Should we study neuroscience to explain market bubbles?

This is virtually unrelated to the world of content, but I had a moment of potential inspiration in the final 10 minutes of my walk to the train station after the podcast I was listening to ended.

The show in question was Planet Money's "What's a Bubble" about the latest Nobel prize in economics given to both Robert Shiller and Eugene Fama.  Both won for their studies of markets, but they have diametrically opposed viewpoints on how markets work, and specifically whether market bubbles exist. In short, Fama believes people are rational and therefore prices always reflect current information and markets respond when information changes, which means there are no bubbles.  His evidence is that you cannot predict when there will be a fall in prices.  On the other hand, Shiller believes people do not act rationally and that market prices can be like a symptom of a mental illness.  He identified the 90s stock market and the 00s housing market as bubbles before they crashed.  (Listen to the podcast for better explanations in their own words.)

My knee jerk reaction was to expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle.  But they appear mutually exclusive?

I'm not an economist, I only played one in college and grad school where I read both Shiller and Fama. The idea of behavioral economics is still a rather new take on the field, using psychology and other social sciences to explain why people make economic decisions.  But has it been taken further into human development studies that look into how people can be fundamentally and scientifically different?

I ask because my second reaction to the podcast was that Fama is probably right. I feel that I am generally a rational person and tend to over-analyze more than make impulse decisions.  (Checkout candy lines are powerless against me to the detriment of my kids.)  But then my third reaction was that someone in my life I know very well surely would argue that Shiller is right, because she doesn't believe people are rational but rather are more emotional.  I would go out on a limb and say that she is more of an emotional person than I am in general and we make decisions very differently, often with different conclusions.

So if there are really two people whose natural tendencies on individual decision making are different, then the aggregate market is composed of a portfolio of people who range from classic "economic man" to unpredictable crazy person.  So the next step to better understand the market is in fact to understand how people develop these characteristics.  This sounds like the nature vs nurture studies.  Role of society and family. Evolution and genetic research.  Is anyone going as far yet as trying to connect the stock market and neuroscience?

I would read that.


(I didn't know how to fit in this reference, but our hardwired fear of snakes must provide a clue to solving a financial crisis.)

Changing My Content Habits

I am one of the many Google Reader power users changing long-held habits cold turkey.  But while most of the noise has been about the loss of Reader, I am hit with a double whammy: I still used iGoogle, too.

A personalized iGoogle
has been my home page
dashboard

Yes, part of me is still living in Internet 2006.

While Google gave ample warning of the impending executions product changes for alternatives to emerge, I took the opportunity to re-examine some of my content consumption habits and see if it is time to change, not just substitute. While I am a creature of habit, I do have different needs than I did even just a few years ago, and with smart phones, tablets, and social media, there are likely much better habits for me to adopt.  I'm not the only one, which may have played into the services' demise.

So as I look at replacement for the two Google services, this is what I now value:

1. Dashboard
   This was the best benefit of iGoogle.  With widgets and feeds showing just the top news or information from topics and sources I could quickly scroll down the page scanning for the latest relevant information.  I kept this my browser home page and would glance at it several times throughout a day.
    
2. Organization 
   Both iGoogle and Reader allowed me to collect relevant information sources and organize them in a single location to find later.  I also loved grouping content from competing perspectives to create more balanced view.
    
3. Immersion
   When I need to learn about a new topic, after initial research I loved gathering a collection of feeds together that I could scan every day to continue the education process to quickly build up new knowledge and expertise. (Or at least quickly learn some vernacular to sound like I have some expertise.)
    
4. Discovery
   This is something neither service could do effectively.  I always want to find new voices, perspectives, and sources.
    
5. Efficiency
   I have less dedicated time to read and browse than ever before, yet the amount of content and great sources grows every day.  Years ago it was a huge breakthrough to simply have everything available on the web and in one place.  But now I need content available for whenever I have a free minute to consume, and I need help pulling out the most important and relevant content to me.
    
6. Targeted Sharing
   I have always loved sharing content, but I grew up in the golden age of email, so that is my default way of thinking.  The targeting of an email is great--it matching specific content to a specific audience.  But the process is still usually clunky, and it doesn't integrate with others' content habits as much any more.

At the end of the day no single service meets all of my needs, including the two going away.  I find myself using more content platforms than ever before.  That seems inefficient, but it is actually is okay, as each excels in different experiences and situations.

I am always experimenting and trying new content and products.  There are different paradigms of how to find the best content for someone--algorithms, human editors, social voting.  Each has its advantages so like most I find myself using a mix. I still religiously read a few publications directly, such as my great local newspaper.  But here are the services and platforms that I find myself increasingly using that are candidates to be locked into my new habits.

• Feedly.  I tried out several of the much-discussed Google Reader alternatives, and I am settling on Feedly for now.  It's still a good experience for that once-a-day immersion, although with the amount of content flowing in now from my collected feeds, it is becoming a chore to surface the most relevant stuff.
    
• Tweetdeck/Social Media.  While I am not particularly active in social media, I now follow a critical mass of relevant people and the throughout-the-day dashboard experience is pretty good with columns for custom searches and lists, and it is great for discovering new people.  Social media does filter out some of the better content, but it still has an "A1 problem."
   
• Tablet Aggregators.  I am increasingly using Flipboard now that they are adding more content sources to add directly, but I am a bigger fan of Zite.  While the presentation and user experience is beautiful, the former repeats too much content I have previously seen.  However, after investing some time to personalize my interests, Zite has become an excellent tool to discover content from new sources that is very relevant to me. This has become my end-of-day read.
   
• Apps.  I like where some of the upstart news apps are going with efficient storytelling, like Circa, Digg's News.me, and pre-Google Wavii, but I haven't locked into any yet.  Newspaper and social media apps are still the main go-to's when I have a spare moment. GoComics app has just taken my morning comics routine mobile. I also enjoy apps like NextDraft's daily curated links, which has just the right amount of context and content for a bus ride.  For longer free moments, I always have several ebooks and other documents loaded up on my Kindle app.
   
• Bookmarking / Sharing Spaces.  They are fundamentally different products, but I group together Evernote, Google Plus, and Flipboard magazines because I use them for saving and organizing content for myself and others.  

I loved Google Reader, but I also love the growing stack of unread National Geographics next to my bed that I really do plan to read some day.  Maybe some day I will change that habit, too.

My Perspective in One Graphic (the most egocentric post ever)

As a visual thinker, I have always loved sketching charts and graphs and trying to draw pictures to illustrate ideas.  My whiteboard habits are well known to those who have worked with me.  And now that infographics are all the rage, here is one graphic representing... me.

Looking through sketches and thoughts in old notebooks, at articles I have shared online, what books I have read, classes I have taken, RSS feeds in my Google Reader, tags I use in Evernote and other sites, I have been compiling a list of topics that interest me and influence how I think.  Naturally I was tempted to see if I could connect all of them together in a diagram.  The result is this graphic, an overly simple illustration of my perspective on life.  In theory this is a key for understanding me.  Although the fact that I even did it is the most important point.  

Don't Interrupt the On Demand Generation

We are like most families with young children.  Our televisions have finger prints from curious hands expecting touch screens.  Our kids mostly watch reruns from PBS on Netflix.  iTunes and Spotify allow us to have spontaneous dance parties to any Disney princess song.  We could join the countless other blog posts and YouTube videos about little kids trying to launch apps with a print magazines, illustrating that the next generation is growing up with different expectations of media.  

Of course they are.  Just as kids who grew up with the Internet expect to always be able to call up any answer with a simple search, my girls (ages 5 and 2) already expect instant, on demand satisfaction.  But now with mobile devices, there are no limits on expectations.  As a father I am held accountable to every question they have.  ("How many types of snow are there?" "I don't know." "Daddy! Look it up on your phone!")  And heaven forbid the times when our cell phones aren't charged and we have to rely on the car radio.  ("I don't like this song. Play Call Me Maybe again.")

But I am realizing there is even more to this expectation of on demand media.  Right before Christmas I was shopping with my older daughter at a toy store to purchase a gift for her friend.  As we perused the aisles she was acting like, well, a kid in a toy store.  One particular doll caught her eye and she eagerly ran up to it.  As she excitedly pointed it out to me, she said, "This is the one from the commercial when we watched TV!"  With years of experience being a kid and knowing the expertise of marketing to children I knew this was the likely leading to a plea for a purchase.  But then she said the last thing in the world I would expect.

"I don't like it."  Why not?  "Because it was on the commercial."  As I became more and more curious and probed into her reasoning, the best I could surmise is that she was offended by the concept of a commercial interrupting her show and was penalizing the product for participating.

As I have thought about this, and really paid attention to how much of her world truly is on demand and from commercial-free services, it is not unreasonable to see how little tolerance she could have for anything that disrupts her consumption.  We were indoctrinated to be patient and tolerant with our media--waiting for a favorite show or song to come on the air and then sitting through commercials every ten minutes.  So if this is true, that the newest generation will not grow up as accepting of interruptions, there will be serious implications for advertisers.  I would expect there will be increasing focus on more embedded ways to embed messages as we are seeing today with the trends toward native advertising, product placements, and other types of content marketing.  And it will continue to get more extreme as these kids become targeted demographics.

But then again, that is a lot to extrapolate from a conversation with a five-year-old.  There is an equal probability she simply didn't like the doll's dress color.  

Digital Storytelling with a Victorian Diary

On Monday I said goodbye to a friend fom 124 years ago. 

When my Great Great Grandmother, Minnie LeCraw, was 21 she kept a diary with brief daily entries chronicling life in rural Indiana of 1888. The diary has been passed down through the family and many people have read it to catch a glimpse of who she was and relive the adventures of a young school teacher.  Her handwriting is beautiful. The book has a handsome leather cover. And her Victorian, one room school house setting is inviting. But the thing is....  it is really boring. 

Each daily entry was no more than three sentences, often filled with abbreviations, initials, and mentions of mundane activities.  You can quickly read an entire month of seemingly disconnected sentences.  It begins to feel repetitive. 

But I was convinced there was a compelling story in here. I wanted to experiment with a new approach at the narrative that would capture it.  What follows are the three evolutions in content product concepts. So far the tangible output is not much better than an amateur blog. But the process has inspired me to imagine a very intriguing storytelling model.

Power of Daily Serials

As an avid reader of daily comic strips, a fan of old radio dramas and good television dramas, I recognize the potential of serialized content.  When written well, this can be a great narrative device to make the audience wait between installments.  So last year when I noticed that the 2012 calendar lined up with the 1888 calendar, with matching dates and days of the week, I decided to try blogging the diary one entry at a time, on the same "day" that it was written.  So on Sunday, January 1, 2012 I published the following entry:

"Sunday, January 1.  Watched the New Year in last night.  Parted from F. at half past eight — reached Bethany about ten and taught Sunday School class as usual.
I helped entertain callers in the afternoon and attended service at Bethany church again at night.  It  has been a pleasant day, but I wished for one more hr. at home."

minnielecraw.wordpress.com

This immediately made it more interesting.  As family and friends learned about the diary blog, some began visiting daily and others signed up to receive each post as an email.  Programmed to be delivered early in the morning, I personally loved reading the daily diary entry each morning waiting for my train.  I know others who read it out loud to the family at breakfast.  The routine became part of the story.  

Why did the serialization work?  Because that is exactly how it was written. Minnie LeCraw sat down each day and wrote a page in her diary as a single, contained content unit.  

Down the Rabbit Holes

The next step in the story was adding layers to the raw content.  As I read and share the diary, I have two objectives. I want to learn something about the author and also get a glimpse into a historical time and place. 

At its face value it is difficult to get a good image of Minnie LeCraw or life in 1888 Indiana just from the words she wrote.  The diary entries are brief.  There are many disconnected passing references to people and places that are meaningless to the reader.  She was not writing this for an audience, presumably just herself or her family who would know the backstory of the people and activities she recorded.  But for readers today it needs context.  So I began to add content.  

First I created four top-level pages that introduce Minnie and other characters that appear in the story and describe the locations and setting so that readers could enter the diary with some background. 

• Who Was Minnie LeCraw? 
• Meet the Other Characters
• Learn About the Locations in the Diary
• Indiana in 1888

These took some investigative work to determine who the 120 different people were that she mentions over nine months, often only by first name, and their relation to her and each other.  She also visits at least 12 different locations throughout the year.  I used genealogy sources, scanned historical books and records, local histories online, and the most valuable, scanned property maps from the 1870s and 1890s. These often included both biographical sketches of some prominent pioneer families of those counties as well as detailed township maps that I could cross-reference with current day Google maps. I was able to uncover who many of the people were and what the towns she lived in looked like at that time.  In fact, the town where she boarded and taught school has long since vanished. Finding where Bethany of Parke County, Indiana was the first mystery I needed to solve.  After hours of studying maps and old photos, when I drove through the town of Waveland for the first time ever this past July I felt as if I was visiting an old home.

Comparing historical and current maps

Next I began to look closely at what she was saying. I realized there could be an interesting story in almost every sentence.  When something caught my eye, I would do a little research and add a post script "Editor's Note" to the blog post providing a little background, links to additional information, and the occasional image if it was directly related to something described by Minnie.  My added notes included biographical sketches of neighbors, explanations of school administration policies, descriptions of what everyday objects and events where in 1888, and analysis of historical and modern maps to pinpoint buildings and compare locations today.  A seemingly straightforward sentence, upon further inspection, could almost always send me off on an illuminating research adventure.

One early instance was her sentence: "All day the low hung clouds have dropped their garnered fullness down."  It sounded too poetic compared to other sentences, so after some digging online I found that it was likely a quote from a poem.  This poem was only (as far as I could find) published in a 19th Century primer textbook, and only in the 5th edition.  She probably used that textbook in her classroom.  Google has scanned that edition so I could see the page of the actual book.  Fascinating.  In that process I caught a glimpse of Minnie and the past.  But I'm not sure the words of an editor's note could quite capture it.

Examples of entries with editor's notes that were an experience just to research: 

• February 16: Reading a Dickens book
• March 5: Traveling by train and handcar between small towns
• April 6: Distribution of one-room school houses and identifying a likely location of where Minnie taught.
• April 10: Going to the small town opera house
• April 23: Indiana State Normal School
• April 27: Getting a teaching license
• May 17: Trying to find out what meeting she attended in the county seat
• September 25: Visiting the future President

Parallel Narratives

The diary project as described above ended on October 1, with the final entry made by Minnie on that day in 1888.  I added notes to more than a third of the daily entries.  The overview pages have been expanded with research and analysis of people and places mentioned within the diary pages that I was able to piece together some of the story of her life.  I determined that she boarded with the family of her older sister and that she had been living with them and moving across the state for several years since her parents had died.  I now have a pretty good guess for where and when she met her future husband, my Great Great Grandfather, whom she was frequently writing letters to and traveling on trains to visit that year.  Both of these facts were unknown to her grandchildren, who had originally shared the diary and their family notes with me.

While the daily format and the extra content layers made the diary a more interesting experience, it still doesn't tell the story I think it can.  It doesn't even present the story that I personally experienced through poring over old maps, tracing her walking routes through fields or trips on old train lines, getting to know the people in her life, picturing the church gatherings, community events, and imagining who she was at that point in time.  My understanding of what a young woman's life would have been like in rural Victorian Indiana was challenged and is now much richer.

But how can that story be told?  Daily blog posts with extra links is a nice exercise, but it still does not capture the messages.  I think there is a third step in evolving the story.  I want to combine the compelling nature of the daily serial and the contextual layer of notes and links with the strong linear narrative of a book.  I imagine parallel narratives that unfold together but at different levels.  One that discusses the surprising and meaningful themes that her life illustrated that year, such as the independence and limits of women without families, the immersive role of the church within small towns, and the rhythm of life in that era.  There is also a narrative that is essentially the story of a town--getting to know the people of 1888 Waveland, Indiana, visualizing the place, stepping back in time.  And finally there is the narrative in Minnie's own words.

I admit I don't have this product figured out yet.  It may be an ebook, an another type of website, an app, or some other new digital format that would allow for the appropriate pacing and depth of the stories.  But regardless of what it is or when I get around to creating it, I am excited to tell this great story.

Final Thought

The purpose of even beginning this project was to capture the story of my Great Great Grandmother in a way that can be enjoyed and shared by my daughters, cousins, and family members that now spread across the globe.  I debated publicly publishing someone's private diary, but the content is much more about journaling facts and events than recording personal thoughts.  The strong, independent 21-year-old Minnie LeCraw in 1888 is a valuable story to capture and share with many.

When the Entertainment Product is a Live Spectacle

This year's summer Olympics are the first to occur in the age of social media, and given that the United States' viewing audience is several hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, the inevitable tape delay question arises.

Of course this is not the first time the Olympics have been shown on delay in the U.S., not even the first time in the era of new technology.  The games in Seoul and Barcelona were before the rise of the Web, but cable news was already redefining the news cycle to be 24 hours, instead of the controlled broadcast and print schedules.  By the Sydney Olympics in 2000, NBC had to deal with an extreme time lag and the early use of the Internet spreading news and information outside of the media's control.  This only increased with the Athens and Beijing games as technology improved (mobile, streaming video) and the culture became more expectant of real-time information.

There may be some irony that part of London's opening ceremony celebrated the rise of this culture, yet this may be a threat to the current economics of the Olympics that are still based on the old business model of mass advertising to a captive and controlled audience via licensing to broadcast channels.  There has been much discussion as to whether that is a still a valid business model (ratings are still high...) or whether NBC is decreasing value instead of adding it, or if the entire ordeal is just too commercial.  But let's ignore those arguments for the moment and assume that there is a business model that will work for NBC and the IOC that supports a real-time product instead of the traditional prime-time package.  Do I actually want that as a consumer?

I fully support the news industry reinventing itself along with technology to provide a more real-time product with better use of technology, even if it means painfully blowing up some business models (or watching new market entrants disintermediate some traditional leaders.)  And I am excited by the potential of television and movie entertainment moving to an on-demand experience.  But what are the Olympics?  And other sports for that matter?

I believe they are primarily an entertainment product, but with elements of news baked in.  Sports, especially on this scale, are a spectacle.  They are events packaged as products.  In theory, if the drama is good enough I would enjoy watching them on demand, separated from the live timing.  This sometimes works.  I have been recording football games for years and watching them at a later time when I am unavailable to watch as they originally air.  There is a tiny loss in the experience, as part of the spectacle of sports is sharing the event, even if remotely, with other people simultaneously.  So tape delay can work.  It is a bigger loss, though, if I already know the outcome.  I never watch the entire recorded football game if I hear the final score in advance.  So tape delay with leaked results is a much reduced experience.

So what should NBC or others do with something like the Olympics?  While they could simply broadcast every event live and optimize distribution and audience through the latest technology, I'm not sure this would be an improvement.  Because most people still have inflexible schedules even in a real-time culture, the full entertainment experience could not be consumed as it happens.  It would be treated more like news than an entertainment product to be enjoyed.  There is still a lot of value packaging the spectacle.

In this case, I do not see an obvious way to package and present the Olympics with our current culture and technology possibilities and limitations.  The current mix of breaking news throughout the day, optional real-time broadcasting of events, on demand replays, and a nightly packaged product is probably the natural equilibrium.  Although it requires individuals to decide how they want to consume the product and personally navigate some of the conflicts. (In other words, try to avoid seeing results during the day in order to preserve the nightly experience, or to find time to watch more events live during the day.)

Despite the challenging puzzle, the Olympics are fantastic content.  There will surely be incredible innovation around packaging and distributing that content, and other sports, in future years.  I am excited to see how the next games held in a distant timezone are presented and consumed.  It's sure to be in even more dramatic fashion.

Publisher Brands for Content Discovery, Not Distribution

Publishers are being disintermediated in their role of content gatekeeper for their audience.  As a consumer, I am not limited in my choice of articles or books to read by the decisions made by editors at my local newspaper or one of the few national publishers.  Their judgment was a necessary value in a world when content was scarce and distribution was a barrier.  But content is no longer scare, with exponentially more options, and I cannot possibly consume much more than I am now.  So I still need help deciding what to read.

When a speaker announced at a January book conference that more books were published during that week than in all of 1950 I was not really surprised yet taken aback at the same time.*  I have so many more choices as a consumer, and content is being created and published that would never have seen the light of day in the past.  Some of it must be more relevant to me than what was traditionally chosen for more mass audiences.

So how do I find it?  The wisdom of crowds lover in me wants to believe that quality will rise to the top. The population will find what is good and elevate it better than any small crowd of trained editors or physical retailers ever could.  But in reality I can't see that effectively working, especially as my definition of quality content includes what is personally relevant.

This is why I believe the personal discovery process for content is the biggest opportunity right now.  There is a lot of innovation happening across all types of content.   Some companies are focusing on algorithms using simple user inputs (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Zite), and others are looking for social connections to find more relevant content (Facebook, Goodreads, Spotify.)  Most are beginning to incorporate both aspects.  All of those companies I just mentioned do a decent job of finding new content specifically for me.

But what about those publishers with their teams of editors who used to pick what I should read?  Do they still have a role in this world?  I think they just might.

While they cannot ignore the trends toward personalization or they will be completely left behind, they do have a head start over any technology upstarts at understanding specific audiences and communities.  And more importantly they (at least for the moment still) have the ability to fund and sponsor content creation.  Publishers appear to be losing the battle of distribution--other companies are doing it better, in more personalized ways--but they still have brands that mean something to audiences.  The same great article has more weight under the flag or The New Yorker than it does under noname.com.

So how can publishers use this brand equity? A recent announcement from Forbes might be one example.  They are asking contributing writers to take responsibility to build their own individual audiences online with content that goes beyond what appears in the standard publication.  And they are compensating them for it.  This allows Forbes the ability not just to expand their total audience, but to sponsor many more content creators than they would have before and add more support, especially financially, to those that appear wise to the crowds.  It works for the contributors by giving them the Forbes banner and promotion to give them a boost to be noticed in the increasingly saturated sea of content.  And it will benefit me, the consumer, but highlighting content choices as Forbes-approved if I believe their brand is appropriate for me.

I expect we will see more ideas like this from publishers, not just in news, but in books, music, and other entertainment.  They will focus more on their brand and using its equity to facilitate the discovery of content for their audiences, especially for those with specific, defined, even niche audiences.  This could even be done without publishing or distributing actual content.  No one has figured out how to monetize their brands separate from distribution-based business models yet, but it is inevitable as they are forced to reconsider their very missions and look at where their value truly resides.

UPDATE: Here is a recent example of blogger Joshua Gans, someone I have enjoyed for several years, moving over to the Forbes brand. http://gametheorist.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-parentonomics-blog.html



* I have not fact checked this statement, but considering the explosion of self publishing and publishing upstarts and opportunities, the idea is surely correct even if the number is not completely true.