Results tagged “chrisanderson”

There have been a lot of great conversations around and about some of my recent posts; Here are some highlights.

My post about Google's Microsoft Moment seems to have really struck a nerve. First amongst the responses, from my perspective, is prominent Googler Matt Cutts' "Why Googlers should read Anil Dash's post. The open-mindedness and willingness to take constructive criticism that Matt shares with a number of his colleagues at Google (I'd also highlight Karen Wickre, who helps lead Google's efforts in blogging and on Twitter) are going to be the factor that decides whether or not Google falls prey to the dangers outlined in that essay. Matt concludes his comments with a simple, and inspiring exhortation:

Googlers, ask yourself how you can help make another one of those moments where you’re proud to work at Google. I think those moments are a great way to keep from becoming just another large company. And if Googlers are open to posts like Anil Dash’s, the web is tell us tons of things it wants us to do, or how to do them better.

Some other notable conversations around these ideas popped up as well:

• The presciently-named (but independent) Google Operating System blog offers up Google's Changing Corporate Culture.
• Ex-Googler, current FriendFeeder and all-around good guy Kevin Fox takes issue with some of my points in Google's Apple Moment. Kevin raises the point that a lot of Googlers did: It's okay for Google to have two different operating systems because they serve two different markets. I don't disagree — I did ask in my original essay "If the keyboard works with my fingers instead of my thumbs, I should use Chrome OS and not Android?" and folks at Google have already responded to me privately with, in effect, "Actually, that might not be such a bad way to put it..." My point, though, was not that it doesn't make good technical sense to have these systems. Rather, that sort of roadmap complexity makes it hard for casual outside observers to believe that their needs are being put ahead of the company's platform ambitions. I'll chalk up the lack of clarity there to my own poor editing and the fact that John Gruber highlighted that bit on Daring Fireball, which may have put more focus on what was a relatively minor point.
• I loved, and totally agree with, Mini-Microsoft's Microsoft Has Turned The Corner. This makes explicit what was part of the subtext of my essay: Even Microsoft doesn't do this kind of shifty crap anymore, if they can help it. And to their credit, Microsoft since Ray Ozzie's ascension has also seemed to regain their ambition and clarity around creating innovative products. I'm not sure if that's correlation or causation, but it's good to see regardless, and this is a post well worth reading in full.
• One of my favorite bloggers, Mike Masnick of TechDirt, asks Has Google Reached The Perception Tipping Point? The post consists of the single word "Yes." Okay, not really, but it's still thoughtfully argued and especially highlights Google's recent track record in the area of intellectual property and DRM, which is TechDirt's strongest suit.
• Finally, a couple more mentions in bigger media: BusinessWeek's Rob Hof offers up a critical look at Google's strategy, which is a welcome change from most mainstream press that tend to slavishly puff up any pronouncement of this scale that comes out of the tech industry. Similarly, Alex Pham at the LA Times puts the Chrome OS story in the context of Microsoft's Office 2010 announcement today. Matt Asay has an even more skeptical take over at CNET. And finally I thought MG Siegler's brief post about the back-and-forth between me and Matt Cutts offered up a nice perspective on the perils and potential of this inflection point in Google's evolution.

Here's a two-fer: Chris Anderson's CNN Commentary on Google, Microsoft, and Free. Chris ruminates on whether the tech giants' habit of entering new markets with free products funded by the obscene margin they make in their primary lines of business is going to face legal scrutiny in the future. Recommended if you liked either Google's Microsoft Moment or Free Criticism, Science After Data and Airport Books.

Reason mag's Tim Cavanaugh had an amusing riff that referenced that post of mine from the other day: Resolved: The New York Times Should Be Staffed By Volunteers, Like Meals On Wheels. I thought it was a fun read, at least.

And if you're seeking out even more comment on these topics, Silicon Alley Insider has a pretty fun thread in response to my Free Criticism post, along with a slightly more inane one in response to last month's post about The Future of Facebook Usernames.

Finally, some stuff that's actually related to my day job:

• Tony Dearing at AnnArbor.com has a really smart take on a conversation we had about what that site is doing to make a real community-focused local news website. I think the current AnnArbor.com team has the best chance at success of any of the dozens of similar efforts I've seen over the past several years.
• In a similar vein, Ken Edwards has a detailed look at what it's taken to build the new BG Views community at Bowling Green State University. It's always fun to watch a project like that from afar and get to see a new community take off.

Thanks to everyone for great comments on my previous posts, and even more for the inspiring conversations that have happened around these topics. And a specialy thanks to the many of you who've shared links to these pieces on Twitter: @padmasree, @timoreilly were instrumental in kicking off the broader conversation around the recent Google post, and it was really gratifying to see @wilw find a quote in my Free Criticism essay that really seems to have struck a nerve.

When I saw Malcolm Gladwell doggedly dissecting Chris Anderson's upcoming "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" (see Chris' response here) my first reaction was: Brilliant! Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, and Malcolm Gladwell is a top brand name at The New Yorker, and as corporate cousins, clearly Condé Nast's publicity machine must have engineered this beef, trying to boost sales of both their titles through a completely manufactured rivalry.

Their past titles have been champions of what I call the "Airport Books" genre: The elite class of business titles that I see sold in airport newsstands next to the magazines and crappy romance novels. (I might have unknowingly stolen "airport books" from someone else, but I can't find a citation.)

Alas, I'm assured that this particular contretemps isn't a planned corporate PR stunt. (Though I know lots of nice folks at Condé, they don't seem to mimic street-level hip hop marketing as often as one might hope.) Instead, it seems the criticism and counter-argument are sincere.

The core of Gladwell's argument is simple: "Free" fails to provide data to support its claims about the future of pricing, using anecdote and confident assertion in place of actual evidence. In his objection to this methodology, Gladwell seems uncharacteristically strident, compared to his usual measured tones. Whenever I see somebody getting their dander up, I think of one of the first things I ever blogged about ten years ago: We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. Ah hah!

Let's see what criticisms have been leveled at Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, the juggernauts of the airport book genre:

• The IUP Skeptical Inquirer's Wesley Cecil has a review of Blink which offers this up: "Gladwell relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of each chapter is a short story or series of stories that are supposed to illustrate some aspect of his theory of snap judgments. ... [I]ntuitive feeling triumphs over careful study. ... [O]ne case does not an argument make."
• Slate's Jack Shafer on Gladwell telling a tall tale at The Moth, which kind of ridiculously insinuates that this is a character flaw instead of just a fun story.
• More definitively, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani made this point in her review of Outilers, but extends it to apply to all of Gladwelll's books: "[His] books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases (like the 'stickiness factor' and 'the Rule of 150') to plant concepts in the reader’s mind. ... 'Outliers' Mr. Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. ... [His examples are] all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories."
• Joel Spolsky keyed off of Kakutani's review on his popular blog: "what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works." (Bonus points to Joel for swiping en passant at airport book titan Thomas Friedman and his cartographic ironing board.)
• Kevin Arthur's post built on Joel's rant, offering a slightly more measured, but still critical analysis: "I feel like clarifying my opinion on this... I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done."
• Peter Coclanis at Open Letters just gets downright mean: "[L]et me say from the get-go that my goal in this piece, which focuses on Outliers, is to demonstrate at once how wildly overstated such just-jacket claims are and how egregiously incomplete, insubstantial, and unconvincing Gladwell’s explanation of success actually is. His methodology stinks, too, and, from his dust-jacket photo, he appears to need a haircut." I know what fun it can be to bash someone from afar on the web, but I bet Coclanis is a lousy dresser. Just sayin'.
• And not to belabor the point, but let's close up with Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic, taking a stridently snarky look at Outliers: "By the time Gladwell reaches his penultimate chapter, he is in full inspiration mode, and impervious to all forms of critical thinking. ... Here is the Gladwell method nicely on display: a questionable assumption, a partial walk-back of an earlier claim, and finally another questionable assumption synthesizing the half-reversal."

My goal is not to ennumerate all of the criticisms of Gladwell's books — I enjoyed reading all of them, and I like his New Yorker pieces, and that's kind of all I would ask of the guy. But I can't help but wonder if being ceaselessly criticized for using assertions and anecdotes in lieu of hard statistical data has left him much more inclined to criticize others for using the same technique.

I haven't had a chance to finish reading Free yet, but I am sure that both of these authors' books absolutely do lean more towards anecdotal evidence than statistical proof. And honestly, it's okay that these books don't necessarily follow the tenets of hard science. In many cases, they're arguing that a cultural trend is becoming true, or is about to become true, and the reality is that asserting that these trends are ascendent actually helps them come true. In short, these are books designed to create culture, presented in the guise of reporting on culture. I like that!

But of course there will always be those who disagree with the idea of starting from a premise first, and then finding examples to support it. Perhaps the last word in favor of using hard data to support social observations may be from a story package in Wired a year ago, which was headlined "The End of Science" and anchored by a story called The End of Theory:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

... But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. ... The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

The author of this compelling argument in favor of using overwhelming amounts of data to help replace formulating theories about human behavior? Former scientist Chris Anderson.

Bonus link: If you're interested in actual debate about the content of the book, Mike Masnick's excellent overview over at TechDirt is a must-read.

I nominate Chris Anderson for best day ever. A hit book on its first day out (my review got a nice nod), a featured blog on TypePad (and you get a copy of the book if you sign up), and now Boing Boing sez that Conde Nast finally owns Wired News.

I can't imagine what it's like to edit one of the most award-winning print magazines around and then catch shit for the fact that the website is written by a different crew. Let's see if Best Week Ever recognizes the milestone and gives Chris a shout-out.

I'd started reading The Long Tail (You've read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I'd read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris' blog since it started. Was there really anything new left? How could I still be interested in a topic that long ago became part of the scenery for the Web 2.0 and VC crowd?

In short, it's just plain good writing. My enjoyment of the book probably centers around the extensive amount of hard data used to gird the book's examples, as well as the pleasingly broad set of cultural influences and examples used to illustrate the effects of the Long Tail. I've criticized the technology industry often for its unrepentant insularity; The breadth of culture in The Long Tail amply evidences the fact that the phenomenon extends well past the confines of the traditional definition of "technology" as an industry.

Above all else, using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique. The Long Tail is profoundly intellectually honest.

I'm on the record as a genuine admirer of Malcolm Gladwell, but I have to say that one of the most accurate of the persistent criticisms of his work is that it often substitutes qualitative anecdotes for qualitative evidence. Given that this is, to some degree, what Blink is about, I don't find this a particularly egregious habit. But it is nevertheless a valid point to raise, and The Long Tail is a stronger book for the near-scientific rigor of much of its analysis. (Informing this discipline, no doubt, is Chris's stints at Nature and Science.)

But here's an example of how the breadth of the narrative really got my gears turning. If you read this site back when I used to do my Daily Links, you might remember the history of house music I linked to. It's an encyclopedic and comprehensive resource that, along with the dictionary of samples, was one of my favorite links ever. Interestingly, house music comes up near the end of The Long Tail.

Now, I believe that, without hip hop and remix culture (of which house music is firmly a part), there would be no blogging. "Rip, Mix, and Burn" isn't merely a tenet of digital culture, it's among the fundamental principles of post-disco black music, which has consistently shaped contemporary culture. And that's important to note because The Long Tail isn't a book about business, or the Internet, or even economics. At least, it isn't merely about economics; It's a book about a change in culture.

Of course, The Tipping Point reached its, well... you know, after somehow morphing from being a book about cultural trends into being perceived as a business guide. So I'm not surprised that The Long Tail is packaged that way; The same audience might well purchase it for the same reasons. Indeed, Reed Hastings' back-cover blurb suggests that The Long Tail will sit on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. Presumably these books are all also bad and good for you.

But I digress. House music, you say? Let's go to the tape:

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

Naturally, there's a lengthier explanation of why this is so in the book, along with an acknowledgement of Umair Haque for contributions to the analysis. But what struck me as noteworthy in this, admittedly minor, part of the book was the pleasantly catholic set of influences. There's a lot of commonalities between the various long tail-based media that media hackers and culture jammers tend to gravitate towards.

I think it's no coincidence that many early bloggers (and, especially, many people who made blog-related tools) have been influenced by hip hop's remix culture, or by the multifaceted beat-matching culture of DJing. It's not just the methods of distribution that are similar; It's the aesthetic of mix-and-match, more lately referred to as Rip, Mix, and Burn.

Have I mentioned that, in addition to being an early investor in Six Apart and a skilled blogger, Joi Ito used to be a house DJ in Chicago? It's true.