Blank (Media) Slate

I’ve always known that I live in a little bubble of people who think largely like I do. It seems perfectly natural to me that we hang out with people who share some sort of common interest. Even if the majority of your acquaintances are formed by proximity, there’s a high probability that everyone working together or otherwise living in the same neighborhood have some sort of connection.

What I bumped into during my recent holiday vacation, however, was an entirely different group of people than I usually encounter. While visiting my family in Colorado, I attended a few parties with folks I wouldn’t necessarily consider my posse. But when hanging out with the family, on their turf, you go with the flow.

Everyone’s always been interested in my work for the Patriots, and I’ve got a ton of amusing stories about the ten or so years I was working for them. Generally, there’s not a lot of explaining that has to take place prior to an anecdote; almost everyone knows what a football team is and what they do. This year, however, was very different.

When asked what I’m doing now, I would start with the standard matchmine elevator pitch. Over the past couple years that pitch has taken less and less further explanation. It’s hard to walk down the street in Boston today and not bump into a couple dozen companies grappling with the need to personalize their offering. Even outside involvement in the biz, most folks with whom I interact take the elevator pitch and easily start pushing their own question buttons.

Back home, however, I was surrounded by a shockingly large number of people who had only a vague notion of personalized media discovery. In fact, they assumed that the type of work we’re doing already exists under the covers of the sites they visit. Given my familial connections, there was a wide range of people spanning cowboys, doctors, judges, artists, and professional philanthropists. While not necessarily a mark of intelligence, the majority of them, while were working all over the map, had advanced degrees of one sort or another. Further, most of them talked easily about using email, the web, and tools like SMS, IM, and RSS feed readers in their daily lives (and not in a “gee whiz” sort of way, but as a matter-of-fact).

What I’m saying is that these are regular people who are relatively plugged in. While they’re not involved in building the online stuff, they’re actively using it. They’re moderately heavy computer users, tossing photos around with the likes of Flickr and regularly using iChat, etc., so I didn’t detect a learning curve required there. Further, everyone assumed that many sites performs some under-the-covers magic for their “You’re interest in this, so you might like that” features. It’s just that they didn’t realize these systems are all disconnected from each other.

Almost to a person, I finally got them on board when I said something to the effect that, “Using a MatchKey, you won’t have to do anything other than what you do now. Through our partners you’ll simply see an improvement in what they’re already offering you.” They were sold on the concept, then, when they got the fact that the MatchKey can be used as their proxy for their interests and tastes on various sites. It’s just that they don’t think about stuff like this much.

It was while ruminating on these discussions that I realized how important it is to remain focused on customer need as opposed to kewl tech. To that end, I have a renewed appreciation for the mantra of “don’t change the habits of the consumer, just improve their experience.” It’s easy to forget this reality when living in a bubble where everyone speaks the same lingo.

This is just too good to pass up… Seamus McCauley posted a complimentary note on his “Virtual Economics” blog today:

MatchMine is the best new idea I’ve seen this year. It’s not new to recommend media content to people on the basis of their individual preferences (that’s what Google News tries to do for news, what Last.fm and Pandora do very effectively for music, what TIOTI wants to do for TV, what Amazon does adequately, if sometimes randomly, with books) but trying to generalise it across multiple media from a single location is new.

I’m certainly pleased to hear that the idea I cooked up strikes a chord. I’ve been living this dream for the past couple years, and it’s gratifying that there’s a receptive audience for it. We’re still in the (very) early hours of the execution of the business itself, so I’m excited to see us transition from the “great idea” phase into providing a “great solution” for the end users.

… and so it begins.

This is just a quick note about how I’m currently in social media overload. I try to test out just about every new site on offer, noodling around to see what value they may add to my life. It’s possible I’m nowhere near the typical demographic these sites are targeting (especially given the fact I’m over thirty), but then again I’m a guy with a few bucks in my pocket of discretionary income. It just seems their target tends to be folks with more disposable time than cash, and I can’t help but wonder what that means.

I could be atypical, but I’m still looking for the killer social networking site that truly caters to my personal interests (which only tangentially include media). Movies are fine, I suppose, and I like to listen to music, but there’s a limit to how many favorite lists I can create, comment on, and share. Then it becomes a never-ending cycle of maintenance — after all, my tastes continue to change.

Moving beyond media (which is a relatively obvious target for these sites), there’s not a lot of social networking magic happening in the areas of life that really matter to me. For example, I’ve been trying to find good sites that connect people dedicated to sustainable living. I can’t make three clicks without getting stuck reading people to chatting up (the same) bands, (the same) movies, and the (same) viral video, but where are the folks chatting about their “Top 10 Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprints”?

… then again, perhaps I’m not looking hard enough.

I’ve been reading up on memory lately and found an interesting effect that might speak (in a totally non-scientific way) to something that seems to be part of our collective culture. I was listening to research CDs by Diana Deusch (see an earlier post for more background) and a pitch memory experiment caught my attention.

Here’s a quick blurb on “Short Term Memory for Pitch” from her site:

Suppose you play a tone, and this is followed by another tone which is either the same in pitch as the first, or differs by a semitone, most people find it very easy to decide whether the two tones are the same or different. This is true even when the tones are separated by a five second delay.

That’s all very well and good, of course, but when the intervening silence is filled with other tones, the task becomes much more difficult. Nothing strange there, I think we all get that. What gets more interesting, though, is when you fill the space between tones with spoken words (in this case they are spoken numbers). As Deusch says:

Most people find the memory task much easier when spoken numbers rather than tones are played during the interval between the test tones. This contrasts remarkably with the memory loss that occurs when a sequence of tones is played during the interval between the test tones, even though the extra tones can be ignored. So we conclude that the pitch of a tone is held in a specialized memory store, and that interference takes place between pitches inside this store. Other materials - such as spoken numbers - do not enter the store, so they produce much less interference with memory for pitch.

According to the background reading I’ve done in memory, it turns out that short term memory can only juggle a handful of similar items before they are either committed to longer term memory or lost. In fact, George Miller, while at Bell Labs, determined that the number of similar items is about seven, plus/minus two. Research has since shown that the number of “storable items” differs by type and situation (eg. seven for digits, six for letters, and five for words).

What I find interesting is how this might map into popular culture. For example, I’ve always wondered why people tend to remark about recent films being “the best movie ever.” I don’t take those statements literally, but assume them to be infused with exuberant hyperbole to make a point. It’s also relatively well known that in order to capitalize on this effect, movies in contention for Oscars are purposefully released near voting time.

So, if all this is well known, what’s the point of this post? First of all, I think it’s interesting to play with the temporal effect of “liking” something (ie. adding more relative weight to recent interests, degrading them over time). Second, I think it’d be interesting to explore if we’re hardwired to only allow for something like 7 +/- 2 “greatest” movies/songs/etc. in our heads at any given time.

I’ve struck up a conversation with Yihong Ding about taking small steps toward a more effective Semantic Web and an idea popped into my head that seemed worth jotting down. In order to get folks moving in the right direction perhaps something small like a reader of microformats… we could call it a “MicroReader” … might be interesting. It could be something that sits in your browser (eg. a Firefox add-on) and does nothing more than display a list of detected microformat tags in the page being read.

While not a lot of folks are leveraging microformats (from what I can tell), it might be a way to increase awareness of their utility. It’s possible, for example, that it’d be a poor man’s way to encapsulate some of the salient points the author wanted to convey. We all know people don’t read every word of an article, but rather glance at bullet points, captions, charts, etc. This might be just the ticket to easily display the “bullet points” of a post.

For example, if the MicroReader detected a known format (eg. “hreview“) it could automatically generate a summary panel with the information. With only a few sites actively leveraging the format now, it’d be of little value, but if Yahoo Tech is using them, could mom-n-pop be around the corner?

I’m not really sure if that gets us closer to a semantifying the web, but it’d be kinda’ neat.