Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

Talking Back to Technology

The tech world seems to be leaning heavily towards voice activated devices. Siri – Amazon Echo – Facebook M – “OK Google” – as well as pretty much every vehicle in existence. It should make sense that we would want to speak to our digital assistants. After all, that’s how we communicate with each other. So why – then – do I feel like such a dork when I say “Siri, find me an Indian restaurant”?

I almost never use Sir as my interface to my iPhone. On the very rare occasions when I do, it’s when I’m driving. By myself. With no one to judge me. And even then, I feel unusually self-conscious.

I don’t think I’m alone. No one I know uses Siri, except on the same occasions and in the same way I do. This should be the most natural thing in the world. We’ve been talking to each other for several millennia. It’s so much more elegant than hammering away on a keyboard. But I keep seeing the same scenario play out over and over again. We give voice navigation a try. It sometimes works. When it does, it seems very cool. We try it again. And then, we don’t do it any more. I base this on admittedly anecdotal evidence. I’m sure there are those that continually chat merrily away to the nearest device. But not me. And not anyone I know either. So, given that voice activation seems to be the way devices are going, I have to ask why we’re dragging our heels to adopt?

In trying to judge the adoption of voice-activated interfaces, we have to account for mismatches in our expected utility. Every time we ask for some thing – like, for instance, “Play Bruno Mars” and we get the response, “I’m sorry, I can’t find Brutal Cars,” some frustration would be natural. This is certainly part of it. But that’s an adoption threshold that will eventually yield to sheer processing brute strength. I suspect our reluctance to talk to an object is found in the fact that we’re talking to an object. It doesn’t feel right. It makes us look addle-minded. We make fun of people who speak when there’s no one else in the room.

Our relationship with language is an intimately nuanced one. It’s a relatively newly acquired skill, in evolutionary terms, so it takes up a fair amount of cognitive processing. Granted, no matter what the interface, we currently have to translate desire into language, and speaking is certainly more efficient than typing, so it should be a natural step forward in our relationship with machines. But we also have to remember that verbal communication is the most social of things. In our minds, we have created a well-worn slot for speaking, and it’s something to be done when sitting across from another human.

Mental associations are critical for how we make sense of things. We are natural categorizers. And, if we haven’t found an appropriate category when we encounter something new, we adapt an existing one. I think vocal activation may be creating cognitive dissonance in our mental categorization schema. Interaction with devices is a generally solitary endeavor. Talking is a group activity. Something here just doesn’t seem to fit. We’re finding it hard to reconcile our usage of language and our interaction with machines.

I have no idea if I’m right about this. Perhaps I’m just being a Luddite. But given that my entire family, and most of my friends, have had voice activation capable phones for several years now and none of them use that feature except on very rare occasions, I thought it was worth mentioning.

By the way, let’s just keep this between you and I. Don’t tell Siri.

25 Years of Photoshop

Jennifer in Paradise.tif – the first photoshopped pictureBrothers Knoll sent over their original Je

Jennifer in Paradise. It’s a picture that’s become iconic in the history of digital imagery. It shows a topless woman with her back to us, sitting in the blue waters of Bora Bora and gazing towards the island of To’opua. But it’s not what the picture shows that makes it iconic. It’s what happened to the picture after it was taken. Jennifer just happened to be the girlfriend of Photoshop co-creator John Knoll. So, when he was demonstrating what Photoshop could do while pitching it to Adobe in 1988, this was the picture he had handy. As such, Jennifer in Paradise became the first picture in history to be Photoshopped. Adobe bought in. Two years later, in February, 1990, version 1.0 hit the shelves.

I was introduced to Photoshop a few years after this. I believe it was version 2.something. Up until that point, I, and the rest of the world, believed that the camera doesn’t lie. You could believe your eyes. But Photoshop would change all that. It would push us over the brink from an analog to a digital world. It would take reality and break into a million pixels, each of which could be manipulated into something that looked real, but wasn’t.

Of course, technology had got there before Photoshop. John worked at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. So did Jennifer. The vacation in Bora Bora came after the couple had just finished a marathon run to finish up Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But digital manipulation of images was the sole domain of highly trained technicians working on equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, using industrial strength software that was specifically written for the purpose. Before Photoshop, only a handful of people in the world could digitally alter an image.

That all changed when Version 1.0 of Photoshop was released. Digital manipulation became democratized. It, along with Aldus Pagemaker, Aldus Freehand and the Mac gave us all the power to publish. But for me, the power of Photoshop was always in a different league. To be able to manipulate photos, which up to that point were the hallmark of veracity, now that was a brand of sorcery that went far beyond the pedestrian shuttling of words back and forth on a screen. It was intoxicating and a little sacrilegious. Nobody cheered when you turned out an adequately typeset newsletter, but when you showed them a well-photoshopped image that magically messed around with reality, that got passed around. Pagemaker was a tool, but Photoshop made you an artist.

For me, Photoshop was the first program that made me aware of the power of digital media. I, like millions of other desktop publishers, had assembled a ragtag collection of tools that consisted mainly of pirated programs. But I actually paid for Photoshop. Why? Because each edition added features that opened a new Pandora’s box of possibility. When you cracked the cellophane, you were guaranteed at least of couple weeks of OMGs as you put the program through it’s paces. Photoshop made me fall in love with digital.

Today, it seems like digital has always been with us. Our world is a better-designed place than it was 25 years ago. And a quarter century may seem like forever in today’s terms, but that makes Photoshop just a few years older than my oldest daughter and it seems like she was just born yesterday.

The 90’s were a heady decade for me. I turned digital, never to turn back. I bought my first Mac, a little Mac SE 30 about the size of a home espresso machine. Soon, I would catch my first glimpse of the Internet. I created my first website. I tried Google for the first time. And by the end of the decade, I decided my fledgling agency would focus exclusively on the digital side of the industry. Jennifer in Paradise was a big part of that.

Later in the same day that John Knoll snapped that fateful picture, he proposed to Jennifer. It was the start of something magical, both for the Knolls and for the rest of the world. Thank you.

A Few Words on Memories

It’s been a highly emotional weekend for me. After a long battle, my Mom slipped quietly away in the middle of the night last Thursday. My Dad, my sisters Laurel and Heather and I held her hand and stroked her forehead for most of the night as we watched her increasingly shallow breaths. We spent a lot of time reminiscing. It was all horribly beautiful. It was life – and death.

When a parent passes away, you feel like a large chunk of your life has been suddenly ripped away. In my almost 54 years on the planet, my Mom has been one of the constants that has connected the ever changing dots from my birth to today. As I started for the door of the hospital room for the last time and looked back at the tiny still figure on the bed – also for the last time – I realized that constant is gone. I’m adrift. I’m an orphan (my Dad is actually my stepdad). I’m at a loss for words.

Maybe that accounts for the huge wave of nostalgia that hit my sisters and myself this weekend. We realized that a significant piece of our lives was teetering on the edge of a precipice – slipping away from our grasp. We were desperate to freeze it in our memories, securing it for the future. When so much was slipping away, we needed to hang on to what we could. So, we wandered the streets of the small Alberta town we all grew up in. We snuck into our old high school, looking for the locker we had in grade 8 and sitting in the desks in the classroom. We tried to find our grad photos. We were even going to knock on the door of the house we all grew up in, 30 some years ago, and see if the new owners would let us take a quick look inside. But then we decided that was just a little too creepy.

The more past you accumulate, the more important it becomes. This is especially true for your childhood. We all need to know where we came from. One of the most touching discussions I’ve had with my Mom I had a month and a half ago. I was asking her about her childhood. As she remembered, her face transformed. A small smile fixed to her lips, she sunk into a warm remembrance of a post war childhood in Southern Ontario, safe in the embrace of an idyllic home town (that has since become a sprawling suburb of Toronto), family card games with the laughter of the grown-ups fueled by gin and tonics and summers spent “up north” in cottage country.

“It sounds like a good childhood,” I remarked.

“It was a good childhood. A really good childhood.”

She then closed her eyes and napped for a bit. I watched her sleep. Life is short. Life is sad. Life is good.

My Mom, as a little girl in Ontario

My Mom, as a little girl in Ontario

So, I have some fundamental questions. For those of us of my generation or older, childhoods are reconstructed from mostly bad photographs, old letters and our memories. None of these are terribly high fidelity representations of reality. But this can be a good thing. It allows us to fill in the blanks, emphasizing the highs and forgetting the lows. For most of us, it gives us the childhood we wished we had, which can be very comforting 78 years hence as we lie in a bed, slipping towards the end of our journey. But what will the essence of childhood remembrance be for the person who was born today? They will leave a huge digital dust trail. How much of it will be available in 8 decades? As they try to construct a refuge in their memories, will there be digital evidence to call bullshit on them? Will indelible fidelity be a good thing or bad?

Daniel Kahneman has discovered that our remembered lives usually bear little resemblance to our actual experiences. Was my Mom’s childhood really as good as she remembered? I know there was pain. I know there was heartache. I suspect life was much harder than she recalled. But that’s not the point. At that moment, when she needed it most, her past was what she wanted it to be. And that’s exactly what my sisters and I found this past weekend, when we needed it. It was a very human thing we did – highly inaccurate, totally implausible and completely indispensable. I wonder how technology might screw that up for my kids and grand kids.

Goodbye Mom. Dream beautifully.

To the Grad Class of 2015: Don’t Rely on Planning

gradMy oldest daughter is graduating from university in a few short weeks. She’s planning for the future. Her mother and I, being practical parents, have instilled this need for planning in her. It’s what practical people do. They make plans.

I, 32 years ago, on my own graduation date – also made plans. According to my plan, I should now be a senior producer on a national Canadian TV drama. This is, of course, after working my way up as a production assistant, writer and possibly a director. But, as Helmuth von Moltke said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In my case, the enemy were the vagaries of real life. Oh – and a little thing called the Internet. In 1983, who’d have guessed that one?

In 1983, my friends in college also had plans. As far as I can tell, only one of them actually had life go somewhat according to plan. He’s the 6 o’clock news anchor in a major Canadian city. The rest of us, as near as I can figure, were pretty much blown around by the winds of fate. Not that this is a bad thing. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t have traded one minute of my digital marketing career for my planned career in television.

The thing is, the world changes too fast to rely on our plans. There is no way we can forecast what’s to come. For those of you who were also making plans in the 80’s, could you have possibly imagined the world we now live in? The fun of life is in discovering new opportunities we couldn’t have possibly foreseen and grasping them. In 1983, the only people who had heard of the Internet were the National Science Foundation and a few university professors. But, just a decade later, it opened a door for me that would in turn lead to an entirely new career.

That was then. This is now. If the world changed that much in the last three decades, just imagine how much it will change in the next three. Somewhere out there is the next Internet – an exponential technology that will wipe out entire industries and start new ones. Keep your eyes open for it. And when you see it, look at it as an opportunity to grow, not as a threat to your plans.

There’s an important distinction here. I’m not saying don’t plan. Planning forces you to think about the future, and that’s always a good thing. Just don’t rely on them. Be prepared to change as required.

I’m always amazed by how our lives are changed by fate. Sudden little detours get thrown in our path that forces a change of direction. And, when we look back, we realize that those little detours made all the difference. For example, I was fired from a job. It was certainly not planned. But as a result, I moved, met my wife, started a family and eventually launched a new career. Yet, at the time, it seemed that my plan for life was blown to pieces. Today, I realize it may be the single best thing that every happened to me.

In talking to my daughter and others of her generation, it seems that they get the uncertainty of the world far better than we did. Maybe it’s because they grew up in a more fluid, dynamic environment. They seem to understand that life is a series of course adjustments and corrections. When my generation graduated, we planned for a life-long career. My daughter is planning, but the plan doesn’t extend past the next year or so, at which time she’ll recalibrate. This tends to frustrate parents, but it’s probably a much more realistic view of the world.

I also realized, as I discussed post-secondary learning with my daughters, that our model of education is hopelessly locked into an outdated view of the future. It’s probably because it’s been created by a generation of linear thinkers and planners. You go to school, you get your degree, and then you go start your career. Wouldn’t it make sense to take a more iterative approach to education, turning it into a lifelong support platform for a constantly evolving plan? You go live your life, and when you take a change of course that requires more learning, you can do so easily and on your own agenda.

My advice for the Class of 2015? Plan if you must. But become a lifelong seeker of opportunity. Leave your options fluid enough to respond to fate. And realize that someday, your life will be defined by the things you never anticipated rather than by the plans you made.

Mourning Becomes Electric

dreamstime_19503560Last Friday was a sad day. A very dear and lifelong friend of mine, my Uncle Al, passed away. And so I did what I’ve done before on these occasions. I expressed my feelings by writing about it. The post went live on my blog around 10:30 in the morning. By mid afternoon, it had been shared and posted through Facebook, Twitter and many other online channels. Many were kind enough to send comments. The family, in the midst of their grief, forwarded my post to their family and friends. Soon, there was an extended network of mourning that sought to heal each other, all through channels that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Mourning had moved online.

As you probably know, I’m fascinated by how we express our innate human needs through digital technologies. And death, together with birth, is the most universal of human experiences. It was inevitable that we would use online channels to grieve. So I, as I always do, asked the question – why?

First of all – why do we mourn? Well, we mourn because we are social animals. We are probably the most social of animals. So we grieve to an according degree. We miss the departed terribly. It is natural to try to fill the hole a death tears inside of us by reaching out to others who may share the same grief. James R. Averill believed we communally mourn because it cements the social bonds that make it more likely that we will survive as a species. When it comes to dealing with death, misery loves company.

Secondly, why do we grieve online? Well, here, I think it has something to do with Granovetter’s weak ties. Death is one of those life events where we reach beyond the strong ties that define our day-to-day social existence. Certainly we seek comfort from those closest to us, but the death also triggers the existence of a virtual community – defined and united by their grieving for the one who has passed away. Our digital networks allow us to eliminate the six degrees of separation in one fell swoop. We can share our grief almost instantaneously and simultaneously with family, friends, acquaintances and even people we have never met.

There are two other aspects of grief that I believe lend themselves well to online channels: the need to chronicle and the comfort of emotional distance.

Part of the healing process is sharing memories of the departed love one. And, for those like myself, just writing about our feelings helps overcome the pain. Online provides a perfect platform for chronicling. We can share our own thoughts and, in the expressing of them, start the healing process.

The comfort of physical distance seems a contradictory idea, but almost everyone I know who has gone through a deep loss has one common dread – dealing with a never-ending stream of condolences over the coming weeks and months, triggered by each new physical encounter.

When you’ve been in the middle of the storm, you are typically a few days ahead of everyone else in dealing with your grief. Your mind has been occupied with nothing else as you have sat vigil by the hospital bed. While the condolences are given with the best of intentions, you feel compelled to give a response. The problem is, each new expression of grief forces you to replay your loop of very painful memories. The amplitude of this pain increases when it’s a face-to-face encounter. Condolences that reach you through a more detached channel, such as online, can be dealt with at your discretion. You can wait until you marshall the emotional reserves necessary to respond. You can also respond to several people at a time. How many times have you heard this from a grieving loved one, “I just wish I could record my message and play it whenever I meet someone who wants to tell me how sorry they are for my loss?” It may seem callous, but no one wants to relive that pain over and over again. And let’s face it – almost no one knows the right things to say at a moment like this.

By the end of last Friday, my online social connections had helped me ease a very deep pain. I hope I was able to return the favor for others that were dealing with their own grief. There are many things about technology that I treat with suspicion, but in this case, turning online seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

The True Meaning of Awesome

My Uncle Al and I - 1963

My Uncle Al and I – 1963

My Uncle Al passed away today. I wish you could have known him.

Al loved gadgets and technology. He was an early adopter for his entire life. He helped me set up my first stereo (complete with 8 Track player). He had his own email domain. And he loved Facebook. If we posted a picture of our kids, or ourselves – or pretty much anything – he always left the same comment….

“Awesome!”

Now, a lot of people use the word awesome. Like many words, it’s power has become diluted through over usage and misuse. But if anyone knew the true meaning of the word awesome, it was my Uncle Al.

The true definition of awesome, the one not corrupted by popular usage, is this:

causing or inducing awe; inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear

When my Uncle Al used the word “awesome” I think that is how he meant it.

For instance – “awesome” as in “awesome responsibility” – a responsibility so great that it can crush some people. A responsibility that is so heavy that you may be tempted to just set it down now and again. But Al never did.

I know Al because of my father (he’s not a biological uncle – he’s an honourary one). They became friends about 55 years ago. They met at the church where my father was volunteering as a faith instructor. Al was looking to join the congregation. They soon became inseparable friends.

At the age of 27, my father had to have back surgery. Uncle Al visited him in his hospital room and made a promise – “Bill, I will always look after your family if anything happens.” Of course, at 27 neither of them expected anything to really happen. But it did. Dad developed a blood clot and passed away, leaving behind my Mom and I. I was one.

Now, the promise Al made could easily have been forgotten. Al would have been in his early 20’s at the time. No one would have expected him shoulder the “awesome” responsibility of looking after a grief-stricken widow and her young son. But Al did. For 53 years. Through all the ups and downs of our subsequent lives. Al was always there – helping, supporting, guiding. He was our rock. Not once did he put down the weight of the promise he had made. Just last fall, he was there, lifting appliances and loading furniture on a truck to help me move my Mom and Step-dad into a new home. Now, I know he was already suffering from the condition that would ultimately take his life, but he never slowed down. Not once. Not ever. Al had made an promise and he was going to keep it.

Al had an “awesome” sense of family. He revered family. His love of family knew no boundaries. It extended to his children, his wife, his siblings and to an extended family of which I was honoured to become part of. He and my Auntie Yvonne raised many, many foster children. He adopted dozens of honorary nephews and nieces, including my sisters and – eventually – my wife and children. For Al, there was no division between blood and love. We were all his children, whether or not we shared DNA.

Al worshiped family. He was never happier than in the buzz and give-and-take energy of a family gathering. Just yesterday, as Al lay in his hospital bed, edging nearer to the threshold between this world and the next, we surrounded him and shared stories and a few minutes of welcome laughter. I had a slight twinge of guilt, wondering if our behavior was appropriate given the gravity of the situation. Then I realized that Al would have loved the fact that he was in the center of all this. He would have thought it was “awesome.”

Even if you never met Al, by now you know he was an “awesome” father and husband. He was, in the words of his son Gregg, “the best man I have ever known.”  And much as we all grieve as we were forced to say goodbye far too soon, I cannot imagine the loss that is being shouldered by his soulmate – my Aunt Yvonne.

“Soulmate” – there’s another of those words that has had it’s meaning muddied because of overuse. But, if ever there were soulmates, it was my Uncle Al and Aunt Yvonne. To all of us, it was as if they were fused into one soul-entwined incredibly caring entity – known as “Al and Yvonne.” In my life, they were my constant – my polestar – my compass bearing. They were a source of unconditional love and comfort. To me, although the physical composition has been forced to change, they will always be “Al and Yvonne” – because Al will live on in the most real of senses through Yvonne. She will remain the caretaker of his soul, because they have been spiritually attached for almost 6 decades now.

So, when my Uncle Al used the word “awesome” – it was with a full appreciation of the word’s power. It captured the reverence, the admiration and sometimes, the fear that comes with awe. He lived his life in an “awesome” manner, whether it be with his responsibilities, his faith, his love or his appreciation. He never slowed down. He gave everything he had to give. He infused all of us with his sense of “awe.”

My Dad

My Dad- Bill Hotchkiss

When things became dark early this week, I took a picture of my dad to watch over Al. The picture reflected the spirit they both shared – full of life, love and laughter. For my dad, he got to share this with Al for far too short a time. But Al also carried the spirit of my father and through him, I got to know my dad a little better. Late last night, my father was there as a guide when Al slipped from this world.

I know how Al will describe his new adventure. It will be “awesome.”

 

 

 

The Trouble with Trying to Stand on The Shoulders of Giants

Standing-on-GiantsIt has long been thought that academia provided a refuge from the sordid world of business. But when a Nobel prize-winning academic says that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t publish, you know something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Laureate Peter Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) told the Guardian:

“Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

The whole point of publishing is to share knowledge. But academic publishers don’t seem to have received that memo. For the past two decades, publishers like Reed Elsevier, John Wiley and Springer, who got in on a good gig early, have propped up ridiculous profit margins by slowly squeezing non-profit publishers out of the picture. In the process, they’ve turned academic publishing into a hamster wheel that stresses quantity over quality. Most academic research is rushed out to a limited audience that has been designated as the ones who “count” and the rest of us have to pony up ridiculous sums to access an article that lies on the far side of a barricaded pay wall. Academic publishing is one of the few bastions that has managed to resist the digital tide of declining transaction costs.

I love academic research. I am a big believer in scientific inquiry. I am an avid reader of blogs like Science Daily and Big Think. But 9 times out of 10 (or 99 times out of a hundred), when you actually read an academic paper (if you can get your hands on one), it’s hopelessly mired in academic jargon and the actual findings fall disappointingly short of remarkable. What should be a reflection of the best of who we are has turned into a sordid little business run by shortsighted people who are only in it for a quick buck. If one of the pre-eminent physicists of our generation would rather become a used car salesman or worse yet, a marketer, than follow his passion, we know something is seriously wrong.

Google tried to remain true to the spirit of academic publishing when they introduced Google Scholar. I use Scholar a lot, and have found it very useful for accessing landmark papers from a few decades back that have managed to seep into the public domain. But if you use it to try to access more recent papers, you typically run headlong into one of the afore-mentioned pay walls. I tried to see how academics feel about Google Scholar and was amazed to find this quote from the McKinney Engineering Library blog at the University of Texas:

“Google Scholar has an ambiguous status in the library and research world. Obviously, it is powered by the Google, which is kind of a dirty word in academic research. Also, the fact that it is free throws further suspicion on its quality, particularly when libraries pay lots of money for database access.”

WTF? Forget for a moment that Google is referred to as “the Google” – which I hope is a joke aimed at fellow Texan George W. Bush. Since when should knowledge be judged by the size of its price tag? Stewart Brand identified the disconnect 30 years ago when he said,

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

The rest of the world seems to have moved in the right direction. What the hell is the problem with academia?

If you’re not mad about this, you should be. The vast majority of academic research is funded directly by your tax dollars. Academic publishers don’t pay anyone for content. They have done nothing but agree to publish, which, in today’s world, costs virtually nothing. But somehow they still feel entitled to charge $50 to access an electronic version of an article. Reasonable profits are the right of an honest businessperson, but academic publishing doesn’t even come close to passing the “smell-test.”

One of the big Academic publishers, MacMillan, is at least considering loosening the drawstrings a touch. They’re lowering the drawbridge of their pay wall just a smidge by offering the ability to read and annotate articles on line. But academic publishing still has a long way to go before it approaches the accessibility that marks almost every other form of publishing in the digital world. So far for most researchers, the draw of being published in a prestigious journal has outweighed the idealism of openly publishing their work for all to see on a digital platform.

I suspect this is an area just waiting for disruption. I hope that the academics that are creating the content agree. It seems that academic publishing has been hiding in a previously overlooked nook that has escaped the relentless liberation of information driven by technology. But if MacMillan is feeling threatened enough to lower their defenses, however slightly, I suspect that the tide is beginning to turn. I, for one, thinks that day can’t come soon enough.

Farewell Search Insider. It’s Been Fun!

Note: This is my farewell column for MediaPost’s Search Insider.

476.

What’s significant about that number? Well, it’s a Harshad number. Math geeks can learn more here. For history buffs, it’s also the year in the Julian calendar when we switched from the Julian to the Anno Domini calendar. Generally, it’s when most historians say the Roman Empire fell and we went from ancient history to the Middle Ages.

It also happens to be the number of Search Insider columns I’ve written since my first appearance here 10 and a half years ago.

It’s been a good run. I’ve had fun. I’ve ranted the odd time. I’ve taken you with me on my family vacations. Most of all, I’ve had a ringside seat at the emergence of a true industry. In fact, that’s what my very first column was about – Search growing beyond the confines of a cottage industry into a real contender for ad budgets. Here’s how I ended that column:

Search will become much more sophisticated, and the price of entry to play the game may prove to be too expensive for many smaller providers. Alliances will form and total solutions will begin to emerge. Google and Yahoo! will have to address the huge amount of time and effort required to manage a large, sponsored search campaign. Real money will start to be invested and made.

And to think, one day I’ll be able to say I was there.

Well, I guess that day has arrived. In the next 5 years, according to Forrester, digital will surpass TV as the single biggest destination for marketing budgets and search will make up the lion’s share of that spend. Digital budgets combined are forecast to top $100 billion. I think that qualifies as “real money.”

But regular readers will also know that over the past 10 plus years, my columns have spent less and less time inside the “Search Insider” box. I’ve talked before about the artificiality of the way we’ve divided online up into channels. As our digital world has become richer and more robust, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep it compartmentalized into arbitrarily defined boxes. My personal interest has always centered on human behaviors and the rapidly growing intersection between behavior and technology. Search is part of that, but so is social and mobile and content and rich media and wearable technology and – well – you get the idea. Digital is a deeply and widely interwoven part of our lives. It makes up much of the context of our environment. Trying to talk only about one part of it would be like trying to describe the world by only writing about water.

At the end of 2014 (AD – just to keep our calendar references consistent), Ken Fadner, the publisher of MediaPost, asked me if I’d consider a move. I said yes. So this column – number 476 – will be my last one for the Search Insider. Starting next week, I’ll join the Online Spin lineup. It’s probably more appropriate. I haven’t been active in search marketing for the last 2 years. I’m hardly an “Insider” any more. I am, at best, a somewhat informed observer commenting from the sidelines. I think that can still be a useful perspective. I hope so. I will continue to write about the things that interest me: corporate strategy, human behavior, evolving cultures, digital technology – and yes, the odd rant.

So, for those of you who have been along for the ride for the last 10 and a half years, thanks for sticking around. When this ride started, there was no Facebook, no iPhone, no YouTube, no Twitter – and Google was just starting to figure out how to make some real money.

We’ve come a long way. But I suspect we’ve barely started. Maybe we’re even transitioning from one era to another. After all, it’s happened before when we’ve hit the number 476.

See you next Tuesday at Online Spin.

The Apple Watch – More Than Just a Pretty Face

wpid-iwatch-goldI just caught Tim Cook’s live streaming introduction of the Apple Watch (I guess they’ve given up the long running “i” naming theme). What struck me most is how arduously Apple has stuck with traditional touch points in introducing a totally new product category (well, new for Apple anyway).

If you glanced quickly across the room at someone wearing Apple’s new wonder, you probably wouldn’t even know they’re wearing technology. The Apple Watch looks a lot like an analog watch. There is even a Mickey Mouse face you can choose. The interchangeable bracelets smack of tradition. Jon Ive verified this point in the video that ran at the introduction, saying they borrowed heavily from the “watchmaker’s vocabulary” in the design process. They even consulted “horological experts from around the world” to provide a time keeping experience rooted in cultural nuance. The primary interface to the watch is a modified version of the very old fashioned watch-winding crown.

Now, appearances can be deceiving. As Cook, Ive and Kevin Lynch put the watch through its paces, it was clear that this is an impressive little piece of technology. Particular attention has been paid to making this an intimate device, with new advances in touch technology, biometric and motion sensors and the ability to personalize interfaces and hardware to make it uniquely yours. Watching, I couldn’t help but compare this to Google’s introduction of Google Glass. In many ways, Glass is the more revolutionary device. But the Apple Watch will have a much faster adoption path.

Google impresses first with sheer brute-force technological effort. Design is an afterthought. Google uses UI testing and design to try to corral a Pandora’s box full of raw innovation into a usable package. Apple takes a much different approach. They look first at the user experience and then they pick and choose the technologies required to deliver the intended experience. They lavish ridiculous amounts of time on seemingly miniscule design details but the end result is typically nothing less than breathtaking. We’re impressed with the technology, sure, but the overriding emotion is one of lust. We just have to have what ever the hell it is that is being introduced on the main stage of the Flint Center.

larrygiseleDespite the many who have said otherwise, including the late Steve Jobs, Apple has never really made a revolutionary device. Others have always been there first. What they have done, however, is taken raw innovation and packaged it in a way that resonates with its audience at a deep and hormonal level. Apple products are stylish and sexy – the Gisele Bündchen of technology – yet attainable to mere mortals. They take the “next big thing” and push them past the tipping point by kindling lust in the hearts and wallets of the market. Google products, despite their geeky technical prowess, have a nasty habit of getting stuck on the wrong side of the adoption curve. They are the – well, let’s face it – they are the Larry Page of technology – smart, but considerably less sexy.

Apple times entrance to the adoption curve to near perfection. They have a knack of positioning just ahead of the masses. Google’s target is much further down the road. They release betas well ahead of any market demand. That’s why most of us can’t wait to wear an Apple Watch, but wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of Google Glass.

One last thought on this week’s introduction of the Apple Watch. Wearable technology is following an interesting path. Your smartphone now acts as a connected main base for more intimate pieces of tech like the Apple Watch or Google Glass. Increasingly, the actual user interfaces will be on these types of devices, but the heavy lifting will happen on a smart phone tucked into a pocket, purse or backpack. Expect specific purpose devices to proliferate, all connected to increasingly powerful MPUs (Mobile Processing Units) that will orchestrate the symphony of tech that you’re wearing.

The Era of Amplification

First published in Mediapost’s Search Insider, May 1, 2014

AmandaToddVideoMediapost columnist Joseph Jaffe wrote a great piece Tuesday on the Death of Anonymity. He shows how anonymity in the era of digital has become both a blessing and a curse, leading to an explosion of cowardly, bone-headed comments and cyber-bullying.  This reinforces something I’ve said repeated: technology doesn’t change human behavior; it just enables it in new ways. Heroes will find new ways to be heroes, and idiots will find new ways to be idiots.

But there is something important happening here. It’s not that technology is making us meaner, more cowardly or more stupid. I grew up with bullies, my father grew up with bullies and his father grew up with bullies. You could trace a direct line of bullies going back to the first time our ancestors walked erect, and probably further than that. So what’s different today? Why do we now need laws against cyber-bullying?

It’s because we now live in a time of increased amplification. The waves that spread from an individual’s actions go farther than ever before.  Technology increases the consequences of those actions.  A heroic act can spread through a network and activate other heroes, creating a groundswell of heroism. Unfortunately, the flip side is also true – bullying can begat more bullying. The viral spread of bullying that technology enables can make the situation hopeless for the victim.

Consider the case of Amanda Todd, a grade 10 student from Port Coquitlam, BC, Canada. Todd had been bullied for over a year by a guy who wanted “a show”. She finally relented and flashed her breasts. While not advisable, Todd’s actions were not that unusual. She wasn’t the first 15 year-old to experiment with a little sexual promiscuity after prolonged male pleading. It certainly shouldn’t have turned into a death sentence for Todd. But it did – because of amplification.

First of all, Todd’s tormentor was a man who lived thousands of miles away, in Holland. They never met. Secondly, Todd’s indiscretion was captured in a digital picture and was soon circulated worldwide. As teen-agers have been since time began, Todd was mercilessly teased. But it wasn’t just at the hands of a small circle of bullies at her high school. Taunts from around the world came from jerks who jumped on the bandwagon. A teen-ager’s psyche is typically a fragile thing, and the amplitude of that teasing was psychologically crushing for Todd. Desperate for escape, she first recorded a plea for understanding that she posted online, and then took her own life. The act that started all this should have been added to that pile of minor regrets we all assemble in our adolescence. It should not have ended the way it did. Unfortunately, Todd was a victim of amplification.

My wife and I have two daughters, one of which is about the same age as Todd. Because they grew up in the era of Amplification, we pounded home the fact that anything captured online can end up anywhere. You just can’t be careless, not even for the briefest of moments. But, of course, teenagers are occasionally careless. It’s part of the job description. They’re testing the world as a place to live in – experimenting with what it means to be an adult –  and mistakes are inevitable. Unfortunately, the potential price to be paid for those mistakes has been raised astronomically.

Here’s perhaps the most frightening thing about this. Todd’s Youtube video has been seen over 17 million times, so it too has been amplified by technology. Amanda’s story has spread through the world online. The vast majority of comments are those you would hope to see – expressions of sympathy, support, understanding and caring. But there are a handful of hateful comments of the sort that drove Todd to suicide. Technology allows us to sort and filter for negativity. In other words, technology allows bullies to connect to bullies.

In social networks, there is something called “threshold-limited spreading.” Essentially, it means that for something to spread through a network, the number of incidences needs to reach a certain threshold. In the case of bullying, as in the case of rioting or social movements, the threshold depends on the connections between like-minded individuals. If bullies can connect in a cluster, they draw courage from each other. This can then trigger a cascade effect, encouraging those “on the margin” to also engage in bullying. Technology, because of its unique ability to enable connections between those who think alike, can trigger these cascades of bullying. It doesn’t matter if the ratio of positive to negative is ten to one or even one hundred to one. All that matters is there are a sufficient number of negative comments for the would-be bully to feel that he or she has support.

I don’t know what the lasting impact of the Era of Amplification will be.  I do know that Technology has made the world a much more promising place than it was when I was born. I also know it’s made it much crueler and more frightening.  And it’s not because of any changes in who we are. It’s because the ripples of our actions now can spread further than we can even imagine.