From The Head Of Zeus Jones

From the Flickr of only alice

As you may have read, we've recently combined our blog and homepage into a new recently designed zeusjones.com. Subscribers to this blog should see still be getting the feed (as long as Feedburner does as promised) but old-fashioned visitors should point their browsers to zeusjones.com/blog for the newest updates.

Thanks for your support everyone and I hope to see you over at the new site.

Adrian

p.s. We'll leave this blog up for a little while but all the past posts are available over at the new place.

From the Flickr of bcostin

A couple weeks ago, I caught a snippet on the news about an interesting correlation. Apparently, the economy is directly responsible for an increase in the incidence of West Nile virus. Foreclosures have increased, and many of the foreclosed homes have pools. With no one tending these pools they've become breeding grounds for new mosquitoes.

Shortly after that I switched my running style to a shorter stride and higher cadence. I found I was able to run further without tiring and that my overall speed increased as a result. Some quick research revealed that this is a fairly well known effect. The benefits of a faster cadence are less time in the air and lower impact on your legs; better positioning to maintain momentum and increased potential for speed.

A few days ago, this post on using Google Maps to test a site's potential for solar arrays caught my attention. It was an unexpected and clever use of maps combined with existing data around the Sun's strength at various places. (I recently had a solar site assessment - it took several hours and involved a technician climbing up onto my roof with gear to measure the angle of the roof and then a fair amount of calculations afterwards. It cost me a couple of hundred dollars as well.)

And then most recently, this snippet from NPR linking hairy women to a declining economy also got me thinking.

So what do all of these have to do with each other? Russell wrote about this a while ago in Campaign - the idea of non-obvious relationship awareness. As our ability to measure just about every facet of our world increases, odd and unexpected relationships start to appear.

However, awareness is the first step towards behavior change. I've touched on this before, numbers provide a way to make decisions about what to do. Quantification of the risks associated with smoking changed behaviour and legislation around tobacco use. Quantification of the dangers of trans-fats are currently creating the same result. Measurement allows us to understand much more clearly the relationships between things that aren't obviously related and that understanding makes us change our behaviour.

Because our entire evolution up to this point has been built upon obvious relationship awareness, there's a potential for the impact of measurement to create fairly large and disruptive changes at every level of society. As our understanding grows around the relationships between seemingly unrelated things we will inevitably alter our behaviour accordingly.

The non-obvious relationship awareness of measurement could be cultural change.

John Grant: Planning's Midlife Crisis? from JWT on Vimeo.

I've been hesitant about blogging about JWT's videos from their planning at 40 event. Ed and Paul have made some very good and evenly balanced points about Jon's speech, and today I think that the only thing left unsaid is the completely partial and biased view.

Thank God for the inclusion of John Grant. Otherwise, I think this event might have felt like a wake. I think it's a sorry state when a discipline that's only 40 years old feels its best days are behind it. Has nothing important happened since King and Pollitt codified the planning commandments? When did a discipline that was born from the desire to reform an industry become part of the institution? I'm pretty sure that the first planners battled status quo and dogmatic thinking. Aren't the planners who practice today the beneficiaries of their efforts, and don't they have a responsibility to do the same?

I think we can all agree that the world in which our communications operate is fairly different today from the one in which King and Pollitt operated. As the people within agencies most directly responsible for understanding the nuances of the outside world and helping to incorporate those nuances into the creation of communications isn't the most critical job of the planner today to understand the present (and the future) rather than maintaining strict obedience to the past?

I remember very clearly reading scathing condemnations of planning's reliance upon qualitative research when it first started taking hold here in the US. Back then these were written by wrinkled old researchers who could see their worlds slowly slipping away. However, the themes were exactly the same, the lack of rigour, the flaky reliance upon creativity, intuition and serendipity are the those currently used to condemn bloggers and blogging.

I was once reminded that there's a point in everyone's life where the roles of parent and child reverse and it becomes the child's responsibility to tell its parents to go sit in the corner. I think that time has come for the child called planning.

Had a couple of odd experiences last night:

First, out a dinner with some friends and these women start walking through the restaurant carrying signs.


Turns out they're "models" hired by a few of the other fashion retailers in the mall. During my 1-1/2 hour dinner, they came by 3 different times with different outfits and different signs. I was appalled - no one else gave it a second thought. Are we so numb when it comes to advertising that we'll accept its intrusion into any environment? For me, I'll never set foot in that place again. A restaurateur who shows that lack of respect for my overall experience shouldn't be rewarded IMO. I realise times are tough but that's no reason to punish paying customers.

As I was leaving, I opened up my iPhone to see that I suddenly had over 150 unread messages. Opening up my inbox I found 70+ copies of an email from new startup predictor service YouNoodle.


I had registered for the beta of their service after reading about them on Techcrunch. Basically, they'll compute a valuation for your startup in 3 years based on a host of quite sensitive information about funding, partners, business model, industry and so on.

Not only did they spam me 70+ times to tell me that I could now use their service - they also cc'd everyone else who had registered on the same email chain! This generated an equally long stream of replies to all which, while interesting, further clogged up my email.

They never emailed to apologise, except to people who'd emailed them directly and it also doesn't appear that they've issued any other kinds of statements either.

They now have absolutely no chance of getting personal information about my company or anyone else's company from me. If this is an example of how they treat personal information and privacy they're DOA. It's an interesting business/service but it's clearly an excuse to harvest valuable data. They know that, I know that and the only thing that makes me OK with it is them not screwing around or being careless with that data.

Both of these are examples of "marketing" that completely undermines the core business. Unfortunately, I don't think this is that rare. People lose track of what business they're really in and do stupid stuff that negates all the hard work they've put in elsewhere.

To balance yesterday's slightly pessimistic post, I came across this brilliant statistic yesterday whilst doing some research - the average web page has tripled in size over the last 5 years and the average number of objects has doubled.

Objects are defined as: "images, audio, video, and external CSS and JavaScript files."

I think this is interesting because it's another symptom of the fact that sites are increasingly collections of different services but it also got me thinking that web sites can be thought of as today's stone tablets. In this context, they are equally (if not more) multi-dimensional than the Mayan tablets I wrote about yesterday.

In fact sites operate on at least 4 different axes:


Functional: they do things for people or perform services
Literal: they typically have a literal communication
Visual: they ought to be visually appealing and communicate graphically
Relational: they typically point to other related information

(I realised there are more after I made the drawing and I'm too lazy to make a new one)

Web sites are also creative outlets that speak volumes about the people who made them so there's also the:

Structural: the communication that comes from the form, style or structure of the site
technological: the kind of technology that was used in the site's creation also communicates.

Each of these dimensions can carry a different set of "messages" making web sites capable of extremely rich levels of communication. All of which makes approaching the building of a web site with a "communications-industry" mindset feel a bit wasteful.

Watched a brilliant program last night via Netflix "Watch Instantly" on the history of the deciphering of the Mayan hieroglyphs (it's actually available to watch online at PBS).

Apparently, the researchers were stumped for ages because at around 800 different characters, the Mayan language didn't fit the 20 - 35 needed for an alphabet; the 80 - 100 needed for a syllabic language nor did it have enough to fit a logographic language like Chinese which has thousands of different symbols.

The breakthrough was finally made by a teenager who realised that the Mayans did indeed have syllables-based writing but that there were often up to 15 different symbols for the same sound. The choice of which symbol to use appeared to depend not upon linguistic considerations but instead upon graphic considerations. Basically, they would substitute different symbols based upon the look of the symbols as well as the meaning of the symbols. Their writing had both literal as well as artistic meaning.

I thought this was fantastic on so many different levels. The richness of communication that this system must have been capable of is amazing to imagine. Additionally, because the symbols were pictures that different people "wrote/carved" differently the character of the writer/carver would have come though unmistakably. All in all, these would have been writings that would have required a reader to absorb and study in order to gain their full meaning. Writings that might have revealed layers and layers of new meaning the closer one looked.

Sigh...

About a month after we'd decided upon the name Zeus Jones, Eric brought up the myth of Zeus' origin. Son of the king of the Titans - the original gods - Zeus ended up killing his dad, ushering in a new era of gods on Olympus. It was an unintended theme, but I've sometimes wondered whether having a mythological archetype on our side hasn't helped us in some way.

I was reminded about this by the launch of Cuil, which - even though it launched on a Sunday evening - generated masses and masses of coverage from all the A-list bloggers and even hit the traditional media.

However, Cuil's buzz hasn't been generated because it's a better product. In review after review, Cuil returns results that are worse than Google's (and in some cases Yahoo's and Microsoft's too).


Instead - I think - their buzz has been driven because they have explicitly leveraged the Zeus creation myth. Founded by a husband/wife engineering team who left Google, they have built their product to exploit the weaknesses of Google, even down to the black screen v. Google's white. Adding to the mythology is the fact that Google also apparently tried to eat buy Cuil at birth.

It will be interesting to see where this one goes.