Jul. 21 2010

The dangerous art of the right question

bobulate:

Venkatesh Rao on the dangerous art of the right question. Four questions that are, in fact, terrible from the world of business:

1. Who is our customer?
2. What is our market?
3. What is our goal?
4. What problem does our product solve for the customer?

They’re terrible, he says, because they’re devoid of information. Instead:

Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand. They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.

Here’s why things work this way:

There are two types of questions. Formulaic questions and insight questions. …. Formulaic questions can be asked without knowing much. If they can be answered at all, they can be answered via a formulaic process. …. Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation.

So how do you ask these questions? Here are three ways:

1. The Poirot Method
2. The Jack Welch Method
3. The 42 Method

And what are those you ask? For those answers, you should head over to read the piece in its entirety.

[via]

this reminded me of dave gray’s new gamestorming book.

Apr. 20 2010

you’re not the first thing i reach for.

now that i have a new commute in the morning, i have some time on a train to do as i please.

most of it is spent in the new york times iphone app.

what i’m not doing?  twitter, facebook et al.  even if i do, for a second, i’ll close it out shortly.  not that i don’t love my friends, digital and non, but i’ve decided i don’t need you being some of the first items pinging around upstairs.

maybe, it’s like eating breakfast for my brain.  should i have the balanced meal or the piece of candy?

this was inspired by this.

Apr. 16 2010

Will the Future Contain Information Black Holes?

So, why we are all thinking of a ubiquitous information future, there are likely to be (many?) situations in which there is no economic or social reason for the presence of that information.

who’s going to get there first and what will be your intention?  equal parts opportunity for control and advancement.  who would’ve thought that “information management” requires social responsibility?

Mar. 12 2010

The case for context

These terms I’ve been using – “intellectual framework,” “systemic information,” etc. – this is what I mean when I say “context.” I’ve pitched you on the consumer benefits of context, but information creators are also slowly beginning to come around to the long-term ROI of delivering context as well, for several reasons. For one thing, our information becomes much more valuable and much more desirable to you as your framework for understanding it becomes better. Jay Rosen has astutely noted the uptick in attention to financial crisis stories after This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money episode laid out the context of the crisis. For another thing, the success of Wikipedia and the enduring popularity of items like “The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Social Media” has taught us there’s a real market for context. There are also significant advertising benefits to having more sophisticated structures for information than “latest updates.” We could dwell on the “why” for a long time.

if you’re in austin - put down your phone, stop stalking that girl you saw at the bar and go to matt’s panel.

Nov. 08 2009

Against the backdrop of the evolution of media and its powerful gathering of news material and data, all of the world’s happenings are trimmed like a lawn by a mower, with fragments of information flying about from place to place through the media as grass flies through the air. These broken pieces of information adhere to our tofu-like brain like spices sprinkled so thickly that they obscure the entire surface. For a moment, this makes us think we’re quite knowledgeable, but information tacked on the surface of the brain doesn’t amount to much when you add it all together.

Kenya Hara, Art Director for MUJI, on information dissemination in Designing Design. [Thanks for book and wine tip Dave. Book review with above quote here.]

It is interesting to relate this sentiment to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of a low-information diet, reserving your brain for higher order functions than storing what amounts to rubbish by and large (according to him, you’ll learn whatever news is important by speaking with people at parties via verbal gossip).  However, from the perspective of the digital information professional, the apparent chaos surrounding information dissemination is not random, much like looking at beehive or a crowded intersection in New York or Shanghai, over time, there is an order, a flow, a rhythm and a harmony.  Information isn’t broken, it is imperfect by design.  There is a simplicity in the abstraction that captures the nuanced way information goes from atomic to ubiquitous, from valuable to valueless, from sticky to externalized, from profane to mundane.  Information has nature, a food chain, a cycle of death and rebirth, beautiful disasters, seismic shifts, and yet has a stillness when observed as a landscape obscuring us from the dynamic details.  The goal is to become one with this nature.

(via gbattle) (via evangotlib) (via mikehudack)

Sep. 04 2009

But the Internet did something else to the news. By putting everyone on a 120MPH highway, it left very little room for value judgment and discretion around what is or isn’t worth talking about.
Basement.org: On The Web, More Isn’t Only Less, It’s Actually Nothing (via 43folders)

Jun. 29 2009

Toward a theory of information relativity

People will also believe that they understand something when they don’t really understand it. Have you ever left a meeting where everyone seemed to be in agreement, yet their later actions made it clear that they didn’t agree after all? It’s common to see nodding heads in a room when people don’t agree – they think they agree but in reality they don’t. This is because when an explanation is sufficiently vague, people are free to believe what they want to believe. Politicians often use this rhetorical principle to great effect. Words like “freedom, justice and fairness” mean different things to different people. Vague explanations are common in business, and they can give the illusion of agreement. But they don’t get results.

Apr. 11 2009

Against Realtime

The future is now, more so than ever. Silicon Valley, filled with worshipers of the new, has embraced “realtime” as the latest trend. If it didn’t happen in the last 10 minutes, it doesn’t matter.

…

This relentless neophilia is based on the notion that information only has value if it’s fresh. That the only news is breaking news. That the only thing you want to know about your friends is what they’re doing right now.

What if it’s all wrong?