Dida-5 and the emergence of Fractonomy

My best part of the day, is dropping my 5-year old to school. Ah! The questions and insights...

Of late, she has become reticent and prefers to listen to Music. Pretty soon, she got bored of her kids' songs. So, I function as her DJ. When a new song plays, she either commands, "I don't like it. Could you change daddy" or she remains quiet.

I noticed that, whenever "Jack and Diane" plays, she sings along. So, I brought in a collection of John Mellencamp. Bumner! She did not seem to like anything other than "Jack and Diane".
So, I kept trying other singers in that Genre.

For her age, her taste is pretty nuanced. She would not like a slow song. Yet she particularly likes Micheal Buble. The traditional taxonomy of musical genres is not very useful for me, to select songs for her.

Pandora did not work for me,beyond a point, partly due to the short rides. Since I am a music lover myself, I curate the songs for her and of late, she rarely says, "I don't like it".

I can almost externalize my daughter's taste pattern, into a new custom genre, which I would call, the 'dida-5'. Her taste is not going to be the same, 2 years from now. It would become 'dida-7'.I am pretty sure, there would be others whose taste fall into 'dida-5'.

The trajectory of her taste could be reliably predicted and would emerge like a fractal, with data from other consumers, bound together, in a connected consumption platform.

I would call this, 'computer-generated' custom taxonomy as 'fractonomy'. I used taste as an anchor for classification. However, Taste could be easily replaced by any other attribute, in this "Everything is Miscellaneous" Era.

A New kind of Newspaper

Anticipation ain't necessarily bad. Simple things like anticipating for your favorite TV Show, adds to the richness of life experience.

While providing the comfort of time-shifting, the Tivos of the World killed such simple pleasures, life has to offer.

During the days when the Newspaper boy is late, it invokes a delicious feeling of expectation.

It is not as if, that we are missing on some critical information or news, but it is the joy of the morning ritual, with a coffee and a Newspaper. Such rituals provide a secure sense of predictability in our lives.

The internet killed such simple pleasures. Yet with the deluge of real-time content in twitter, it is possible to re-invent the secure of predictability in our lives through Media, by the confluence of Technology and Curators.

A Personalized media device that is constructed especially for you, to recreate the morning newspaper ritual, the evening relaxation TV Show and the lazy weekend rituals. ... a new kind of Newspaper and a new kind of Appointment Television.

One man's Curation is another man's junk

The Printing Press made as all Readers. Yet with the great deluge of books, how many have you read completely, following every nuance? Probably a handful.

The Web made us all writers, is a myth. Good Writing requires enormous attention. Robert Pirsig rented a place and used to write from 3 AM when he was working on 'Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance'.

Like Venky Ramakrishnan the Nobel Laurette says, "You cannot do Science, in order get the Nobel Prize. That is a route to failure and unhappiness". This principle applies to writing as well.

So, people blog for sometime and then they give up, once the initial enthusiasm wears away.

Clay Shirky is right about the fact that, we do all these activities, because of a cognitive surplus.

However, what we could do best, which is unique to each one of us, is the ability to curate digital information, from our own little window.

The videos that we watch in YouTube and the blog posts that we enjoy, the interesting web pages that we visited, we could curate it in Twitter, for instance. If we enjoy consuming and is authentic about our preferences, then pretty soon, one could have a good following in Twitter.

In a matter of few years, digital curation is poised to become a profession by itself. Even though, curation is subjective in that, 'one man's curation, is another man's junk', if we are authentic enough, we could have a Tribe for ourselves. You never get paid to Read, but you would certainly get paid to curate....and Authenticity is the name of the Game.

Usage Roadmaps and Vending Machines

There is an overwhelming trend to make applications exceedingly simple to use. The rationale being, if the user does not "get it", then they might not adopt it at all.

Google brought in this vending machine user interface to the web. Just like, when you want to consume a Diet Coke, you press few buttons and a Diet Coke is dispensed, without much effort from the user's part. You simply type in a few search terms and your product (which is a website list) is dispensed.

Vending Machines result in faster adoption than,say,learning to type using a QWERTY keyboard or driving an automobile. But, unfortunately, such a minimalistic approach might not work for all contexts.

For contexts which cannot be simplified beyond a certain point, I suggest a new tool, called the usage roadmaps.

Instead of releasing newer and newer versions of user interface of the product, which requires constant user learning,you decide on having only one version of the Product UI. A first-time user will have a skin as a User Interface.

As the user progresses in usage, let the menu items and other user interface aids, appear progressively. This requires that your product should have a "usage roadmap".

Such usage roadmaps must align well with product roadmaps.