It never ceases to amaze me to hear about the amount of money that spent (wasted, really) on advertising, year after year.
Don’t get me wrong, advertising is great in that it supports amazing companies like Google that truly want to democratize information, but do people really think that it’s a good use of their money? I’ve quoted Wanamaker ad nauseam here before: “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
We’re convinced that number is a lot higher on the web. There seems to be this meme that resurfaces in the world of content on the web, year after year. Advertising in most cases is a complete waste, it’s a lot better to underwrite the creation of nutritious, relevant content that relates to people and helps them explore a particular interest they have.
And yet, here we sit in 2011, more than a decade after the creation of the web, with warehouses filled with monkeys on typewriters (ok that was harsh) content farms that squeak out this crappy content just so that advertisers have something to put next to that content when a weary search engine user “stumbles upon” some page on a whim.
If we haven’t learned anything from Cluetrain Manifesto, any of the 17 Seth Godin books, and if common sense fails too, we might learn from Felicia Day’s SXSW interactive panel:
“Why pay $300,000 for an ad that people are going to avoid watching?” she said, referring to technologies such as Tivo that allow people to bypass television ads. Why not, Day said, spend half that or a quarter of that to fund a Web series, which will provide quality content that people care about, and has the potential to expand to other media? (The Guild has expanded with a comic book deal from Dark Horse).
It’s apocryphal that established companies who have spent years cultivating their brand do not have knowledge they could impart in order to make the world a better place. Then again, maybe the proper channel/medium hasn’t existed until today.
This post on “getting to genius” made it to hackernews and I found a few of the ideas fascinating.
At Xerox PARC Alan Kay was known for saying, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”
I’ve heard this similar idea about “perspective” from successful angel investors and VCs:
Genius is the extreme form of insight. It’s really not a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps. I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is.
Getting to a rare perspective is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among disparate ideas. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen.
I think it’s this one that interested me the most, Richard Feynman’s advice on being a genius:
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!
I find that many personal projects and “interests” operate in much the same way. Sometimes I’m actively pursuing them (whatever “pursuing” might mean… whether researching, implementation, or improving). Sometimes they are dormant and I need to passively reflect upon them before they can move forward.
I often wonder how I could extrude that certain state of mind out into the world. What if people could see my nascent and possibly dormant projects and help contribute to them?
Over the past few years, we’ve developed a “slow hunch” as Steven Johnson might call it: The tools and mechanisms that social systems like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora have “discovered” (notice I didn’t use the word invented) might be incredibly useful to improve humanity and help more people “get to genius”.
{there is nothing NSFW about this post, but now that I have your attention…}
In the past five years, much of our domestic discourse regarding education and education reform has revolved around STEM training, so that the US can manufacture more scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. For a long time, I agreed with this predominant position because it made lots of sense on face value.
After completing degrees in both technology and “math” (computer science and an mba), and what could also be called an “art” degree (design), I find myself disagreeing with the emphasis on STEM learning in a vacuum. As automation accelerates and makes our lives filled with less repetitive work, the need for more creativity and innovation in our day-to-day careers will only increase. While there will always be a need for liberal arts majors to help communicate and express new ideas, that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here. It’s universally necessary to be able to think creatively and solve problems more than ever (Even for “nerds” with STEMmy backgrounds like computer science). Maybe training in the arts and other similar creative domains can contribute more organic growth to the economy and advances in the sciences and technology than we’ve ever thought before.
I didn’t come up with the acronym “STEAM“. I’m not entirely sure who did, but the idea of focusing on the arts has been discussed before by many before me, including John Tarnoff in this Huffington Post article. Here’s a short clip:
“A” skills in the 21st century actually apply to a larger, broader segment of the workforce than STEM skills. America’s competitiveness is equally distinguished by its creative industry productivity and exports, from movies, TV and games (traditionally the highest-ratio export business in the nation) to architecture (Bilbao Guggenheim, anyone?) to the myriad of leading writers, designers, graphic artists and others who use their imagination to create new products and services — and the infrastructure of creative enterprise managers (producers, editors, financiers, marketers) that support and run their businesses. This cadre, that sociologist Richard Florida defined in 2002 as the Creative Class, represents approximately 30 percent of the United States workforce. In contrast, a quick look at NSF statistics indicates that science and engineering makes up approximately 10 to12 percent of the United States workforce.
A large portion of the budget for Teach for America comes from a Federal funding “earmark”. Congress has equated “earmarks” with only its negative connotations (wasteful and pork barrel spending) and none of its positive ones (providing needed support to an organization that contributes to education in badly needed areas of the country).
Speaking of leadership, someone in Congress should invest some on TFA’s behalf. Government funding – federal, state, local – is just 30 percent of TFA’s budget. Last year’s federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says that every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars. All that money might, however, be lost because even when Washington does something right, it does it wrong.
It has obtusely defined “earmark” to include “any named program,” so TFA has been declared an earmark and sentenced to death. If Congress cannot understand how nonsensical this is, it should be sent back to school for remedial instruction from some of TFA’s exemplary young people.
The combined wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (over time) cost the US over $320M a day. A DAY. During the early part of the Iraq war, that number was $720M a day. We can’t find $21M for a program that helps schools find world-class teachers?
