Here are the links:
Good luck! It's a big decision :)
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
How To Choose a Domain Name (Flowchart)
Choosing a domain name is hard. Luckily, there are tools that can help. Having recently chosen a few domain names, we've learned a little (mostly, how frustrating it is). Without further ado, a flowchart to guide the process:
Here are the links:
Good luck! It's a big decision :)
Here are the links:
Good luck! It's a big decision :)
Friday, December 11, 2009
Zombies or Helpers?
So which is it? Smart or dumb? Actually, Surowiecki describes both. On the one hand, a crowd at a county fair most accurately estimates the weight of a cow, and a stock market on who's going to be president is better than the experts. On the other hand, a group of people judging whether the space shuttle should take off make a tragic mistake.
"We have limited foresight into the future. Most of us lack the ability-- and the desire-- to make sophisticated cost-benefit calculations.. And we often let emotion affect our judgement. Yet despite all these limitations, when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent."
-James Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds
"None of us is as dumb as all of us."
-despair.com
Surowiecki claims one difference is how independent the members of the crowd are. If people follow each other instead of contributing their own independent thoughts, they form an information cascade which can wash away good judgement.
And yet when people are making decisions, they often want to know what others think. Ideally, then, there are two separate pieces to the system: crowd members who stay independent, and an "aggregator" (possibly a decision-maker) who puts together the information into a result.
No zombies were harmed in the making of this blog post. Seriously, don't worry, those people are not really zombies. Photo by ioerror.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Toothpaste & Communism
Today, we have a guest post from Melissa.
In the early 1990s, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I lived in Budapest, Hungary, a recently Communist place which that was letting go of its collectivist ways. Some trappings remained. Few people owned property or cars, Hungarians were never on time, and product choices were few. When you went to the store to buy toothpaste (fogkrém), there was one brand, and that's what you bought. It seemed like a drag at the time, but wasn't important enough to complain about.
Things are different in the US in late 2009. On the toothpaste front, the number of choices is overwhelming to the point of mental paralysis. Go to the average big box store. You don't have to understand combinatorics to know that the numerous axes of choice produce a dizzying array. First you've got the brand: Colgate, Crest, Aim, and more. Then you've got paste vs. gel, whitening vs. not, tartar control vs. not, mouthwash/breath additives vs. not, spearmint vs. peppermint. Though not all possible combinations are represented, there are well over 50. This is just among the mainstream toothpastes. They don't easily differentiate by price, so I don't have that to go on. I've gone to Target with the goal of buying toothpaste, and, faced with more choices than I could handle at the end of a long workday, I've left without. This is madness. Choosing toothpaste should not be so hard.
To cut down on choices, I enlisted the aid of my dental hygienist. "Should I be getting all that tartar control, whitening & breath freshening?" In a word, no. According to Marcia, the whitening doesn't really work, breath freshener is a waste, and the tartar control is bad for your enamel if you don't have a tartar problem. So now I'm down to brand. If I go with the plain jane toothpaste, I still need a little help with 3 brands times 2 formats (gel vs. paste), but six is manageable. Especially if my friends can tell me what they like in some organized fashion. Without communists around to tell you what to do, friends are a good second choice.
Got a favorite toothpaste? Vote here.
In the early 1990s, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I lived in Budapest, Hungary, a recently Communist place which that was letting go of its collectivist ways. Some trappings remained. Few people owned property or cars, Hungarians were never on time, and product choices were few. When you went to the store to buy toothpaste (fogkrém), there was one brand, and that's what you bought. It seemed like a drag at the time, but wasn't important enough to complain about.
Things are different in the US in late 2009. On the toothpaste front, the number of choices is overwhelming to the point of mental paralysis. Go to the average big box store. You don't have to understand combinatorics to know that the numerous axes of choice produce a dizzying array. First you've got the brand: Colgate, Crest, Aim, and more. Then you've got paste vs. gel, whitening vs. not, tartar control vs. not, mouthwash/breath additives vs. not, spearmint vs. peppermint. Though not all possible combinations are represented, there are well over 50. This is just among the mainstream toothpastes. They don't easily differentiate by price, so I don't have that to go on. I've gone to Target with the goal of buying toothpaste, and, faced with more choices than I could handle at the end of a long workday, I've left without. This is madness. Choosing toothpaste should not be so hard.
To cut down on choices, I enlisted the aid of my dental hygienist. "Should I be getting all that tartar control, whitening & breath freshening?" In a word, no. According to Marcia, the whitening doesn't really work, breath freshener is a waste, and the tartar control is bad for your enamel if you don't have a tartar problem. So now I'm down to brand. If I go with the plain jane toothpaste, I still need a little help with 3 brands times 2 formats (gel vs. paste), but six is manageable. Especially if my friends can tell me what they like in some organized fashion. Without communists around to tell you what to do, friends are a good second choice.
Got a favorite toothpaste? Vote here.
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