24 July 2010

Creativity Increased By Multitasking

I love stories that debunk conventional wisdom, especially cobwebby corporate wish fulfillment. In this case, a wholesale frontal assault on creativity training:

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Forget Brainstorming

Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together. In fact, according to University of Oklahoma professor Michael Mumford, half of the commonly used techniques intended to spur creativity don’t work, or even have a negative impact. As for most commercially available creativity training, Mumford doesn’t mince words: it’s “garbage.” Whether for adults or kids, the worst of these programs focus solely on imagination exercises, expression of feelings, or imagery. They pander to an easy, unchallenging notion that all you have to do is let your natural creativity out of its shell.

Bronson and Merryman do go on to make some concrete recommendations and observations:

• Physical activity loosens up creativity muscles.
• Throw away the suggestion box: it’s demotivating.
• Don’t watch TV.
• ‘Do something only you would come up with — that none of your friends and family’ — and co-workers — ‘would come up with.’ - Mark Runco

But the one I found most compelling is that multitasking seems to support creativity:

Take a break.

Those who study multi-tasking report that you can’t work on two projects simultaneously, but the dynamic is different when you have more than one creative project to complete. In that situation, more projects get completed on time when you allow yourself to switch between them if solutions don’t come immediately. This corroborates surveys showing that professors who set papers aside to incubate ultimately publish more papers. Similarly, preeminent mathematicians usually work on more than one proof at a time.

Perhaps my bias toward multitasking is based on the nature of the work I do, and that I think is central to most professionals: it’s creative work. So putting something down when you have come to a halt, and turning your mind to something else for a while actually increases our capacity for creative thought.

Again, proof that we aren’t chairs, we are people.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Bettery Way to Ask People to Be Creative [Management] (lifehacker.com)
• The Creativity Crisis (newsweek.com)
• Asking Questions (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Getting All A’s But Flunking Life - IQ Scores Climb As Creativity Sinks (eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com)
• American Creativity in Decline (ideas.blogs.nytimes.com)

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23 July 2010

The Flipboard Dilemma: Who Owns User Experience?

Flipboard burst on the scene this week like a Rodriguez movie trailer, or a new diet drug, and everyone rushed to download (following Scoble’s recommendation). Now that the dust has settled, and the controversy about Flipboard being unready to handle the surge of signups has started to abate, some larger issues are starting to arise from Flipboard’s modus vivendi:

Joel Johnson, Is Flipboard Legal?

Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?

Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.

Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)

Back in the ancient days of the mid-aughts, there was a healthy debate online about whether or not news outlets should provide full content feeds or simply headlines and excerpts. Rather than rehash that debate—one that’s still ongoing—just remember this: whether a company chose to publish “full feeds” or excerpts, the choice remained theirs.

The fact that publishers have some explicit means of controlling the use of their published materials through RSS (as well as devices like the robot.txt files used to control indexing by search engine robots) has not actually always provided strong enough controls for publishers. Said differently, publisher have still blocked or threatened services like Pulse and Flipboard even when they are only serving up what has been published in their RSS feeds. Murdoch has made the case that search engines ‘bots don’t have the right to index his sites even when robot.txt files indicate that those sites are open for indexing.

This suggests the need for some other mechanism to define what sort of reuse or aggregation rights that publishers care to allow. Creative Commons suggests an example, but it is likely to be considered too coarsely grained, and it doesn’t delve deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of actual reuse.

The rise of tools like Flipboard may represent a new day. Tools that intentionally sidestep RSS, and instead reach through the URL and spider the websites themselves, like search engines do. Search engines build indexes and return snippets clipped from the myriad sites they have visited based on the search queries users enter. But Flipboard is tapping into our social networks — like those that I follow on Twitter — by reaching through the URLs in the Twitter stream, and aggregating what they point to, and rendering it in a magazine-like UX.

But the presentation in Flipboard poses some real business problems. Where’s the ads? Publishers make their money on ads (and pay walls), and so they are going to start to howl if people are viewing their stories with all the ads parsed out.

Perhaps even more contentious will be the response of Facebook and other social services like Twitter. To the extent that Flipboard replaces their UX, they may lose revenue as well. Twitter recently has moved into the realm of building its own clients and does so with the explicit goal of making ad revenue. These social network giants could block access to Flipboard and other tools of this sort, simply because they will resist being treated as a dumb pipe of social messages. Facebook will certainly move aggressively if Flipboard ‘dumbs down’ what Facebook does for users, treating it just as a messaging bus with URLs, pictures, and social gestures embedded in it.

It is relatively simple to extrapolate to a near future in which Flipboard, or some other entrant with similar aspirations, has ginned up a superior user experience, one that involves its own layers of sociality. Imagine that Flipboard can offer its users greater benefits by communicating directly through Flipboard, and not through underlying services like Twitter or Facebook — for example, being able to share Tumblr like reblog capabilities, or some other dimension of sociality that naturally falls out of the iPad experience.

I am certain that Twitter and Facebook would consider this course of events — however hypothetical — with some alarm.I believe that these companies must retain control of their user experience, and they must resist being commoditized by a richer layer of sociality superimposed above their offerings.

Related articles

• Flipboard (coolhunting.com)
• Too Successful, Flipboard Flops At Launch (thenextweb.com)
• You: Flipboard iPad app goes from fascination to mockery in a snap (washingtonpost.com)
• Flipboard hype crashes iPad app’s servers (money.cnn.com)
• Flipboard for iPad gives Facebook, Twitter a magazine-style makeover (thaibrother.com)
• Flipboard for iPad app review (engadget.com)
• Flipboard turns social network content into a virtual magazine (tuaw.com)

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22 July 2010

The Fear Of Being Found Out

Jeffrey Rosen has a recent piece in the NY Times Magazine, which exposes the natural conservatism of our theoretically open and liberal society. Every action that has been recorded on the web — that party where you drank too much and put on a tutu, your espousing socialist rhetoric, or calling a college buddy a racial epithet — and someone someday is going to dredge it up and use it against you.

Jeffrey Rosen, The Web Means the End of Forgetting

[…]

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.[emphasis mine.]

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

[…]

Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

This is not an entirely fanciful vision. Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. Tadayoshi Kohno, a designer of Vanish, told me that the system could provide expiration dates not only for e-mail but also for any data stored in the cloud, including photos or text or anything posted on Facebook, Google or blogs. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data didn’t linger forever.

I am intrigued with the notion of digital forgetting, and in a world dominated by a few apps like Facebook and MySpace it would be straightforward to have such features implemented, by government dictate if needed.

Related articles

• Internet As Your Permanent Record (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Speak, Memory (3quarksdaily.com)
• Digital Remembering (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

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