Archive for the 'People' Category

No Personally Identifiable Information

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on October 12, 2011
in People
. 0 Comments

With our hardware advances alone — computers can extract, store and analyze significantly greater amounts of data than a few years ago — it becomes easy for those who have data to actually use that data. And the software has improved, too.

There are many reasons to feel, if not unhappy, at least slightly uneasy about the direction our information society is taking.

Really? What could happen to me if my private information was used by people or organizations?

For one, many people value privacy on principle. I feel that it is my unalienable right to hide information from others as long as that information does not harm them, even if making that information public would not cause me any discomfort or trouble. Recently, Spotify started auto-publishing what users listened to directly on Facebook. Even if telling your friends what music you are listening to hardly qualifies as discomfort or trouble, the fact that Spotify and Facebook took the decision to share that information is outrageous. That is my decision, even if the subject is of minor importance in the grand scheme of things.

Grow a spine. Who cares if you listen to Nickelback? Are you an angsty teenager?

It’s not only about listening to Nickelback. There’s also the oppressed, the minorities, those in a position of weakness who would suffer greatly if their church group knew they were gay, if their employer knew they were looking for another job, if their government knew they were printing pamphlets, if their friends knew they voted for another party…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written again and again about the implications of privacy invasions. A simple cell phone that records your location information could cause a lot of trouble:

  • Did you go to an anti-war rally on Tuesday?
  • A small meeting to plan the rally the week before?
  • At the house of one “Bob Jackson”?
  • Did you walk into an abortion clinic?
  • Did you see an AIDS counselor?
  • Have you been checking into a motel at lunchtimes?
  • Why was your secretary with you?
  • Did you skip lunch to pitch a new invention to a VC? Which one?
  • Were you the person who anonymously tipped off safety regulators about the rusty machines?
  • Did you and your VP for sales meet with ACME Ltd on Monday?
  • Which church do you attend? Which mosque? Which gay bars?
  • Who is my ex-girlfriend going to dinner with?

Then don’t use a smartphone — don’t use tracking technology if you don’t want to be tracked.

Smartphones, I can do without, even though it seems these days most people cannot. But the internet? Not only does every site track what you do on that particular site, but there’s a growing tendency for some companies to track you across multiple unrelated sites — Google and Facebook are only the tip of the iceberg. We are still far from a solution for people to say « do not track me » let alone actually enforcing that solution.

Credit and debt cards follow the same principles — your bank or credit card company knows where your are buying from, and what amounts you are buying. Your phone company knows who you call, when, and for how long. And government agencies keep a lot of information about many things you do.

In isolation, all of that information is not very useful, but once the owners of these files start sharing them, they become a lot more distressing for us.

Distressing? Why?

Below the surface lies our old human habit of appearing to others as we wish to appear, which for most of us involves hiding some elements and sometimes lying about others. We are weak, boring, average, struggling and unhappy, but we wish to appear strong, interesting, exceptional, successful and happy ; and there are few, if any, whom we trust to see our real selves. Maybe the would would be a better place if everyone was fully honest with others — no secrets, no lies, just sincere honesty — but that is not how we are, and uncontrolled publicization of information about ourselves will make many of us unhappy.

But those are faceless corporations sifting through my data with automated tools. Even if they could judge me, I wouldn’t care.

You need health insurance, but the insurance tells you that since you buy medicine far more often than the average citizen — it’s right there on your credit card transaction history — there must be something wrong with your health, so you will need to pay more. And you spend a few hours explaining that the medicine was for an ailing family member, not yourself.

A prospective employer determines that because you did or said something silly back in college, you should not be hired, but never explains why you were rejected.

You are divorcing, and your spouse’s lawyer digs up some innocent information from your cell phone or internet history which, out of context, makes you look extremely bad.

Even faceless organizations can judge you based on information. In fact, they would rather collect and buy as much information as possible about you, because they assume that you would lie about it.

Wait, wait, wait. You’re assuming that my insurance company could find out about my credit card history.

Yes, I am assuming that, and I know it sounds like paranoia. But there are evil people out there who see those huge databases full of tasty personal information and will try to get their hands of them. This has already happened.

Hackers regularly attack web sites and extract personal information from their databases.

It started as a security breach on the PlayStation network and other Sony services that exposed the personal information of 100 million users. From there, it has mushroomed into broader, ongoing security troubles across the Sony empire that have spilled out into the wider world.

Lawyers have used the courts’ power to subpoena ISPs for personal information of potential offenders, without the courts’ consent.

To summarize the staggering chutzpah involved in this case: Stone asked the Court to authorize sending subpoenas to the ISPs. The Court said “not yet.” Stone sent the subpoenas anyway.

Recently, the German government used trojans to extract communication information present on computers.

[...] the German-based Chaos Computer Club announced it had examined a Trojan horse program allegedly spread by government officials to secretly spy on citizens’ Internet travels, e-mail, chat and more. The software, originally intended only to help officials intercept Internet phone calls through legal wiretaps, went far beyond those permissible purposes, the hacker group alleged.

Individuals, corporations, governments, everyone has done it and will probably do it again at some point. Just because something is illegal or forbidden does not mean it will not happen. Nor does it mean that laws cannot be later adapted or extended to allow previously forbidden behavior.

I do not trust groups of humans to act in a responsible and independent manner. If the underlying principles of a technology makes invasions of privacy impossible or very difficult, I will feel safe and secure. If the only guarantee is a promise, however strong or binding it may appear, then I might as well assume that there is no privacy.

What if they guarantee that there is no personally identifiable information collected ?

That is usually a promise — an intentional anonymization process that could be removed at a later point. But even assuming that they are honest and will remain forever honest, « personally identifiable » is hardly a concrete property of information. If you are the only person in your ZIP code born on a specific day, then ZIP code + birth date is a personally identifiable information about you. And indeed, 87% of the US population can be identified using only their ZIP code, birth date and gender.

Your facebook browsing history, never mentions your identity, but I can guess you who you are based on which Facebook profile you visit the most — yours — using a simple frequency analysis algorithm.

The only way to make sure that no personally identifiable data is stored is to make sure that it is deleted.

Article Image © Andrea Roberts — Flickr

RS Latches

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on September 12, 2011
in People
. 0 Comments


One of my oldest memories harkens back to 1989 — I was a four years old boy in communist Romania. My mother has a PhD in biochemistry, and her father and brother both had a PhD in physics, so it might seem quite unsurprising that I followed in their rational and scientific steps, but it would be hard to put the proverbial finger on how, precisely, that happened. This is what that specific memory is about.

It all started with my frequent stays at my grandparents’ house, a conventional second-floor flat in Bucharest, where my grandmother and grandfather took turns babysitting me while my parents were out hammer-and-sickling (well, laboratory-and-architecturing) the socialist ideal. My grandfather was intent on turning me into a bright scientific mind, so he asked my uncle to build me a computer. Nothing fancy, mind you : it had no operating system worth mentioning, no hard drive, and depended on magnetic tapes and 8″ floppies to actually work. My grandfather showed me a standard BASIC interpreter, and had me type in a program that displayed, line by line, an analog wall clock.

Fascinated, I started spending my days on that thing writing BASIC code, learning how to build increasingly complex programs, and starting my career as a programmer. Or so had my grandfather hoped. A few seconds after discovering computer programming, I discovered computer games, which were a far more fascinating novelty than displaying wall clocks on a screen. I promptly forgot about the BASIC interpreter and for nine long years, I assumed that programming computers was some sort of esoteric arcane art, invisible to the uninitiated, and remained entirely uninterested in it.

Instead, my breakthrough as a rational mind was triggered by the close proximity of two unlikely catalysts : one was a frequent diet of mecha anime (the quality of the Romanian dubbing was hilarious), and the other was a cupboard drawer full of bits and pieces that could, to a child’s mind, be spare parts out of which a robot could be built : wheels, small electrical engines, cables, batteries, microprocessors, light bulbs… as a matter of fact, once I had the basic understanding of how a batteries + cables + engine setup worked, I did build small uninteresting contraptions.

I became intensely interested in building a robot myself. Obviously, I did not have the technical skills or the willpower to follow through with this plan, but I would listen, entranced, to any explanations I would receive that were related to robot-building. My grandfather was writing a book on semiconductors at the time, so he showed me a large digital circuit and let me understand that this is what the brain of a robot would look like — only quite larger !

And so he started teaching me the elementary principles of digital circuits. We spent little time discussing the underlying technical details, and instead concentrated on the simpler abstractions of logical gates. This time, I was fascinated. I would grab a pen and paper and draw circuits for fun. The meaning of AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XOR are imprinted in my brain ever since I was five years old… there are few concepts remaining in my brain that have been there for so long.

My circuits behaved like mathematical functions : I would mentally set the input bits, and the output bits would contain the result, so I could build the truth tables that mapped input combinations to output combinations. I experimented with basic arithmetic functions, learning binary as I went. And then one day my grandfather showed me a circuit that I could draw from memory to this day : the RS latch.

The fun thing about the RS latch is that it cannot have a truth table. It is an entirely different beast from arithmetic “write input bits, read output bits” circuits in that it has a state. If you write 1 to the S input bit, the output becomes 1 and remains 1 until you write 1 to the R bit, at which point the output becomes 0, and so on. To say things differently, the S input bit stands for “Set” and sets the output to 1, and the R input bit stands for “Reset” and sets the output to 0. When both R and S are set to 0, then the latch output bit is equal to whatever it was previously set to.

The RS latch is a versatile little thing. It can be used to implement RAM (one of the first things I did with it), or it can be chained to create an incrementing counter.

After a while, my interest in digital circuits faded, but the effects it had on my character were permanent : I now had experience applying abstract rules to abstract concepts, and it was fun.

Article image © Cornelia Kopp — Flickr

Missing the Point of Facebook Connect

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on February 22, 2011
in People
. 0 Comments

Facebook Connect lets Facebook users connect to third party web sites using their Facebook account, and provides the third party site with limited access to the private information of the visitor. Many sites implement it in order to increase the conversion rate from anonymous users to connected users. The main issue is how greedy those sites are going to be with private information access — and how disproportionate the access requests are in some cases.

How much access I’m willing to grant a given site obviously depends on how I intend to use it.

In this aspect, someecards.com is unusually silly. They’re an online greeting card site that is surprisingly lightweight in terms of ads, and they mostly rely on you sending online greeting cards to your friends to bring them to the site. The feature they implement using Facebook Connect is posting a greeting card directly to a friend’s wall, something that obviously needs me to authenticate as the owner of my Facebook account and allow them to post to my friend’s wall. What someecards.com actually requires me to do is:

  • Grant them access to my public profile information : by authenticating, they know who I am and can subsequently access my public profile. Because it’s, you know, public.
  • Let them send me e-mail directly at my own address. Why?
  • Let them access my birth date. Why?
  • Let them access the birth dates of my friends. Why?

Out of four access requests, three of them have no relationship whatsoever to what I am actually trying to do — posting a greeting-card to the wall of a friend. This makes Facebook Connect look less like a helpful feature and more like a troll guarding a bridge. Whatever you do, do not use Facebook Connect like this!

Of course, why they are asking for this is quite obvious: they are actually having me create an account with them behind the scenes, and that information is needed to power their birthday calendar feature, which I suspect involves sending me e-mail to remind me that I should send a someecards.com greeting card to a friend for their upcoming birthday. And, again, they are trying to funnel users into creating an account when all they wanted was to post something to a friend’s wall. These are two completely distinct use cases. Keep your act straight, please.

Naturally, what makes me say that the guys behind someecards.com are scumbags is a subtle but very interesting touch. But first, a bit of trivia about Facebook e-mailing permissions: when a third party website asks for your e-mail address, Facebook lets you choose between your actual address and a proxy address (mail sent to the proxy is forwarded by Facebook to your actual address). The entire point of using a proxy address is that, as soon as you revoke e-mail rights to that web site, the proxy address disappears and they can’t send you any more mail. If you do provide your actual address, then it remains in their database for as long as they wish to keep it there, regardless of what rights you revoke or how much you complain. As a matter of principle, I always pick the proxy address. Most websites just deal with it.

The someecards.com developers actually added a piece of code that detects if you have picked a proxy address and refuses to create your account.

It is quite subtle and requires some knowledge about how proxy addresses work, and the error message tries to pass it off as a «security requirement» so I suspect few people understand exactly what is going on when this happens.

What they just said was: «We’re going to send you e-mail even if you don’t want to receive it anymore, and we don’t want you to be able to stop us!»

Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Be Careful What You Ask For

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on December 3, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

Jumo is a brand new social network that lets you connect with the causes and organizations that you support. They started their open beta recently, so I chimed in to see what was going on over there.

I didn’t get past the signup form. Not because of any bugs or technical difficulties, but because of this:

So, it turns out that to connect to Jumo, you need to have a valid Facebook account. Why not? Letting your users connect through Facebook is a good strategy to gather information easily (it lets the user import his personal information from Facebook instead of typing it by hand). Requiring a Facebook account is probably a bit too extreme in my opinion, especially when it’s technically unnecessary, but I can live with it, especially since my Facebook profile is designed to contain only public information.

The showstopper here is that I need to grant permission to post on my wall. I’m utterly and irrevocably paranoid about my online image, so anything that looks like me saying things I don’t actually want to say is grounds for immediate rejection. I have absolutely no idea what Jumo is going to do with this permission once granted, and the last few times I’ve seen that permission granted by my friends, shady applications flooded their walls with advertising for other third party sites said friends knew nothing about. I’m pretty sure Jumo is not going to do that, but them asking for permission can only mean one thing: sooner or later, a message from Jumo will appear on my wall without letting me review its contents first.

Ultimately, this is a gamble: by asking for wall access, Jumo is willingly throwing away all the reputation-obsessed people who will not grant that permission, but earns the right to post a message on the walls of all those people who don’t care enough about Jumo to write that message of their own accord. And they’re playing their cards just right, because people like me are a minority. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a cheap, dirty trick.

It’s payback time. Not.

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on December 3, 2010
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Why do generosity and sharing survive? Giving stuff away without asking for something in return is irrational. In a cold, rational society, those who give willingly would be taken advantage of by free riders until they wither and go away. Well, it sounds like humans are conditioned to find and punish free riders, and unfair behavior in general.

A recent experiment by Ryan McKay illustrated this quite clearly. Subjects were grouped in pairs, one of the two was given a lump of money and told he could share any or all of it with the other. The second subject could then spend the money he received to reduce the first subject’s earnings at a 3:1 ratio (so spending $1 would reduce the first subject’s earnings by $3), thereby punishing him for being unfair. Priming the second subject with words related to religion caused the second subject to have a significantly more aggressive punishment behavior — they would rather lose $1 than have an unfair individual earn $3.

Combine this with Dan Ariely‘s conclusions in a cheating-based experiment: subjects were given a timed examination, and were rewarded based on how many questions they said they had answered — so you could cheat and say you answered all the questions, and get the maximum payout, even if you did pretty badly on the test. The first conclusion was that everyone cheated by a little amount, which is fairly interesting in itself, but the second conclusion was very surprising: by asking the participants to remember the Ten Commandments before taking the test, all cheating was eliminated, including those people who self-identified as atheists and therefore had no earning-points-for-the-afterlife motivation to respect the Ten Commandments. Ariely’s entire talk is pretty interesting for that matter:

In short, we’re nice to each other because 1° that’s the way we were conditioned to be and 2° the others will punish us if we don’t. The problem with the Internet is that it’s a mostly anonymous environment, so reason 2° goes out the window. You can’t punish someone you don’t know and probably lives in a different country. It follows that people who are not affected by reason 1° and find out reason 2° does not apply will take advantage of everyone else.

The New York Times ran a moving piece about Vitaly Borker, who has set up a fairly interesting business model: he waits for people to land on the web page of his DecorMyEyes online shopping site, and buy a pair of designer glasses. Once this happens, he buys fake glasses from eBay, ships an incomplete package and charges more than what was billed. From the New York Times piece:

[She] placed an order for both the Lafonts and a set of doctor-prescribed Ciba Vision contact lenses on that site, DecorMyEyes.com. The total cost was $361.97. [...] The next day, a man named Tony Russo called to say that DecorMyEyes had run out of the Ciba Visions. Pick another brand, he advised a little brusquely. [...] With the contacts issue unresolved, her eyeglasses arrived two days later. But the frames appeared to be counterfeits [...] Soon after, she discovered that DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 — or an extra $125.

And once the customers ask for a refund or threaten to get their money back from their bank, DecorMyEyes threatens them with lawsuits, and stalks them on Google Earth and sends them a picture of their home to bully them into giving up their money.

The elegant part of this business model is that this outrageous customer «service» means those people who ended up on the wrong side of a DecorMyEyes transaction will complain about it on the internet. The typical Google search for DecorMyEyes yields pages upon pages of angry «don’t buy from DecorMyEyes» customer reviews. This should even the odds and let everyone know it’s a hellish scamlike business, right? Wrong. Most people will never do a search for DecorMyEyes, even if they’re about to give them their credit card number. Silly humans. On the other hand, since all those angry reviews invariably linked to the company’s website, their Google rating blew through the roof, which in turn let them end up in delicious spots in searches that really matter, like «Ciba Vision» and incidentally prove me right as far as my earlier theories about scamming go:

  • Relying on repeat business is impractical — glasses are a rare, costly expense.
  • There are no dominant brands that own the market — at least, not on the Internet selling French glasses in the US.
  • There is little to no contact between potential customers — because humans don’t do reputation research.

Customer losses are estimated at $1.7 billion. Nice one. Vitaly Borker has been going at it for at least two years, and there’s still no public righteous avenger wrath going on. The Internet is too busy righteous-avenger-wrathing a lady who puts a cat in a trash bin to go after a billion-dollar bully.

Silly Internet.

I’m Terribly Disappointed with Myself

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on November 10, 2010
in People
. 0 Comments

I know it sounds sad, but actually, I wish I could be even more disappointed with my self.

Many successful people around me (and by successful, I mean the target of my secret envious hatred) have a strange and yet obvious personality trait: they believe the things a person does are an accurate reflection of that person’s quality as a human being. For instance, they might be convinced that a person who wakes up at 9:00 am on a Tuesday is a lazy sloth that is subtly inferior to non-lazy non-sloth types. What reflections a given action casts is ultimately a consequence of their upbringing, education and personal beliefs — in two men kissing each other in public, one may see perversion and shameful sin where the other sees courage and happiness. You will never hear these people utter «well, he can live his life however he wants» about anyone — in anything, they see either grandeur or mediocrity, but never open-minded neutrality, and anything that may sound like neutrality is either polite self-censorship or bored indifference.

These people are sincere. Not only do they say that waking up at 9:00 on a workday is irresponsible, but they wouldn’t be caught dead waking up at 9:00 on a workday. The noble, respectable thing to do is to wake up at 7:00 and they will do so because their pride and their opinion of themselves depends on it.

And that is why they’re successful. Let me explain.

Everyone wants to be successful, because everyone hates mediocrity. And yet, if I asked you «What’s your plan for being successful?» it would involve a lot of hesitation and a lot of things that are oddly reminiscent of things you are already doing (ironically, that’s also what the successful people would answer, but at least they’re right). The biggest issue with being successful is the lack of a road map.

The end result is a descent into mediocrity: when you were a small child, you wanted to be an astronaut. When you were in middle school, you had lesser yet prestigious dreams of having a great job and living in a great neighborhood with a great family. As you get older, your job and home expectations get increasingly lower as you find outsome of your objectives are too difficult to achieve, until you decide you’re lucky to have whatever you ended up with.

Those people who have a sharp opinion about every single thing around them? They have a much easier time avoiding that slippery slope, because «I guess this is acceptable» grey areas are simply not a part of their world view. If they took a second-rate job anywhere, it would sting like sharp, rusty jalapeño-coated needles. They have a ten mile wide road map with «you are not here» written all over it in blood and tears of shameful disappointment. No wonder they ended up where they did. And they cannot find any excuses, because they’re not just trying to impress their friend or keep up with the Joneses: the only judge of their eventual success is their own opinion of what is great and what is not.

Are you happy with yourself? With your job? With your home? They never are.

It sounds like a sad life. But I ask: is a parent not constantly disappointed with specific things their child does, and still proud of him at the same time? The way to stay sane is to constantly remember that things should be better, and yet to be proud of the life you lead.

Seven Community Profiles

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 24, 2010
in People
. 2 Comments

There are many different ways in which an individual might belong to a community. Some of them are passive while others are active, some of them chose to belong there while others simply never chose to leave, some of them care about the community while others only care about whatever the community stands for. To anyone who has to work with communities, an overview of the various profiles of community members is essential.

1. The Passionate

He’s the meat and potatoes of your community, passionate about its final purpose and willing to share that passion with others. In a Neighborhood Association, these are people passionate about living there and willing to improve everything they can. In a Board Game Club, they are the people who love playing board games and always try to get their friends to play with them.

Cater to the Passionate, for they have the perfect balance of doing and sharing—if either is missing, your community will soon turn into chaos or silence. Their main interest in joining the community is finding like-minded people to discuss their shared passion, so that as long as you keep a fair proportion of  passionate members, they will be happy enough to stay.

2. The Socialites

Above all, the Socialite enjoys being part of social circles. The purpose of the community is just an excuse for meeting other people that have something in common with you. She joins a Poetry club because they she to meet people and Poetry is a good topic to start a discussion—but she will feel no obligation to stay on topic.

The Socialite is both an asset and a time bomb. Her tendency to network with everyone is an excellent way of keep conversations going, help new members integrate with the group quickly, and connecting to people outside your community for help or for finding new members. However, unless properly channeled to a dedicated «off topic» time or place (a forum, a dinner), she might bore people who joined the community out of passion.

3. The Devoted

Every community needs people to work on the bloody details of making it work—when everyone else is having fun, these people meet and toil and work so that the sessions happen on time and the new members are given all the useful information and the web site is online and there’s chocolate cookies and fresh lemonade waiting for everyone after the training session.

It is essential to find any new members that might turn into Devoted, to quickly grant them responsibilities that will help channel their energy. But be careful: people in positions of responsibility within a community have the power to change it. Some of the Devoted often have strong ideas about how the community should work, and such things are best discussed beforehand.

4. The Obsessed

Just like the Passionate, the Obsessed are madly in love with the purpose of the community, but they do not share it with others because of their timidity or lack of interest in human communication. In solo activities, such as Computer Programming, the Obsessed just keep to themselves (sometimes emerging from their cave to rant on a discussion board or join a club «to see what it’s like») but team activities, such as board games or sports, force them to join a group so that they can engage in their passion.

The Obsessed don’t care about discussing their passion, they just wish to act. They’re a nice bunch to have around, but too many of them can turn any community into a quiet wasteland and turn off new members.

5. The Clueless

The Clueless join a gym because their wife asked them to. They join a church group because they parents asked them to. They join a knitting club because they’re curious, but that curiosity fades after a few days. These are people who do not care about where they are, what they are doing or who they are doing it with. They come to one session in three and you couldn’t find their phone number even if your life depended on it.

Most of the time, the Clueless are members who joined only recently, and don’t really care about the community. Find them quickly, keep an eye on them, and let them vanish on their own.

6. The Role Models

When a member is exceedingly charismatic or skilled (and not completely obnoxious about it), other members will look up to her with respect and admiration. They are usually older members, who have been with the community for a while and are known to everyone. This implies that the community is old and large enough to support them, which is often a good sign that it’s in good health; role models may leave, but they sometimes come back and are remembered by those who have become the new elders.

Having Role Models is a very good thing, because they give members a new reason for being part of the community: staying near the role model. If you have a few admirable players in a sports team, the other team members will enjoy their presence as much as they enjoy the game. Cater to the Role Models, and prevent them from becoming obnoxious about their superiority.

7. The Moderators

Some members are recognized by others to be wise, honest, independent and beyond reproach. This gives them the authority and leverage to moderate any issues that might come up between the other members, and teach any new members the lessons they need to be accepted in the group.

In medium-sized communities, moderators are the key to the continued stability of the community. In large-sized communities, their natural authority vanished because there are too many members for a natural consensus to exist on their status. In these cases, it becomes necessary to supplement their natural authority with an official title—but be wary of the risks: an official title does not grant legitimacy in the same way that natural authority does

Related Posts

We Don’t Care About Your Prose

Published
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Victor Nicollet
on September 17, 2010
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. 0 Comments

So there you are, Mr Blog Author. Or Ms (I’m not very good at guessing genders over the Internet). Through devious plans and clever hacks and selling your body on the e-streets you’ve achieved what seemed impossible at first: brand new pairs of eyeballs hitting pages on your web site every day. There you are, rubbing your hands and cackling like an evil maniac in front of your Google Analytics benchmark, wondering what to do next.

«What you should do,» shouts just about every blog expert, «is let people subscribe in a variety of ways: RSS, e-mail, twitter…»

This is right. But it’s too soon. What you have now is a reader who has only read one article on your blog. Before they add you to their RSS aggregator or give you permission to send them e-mail updates or commit to anything, they will want to know whether that article they just read is typical of your abilities as an author, or if you just managed to get lucky.

So, they will click on another link, desperately trying to read another article on your blog. The second article anyone reads on your blog is the most important article they will ever read.

Silly people all around the world think it’s the first article that matters. Bovine feces, I say. You have absolutely no control over what the first article will be—this is up to the people who link to your web site. So, if a popular twitter user mentions your article about a shrimp on a treadmill to the tune of Benny Hill, this means a crowd will be reading that article as a first article. Besides writing great articles all the time, the only thing you can do is find out what articles people are being linked to, and improve the format of those articles (do not change their text: it’s dishonest and you will be called on it).


Courtesy of IttyBiz.

You do have control over what the second article is. What people can do when they’re done reading an article, ranked from potentially bestest to potentially worstest:

  • Pick a link in the «related posts» list (you have one, right?)
  • Follow a link in the «recommended reading» list (you have one, right?)
  • Click on a comment in the «recent comments» list (you have one, right?)
  • Use the «next» and «previous» links
  • Follow a link in the «recent posts» list
  • Click on the «home» link to navigate to the latest blog post
  • Go for the archives

Which one they will pick depends on whether you have these links and where they are in the layout. It’s in your best interest to have all of the links at the top of the list, and point them to the best articles you can find on your blog (I recently did this, using the number of Facebook Likes to pick them). And the real trick is this: people don’t care about your prose, what they love or hate is your ideas and your content. Unless you’re writing about prose, of course.

If people are looking for a second article to read, it means they enjoyed the ideas and content they found in the first article they read, and they need to read more.

Your «related posts» should point to similar content. Your «recommended reading» should match the theme of your blog (you have one, right?).

Always repeat yourself on your blog, in as many posts as you can. You write the damn thing, of course it feels repetitive to you. But someone who just discovered it and is intrigued by your ideas? They just cannot. Have. Enough. They want more and you should give them more!

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Cogwheels

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 16, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

Are you looking for a motivational speech or a way to lift your spirits? Then go away. This stuff is depressing when you think about it for too long.

Still here? God, you must enjoy being depressed…

Let’s go back to a 1950 essay by economist Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil, narrated by a pencil describing its genealogy:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

The Need For Infrastructure

The ideas presented in the essay are fairly simple: creating a pencil requires several workers to use tools upon base materials (wood, metal, graphite, rubber). These materials and tools themselves had to be obtained by more workers using more tools and materials (a logger needs a saw to cut down the trees that will provide the wood for the pencil), and so on up the stream of industrial capacity.

Looking at things from the other side: assume that you have the detailed plans for every single tool and machine and substance involved in creating a standard 1950 pencil, and tens of thousands of intelligent, skilled and motivated workers, and we send you all back in time to 30,000 BC. How long do you think it would take before you could produce a single pencil? How much longer before you could produce them on an industrial scale?

I know I promised never to quote video games again, but this quote from Chairman Sheng-ji Yang is so appropriate that it would be a crime not to use it:

Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

And that’s why building a colony on Mars (or the moon) is so difficult: you have to ship the entire infrastructure from Earth before you can build anything meaningful in situ.

You’re just like Everyone Else

Where do you stand in the grand scheme of things? The complexity of everyday things means that no matter what you do, you’re a cog in a huge post-industrial machine. Even if you’re the CEO of a huge corporation, you’re just a cog that makes sure all the other cogs work together. What kind of cog are you exactly?

The general consensus is that working for a large corporation lets you feel like a very small cog in a very large machine, and that is a quite horrible feeling.

I disagree.

The little cogs employees of a large corporation may be frustrated at the small scope of their daily activities, but they still have hopes of being greater. They remain convinced that somewhere out there, some people are not just small pieces of a soulless machine, and they can grow up to be just like them.

This is a hope that I wish to annihilate.

The problem isn’t that there are large corporations. The problem is that our technological level prevents any single person of accomplishing anything significant on their own, unless your definition of «significant» predates our industrial society.

Some people create web start-ups in the deluded hope of being self-sufficient and doing something great alone or as a small team. Yet, even if they succeed, they merely add a tiny speck of additional value to a vast heap of existing infrastructure—server-side software, web browsers, server hosting, server hardware, online payment systems, banks, internet backbones and service providers…

The added value of a start-up is, by definition, to leverage existing resources in a clever way, because the founding team does not have the time to create a significant amount of new resources. That’s why we hear about «founders» (was there when it began) and «owners» (put money into it) and «authors» (provided all the high-level intellectual work) of successful projects, but seldom hear about «makers»

When you create a new company, you don’t stop being a cog in the machine. You just start being a cog in a cleverly unexpected and deviously useful place in the machine. Don’t let it go to your head—by going where no piece of the puzzle ever went before, it’s your responsibility to fit in with the pieces around, which is a lot harder than letting other people find the right place for you.

And a lot more exciting, too.

Related Posts

Daily Budgeting

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 15, 2010
in People
. 2 Comments

For the average person, buying one $900 television set every ten years is a reasonable spending, and buying the latest $900 television every week is outrageously unreasonable. The problem with infrequent costly purchases is that they don’t happen often enough to let people intuitively sense whether they’re overspending. They’re simply not on the same scale as everyday purchases.

To help me decide whether an expense is acceptable or not, I use a scaling technique that lets me see the actual cost of every purchase on the same scale as an amortized daily spending budget.

Daily Spending Budget

Every year, the average American income is $31,410 (€24,660 in France). If that average person split their income over the 365 days, they would have a spending budget of $86/day (€67/day). A large percentage of that will be spent on housing (rent/mortgage), credit card payments, various taxes, and utility bills. Another part of that is hopefully saved for retirement, college tuition or emergencies.

To estimate your current daily spending budget:

  1. Add up your monthly payments and savings. Every cent that leaves your account on a predictable, monthly basis, should be counted here. Multiply by twelve.
  2. Add your yearly taxes (estimated, if needed) to the total.
  3. If you have any annual spending (such as a yearly subway card or a magazine subscription), you can also add it to the total.
  4. Subtract this total from your yearly disposable income.
  5. Divide the result by 365.

The result is the amount you can use every day for variable or exceptional spending: food, movies, music, video games, brand new television sets, iPhone applications…  sounds small? It is.

When evaluating this budget, don’t take into account expected future changes (such as a long being repaid in full or a raise that’s going to happen). You should be extremely careful about basing today’s spending strategy on future events (that might never happen).

Amortized Daily Spending Budget

The standard spending budget doesn’t help, because most exceptionally large expenses exceed that daily budget anyway. So, what I do is amortize those purchases by spreading their cost over several days, and automatically subtracting the daily amount from my daily spending budget.

Quick example:

Jane has a $23/day spending budget, and she buys a $900 television on Monday. She could try amortizing that television over a single month, but that would cost her $30/day, which exceeds her daily budget. She could try amortizing that purchase over two months, which would cost her $15/day and leave her with a $8/day budget—too small. So, instead, she decides to amortize the television over three months. This only costs $10/day and leaves her with a $13/day budget.

The main benefit of this system is that it turns a $900 price tag that is fairly vague and difficult to compare into an easily compared daily cost (such as «you’re spending almost 50% of your daily budget on this television for the next three months»).

At the end of each day, add up your total spending for that day (excluding any purchases you are amortizing). If you didn’t spend all your money, use it to pay for purchases that you are amortizing.

On Tuesday, Jane spends $1 on coffee and $8 on lunch, leaving her with an extra unspent $4. She decides to subtract that from the television purchase. The daily cost of the television is now $9.96 (she paid $14, which leaves $886 to pay over the next 89 days).

Should you overspend, carry the balance over to the next day. Since the cost of your amortized purchases is already taken out of your daily budget, this means you pay for those purchases even when you overspend.

On Wednesday, she pays for her friend’s lunch for a total of $20. This exceeds her daily of  $13.04 so the negative balance is carried over to the next day.

When you overspend so much that your budget for the next day dives below zero, it means your purchase is too large. Ask yourself whether it’s worth it, and if it is, amortize it over one month.

On Thursday, Jane has a budget of only $6.08, but in addition to her $8 lunch she decides to buy a beautiful $30 sweater. Not only does this exceed her daily budget, but it also exceeds her $13 budget for the next day! She needs to amortize the sweater over one month. The sweater will cost her $1/day (her new amortized daily budget is $23 – $9.96 – $1 = $12.04). Also, out of the $8 lunch, $1.92 are carried over and deducted from the next day’s budget: $10.12.

If you’re currently amortizing several purchases, and you underspend, start paying for the purchase that has the lowest amount left to amortize.

On Friday, Jane decides to be excessively frugal, and only buys a $3 salad from the cafeteria at work. This means she has a $7.12 surplus from the day, which is used to pay for the purchase with the lowest non-amortized value : the sweater.

On Saturday morning, her outstanding amortization debt consists of:
→ $856.12 over 86 days ($9.95/day) for the television
→ $21.88 over 29 days ($0.75/day) for the sweater

This leaves her with a daily budget of $12.30

As you can see, if you overspend, your amortized expenses start clogging your daily budget to the point where you have to amortize the purchase of a $10 lunch over an entire year. If that doesn’t knock some budgeting sense into you, I don’t know what will.

This approach can be used in a weekly version instead of a daily version, but it’s harder to notice when you’re going over budget if you only catch up with your expenses once every seven days. I would suggest using the daily version anyway, even if you only compute the values weekly anyway.

You can download an Excel Spreadsheet to help you compute your daily budget easily. It should be compatible with OpenOffice. Let me know if it gives you any trouble!

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