else better? If it’s the case that it is bringing other people up but not the top people down, is it egalitarian or more like a performance boost?

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2008/12/02/malcolm-gladwell-talks-about-outliers-at-rotman-school-of-management/feed/ 11     Hidden Data: Google Predicts Flu Epidemics http://jaygoldman.com/2008/11/11/hidden-data-google-predicts-flu-epidemics/ http://jaygoldman.com/2008/11/11/hidden-data-google-predicts-flu-epidemics/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:11:16 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=186 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> I was talking the other day about how much I love when hidden data (or metadata) exposes itself in unexpected ways, like in a trenchcoat at a stop light (just kidding!). The last post was about Flickr using the geotagged information in its photos to map regions. This time we turn our attention to the mighty Google, who released Flu Trends earlier today. The idea is that particular search terms, when plotted geographically, reveal the beginning of a flu outbreak sooner than traditional systems (Google says up to two weeks faster).

    Google Flu Trends vs. CDC

    Google Flu Trends vs. CDC

    As you can see from the graph above, Google is doing pretty well compared to the Centre for Disease Control’s data for the same period. Given that this analysis essentially comes for free, I’d say it’s probably a whole lot cheaper than having the CDC calculate their predictions. Anyone know what that cost?

    Flu Trends is part of Google.org’s Predict and Prevent initiative, which looks to “…use information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.”

    Predict and Prevent on YouTube

    They’re exploring many different ways to use our digital world to help make the invisible visible, an approach I can whole heartedly get behind. There’s an amazing wealth of data hidden in our daily interactions with the company, from flu tracking to pop culture zeitgeist. Think about what happens if Android takes off and they gain access to real-time mobile data!

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2008/11/11/hidden-data-google-predicts-flu-epidemics/feed/ 0     Mail Goggles: for serious? http://jaygoldman.com/2008/10/07/mail-goggles-for-serious/ http://jaygoldman.com/2008/10/07/mail-goggles-for-serious/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:49:28 +0000 jaygoldman http://jaygoldman.com/?p=146 Likely-related posts: Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.]]> Sometimes Google is brilliant, and sometimes you kinda want to know what they’re smoking. Maybe it’s the free food? Google Labs presents the latest innovation in email: Mail Googles.

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    ]]>     http://jaygoldman.com/2008/10/07/mail-goggles-for-serious/feed/ 0