Marketing religion

The other day I was distracted by an ad on the side of a passing Muni bus (it looked a lot like this one, but oranger). Apparently the ad is part of a medium-sized campaign sponsored by a bay area Islamic organization.

Their goal is to urge more non-Muslims to learn about Islam and help remove negative stereotypes.

"We're basically sick and tired of people labeling us, of defining us, framing us, so I think it's time for us to stand up and basically inform the American public of who we are and what is our true identity," said Muhammad Hanif with the Islamic Circle of the Bay Area.

I don't think I would have even given the ad a second thought if it hadn't been just a couple days before that I ran into this while riding BART:

"All viewpoints. One platform. Join the discussion," in the little blue text, and a link to the website www.godridesbart.com.

This one I gave some thought to (granted it was more difficult to ignore since I was stuck inside a BART car with it for half an hour). My reaction was complete confusion. Despite being a fairly drab advertisement, there's a lot going on here. Unable to figure out the connection between God's choice of public transit and his interest in American politics, I bit, and checked out the website.

It turns out this is not a BART campaign intended to guilt riders into upstanding behavior, but is in fact (as the blue text hints) a forum for religious debate. The main page entices you into one of three discussion topics including, "Can there be justice without God?" and "Do we really need marriage anymore?" The resources page has a list of informational links in categories: Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Other (coming soon).

So public transportation seems to be a popular target for the new religious marketing campaigns. There's no deception going on here, both campaigns are forthcoming with their mission (at least, after you've visited the site): the first, to improve the public image of Islam, and the second, to encourage debate on God.

What's most interesting to me (besides the question of whether one was inspired by the other) is the decision to use traditional advertising. Some people have questioned the morality (or even legality) of a municipal agency posting religious material. That, I take no issue with. The very premise of advertising is the subjection of the public to intentionally biased information. Whether the topic is Islam or a ski resort probably shouldn't bear on an ad's right to be posted in public (though at school is another matter). I do wonder, though, whether the association of consumer products and religion through use of traditional advertising is a particularly good idea for either mission.

Lyric search for Ubiquity

Another simple ubiquity command--similar in method to my attempt at nextmuni--to grab song lyrics from astraweb.com. There's a basic alternative version here, but I thought I'd improve slightly on the simple google search (install link at bottom). I've already found this command handy, and it highlights a great benefit to using Ubiquity for quick lookup tasks like this one... avoid ads!

If tools like Ubiquity become popular across the spectrum of online search (as I imagine they will) what's the implication for ad revenue? I'd worry that search sites and hosts for this type of data might try to combat the trend. The two commands I've written so far are extremely tenuous (though much of that is a result of novice javascript use) in the way they grab their data, and it wouldn't take much more than a change of font-size on my chosen lyrics host to kill the command.

If Ubiquity continues ad-free, there isn't much incentive for search engines and data providers to play along. Unfortunately, this may encourage previously "free" ad-funded services to adopt less open monetization models.

• lyric command (again, ubiquity required)

Tokyo Stitched

Tokyo Stitched 2007-08 from Jeremy Gordon on Vimeo.

I took quite a few pictures, and a handful of short videos on my pocket-sized Nikon P5000 last year. Finding none particularly interesting on its own, I decided to edit the videos together into a bumpy montage of a music video that does nothing less than perfectly summarize my experience in Japan.

Thanks to Frank Sinatra for allowing* me to steal his song, and thanks to Vimeo for, as of yet, failing to strike down this little video despite its questionable use of unquestionably copyrighted materials. Thanks to a new YouTube policy spurred by Warner Music Group, these 3.5 minutes of video have been nearly impossible to share, even privately. I don't know much about fair use, but seriously WMG, if you would show me the damages, I'd willingly pay.

* Sinatra did not allow me to steal his song. But he would have.

NextMuni for Ubiquity

I took a first run at writing this ubiquity verb mostly out of curiosity. NextMuni is an extremely useful service for even infrequent SF public transit-goers. When things work well, it lets you completely avoid the unfortunate waiting around Divisadero wondering when the 24 is coming.

A number of people have created tools to improve accessibility to the NextMuni service, including Mikhail P's yourmuni which I use constantly and is perfect for frequent commuters with a data phone. As far as I can tell, no one has written a NextMuni command for ubiquity yet, and it seemed an ideal candidate to benefit from command-line access, especially considering the somewhat-clunky interface on the current site.

Writing the command was, indeed, impressively straight-forward. Despite NextMuni's inexplicable lack of an API, extracting the relevant data from the simplified lookup pages was a task well-suited to jquery.

For those interested in trying out this rugged code, it can be subscribed to with the link at bottom. The command has some definite issues (cross streets must be capitalized and there's some flakiness in the preview update that I don't yet understand) but perhaps it will be useful to someone as an example or a tool.

• muni command (hosted at github, requires ubiquity)

Edit: the nextmuni website has changed since the programming of this command, and it is no longer working. Any developers interested in updating the code to work with the new layout are welcome to do so.

Competitive philanthropy

Here's a silly idea, why don't we use competition--that tool that drives innovation and initiative--to inspire achievement in philanthropy.

There are a number of incentives cited by those who give: 1) some feel that giving is objectively important and are driven by a sense of duty, 2) some enjoy the feeling that they have done "good," and 3) some believe strongly in the causes which they support (and may even hope to personally enjoy the benefits of their charity). Additionally, there is giving that is directly self-serving (not that this is necessarily wrong), e.g. donating to a university that you hope will one day accept your daughter.

The relationship between the first three motivations is complex, and from personal experience, determining the relative contributions of each to any decision to give is quite challenging. But for the moment I'm going to ignore the root incentive. Say I do decide to donate $25 to the Red Cross, or to an entrepreneur in Pakistan. I wonder, would I enjoy twice the benefit had I donated $50 instead? Probably not. When it comes to charity, the benefits rarely scale with the cost. If I could somehow graph the benefit I receive (whatever the mechanism may be), I would see the typical curving line of a good with decreasing marginal utility. For that reason, at some point, my additional dollar would be better spent contributing to tonight's dinner, or any other line-item in the massive portion of my non-giving budget.

So this is all fairly obvious, but it represents a serious problem for philanthropy. Some people's utility curves will decrease faster than others, and for many (particularly in the face of economic uncertainty), their curves will cross the Y-axis at such a low point as to prevent the donation of the first dollar.

Attempts to increase individuals' interest in giving isn't new. I've seen marketing appeals towards the previously mentioned sense of duty, feeling of "good", and of course promotions of the importance of a particular cause. I'm unconvinced that these strategies could become very much more effective.

I'd rather consider some other factors of influence, for example: ease of donation, financial burden, transparency of impact, and expected recognition. One of the most exciting recent breakthroughs in charity has been that of Kiva, and I believe their success has mostly to do with their innovations in the first three of these levers.

First, with Kiva, donation is trivial (it takes seconds) once you have a basic account. Second, the financial burden feels extremely manageable since Kiva transacts in micro-loans with repayment rates typically in the high 90's. Finally, donors see who is receiving their loan, which organization is managing it, and receive updates on the status and impact of each investment.

Still, Kiva exists as a completely non-competitive system for obvious reasons--there is something seemingly distasteful about direct competitions involving the exchange of money. This obstacle is a cultural one, and I believe there is a way around it. What if we could devise a system in which investors or donors compete for recognition, and what if that recognition was based not on one's capacity to give, but of one's willingness to give within their capacity.

Awarding philanthropy is no new concept; consider plaques on university buildings, names printed in concrete, credits following public television programs. But those competitions don't take place on a level playing field, most of the world can't afford thousands of dollars of charitable giving. But anyone with a non-zero disposable income (and let's not forget that this certainly isn't everyone) can afford to give something. The problem is, the incentives aren't clear.

The experiment could start small. Kiva, or any similar service, could offer participants to opt-in, report an estimate of their personal income and costs, and be ranked according to the percentage of their capacity they choose to give.

There are technical obstacles, of course. How do you accurately estimate capacity? Is there any way to ensure honest self-reporting? And even with perfect honesty, how do we define capacity? Which costs are living costs and which are luxury goods that should not count against disposable income?

And there are additional concerns. Would we reduce the incentives for some of the largest, wealthiest donors? Are we discrediting in-kind donations, volunteering, and philanthropy of a non-monetary nature?

These issues make such an idea extremely tricky to implement, but nonetheless, imagine a world where individuals and organizations compete to give within their means. I think its possible to paint a very interesting picture. Then again, we might run the risk of dehumanizing charity altogether.

There must be some way to turn donors into heroes. Those making the biggest sacrifices should be awarded the highest praise.

ping.fm + ubiquity = crazy handy

I haven't gotten into twitter-style microblogging yet, and one of the reasons is that there are too many overlapping services. I opened a twitter account a year ago, use facebook occasionally, have gmail open constantly, and have friends who frequent just one or two of those. When I feel like sharing a link or a thought with the world at large, I tend to choose one of the three quite arbitrarily and that just seems unfair.

The problem is solved, though.

Ping.fm integrates status messages across facebook, twitter, gtalk and frighteningly many others that I know nothing about. There's a clean mobile and iphone interface, email access, a gtalk bot, and easy ways to target updates to a subset of your status platforms.

Ubiquity is extremely useful on its own (for reasons I won't detail now), and the ping.fm ubiquity command allows command line updates from firefox very gracefully. Crazy handy.

Justifying the utility of status updates in general, however, I'm still working on. One possibility: contributing to real-time data. It's sort of appealing.

Graphical, contextual news

I'm sort of a news junky, in a loose sense. I was happy when all the major news sources began making their content available online, and I think it's convenient that secondary sources like news aggregators, RSS readers, and the blogosphere in general made accessing and organizing the massive datastream of online news significantly more manageable. Despite the advances in these distribution channels and the technology surrounding them, the way that news is presented seems archaic. It's as if the news medium is still boxed in by restrictions that were torn down long ago. I'm talking about the presentation of news information itself. I read Google News nearly compulsively because it's customizable, uses an effective (though fairly opaque) algorithm to choose stories of interest from credible sources, updates in real-time, and is extremely searchable. All these are excellent improvements on radio, television, printed news, and even online primary sources, but I think we can do much better--the basic form is still a better-organized portal to the same static news we've been reading since the beginning of news.

One of the frustrating aspects of online news is its overwhelming quantity. Despite the fact that I read at least the headlines and basic summaries of hundreds of articles a week, I find that I retain fairly few of the actual details, or even the bigger-picture concepts. I find myself editorializing as I skim the news stream: "another story about X" or "the Nth story this month about the debate on Y." Sure, I can choose the primary article on any given topic (as chosen by the Google computation) or I can choose one of a few thousand articles on the same topic from other sources. But, as I select a BBC story entitled Clerics urge new jihad over Gaza, I realize that what I'm really missing--and what even a background paragraph in this 558 word story can't adequately provide--is decent context. I don't want a link to the wikipedia article on the conflict in Gaza. I want to see how this article, and the 2,536 others like it, fits into the bigger picture. There's a ton of data surrounding any given news story, there are geographic locations, dates, names of political players, organizations, and pundits. Then, there are the hundreds and thousands of news stories leading up to this one; some of them are intricately related, and some are more subtly connected, but all help shed some light on what this particular story should mean to me.

I want all that context summarized for me and I think the best solution is a graphical one. I've seen news timelines, news maps, and other clever attempts, but none are focused on context. Those examples visualize and stratify news according to its meta-data.

If I were to design a graphical representation of news context, I would want to make sure that the high-level data was immediately accessible (with details available by drilling down). High school journalism classes teach that a good lead includes all of the vital statistics: who, what, where, when and why. This visual summary should provide the same, but with a scope that extends backwards in time, and outwards to related players and events that might provide incite into what this particular story means.

The Players. People, groups and organizations. Who is involved and why? Are they stakeholders or observers? What are the arguments being discussed, and have they changed over the history of this issue?

The Location. Is there regional context? What else is happening there right now?

The History. What were the events that lead up to this. Example: the Euro falls below $1.26. Show me where it was this time last year, upon its introduction in 1992, last fall when the US financial crisis hit, and its trend since. Where there are other spikes, show me the associations and correlations.

The Implications. What is likely to happen next? Have similar events occurred under similar circumstances? Example: flight 1549 to Charlotte, NC crashes after it strikes a flock of birds. Tell me about other recent plane crashes and the aftermath. Will US Airways market share shrink? Will there be an investment in bird-safe engines? Will air travel dip?

Having never consumed news in this way, I can't say for certain that such a reformatting of news data would help me retain the information that matters most, but linking small pieces into the "bigger picture" often helps to develop a more complete understanding.

I wanted to take a shot at this graphical approach, so I chose this article and did some related news search through Google to compile the big picture. I'm working on couple of formats which I will post here when I get a chance.

Combining this sort of graphical representation with technologies like Seadragon--introduced in this Ted talk (skip to 1:25 for the most relevant part)--could also be extremely effective.

Interacting with data in this way needn't be limited to the consumption of news either. It is, however, a good place to start and could be a great proof of concept. It seems to me that Google, a company dedicated to the accessibility of information, is extremely well-positioned to take another stab at it. With the ever-accelerating generation of new data, of which news is only a small slice, it seems to me that effective techniques at summarizing, contextualizing and interpreting this data will become more and more valuable.

Outdoor dim sum

I don't understand the reason, fully, but eating dim sum outdoors (particularly when coupled with a view) is a completely different experience, and it's amazing. That Cha Xiu Bao right there set records.

Step 1: Pick up a large pink box of goods from Good Luck, the new favorite Clement St. gem. No illustrated instructions here, but the English menu is very clear and pointing at trays that look particularly tasty usually turns out well. Shrimp dumplings, BBQ pork dumplings, chive dumplings, turnip cakes, and even the less-typical potstickers are all excellent. Don't forget napkins, chopsticks and chili sauce.

Step 2: Drive/bike/jog across the bridge (the big red one) and enjoy the built-in delay between purchase and arrival. Be careful not to taste anything prematurely. Yes, it smells good, but you're almost there.

Step 3: Arrive approximately here, or really anywhere suited to sitting, eating, and viewing, but that particular stone wall has been tested and is ideal for this activity.

Step 4: Enjoy the cool breeze (but not too cool. choose day, season wisely).

Step 5: Appreciate fluffly cloud-like bun dough when juxtaposed against actual fluffy clouds.

Step 6: Enjoy breakfast audibly, and enjoy even more the longing glances from hungry nearby tourists.

Non-Californians with access to a Cantonese restaurant and a place without walls (a bridge view isn't required but is certainly a bonus) adapt as necessary.

Colorful fleet

From Angel Island

A lucky view on the ferry from Tiburon to Angel Island.