'Nano-sharing' the brilliant scene from the 'Raiders of the lost Ark'

My family and I watched the Indiana Jones Stunt Show in Hollywood Studios this week.

The familiar Cairo Market Scene from the Raiders of the lost Ark, was re-enacted where Harrison Ford shoots the sword-wielding assassin.

I have seen this exact scene a dozen times before, yet there was this wonderful feeling watching it again.

From their smile-lit faces,I could guess that, many others in the audience would have seen this scene before as well.

Yet, we were immersed in the scene, in spite of it being very familiar and not novel.

Few brilliant scenes make a movie.

Shouldn't there be a simple way to enjoy individual scenes which Netflix or YouTube does not do today like the Cairo Market Clip

New York Times and Nano-sharing

YouTube brought back our vocal chords, which was eliminated by Sound Recording Technology. Blogs enjoyed similar status for a very short time.

The primary reason being: we could put in 1000 hours of practice and master the piano,without the fear of the 'pianist block'.

Yet, even 10,000 hours of writing would not free us from the writers' block. While it is easy to tweet a few words rather than write a complete blog post. Even that is becoming harder, as it takes effort, to be interesting in 140 characters.

So, link sharing supplanted sharing original thoughts. With thousands of new content every day, even reading is arduous. Thus, we skim tens and hundreds of shared links, on a daily basis.

New york Times now provides the ability to link paragraphs, to facilitate this emerging nano-sharing trend.

You can watch and share interesting segments of YouTube videos such as, the essence of Matt Ridley
Phillippe Starck
Ken Robinson and
Larry Lessig
using easybutton.tv

"I think Sarah Palin is a #male" says NELL

NELL, the Never-Ending Language Learner, is software developed by researchers at CMU that reads web pages constantly, forming models and refining existing models, based on newly formed models.

Contrast this with, how we learn a language. While we adopt statistical learning, similar to NELL, we have a huge advantage. Practice. We not only form models, but also test the models by applying it, whether by talking or communicating in another form.

Then, based on the feedback from the practice, from other people, we could decide to refine the model. This 'social learning', is the biggest handicap of NELL.

Also, none of us are purely 'language learners' as it is one of the many roles, human being, husband, son, dad, voter etc. Hence, we are not perfect in learning the language. Moreover, trying to build a perfect language learner machine is an elusive goal.

Also, the 'collective intelligence' that emerges out from community, tell us, at what level we are, relative to others. NELL has no cognizance of whether its knowledge of the language is 'basic' or advanced or expert-level. So, it makes some naive mistakes such as this and makes sophisticated inferences such as this.

So, if we could come to tolerate some degree of imperfection in the machine, then we could create a colony of thousands of knowledge bots, each having a particular emphasis thus pursuing specific sources, and each having a set of domain focus and having a particular set of Goals.

Over time, the entire internet could be infested with knowledge bots and we could come to rely on particular bots, based on our need, the specific task and the trust we place on the bot.

But, if we do not create a colony, we would end up in the same state, for statistical machine learning, as we did with Neural Networks, last decade, i.e., abandoned due to limitations discovered.

NELL needs socnet too, to keep it going, just like you.

Fractonomy and Mandelbrot

When you go searching for a Seth Godin book in the Library, you go to the Business Section and then look for the Marketing shelf. Not only that, you could find Philip Kotler's book in the same shelf.

Taxonomy or the science of classification, makes this happen.

When you go searching for a "london eye" picture in Flickr, all you do is type "london eye" in the search box and thousands of 'relevant' pictures appear. Folksonomy or tags by folks make it possible. The fact that you could also find Big Ben, is not because of an existence of a hierarchical classification scheme, but due to statistical clustering.

Instead of you searching for information, if relevance has to find you, in this exciting period of the "connected consumption", what would be the key enabler?

Fractonomy. It is a portmanteau of Fractal and Taxonomy.

We could use the power of statistical clustering, not only to cluster consumers with 'similar interests. We could also use statistical clustering to map the trajectory of future interests,which would emerge like a fractal.

RIP Mandelbrot.

Curation without Curators

There are no cars that drive itself yet, no machine that can understand human language, in the marketplace.

But,this week, there was some promising news, about NELL and the Google Car. While this is great news, it might take years, probably decades, to iron out the contextual wrinkles, for widespread use.

Many popular Science Fiction books and Movies, posit a perilous future, with machines taking control over human beings. Such a possibility make books interesting, yet is still a fictional future. We need imagination to augment the abilities of humans, with the possibilities provided by machines.

Curation is one such application. Statistical machine learning could help solve the clustering problem very well. Having known the cluster that you are interested in, by constructing curator pools, machines can be deployed to do the "hill climbing". ... more like Don Norman writes, in "Design without designers".

Will Netflix end its movie suggestion like Walmart?

Over 4 years back, Walmart ended its movie suggestion product, when its algorithm suggested "Planet of the Apes" to folks who bought "Martin Luther King" DVD.

Now, Netflix is reporting that some of its users have rated over 50,000 movies. Even if a person, watched a movie per day, it would take 136 years to watch 50,000 movies.
Also, digg is facing problems sustaining due to "power diggers".

All this indicate, that relevance streams generated by machines, would also follow, the Forer effect.

Suggestions, would appear to be right on, at the very beginning and with time, it would become totally useless.

Connected Consumption with friends do not scale up, as we experience with Facebook. Pool of people, is such a bother to maintain, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio.

Expert curators are too narrow in their domains. The solution ought to be a mashup of all these : Algorithm, Curator Pool, Social Recommendation, Expert Recommendation with the right proportion.

What is a Relevance Engine?

Wikipedia and Delicious, both enable us to share content, but the creativity involved in the sharing exercise is pretty low.

Slideshare and YouTube naturally encourages creativity, but it is hard to find the content that we like, from the long tail of mediocrity. Social Recommendations are thus key to consuming content.

While Stumbleupon solves the problem of discovery pretty well, yet the creative effort needed to share a link, is pretty low.

A Relevance Engine, is a class of platform that combines the characteristics of both an Effective Sharing Platform and a Discovery Engine.

A Relevance Engine serves as the one and only means of consuming the Long Tail, that preserves the richness and diversity afforded by the Long Tail

If we consider the Seth Godin's interpretation of Art as something that has the characteristics of being creative, passionate and personal, then Relevance Engine is a new Art Platform.

Talk is Expensive

Clay Shirky, says in "Cognitive Surplus" that, “Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive. “Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

Let us not get too carried away with "Markets are Conversations". Market Conversations are only one type of Conversation, in the enterprise conversational prism.

The Enterprise response to control the outcome, range from total Social Media ban, to opening Social Media to specific departments, to establishing employee policies on Social Media usage. Yet, none of these responses are adequate.

In order to avoid seeing every conversation as a nail, we need new tools, some without conversations, so that Enterprises could instrument relevant tools, pertinent to their context.

Genuineness and the Johari Window are not orthogonal.

Fluid Segmentation

When you ask a person, what makes an Entrepreneur, you would usually get, "A brilliant guy with a great idea and with enormous drive and tons of hard work".

Brilliance is the operative word here and this model is derived from outcome. However, if you ask the same question to an Entrepreneur, he might say, "Just a regular guy with an artist-like devotion to the context that interests him, with tons of experimentation and a die-hard optimist,immune to rejection."

People view the world with their own lens, which is constantly changing. A 30-year old White Male Professional might have had similar interests with others in his segment, in the Television Era, but not so,in the Era of Collaborative Consumption of Long Tail Contents.

Collaborative Consumption provides new affordances to develop a nuanced taste. We are moving from the world of tangible segmentation onto a world of fluid segmentation, where segmentation emerges from computation of consumption data. In the next decade or so, don't be surprised if the 6things that you like, is totally different from the guys, you regularly hang out with.

Relevant Streams = Social Networks - Socialization

While the Inbox and the TV Guide were the monikers of scarcity, the stream is the moniker of abundance.

But, the stream in its current form, is largely DIY, as @robdiana articulates the pitfalls of the stream.

If a "Regular Geek" has strong issues about DIY streams, imagine the plight of the mainstream adopter. This clearly indicates that,this current trend of the 'DIY curator streams' is transient and would give way to a more robust solution, the 'relevant stream'.

We do have the learning algorithms and 400 million people, who all are eager to share their 'likes' to the world.

What is the problem, then?

The problem isn't technology or availability of curators, but how fundamentally these 'likes' bubble up into our 'relevance stream'.

This is the result of co-mingling, social networks with "connected consumption".

The pivotal problem arises from the "Keynesian Beauty Contest" pattern, present in the Social-network based "connected consumption".

"Keynes described the action of rational agents in a market using an analogy based on a fictional newspaper contest, in which entrants are asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that are the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize."

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

If we segregate the "social aspect" from social networks, we get a "connected consumption" platform of Relevant Streams.

But, I am not predicting the "end" of social networks. Social Networks has its benefits, as discovered by Paul Zak : "Social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains".

I am merely arguing for new platforms of "connected consumption" without socialization.

The Trouble with Recommendation Engines - Recommending the Mediocre

My friend would ask us, with a smile after a meal, "How did you like the meal? Good or Best? Our "Best" does not mean anything and she knew it.

Yet, the ritual continued after every meal, we had at their house. It was more like a conversation piece, rather than feedback.

When Netflix asked me, how much I liked the movie, I thought what a waste of my time. I ain't no Siskel Ebert. For me, if something is good, I am certainly going to shout about it in, either Twitter or Facebook. If I didn't like it, I am going to ignore it and perhaps abandon the movie midstream.

The great majority of my life experience belongs to the mediocre category. Mediocre doesn't equate to bad. I don't expect to have an awesome meal every day. Mediocrity helps us rejoice the awesome.I like to endure mediocrity with Silence.

But, if you asked me, "How was it?" after a mediocre meal, you are now pushing me to an extreme. I might start picking on the flaws. Some people might take the other path and say, "it was good".

Now if you give this verdict, to the machine. It is going to make some crazy inferences, no matter how smart the 'million dollar' algorithm is. There is nothing dumber than asking a viewer, after a movie, "On a scale of 1 to 10,..." type questions. It simply breeds more mediocrity.

Information makes me Happy

One of my buddies suffered from Spondylitis at a very young age. He endured high-intensity pain for a while, religiously following the treatment plan, that his physician outlined. After few years, he changed physicians and the outcome was the same.

Then, he did something different. He began meticulously researching in the internet, interviewing physicians, from different parts of the country and came up with his own treatment plan.

After few years, his spondylitis vanished. While, most of us, use the Internet to superficially learn terms that would annoy our Physician, my buddy was clearly an outlier.




The Case of Search Engines as Gateways to THE Library is well-established. Then, one might wonder how Search Engines would fade away and give way to Relevance Engines.

With the advent of Social Networks, another dominant usage of the Internet is emerging, ... as a tool to make us happy.

Do you want a tool that provides you the the 6things that you like or Search endlessly for interesting content all day long?

Goodbye Search Engine - Hello Relevance Engine

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Mr Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

"All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."

"We can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them," he said When the web is regarded as a library, Search is the obvious metaphor of choice to access this library.

But, we presently bathe in user-generated social streams of mediocrity, blended with some brilliant authentic information and entertainment.

How do we separate fact from fiction? Most importantly, your fact from my fiction? This points to a trend that, the metaphor is about to change, from Search to relevance.

Yeah, this side-effect of Technology as a diversion, cannot be eradicated and we need to handle it. However,the good news is that, the tools are poised to mature.

From Search Engines to Relevance Engine, that provides you the 6 things from 6,844,647 things.

Like I wrote earlier, curation is the solution, as it is the one and only way to preserve the richness and diversity of the long tail of contents.

Leadership - From emotional Intelligence to emotion inducer

"I think the big transformation for business is, not that hierarchy is going to crumble, but rather many of the relative advantages of hierarchy are now reduced.
....
The habitual 20th century norm is: institutions enjoy a relative monopoly on tight management of information and tight co-ordination of action and big distributed groups (like your customers), don't have that." - Clay Shirky

If you want a quick peek on how leadership would manifest in this Century, take a look at this Video (in full-screen mode).


Take a special look at the conductor, Ethan Sperry, who conducts the Collegiate Chorale.

He not only sets the tempo and shapes the sound of the ensemble, he does one more crucial thing.

Ethan infects the air around him, with a liberal dose of his enthusiasm.

The emotion required is dependent largely on the context in which collective action happens, but the principle remains.

In this age of Social Media, the leader is not the one who inducts a tribe for collective action, but one who inducts the relevant emotion (enthusiasm, anger or whatever the context needs) at the right frequency, to his Tribe.

RIP - C.K.Prahalad

C.K.Prahalad is best known for Core Competence, that he developed along with Gary Hamel, in the Pre-internet Era.

Core Competence takes an 'introvertish' view of business, looking at the core competencies of the enterprise, that are not easy to imitate and are pivotal to business success.

Prahalad revamped his model of the Enterprise in Co-creation, in which he acknowledges the limitations of the Enterprise in this Internet Era.

Co-Creation is about creating products and services along with customers as companies no longer owns enough resources to invent products on their own.

Most importantly, he posited the revolutionary theory of Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Here is BOP, in his own words,

"Because consumption can and does increase income. Consider health care. If you are legally blind with cataracts, you can't work and neither can the family member who cares for you. But if you get access to inexpensive cataract surgery, now you can see and both of you can work. Have you consumed eye surgery or increased the family's earning power? You've done both. It's two sides to the same coin."

Candido and his 'micro-interests'

My friend Candido sounded very frustrated yesterday. The prime reason is that, in every water cooler conversation, people instead of using, "The weather is warmer today" conversation starter, resort to, "I love mexican food".

He goes on, "Caucasian, black, chinese, indian, doesn't matter, they all start with the same thing, "I love mexican food". These folks are not intending anything bad. But, he hates being stereotyped, even in water cooler conversations.

Society has a million stereotypes, which function as cognitive shortcuts.

"You are a boy. So, you must like to play only with cars and trucks."

"You are an engineer. So, you cannot be an extrovert."

This percolates all the way, from society to capitalism. The products sold, the recommendation engines, a vast majority of them, want to box you in into neat categories.

Nothing wrong with categorization, but most of the time, it is way off, if categorization is based on broad categories.

So, for relevance and recommendation engines to be meaningful, they ought to have fine-grained interest categories. I call it the 'micro-interest'. But these are wicked hard for machines to derive from, as they lack the richness of interpretation of human beings.

Knowing Candido, I know he is interested in a wide variety of things, from Michael Buble to Tintin Comics, the delicate tango of privacy and publicity to Entrepreneurship.

Yet, most of the Systems have is, a myopic view of him: 35-year old Professional Single Male from Spain (yes, he is actually not from Mexico, but from Spain).

When the machine 'learns' his subtle micro-interests, he is ready to check out relevance engines. BTW, he does not want to have yet another online account.

The Last Mile Problem

Hookworms are a major cause of ill-health globally. In children, they cause intellectual, cognitive and growth retardation.So, eradicating them seems to be the "Solution".

Wrong!!

Eradicating them could cause an outbreak of Asthma. Hookworms secrete proteins that dampens the hyper-immune response of the host they reside,that causes asthma.

In the business context, the word solution evokes a false sense of security, for it is a partial and temporal phenomenon.

So, folks like David Gurteen are suggesting that there could only be responses to business problems and not solutions.

However the word response lacks the "accountability".

The middle ground could be, to identify the relevant scarcity in the context and design a solution that completely addresses it.

The relevant scarcity in the world health case is lack of good health in a wide population and not eradicating hookworms.

The bridge in the picture is almost complete, except for the "last mile". Identifying relevant Scarcity is a last-mile problem.

Nudge, Granny's underwear and Online Addiction

"Because, what they are looking for, from Sliced Bread, might not be, what he thinks is important in Sliced Bread. Maybe, they want it to be cheap or convenient or delivered with a Smile. maybe, they want it delivered to their home. Maybe, they want to go the store, where buying in that store, makes them feel special, maybe they want it to be organic or available at the Whole Foods Market. I mean, there are million reasons, people buy bread and the best one period is not one of them."
- Seth Godin

My expectations from an online service, is more than free nowadays. A cleverly designed tool that nudges me out of their service, so that I don't use it for procrastination. It is not only about one's self-control.

There are a number of external factors in the physical world, which come to the rescue of the individual in exercising self-control. The law of the Land and Social Norms are two of the principal aids.

Social norms function as guardrails, so that one wouldn't cross the proverbial line. ... and then there are "drinking and driving" laws that would function as an effective impediment, for an individual not to drink excessively.

No such natural deterrent seem to exist in the online world. Hence the need to design a "nudge" in your online service.

Of course, kicking users out of your service would cause losses in the short-term. But, instead of users avoiding your farmville after they recognize how great a timesink it has become, these constraints will help retain users in the long-term. ...and is the only effective solution to addiction in the online world, for the individual.

Unless, of course, if you ask the creative Dan Ariely who would illustrate the clever "granny's underwear" technique.

Bring back the Wizards

One of my buddies called me, on reading my previous post and recollected how he encountered several brilliant doctors growing up. He asks, "Where are they now?".

I recollect visiting a particular dentist growing up, who had a roaring practice. My friend's dad (who was a good friend of the dentist) and I were waiting in the waiting room, when the dentist arrived. He waved at us from a distance and we waited for our turn.

As we entered his office, the dentist greeted my friend's dad and says to him, "Looks like the boy has a problem with the third teeth on the upper right row."

I remember gaping with awe, "That's impossible, how did he know it? I don't even recollect him looking at me before. Yet he seems to have noticed the way I clenched my teeth, in the nanosecond, that he walked into the office, amidst the sea of faces".

Let's face it. The intelligence that we created to handle the grand scale and scope of health care, with its accompaniments of the insurers and lawyers, have swept away the wizards and replaced their brilliance with mediocrity.

No point in being a luddite or being nostalgic about the past. Instead the mighty task that we have is to, bring back the wizards, by connecting their intelligence to the intelligence that we created. ...and such a Connected Intelligence is the alternative future, I dearly envision to Ray Kurzweil's.

How many doctors does it take to diagnose an ear infection?

In Massachusetts,the answer is 12. Your actual mileage may vary.

Yup. It took 12 doctors, 8 agonizing days of blood work,Chest X-Ray,a 911 ambulance visit to the E.R., 106 F temp. on few nights and an overnight hospital stay to fix the problem.

Finally, it took a doctor who said, "Wait a moment, first let me remove the ear wax and then worry about root cause". It turned out to be a simple ear infection.

Granted our child did not complain of ear pain, nor was the wax apparently outside, but all the doctors who took a peek with an otoscope, never bothered to remove the wax.

Technology not only makes us stupid but lazy as well. We defer to the intelligence, that we created, for things that require a little effort from our end. We have a litany of tools to choose from for doing this 'pro-technication'.

More than procrastination, 'pro-technication' is a lot harder to identify and fix. One way to fix 'pro-technication', is to design systems that defers tasks and responsibilities back to the human user.

In Corporate 2.0, Systems will start to behave like human beings by participating in 'passing the buck' ritual. I think that is a welcome role reversal and bound to make us more effective, for it is a sign of the existence of the "connected intelligence".

Wikification of Sense-Making

The Printing Press enabled us all to become readers, while the internet is enabling us to become writers.

However with the great deluge of information, we need to design a better language, a screen language, the Über-veda.

Until then, we could design an interim Directed Sense-making System, which would save a lot of time researching in the internet.


Consider this:

Bees collect honey and tell other bees the source of honey through a waggle dance.

They give them a sample of honey.

A billion people are connected to the Internet.

They search, Research,analyze and make sense of information.

Connect me to that intelligence by turning Sense-makers into sense-givers. Ah! The connected intelligence.

The Pre-Internet Man

The information and entertainment needs of the Pre-Internet Man were pretty simple. In the morning, he functioned in a programmed mode with very limited time.

On most mornings, he had virtually no time for entertainment and the 'actionable information value' that he derived from reading a newspaper was pretty small.

Yet, the pre-internet man dutifully performed the ritual of reading a newspaper or watching the morning TV.

On his commute, he listened to NPR (or its place-equivalent cousin), or sought to be entertained by Music, depending on whether he enjoyed being informed or entertained. So, typically, he pre-set his tuner to the Radio Station that catered to his general taste.

In the evening, he loved to unwind from the hard day behind, by switching on the Television at the appointed-time, to watch his favorite show.

During the weekends, he had more time to unwind and laze around in front of the Television and flip to different channels, based on his mood. The hundreds of channels were abundant enough, to keep him mighty happy.

Mass Media worked to serve these needs, by providing a secure sense of predictability in his life as well as function as a social object for his watercooler conversation.

The current Early Internet Man behaves much like a kid in her toy room, who wants all the toys from the store, yet plays mostly with a few select toys. He tends to spend more time searching for the toy, rather than enjoy playing with a toy.

Traditional media was curated for the mass, as well as talent was filtered. The Early Internet man has tasted the fun of the unfiltered authentic 'unprogram' culture that has emerged with the coming of the internet.

Yet, he carries a huge burden to filter from the long-tail of contents, the ones that does not fit his worldview and taste etc.,, which takes up significant amount of his time and hence the analogy with the kid in her toy room.

No, the solution ain't a digital way to 'fastflip' his newspaper or youtube search Videos, but an Uber-Media device that provides a personal newspaper-equivalent in the morning,personal TV Programming in the evening and a personal-curated Netflix.

For, Personalized Curation is the one and only way to preserve the richness and diversity afforded by the long-tail.

6 Questions for Seth Godin

Transcript of Vasu's interview with Linchpin Author Seth Godin.

Vasu: Let us start off with Peter Drucker's Wise Words:"There is always a need for some selling. But, the aim of Marketing is to make selling superfluous. How do you see this notion manifest in this Age of the Connected Consumption"?


SETH GODIN: I am not sure I agree with you that Marketing makes selling superfluous. They do very different things.

I believe that the goal of Marketing is to tell a Story, that spreads, to create products that people are truly interested in buying. The goal of selling is to overcome the fear people have of saying yes.

You need both of them in most situations.We don't to get rid of all the Salespeople in the world. There are very very few products or services that it could honestly be said, could sell themselves.

That said, I think what we are seeing in our connected world is that Marketing is far more powerful than it used to be, because ideas spread further and faster than they used to, which puts the imperative on anyone who has an idea to spread, on anyone who wants to make a difference to create a product that people are actually gonna want to buy.


Vasu: In 1998, one of my co-workers spoke passionately about the Google Search Engine...and I tried it whenever Altavista did not return enough results.After 6 months, I was passionately recommending to, everyone I saw. Is this why, in one of the talks you mentioned that, Google is more about Marketing than about Technology?

SETH GODIN: Well, What I mean by that is, without Technology, Google could not have existed. However, the technology alone wasn't sufficient for them to deliver the value that they've delivered to users and Shareholders. That what has made Google successful is the Story that they tell. What has made them successful is many of the essential Marketing decisions that they've made, that have been so correct, I believe technology has merely enabled that.


Vasu: Products like Starbucks, function naturally, to use Gaping Void's term,Social Objects. I like the Ambience,the WIFI, the convenience of meeting someone in the 3rd place. But, I personally like, Dunkin' Donuts Coffee better. But in conversations, the third place aspect gets remarked in conversations, rather than the Quality of Coffee. Another example is Sergey Brin's Shoes, that he wore at that Conference, a couple of months back. Everybody is talking about it in Social Media. If my competitor has a product more naturally remarkable than mine. Is there anyway I can fix it?

SETH GODIN: Well, you better. I guess my argument is, if you have an average product for average people and all you gonna do, is argue about it.all you gonna do is yell about it. all you gonna do is push it on people. Then you have an uphill battle, don't you?


Vasu: iPhone has millions of us as walking commercials. What more,could an iPhone Television Commercial possibly accomplish?

SETH GODIN: Well OK. What happens is that some people are open to hearing from friends. Some people make a decision about a significant purchase, based on what they hear from friends. Other people, whether through training or inclination have a different approach. Their approach is that, they need to know that something is substantial enough, that they are not going to get into trouble. They need to know, that its' famous. that its real. that its gonna work for them...and that means that they get a lot of security and pleasure out of seeing it advertised on Television. That seeing advertised on Television, puts into a new spot in their head, in terms of their understanding of what it is and so Apple benefits by buying those Ads.

Vasu: I personally like to watch Commercials, provided they are entertaining and are in my zone of interest personally. Dave Ogilvy said, "Advertising is about inventing a promise that the viewer could relate to. How do you see ads playing out in this Age of the Tribes?

SETH GODIN: I think, what we saw for the last forty years, is ads that didn't deserve to succeed paying for themselves. Ads for Average Stuff. Ads for commodities.Ads with obnoxious jingles in them. Ads that we watched, because we really had no choice. Those are gonna go away. We are gonna to still see ads around, that talked to the masses. that connect us in a different way. we still gonna see ads around annnoucing things or create tribes or that connect us. But, we are gonna see the end of,you know,the Palmolive or Tide detergent ads that people don't care one bit about.


Vasu: Let us say, my friend belongs to the third generation of the Bakers, making the finest Sliced Bread, in our county. His father Joe could not do much to scale up, this word-of-mouth reputation, that his grandfather built. Recently my friend took over the business and realized that his customers love them, because no one makes Fresh Bread like them Period. In this age of the Social Media, What should my friend do to Scale his footprint?

SETH GODIN: First of all, I would imagine that for the vast majority of people in his market. They don't agree with your statement. That no one makes sliced bread like he does.

Because, what they are looking for, from Sliced Bread, might not be, what he thinks is important in Sliced Bread. Maybe, they want it to be cheap or convenient or delivered with a Smile. maybe, they want it delivered to their home. Maybe, they want to go the store, where buying in that store, makes them feel special, maybe they want it to be organic or available at the Whole Foods Market. I mean, there are a million reasons, people buy bread and the best one period is not one of them.

And so we need to start there. We need to understand that lots of people, tell themselves different stories. They have different world-views. I would then ask this person, why are you trying to grow your business. growing your business might not be the right plan. But, if you are trying to grow your business. Who do you want to add to your customer list. Because you can't add everybody.

How are you going to build a core group of people who are passionate enough about your bread that, they will drive across town or fly across the country to buy it. and if that's true, what do you have to change your offering. whether its the price or the product or the way it's sold or the story you tell, so that these people would be eager to buy from you.


Vasu: so the definition of remarkable is not what you perceive but what your tribe perceives, right?

SETH GODIN: Thats exactly right. All the word remarkable means, is that someone made a remark about it.

Sergey Brin's Cool Shoes

When I saw Sergey Brin's Cool Shoes in that Video, I thought "Wow!, cool shoes". Then I saw it getting 'remarked' in Social Media a lot.

Now I started wondering, "What unfair advantage, this coolness attribute could have over another brand of "extremely comfortable and durable Shoes". Particularly in this era of the connected consumption.

I asked the Best-Selling "Purple Cow" Author Seth Godin, 6 questions leading to what is "remarkable?"

What is Marketing and why is Google about Marketing?

Starbucks, Sergey Brin's Shoes and why an iPhone TV Commercial?

Ads in the Age of the Tribes

What is "remarkable" in Sliced Bread?

Thanks Seth for taking the time amidst your busy 'Linchpin' launch week.

The Mess Web 2.0 made

Back when things were quieter,individuals by their sheer brilliance, created original objects of value: painting, music, books, equations to name a few.

Then the Scientific Method came along, where we stood on the "Shoulders of Genius" and saw things that would not have been possible otherwise, by systematically deriving, from the works of others.

Along came Ford. He kindled within us, the need to produce tons of objects, 'efficiently'. Computers elevated our collective pursuit for efficiency to an even grander scale.

Then something happened: the web 2.0,The Web is functioning as the great leveler, by bringing in the lazy to the same platform as the industrious, the absolutely talentless alongside the remarkably talented.

Except for the occasional Susan Boyle, these unwashed masses,are gradually ruining the place. Or to use Andrew Keene's aptly pejorative phrase, "creating digital forests of mediocrity". It is getting a lot harder to judge the fact from the fiction.

We are at a risk of collapse of the system , that we meticulously built thus far, through the toil of countless people. It is at this very stage, the trend of curation is starting to emerge.

Curation is the golden thread, that connects the individual to the artificial intelligence that we have created, i.e., the systems, processes etc.,

Curation, in isolation,merely appears to be an act of people choosing what they care about. But, in the larger scheme of things, its impact is grander like the Scientific Method and is our only savior to the mess Web 2.0 has made.

Content Curation and the Big Feast Ritual

A Tribe not in contact with the rest of Humanity, was found in the Amazon. Everyone from the Tribe escapes and swims in the River excepting Adam, who was too shocked to move.

Prof. Brown thinks fast and offers him the Pecan Pie, that he brought along from Long Island. Adam after some hesitation, eats it and does a remarkable thing. He does an ecstatic Tribal Dance and dozes off after a while.

When he wakes up, Bob approaches Adam with his Food. Adam is about to jump into the River, when they withdraw and keep the food in the nearby Rock. Adam sniffs the food and does not take the food ...and thus the “Big Feast Ritual” began.

They install a bell near the rock that Adam can ring, any time he wants food. The Team has an infinite supply of food suppliers from around the world.

They pick a pool of suppliers which they think would appeal to Adam. Then, they pick one tray and keep it in the Rock and run away, whenever Adam rings the bell. Adam sniffs the food and does one of two things, he takes it with him to the bush or rings the bell again. But, just because Adam takes the food with him, does not mean that he likes the food.

We do not have an idea, if he consumed at all. Though, he comes back to ring the bell again. Also, we cannot rely on the time between the bell rings, as a sign that he consumed, as the other day, he consumed a tin of Rosagullas in three seconds, flat and did the Tribal Dance.

Prof. Brown says: "Our goal is to ensure that, Adam comes back to ring the bell often and hopefully make him do the tribal dance." "During an eating session, where Adam could eat anything from a small number of items to a large number, our goal is to make the session longer and longer, so we must switch the caterer, if we have to, during the session."

"Also, we have to ensure that, we replace the non-performing caterer, based on some criteria and replace him with a new one from outside the pool."

2010 is poised to be the year of Content Curation and the organization that comes up with an efficient solution to keeping Adam happy would most certainly triumph.