If you follow the occasional posts here on Building to Think, you’ll know that I’ve spent some time over the last months thinking about personalization and, by extension, tracking. I’ve taken some twists and turns as I’ve stuck my head into the “Filter Bubble” – the supposed problem that got me to venture down this path in the first place.

I won’t go into filter bubbles here, safe to say I don’t think they’re much of an issue. What I’d like to do instead is focus on something that I think is much more important: namely the infrastructure that facilitates personalization on the one hand, and tracking on the other.

First, some basics

Browsing the web involves a number of transactions, with data flowing between your browser and the websites you visit. Much of that data is made up by web content such as text and imagery sent to your browser for you to consume. Few people however realize that this is a two-way street and that information is also sent in the opposite direction.

That information may or may not include data about you as a user, and it may or may not be used by the recipient websites. But when it is used, it might be used for profiling purposes so that the website can target you with advertising and content it thinks you’ll find interesting.

Some people hear this and get ill at ease; it does have a 1984-type quality to it. Others will simply shrug and say that it’s perfectly fine as long as they can benefit from personalized advertising and, as is more often the case nowadays, personalized content.

I’m generalizing profusely here but the gist of it is that these things do occur and that some people find it problematic whilst others do not. Also important is that organizations such as the W3C are doing what they can to facilitate a solution. It’s to that solution I want to turn out attention.

Nothing new under the sun

Targeted advertising and personalized content are two sides of the same coin. The former may sound more malicious, but they’re both made possible through the same mechanism: “web tracking” (i.e., the act of recording the a user’s movement on one or more websites). It should come as no surprised that this raises certain privacy concerns and that these concerns have been around for as long as tracking has been around.

The recent announcement from the W3C is, in fact, not ground breaking. People have been talking about stuff like this for a rather long time. One of the more ambitious “solutions” were, for example, proposed as early as 1998 by non-other than the W3C itself. But the “Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), has that solution was called, never gained much traction, a fact I attribute to misaligned incentives – something well get back to in a little bit.

DNT and P3P are really quite different. But as is often the case with these things, it’s the commonalities that are most telling. You see, both DNT and P3P are (and were) concerned with the fact that tracking, as it exists today, affords little to no control to users. Both are, in this sense, attempts to put the users (back) in the driver’s seat.

(As far as I know, there’s never been a serious discussion about banning tracking altogether. And that is just as well as it’d probably be a technical impossibility.)

User control is a laudable goal and something I support wholeheartedly. But I also think that DNT and P3P suffers from similar problems. And if these problems aren’t addressed, I fear DNT will fall into oblivion just like its forebear—good intentions notwithstanding.

A blast from the past

Before we go into these problems in detail, let us quickly backtrack to the late 1990s once more because there was another piece of policy back then – an important piece – that has yet to me mentioned. That piece of policy was called “Open Profiling Standard” (OPS, they love their 3-letter acronyms at the W3C) and it was, as far as I’ve been able to tell, rolled into, or appended to, the larger P3P draft.

Because they where so tightly intertwined, OPS of course suffered the same fate as did P3P. And this, I think, is a real shame. OPS was no silver bullet, but it did hold a lot of potential. Much more so than what I’ve been able to glean from my reading of P3P and, to a lesser extent, DNT.

P3P gave users control over what type of information they where willing to share. But it did so in a round-about kind of way. It’s backbone, so to speak, was a facility in which content providers (i.e., the websites you visit) could specify what they wanted to track. These settings would then be compared to user settings. If there was a mismatch, users would be “prevented” from visiting the site.

The problem of this approach should be obvious. It’s basically a surefire away to turn away visitors. I’ve been in this business for over a decade and I’ve yet to find a single content provider who thought that was a good idea. It’s no wonder, in other words, that P3P never went anywhere.

DNT is better. Much better. But it’s, in my opinion, not good enough. It basically does away with the problematic content-provider portion of P3P. The user is still in control but, unlike P3P, she’s allowed to visit any website of her choosing. DNT doesn’t care to match the user’s privacy settings with the tracking needs of providers, it simply states what the provider can and cannot do with the user’s data.

Sticks vs. Carrots

The problematic portion of DNT is enforcement. We’re essentially relying on providers to play nice. There’s nothing stopping providers from saying “Oh, so you don’t want me to track you? No problem, come on in” and then turn around and track your every move. There’s no easy way for regular users to check that the websites they visit actually honors their privacy settings.

As is the case with tracking more generally, there are two ways to look at this issue. One way is to point towards the track record of providers who police themselves. That track record is surprisingly good, and so one can look at that and conclude there’s no problem. The other view, and the one I’m taking, is that lack of enforcement is a virtual free card for a few bad apples to do pretty much what they want.

A Twitter users recently explained to me that DNT essentially relies on the same feedback mechanism as all other self-regulatory schemes: comply or the government will be forced to step in. And this is, of course, perfectly true. There are many such schemes, some of which work, and some of which don’t. There’s really no way to know until you try.

Here’s the thing though. There’s plenty of research that shows that incentives are more potent in regulating behavior than are rules and regulations. I won’t cite studies here (ask me in the comments if you like) but the evidence is pretty clear: if you want someone to do something, you’re better of waving carrots around than you are threatening people with sticks.

P3P had no incentives for providers. And neither does DNT. And that’s a problem. We’re basically asking for-profit companies to abstain from a source of competitive advantage. And the same goes for advertisers who, for better of worse, are now able to target users with customized messaging. Are they going to give that up? I don’t think they will.

You might think I’m being cynical. Personally, I just think I’m being realistic. Schemes such as this depend on the compliance of multiple stakeholders, and so it makes sense that each stakeholder should be able to benefit. Why else would they comply? Why would anyone willingly make themselves worse off?

Incentives are the missing ingredient, and that brings us back to OPS.

A far-reaching idea

I’ve understood OPS to be more like DNT than P3P, the scheme it was actually part of. Like DNT, OPS didn’t have the restrictive quality that plagued P3P. It was more “User: Here’s what I’m willing to share, please use it to personalize my experience” and less “Provider: Here’s what we require; go somewhere else if you don’t like it.” Like DNT, it was (and is) more user-centered.

At the core of OPS was a browser-based privacy control panel with which users could control what information they were willing to share. It was something quite tangible; something with which users could experiment in an effort to find a balance that worked for them. Most importantly, it gave users the control they so desperately needed.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as OPS went. And from what I’ve been able to find out, it too relied on the well-meaning provider to abide by the rules. But OPS had (and still have) the potential to be so much more. So much so, in fact, that I think it could serve as the platform for a new privacy scheme, one that is beneficial to everyone—not just users.

Such a concept may strike you as rather utopian considering that users and providers/advertisers are all but diametrically opposed in their needs and wants. But that’s just the thing. They don’t have to be. In the right kind of scheme, this could be a win-win situation in which all stakeholders – users, providers, AND advertisers – can benefit. The question is: what could providers and advertisers possibly have to gain from a privacy scheme?

Tracking is no crystal ball

At present, providers can glean preciously little actionable insight from a user visiting their website. That’s why they are so keen to have you sign up for an account; unless you willingly provide them with some rudimentary information about yourself, the most they can hope to find out is what city you’re from and what pages you visited on their site.

Providers do not know who you are unless you tell them yourself. And this fact has spurred an entire industry of companies concerned with one thing and on thing only: to find out as much as they can about you without actually having to ask your permission. KISSMetrics is one such company, and I’ve heard they’re doing quite well for themselves—ethical considerations notwithstanding.

Providers still can’t know who you are, but through the services of KISSMetrics and other companies like them, the do “know” that you’re looking to refinance your house, say, or that you are entertaining the idea of buying a new car.

They know this because they’re able to track your movements across multiple participating websites. You might, for example, recently have visited various car websites. Chances are that an advertiser would look at that information and think you’re the perfect target to which to pitch a new mid-sized sedan.

This information is far from perfect (the advertisers still don’t know who you are or what exactly type of car you are looking for), but the information they do have allows them to make an informed guess as to your needs and preferences, and that is much better that blindly shooting off ads in the hopes that one of them will find their way to a prospective customer.

Tracking is, in other words, a valuable tool to providers and advertisers alike. But the fact that it isn’t perfect has lead to some less-then desirable new services that (further) infringe on online privacy. What providers and advertisers want, in other words, is better insights. And they want it more than anything.

Rekindling OPS

What if we, as users, could give them that information in exchange for better service? What if we could trade our personal information and use it as currency? As users, we’d have complete control over who gets access to what information. And we’d be able to use that control as leverage in getting what we want. On the flip side, provides and advertisers would gain unprecedented market insight above and beyond what they now have access to.

The OPS privacy control panel is central to this idea as users would need some form of interface with which to manage their data. Everything from web history to psychographics could be incorporated in this panel – some of which could be handled automatically (e.g., websites visited, purchases made, geographic location) whilst others would need to be managed manually (e.g., income level, interests, preferences).

The only limitation I think we need to put to this panel is that all settings need to be “opt-in”. That is, that every single setting must be turned off by default and that only the user him or herself should be able to change this. Nothing should be shared without the user’s explicit consent.

Let me recap that because it’s important: nothing, and I mean nothing, should be shared without the user’s explicit consent. Ever.

If you’ve read my previous writings on this subject you’ll understand why I feel so strongly about this. Having to opt-out of something I may not want, I think, goes against the fundamental principles of the web. It’s not something I’d be willing to compromise on even though I understand that this fact may well prove to be a point of contention for providers and advertisers.

Why a contention? Because some are likely to argue that no user in their right mind would choose to share personal information about themselves. Especially not with for-profit companies looking to make a buck. But I don’t think that’s true. I think plenty of people would be willing to share information with a select number of providers and advertisers. Not all, mind you, but enough to make this interesting for all stakeholders. And that is, as you already know, the whole point.

In closing

OPS was initially described as “special software” to create a “Personal Profile”; something that providers and advertisers could tap into. And that is essentially still true. What’s new in this updated version is the fact that providers and advertisers must now be invited if they are to tap into this profile and, perhaps equally important, that the profile itself holds much more information than was previously the case.

This new version of OPS is different from P3P in that it doesn’t hurt business. On the contrary, it incorporates incentives that plays to the needs and wants of providers and advertisers. And it’s different from DNT in that minimizes the problem of enforcement. There won’t be the same need for providers and advertisers use underhand tactics to retrieve paltry user data when a virtual treasure-trove of useful information is so “easily” attained. All that they need to do to gain access is give users something in return.

This “something” might be a limited-time subscription, access or exclusive content, or something completely different. It doesn’t really matter at this point.  What’s important is that we acknowledge that there are alternative solutions to our online-privacy woes. And believe me when I say that “OPS Redux” may or may not be the best such alternative. But it’s an alternative and does have a crucial difference: it’s built around carrots rather than sticks. And that, I hope you’ll agree, gives it the potential to completely redefine the discussion around web tracking and personalisation.

Let me know what you think. Cheers /Andreas

Apple has built an rather extraordinary (albeit it closed) ecosystem comprising not only software but also the hardware it runs on. In contrast, Google has focused on software alone, explaining why it has had to play nice with hardware providers.

The late Mr. Jobs once said that design isn’t about how things look but about how they work. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how he (and the rest of Apple) went on to apply this idea not just to individual products but to their entire ecosystem (e.g., iPod, iTunes, AppStore, iOS, iCloud).

Google, and others, have followed suite by creating their own ecosystems (e.g. Android Market), but so far they’re one or more steps behind (in my opinion). Apple, post-Jobs, is still leading the charge. But for how long?

Apple’s hallmark, I think you’ll agree, is the simplicity of the its products and services. If they do one thing well over there, that has to be it. They’re masters at removing complexity and making things simple and easy to use.

This is surprisingly hard to do. It might even be impossible to do without steadfast, at times even brutal, leadership from a man like Steve Jobs. Simplicity practically underpins Apple’s meteoric success. But simplicity comes at a price. And this, I think, will eventually be Apple’s downfall.

Organic produce provides a useful parallel here, the success of which may also be attributed largely to simplicity.

An organic apple has the same nutritional value has its non-organic counterpart. The “organic” moniker is little more than a label (a brand) in this sense. But organics does have one distinguishing feature: it’s limited. If I want to buy apples at my local supermarket, I’ve got a choice of maybe ten different varieties. But if I’m looking to buy organic, my choice is limited to one or two.

Buying organic is much simpler, and this may well be the real reason to why organic produce has become so successful in recent years. As consumers, we’re inundated with choice. We like choice. We want choice. But too must choice is problematic. Organic produce provides an easy-to-justify way to simplify a rather mundane task such as buying apples.

The Apple ecosystem is simple in the same way that organic apples are simple. It removes choice from something otherwise complex. It imposes limitations. And maybe that is one of Apple’s greatest realizations; that limits are a good thing.

The challenge, I think, is to know when enough is enough. At what point does it become detrimental to impose more limits and further reduce choice?

Imagine if two kinds of organic apples were the only kind of apples available to you. Imagine that there were no other apples. What do you think would happen if someone came along with eight new kinds of non-organic apples? Wouldn’t that be great? More choice! Everyone would finally be able to buy their favorite apple whenever they wanted – organic or otherwise.

I think Apple will face the same threat. They’ll continue down the line of limited ecosystems and they will, I suspect, have a marvelous time doing it. But at some point someone will reintroduce non-organic apples into the mix, and Apple will suddenly find itself in the limited-choice hole it has dug for itself, unable to get out.

Who this “someone” will be remains to be seen. Maybe it’ll be Google’s Android, maybe it won’t. It doesn’t really matter. The fact is that Apple will continue to make fantastic products for some time. But as with all good things, it can’t last forever – however much some of us might want it to.

Respectfully typed on an iPad.

Image: Apple store in Beijing, China, curtesy of Ivan Walsh

It’s been months since I blogged about the beta version of Protean. A lot of time has been spent since honing the functionality and tweaking the look and feel. But today we’re finally ready to unleash upon the world Protean V1. Concept and design by yours truly and built in collaboration with the fine folks at Maqe. A very special shoutout to Nice (“nBlue” on GitHub) for code written and improvements made. We think Protean is a world’s first, and so we want to share it far and wide. We hope you like it.

Protean in the Wild

• NASA Open Directive
• I’m a Bear! Etc.
• Bangkok Scientifique
• Lionel Damm (Nellio)
• Pixelated (and back again)
• Brandon Ney
• Gordon Ryan
• Denkfabrikblog
• You? Leave a comment.

Theme Features

We’ve built Protean with the explicit aim of making customisation as easy as possible. Knowledge of HTML or CSS is not a prerequisite. We have, in fact, fitted the theme with a number of custom controls that enables bloggers to quickly and easily manipulate the following:

Custom page design
You can easily change the background and colour scheme of your blog posts using the Page Style interface (see below). (You’ll find the same interface under Appearance as well; from here you can control the global site design).

WYSIWYG banner creation
Each blog post is accompanied by a custom banner (think of it as the advertisement or poster for your post). In addition to a background image or colour, the banner can also feature a title and an excerpt from your post.

Google Web Fonts integration
We’ve made it ridiculously easy to use web fonts by integrating Protean with Google Web Fonts. Google’s font library is 100% free and it’s growing rapidly, giving bloggers ample material with which to trick out posts and banners.

Theme Inspiration

The rise of HTML5 and CSS3, as well as the release of WordPress 3. These “new” developments got the cogs spinning, so to speak. We’ve been able to incorporate a number of bleeding-edge features in Protean while still catering to most popular browsers (even IE6).

An immense amount of inspiration was also drawn from designers such as Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis who got us thinking about blog-post customization in the first place. (Check out “The Death of the Boring Blog Post” on Smashing Magazine for more information).

Last but not least, we’d also like to credit the readability-on-the-web renaissance for the contribution it made to our thinking around design and, well, readability. To learn more, be sure to check out Mandy Brown’s excellent “In Defense of Readers” on A List Apart.

Frequently Asked Questions

What about licensing?
Protean is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, meaning that you are free to modify and distribute the theme in whatever way you like. We do, however, kindly ask that you credit Maqe somewhere on your site.

What about browser compatibility? 

Protean works well in most popular browsers. We’ve tested Internet Explorer, Safari, FireFox, and Chrome on PC and Mac – all with good results. (We’ve used CSSPie and HTML5Shiv to get IE to recognise our use of new web technologies, but IE6 is, not surprisingly, still a bit wonky).

What are the technical requirements?

Minimum requirements are WordPress 3 (or above) along with PHP5 (or above).

What size background image do I need for new banners? 

Banner images need to be 870px wide. Height is variable and so you can experiment with that. In our testing, we found 870×300 to be a good size (see www.buildingtothink.com) but it’s really up to you.

What’s with the name? Sounds like some sort of meat product. 

In Greek mythology Proteus is a sea god with the ability to shapeshift. From his name comes the adjective “protean” which means “versatile”, “mutable”, or “capable of assuming many forms” all of which are good characterisations of our theme’s abilities (check out the Proteus entry on Wikipedia for a complete picture). So no, it’s not a meat product.

Feedback

We’d love to hear from you. Seriously. If you have thoughts, opinions, or suggestions about Protean, please feel free to share in the comments below. If you’d like, you can also reach us on Twitter (@anho. Should you run into any problems and want to report bugs etc., please leave a comment.

A recent study by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business [finds] “no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time” or leading to increased polarization…Instead, their findings show that the Net has encouraged more ideological integration and is actually driving us to experience new, unanticipated viewpoints.

I was wrong, but I wasn’t alone. Many observers have lamented the rise of personalization, suggesting, for example, that it’s a threat to democracy. Others have praised personalization as a natural evolution that promises to make the Web more useful.

We we’re all wrong because we all missed the larger point. Whether personalization is good or bad isn’t the real issue here. The issue is that personalization, as it exists today, is being provided without user consent.

Universality, openness, and transparency are, in my view, principles that underpin the Web that I know and love. Personalization without user consent runs counter to these principles. It’s isn’t universal because it shows different things to different people. It isn’t open because it’s not a choice. And it isn’t transparent because it’s not obvious that personalization is taking place.

I get it though. I get it that all Google and Facebook and Yahoo! are trying to do is to provide a better service. I also understand that they have a right to provide whatever service they want. I’m not accusing them of anything; their users have chosen to use their service and, and some point, accepted their terms and conditions.

I also understand that the majority of users would opt for personalization if given the choice and that asking for permission might consequently seem like a mute point. But this is where my grief lies, because not asking shouldn’t be an option. There are consumer protection laws against opt-out schemes and fine print – neither of which provides a perfect parable but that does go some ways toward explaining why this isn’t how things are suppose to get done.

Search engines started out as relatively straight forward services: you typed in your query and the algorithm fed back X because it was deemed more relevant than Y – a conclusion reached by analyzing information about X and Y. It wasn’t until later that information about the user was factored into this analysis and it has, since then, remained below the radar of most users.

To be fair, Google et al doesn’t hide the fact that personal data is being made use of. They’re more than happy to tell anyone willing to listed that “Web History uses [personal information] to give you a more personalized search experience”. But what use are such statements when they don’t stand in contrast to something? How different is non-personalized search? Maybe I won’t like it. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll prefer personalization all day everyday. I just don’t know. Chances are I’m not aware that my search is personalized. And even if I was, I wouldn’t know what difference it actually made.

I can guarantee that the vast majority of Internet users have as a mental image the pre-personalization version of search. They don’t think of it as “personalized” simply because they’ve never been given a good reason to think of it that way. In my last post, I argued against Eli Pariser. But here, I must concede that he’s doing us a favor by raising the issue, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Personalization isn’t a threat to democracy. Not yet, anyway. The real issue is that the services we’ve grown accustomed to has changed without our knowledge. Google has even said their service now includes some form of political filter which, I guess, should make Pariser happy. But not me. As I made clear in my last post, I find politizied search immensly ill adviced.

Again, Google et al have all the right in the world to make these types of changes. It’s their service and they can do with it what they like. But that doens’t automatically make it right and it definitely doesn’t mean we, as users, have to sit idly by and say nothing.

Whether you think personalization is problematic or not, I hope you agree that personalization should be a choice. I also hope you agree that usage of such data should require explicit users consent; that it should be based on an opt-in rather than opt-out scheme. Lastly, I hope you agree that we, as users, have a right to know what and when our personal information is being used.

Do you? Do you agree personalization should be a choice?

This has been an unscheduled rant. I’ll get back to the promised discussion on the merits of personalization next time. I should, by that time, also be able to present some ideas to get us back on track in terms of universaility, openness, and transparency.

I will elaborate on this idea in the next couple of posts. And in this first iteration, I will focus on two ideas that has helped shaped my thinking around this issue since I first wrote about it back in August.

Idea #1 – Filter bubbles

The first and, perhaps, most interesting development is the publication to Eli Pariser’s book “The Filter Bubble”. Here, Pariser raises concerns very similar to my own, albeit it with one very important distinction: he doesn’t limit his criticism to Social Search or, for that matter, Google. He writes:

Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalized—based on your web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees‚ or from what [you] need to see.

Pariser’s concern is that personalization envelops users in bubbles of targeted content and that these bubbles insulate us from new ideas and experiences. It’s sort of like an Echo Chamber but not quite. In Pariser’s filter bubble, you don’t need to say anything. Your actions — the pages you visit, the links you click — speak for you, providing Google et al with the information they need to second guess your likes and dislikes.

Idea #2 – Critisism

The second thing I want to mention is the downpour of critizism ventured against Pariser and the notion that that personalization is in any way a bad thing. John Hawks isn’t alone in pointing out that “At no time in history have people been exposed to a wider range of opposing viewpoints” which, I have to say, is hard to deny. He writes:

We have always had algorithms to select content. In the past, those algorithms were inside the heads of a small number of newspaper editors and media programming executives…That’s why you see things like different newspapers, owned by different companies, publishing opinion pieces on the same out-of-the-blue internet theme on the same day! It’s like a throwback to the past. I like Google better.

Clearly, we don’t need the Internet to construct filter bubbles for us. We’re more than capable of doing it ourselves or, as in Hawks’ example, get other people to do it for us, either by reading particular magazines or watching news networks with a certain ideological bent.

A call for civic duty

Hawks makes a good case, I think, and Pariser must have anticipated it because he goes on to note that newspaper editors and programming executives have a sense of civic duty. They are not algorithms that filter content indiscriminately. People and algorithms may both serve you, the user, with a fair amount of LOLCats if that’s what you’re into (hey, what ever works for you!) but the person, Pariser suggest, would at some point make sure you also get coverage of the war in Iraq, say, or the recent outbreak of E. coli in Europe.

And let’s be fair here: Pariser isn’t arguing for personalization to go away. That, I suspect, would be futile. What he wants instead is for the Googles of the world to infuse into their algorithms that sense of civic duty. He wants the algorithms to behave a bit more like those newspaper editors that says “OK, that’s enough LOLCats, now look at this in-depth analysis of the Romanian elections instead.” (Google already does this to a certain extent but the details are murky).

This is the point in Pariser’s argument where I must raise my hand and politely disagree. Because whose sense of civic duty are we talking about here? Are we talking about Google’s sense of civic duty? Or maybe it’s up to the engineers at Yahoo!? Or maybe Facebook gets our vote? I don’t know about you but I’ve been around for long enough to know that the sense of right or wrong—not to mention what is and is not important—varies from person to person (not to mention from corporation to corporation).

Where would we draw the line and, more importantly, who’s going to be in charge of the line drawing? Politized search appears to me a slippery slope leading to more questions than answers.

The observant reader will now say that “Yes, sure, but aren’t we being a tad unfair here? It’s not like those newspaper editors are epitome of objectivity either! Why should the Googles of the world be held against a different standard?”

The badge factor

I’ll tell you why: because Hawks’ newspaper editors wear their political affiliations like a badge. No Democrat in their right mind would watch Fox News. No Republican in their right mind would read NYT. Content publishers have received tacit consent from their users to apply their own sense of civic duty and political bias to whatever content they publish. In my book, it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that this consent should encompass personalization as well. We are, after all, just getting more of what we’ve already asked for.

But the same cannot be said for search engines! They wear no badges, political or otherwise. And so we have to concede that search engines are different from content publishers. Democrats and Republicans alike use Google. They wouldn’t pick Bing over Yahoo! for political reasons simply because Bing and Yahoo! doesn’t take a political stance.

What if search engines were divided along ideological lines just like newspapers are today? Google for Liberals? Bing for Conservatives? Yahoo! for Libertarians? Isn’t that what would happen if and when users realized that their favorite search engine was trying to impose on them its specific brand of civic duty? People would side with the service they thought was most like them ideologically, and the service providers would, I’m sure, play along as long as there was business to be made.

Thanks, but no thanks

That’s a pretty bleak picture and so I’m going to have to side with Hawks on this one. I too like Google better. The non-partisan Google, that is. Politicized search clearly isn’t the way forward.

This is not to say that I’m now convinced personalization isn’t a mixed blessing. I still think it can be depending on the circumstances, and this is something that I’ll have reason to return to in my next post. For now, let me just leave you with a question: if Mercier & Sperber are right in saying that reason is motivated by preconceived ideas, wouldn’t it be both easier and more desirable to let users choose when to receive personalized content and when not to? After all, who better to determine when personalization is desired than the actual person?

Thai is also a tonal language, which means that the meaning of words change depending on the tones in which they are spoken. A popular example is the rather nonsensical phrase “mái mài mâi mâi măi” which translates into “New wood doesn’t burn, does it?”

Like most Thai learners, I’ve found tones to be more than a little challenging (imagine that!). But I was told that learning to write early could be a boon to pronunciation. And since I wanted to learn to write anyway, I decided to make that my starting point.

A year or so later and I’ve made some headway in terms of reading and writing. My spoken Thai still needs truckloads of work, but at least now I feel a bit more confident that I’ve got a foundation to build upon.

I thought I’d share that foundation. But first, a word of caution.

Information Architects relate to the world in their own special kind of way. We connect, interrelate, structure, and organize our way through the world. And we mold information into shapes that can be readily analyzed—regardless of type or topic.

I am no exception. And as the title of this blog suggests, I build to think. What you’ll find here is a rough-cut work-in-progress. Clearly, it’s not for everyone. But if you, like me, prefer to approach things systematically, then I think you might find it useful.

And so, without further ado: Thai Tones for Information Architects.

The System

There are five tones in Thai: mid, low, rising, falling and high. Finding the right one for any particular word can be a source of frustration. Unless, that is, you have a system to go by. The diagram you see here is my attempt to create such a system.

I’ve yet to find a single word for which this system does not provide the right answer. I’d even label it “foolproof” if not for the number of steps involved. Tone identifications is, as you can see, often a three or even four-step process.

Each step involve answering one of four possible questions: “Is there a tone mark?”, “Is there a final consonant and, if so, what type is it?”, “What is the class of the initial consonant”, and, finally, “Is the vowel short of long?”.

Identifying the right tone is a matter of moving from left to right—answering the questions that pop up along the way. This, however, is no small feat for us beginners, which is why I’ve also created an armory of supporting mindmaps.

The Armoury

There are three mindmaps in the arsenal—each one created to help answer one of the four questions posed in the above-mentioned system (there is no mindmap for tone marks). You’d do well to keep them close by until you’ve manage to commit their contents to memory.

Tone marks
There are four tone marks in Thai. Mid tone is the default option and does not have a tone mark. You’d be forgiven to think that a word without a tone mark would therefore be pronounced with a mid tone. Sadly, this is not the case. But as the system suggests, tone marks do make it easier to find the right tone.

Initial consonants

There are 44 consonants in Thai, each belonging to one of three classes: low, mid, high. Contrary to what these names might have you believe, they do not correspond to specific tones. Low consonants can be pronounced in a high tones etc. Identifying the correct consonant class is a means to the end.

Final consonants

These same 44 consonants can also be used at the end of syllables. “Final consonants”, as they are then called, are pronounced and categorized differently from their “Initial” counterparts. Categorization is again a means to an end: identifying “Sonorant finals” vs. “Stop finals” takes us one step closer to the correct tone.

Vowels

Thai vowels come in two forms: short and long. And apart from some special cases that are always classified as long, it’s often quite easy to hear the difference. One thing though: for reasons I’ve yet to understand, writing short vowels often involve a larger number of glyphs than writing their longer counterparts (go figure!)

NOTE: In the case of initial and final consonants, it is sometimes necessary to also familiarize oneself with so-called “consonant clusters”. I won’t go into that here, but I’d recommend you check out www.thai-learning.com if you’d like to learn more.

Download System + Armory (PDF).

Examples

A few examples to get you startet.

The word “เขียน” means “to write” in Thai:
1. No, there is no tone mark
2. Yes, the word does end with the consonant “น”
3. Yes, “น” is indeed “Sonorant”
4. Yes, the initial consonant “ข” is classified as “High”
5. “เขียน” is pronounced “kĭan” (rising tone)

The word “อ่าน” means “to read” in Thai:
1. Yes, there is a tone mark
2. Yes, the initial consonants is “Low”
3. “อ่าน” is pronounced “àan” (low tone)

The word “พูด” means “to speak” in Thai:
1. No, there is no tone mark
2. Yes, the word does end with the consonant “ด”
3. No, “ด” is not a “Sonorant”
4. Yes, the vowel “ ู” is long
5. Yes, the initial consonant “พ” is classified as “Low”
6. “พูด”is pronounced “pŭut” (rising tone)

In essence, one set of interfaces externalizes information, whereas the other internalizes it, in relation to the user. [T]he user-friendly interface relieves its users from having to commit information to memory, and this information is in turn externalized. When the interface isn’t helpful, information is internalized by the user, meaning they have to think longer about the problem and learn more fully the inner workings of their task.

My gut reaction was to dismiss this idea as irrelevant: I couldn’t see how the benefits of internalization could be realized unless forced upon the user (i.e., “You’re going to use this piece of software whether you like it or not”). Out here in the real world, users have choice. If they can’t understand your interface they’ll simply go use something else.

But then I read “Why are easy decisions so hard” in which the author—Jonah Lehrer of “How we decide” fame—presents evidence that complicated information often is perceived to be more important than the same information presented in a less complicated fashion (e.g., small vs. large text size, tabulated data vs. bar chart). Here’s Lehrer quoting research from Aner Sela and and Jonah Berger:

Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important, and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier.

Now I don’t know what to believe. Can there really be value to unusable and/or overtly complex interface design? I’m not sure. But between you and me, I think I’ll stick with KISS for now. KICS just seems a tad too complicated.

How can we know this of someone who died in 1882?

Steven Johnson provides an answer in his Where Good Ideas Come From. Mr. Darwin, it appears, was nothing if not meticulous and he kept numerous notebooks on topics ranging from geology to transmutation. It should come as no surprise that someone thought these notebooks noteworthy (no pun intended) why they live on ‘til this day. You can even buy edited version off of Amazon if you feel so inclined.

These notebooks act as a backdoor into the mind from which sprung masterpieces like On the Origin of Spicies. They are an invaluable resource. But what makes them so interesting, to me, at this point in time, isn’t so much the records themselves as much as how they where kept. As Johnson explains, Darwin didn’t just keep notebooks; like many of his contemporaries, he kept “commonplace books”.

Wikipedia describes commonplace books (or commonplaces) as scrapbooks aiding the remembrance of useful facts and concepts. But Johnson, quoting historian Robert Darnton, provides a much more insightful explanation that speaks to the process of “commonplacing” (the verb used to denote the act of keeping a common place book). I’ll recreate the quote here:

“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishman read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke them into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. They then reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding new excerpts. Reading and writing where therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things…”

Here then, we have the answer to how we can know why Darwin thought the things he did. His commonplace books explain how he built his arguments; what led him to draw the conclusions that he did. And he wasn’t alone: in reading Johnson I get the feeling that commonplacing was as common in turn-of-the-century England as blogging or tweeting is today. The question is, is blogging the modern-day equivalent?

The answer, I think, is yes and no.

The idea of commonplacing appeals to me for several reasons. If you’ve ever worked with me you’ll know that I like to use visualizations to “build” nacent ideas. And Building to Think is kind of like a commonplace book in the sense that it’s where I try to explain what I’ve learned. But there is a disconnect between the two. Whereas blogging is about the narration of ideas, commonplacing is about building them.

Commonplacing, the way I understand it, is sort of like blogging and bookmarking (e.g., Delicious, Evernote, Zootools) combined, coupled with a touch of the creative chaos that only a blank slate can provide. And it’s this latter ingredient, I think, that makes commonplacing different. It’s less linear, more all-over-the-map, and more conducive to serendipity—the secret sauce of innovation.

Does this mean commonplacing is a lost art? I’m not so sure, but I can’t help to think that future generations will look back at present-day Darwins and wish they had left open backdoors into their minds. The journey is, after all, said to be more important than the destination and insights can get lost along the way. Who knows, perhaps what is needed are new tools with which to take commonplacing into the 21st century.

The idea behind this blog, if you didn’t already know, is to track my thoughts around particular topics. I might start by writing a “primer” about, say, systems theory, as a way to familiarize myself with the concept. I’d then apply that learning in subsequent post of related topics, such as emergence. My focus thus far has revolved around my professional life, but the truth is that’s only half the story. The other half has thus far remained hidden.

That other half is what I referred to above as “extra-curricular” reading. You see, I rarely read business books (you’ll only find one such book on this list) and yet I’m sure what I read influences my work immensely. Below, you’ll find books on economics, biology, philosophy, history, geopolitics, and religion. And although the connection between these books and, say, web strategy might not always be obvious, I assure you it’s there.

So, without further ado and with only a cursory respect to the order in which I read them, here are my Books of 2010:

A demon-haunted world (Carl Sagan) is perhaps the best introduction to critical thinking and scientific skepticism available today. Sagen was known for his ability to simplify and explain the complex, and so also in this case. Highly recommended.

Freefall (Joseph Stieglitz) is a hard-hitting analysis of the run-up and aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. I’ve read most of Stieglitz books, but this is most scathing one to date. Even Obama gets an earful! There’s a WAAbstract available (see below).

Three cups of tea (Greg Mortensson) is the true yet amazing story of one man’s quest to build schools in the most inaccessible parts of Afghanistan. If you’ve ever had doubts as to the virtues of human kind, I’d gladly recommend reading this book.

The selfish gene (Richard Dawkins) is nothing short of a masterpiece. In it, Dawkins’ lays out his thinking around replicators, genes, and “survival machines”. You may not know it, but it also marks the first use of the term “meme”.

The origin of species (Charles Darwin) should probably have been read come before The selfish gene, but be that as it may. It was interesting to get a first-hand account from the man himself. Nothing like going straight to the source.

What the dog saw (Malcolm Gladwell) is a collection of essays originally published in the New Yorker. Gladwell is a master storyteller that can turn the most mundane topic into an interesting piece of non-fiction.

Glut (Alex Wright) reads like a history lesson for information architects. It’s really quite fascinating, albeit not an easy read. Interestingly, I seem to remember more tidbits of information from this book that any other (Idols of the mind, anyone?).

The god delusion (Richard Dawkins) is very much an inescapable consequence of Dawkins’ career. A vocal proponent of evolution by natural selection, he’s often attacked by creationists. This is his attempt to swipe the matt from under their feet.

The greatest show on earth (Richard Dawkins) is a step-by-step account of the evidence for evolution by natural selection. It lays the foundation for all of Dawkins’ books, past and present.

Rework (Jason Fried) is the one token business book I read this year. I’m a fan and long-time customer of Fried’s 37Signals, but Rework offers the same kind of facile short list of do’s and don’t as most books of this kind. Still, I agree with most of what he says.

The next 100 years (George Friedman) is Friedman’s attempt to predict the geopolitical climate of 2100. I’m not qualified to judge the validity of his arguments, but it does make for an interesting read. There’s a WWAbstract available (see below).

God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) is really quite similar to Dawkins’ The god delusion. This was, however, the first time I ever read Hitchens and his language alone makes the read worthwhile.

How the mind works (Steven Pinker) is an opus of science writing that covers everything from evolutionary psychology to neuroscience. Very informational, but I struggled at times. Friends tell me Pinker’s Blank slate is more accessible.

A very short introduction to philosophy of science (Samir Okasha) is, as the title says, very short. It’s really not more than a cursory overview, but I found it worthwhile and, at times, mind-boggling nonetheless.

The blind watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) is a work-in-progress, but I’ll be done before the new year. The book is a continuation of The selfish gene but is actually quite different (it’s more of an argument for than explanation of the gene-centric view of evolution).

In reviewing this list, it’s strikes me how much my interests has shifted during 2010. Had I produces a similar list for 2009, you’d had found more books on politics than on the natural sciences. Also interesting is how little my surrounding seems to have influenced me. I moved from Seattle to Bangkok in late 2008, but I’m having a hard time seeing a connection between that move and my new-found interest in the natural sciences.

This shift becomes even more marked if you factor in other forms of media. Podcasts, for example, has long been a favorite information source of mine. And in addition to master pieces like WNYC’s Radiolab, I now rarely miss an episode of the Skeptic’s guide to the universe, Point of inquiry, For good reason, or Dan Carlin’s Hardcore history etc. Science, I’ve discovered, has an uncanny ability to capture my imagination.

One year and fifteen books later and it’s only natural to ask which one I liked best. It’s not an easy pick by any means, but my choice has to fall to Dawkins’ The selfish gene. Written in 1976 when Dawkins was only 35 years old (how’s that for a humbling fact?), this book has forever changed my outlook on life. It’s really quite striking. The only real grief I have with it is that I wish I would have read it sooner.

So much to read, so little time.

Taleb uses the example of history to illustrate that our memories of past events are more clear-cut than reality might suggest. This, he writes, is because someone (our unconscious self, or maybe a well-meaning historian) has woven an seemingly random set of events into a narrative—each one linked through a web of discreet and readily observable causes.

But history is just one example. The fact is that Taleb’s fallacy applies to all aspects of human life, including financial markets, religious belief, gambling behavior, and, crucially for our purposes, brand development. As we shall see, it’s quite possible to capitalize on the underlying tendency for “causal thinking” in the creation of compelling brands.

Taleb’s oeuvre goes well beyond the scope of this post, and that’s perfectly fine—I’m only referring to it here to illustrate the immense power that narratives have in communicating complicated ideas. Nowhere is this trait more important than in the third and final step of the brand creation process—Execution—where the fledgling brand is released into the wild.

The importance of stories

SbyD is all about avoiding the threat of miscommunication. Whereas empiricism helps transfer insights from market to practitioner (Inspiration), and prototyping enables practitioners to effectively share ideas (Ideation), narratives ensure that our ideas can transfer back into the market place (Execution). This is really what SbyD is all about: effective communication throughout the design process.

In “Storytelling—Branding in Practice”, Fog et al takes the ideas of brand narratives to the logical next step: brand stories. This is, after all, what a narrative really is: “a story that is created in a constructive format…that describes a sequence…of events” (Wikipedia, 2010). A compelling brand story, the authors argue, is increasingly becoming a bare minimum for market success:

“We navigate our world using symbols and visual expressions that signal our personality and our values. And strong brands are one of the means by which we do this. A pair of hiking boots from Timberland and a Kevlar jacket from North Face for example, signal an outdoorsy, active type. But this also works the other way around, such as when we boycott companies that fail to meet up to our moral expectations. Increasingly we are using the shopping-cart to “vote”, expressing ourselves through our purchases. And strong brands are becoming an important tool for communicating these ideas.”

If you’ve read part one and two of this series, you’ll recognize the importance of culture in the above quotation. It’s not mentioned outright, but reading between the lines we see that storytelling is a tool with which to organize “clusters of cultural ideas”. Storytelling is the glue, so to speak, with which these ideas can be arranged and linked together in a compelling fashion.

This is important because people don’t remember facts; they remember stories. And that’s why branding has become big business. Just as the raconteur has captivated listeners around campfires for generations, brands are now garnering attention by speaking directly to our innate needs and desires.

Brands are, in this sense of the word, the new storytellers. They provide narratives; stories that people use to make sense of the world around them. Nike, for example, isn’t in the business of selling footwear—they are in the business of selling the story of personal achievement to millions of people around the globe. That’s not a bad business to be in: the market for high-end running shoes is really quite small compared to the market of self-actualization.

Finding your story

Whatever the business, you’ll need an effective narrative if you are to break through the clutter and connect with your audience. But finding this narrative is hard, and finding people willing to listen is likely to be even harder.

Let’s tackle the second problem first.

Finding people willing to listen to your message might be hard, but it’s often hard for the wrong reason. In his recent book “Start with why”, Simon Sinek speaks to the reason of why this it: people are willing to listen, he says, if you genuinely have something to say. Thing is, few companies do.

Sinek makes use of a simple three-circle diagram to point out a fact that is so obvious it often gets overlooked: most companies talk only about the “How” and the “What” of their business, and they consequently fall by the wayside. Successful companies—companies like Apple, Nike, and Virgin—speaks to the “Why”. They lead with their raison d’etre. They lead with a story.

The reason I bring this up is simple: you won’t get anywhere if you don’t stand for something. But if you (or the company for which you are developing the brand) does stand for something, you’re unlikely to be troubled with finding people willing to listen. They’re out there. Finding them is a task for the folks in MarCom.

Lets turn out attention to the problem of “finding” our narrative. Again, if you’ve read parts one and two, you’ve likely already struck upon the idea of using the Brand Molecule as a jumping-off point. That’s good, because the molecule should contain all the relevant building blocks we need. The only think missing is the “glue”—the story line. And for that we again turn our attention to Fog et al.

The four elements of storytelling

There is no one-size-fits all formula for good storytelling, but “[a] peak into the annals of literary history shows that most stories—from Aristotle to Hans Christian Andersen—entail at least some fixed basic elements. These elements can be mixed, matched and applied in a variety of ways depending on the context in which the story is told, and its purpose.”

Fog et al identifies the following four basic elements:

• Message—Without a clearly defined message, there’s no reason to tell stories. Volvo is about safety, Nike about self-actualization.
• Conflict—As storytellers, we get our message across through conflict and its resolution. Apple is the antonym of Microsoft; Avis tries harder than Hertz.
• Characters—Heros, adversaries, supporters, and benefactors. Whatever the cast, it’s important that the audience can identify with the characters.
• Plot—The narrative or sequence of events. Ford created the Model-T a hundred years ago, and now they’ve created the Volt.

There’s enough material here to fill several posts, but I will skip the details and go straight to the moral of this story: by presenting your brand as part of a narrative—a story with a clear message, a dramatic conflict, a strong character set, and an intriguing plot—you’ll make it easier for your audience to understand your brand and take it to heart.

Taleb wrote about the “narrative fallacy” in his 2008 best-seller “the Black Swan.” To him, it was a problem to be shunned at all costs. But to us, as branding practitioners, it serves only as an acute reminder as to the power that storytelling can have over the human condition. It’s a force to be reckoned with. And that is why it’s so important when developing brand strategy by design.