I’m tired of writing HTML formatted email. I’m going to make a clean break to plain-text, and thanks to Outlook-QuoteFix, I’m going to be able to ensure that I can properly format my plain-text replies.
This will be an experiment to see what it’s like to break the HTML email habit. Wish me luck.
Very interesting. Facebook has announced that it will no longer rank popular applications by raw number of users, instead choosing to measure “engagement” those users have with the apps they’ve installed. This is a great, smart shift, and I think it presages lots of changes to how online activism is measured.
We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day). These touch points are:The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash
…is of my dear friend Yoram Bauman, the Standup Economist, illustrating a feature article in the University of Washington Weekly. That’s right, Yoram is a Ph.D. economist who is also a stand-up comedian. His “Principles of Economics, Translated” comedy routine has over 213,000 views on YouTube. Who’s laughing now?
I’m certain there are least two dozen of you who have been wondering, “Hey didn’t you just go on a big vacation?” and “Where are the goddamn photos?”
Wonder no more: we got back from the Lake District a week ago. We spent 10 days hiking around the fells and dales and staying in hostels. A couple of days in London the way out. It was great. England is very pretty and frighteningly expensive. The photos are here.
Among my favorites:
A few amusing thoughts about England:
Congratulations to Jon and Fran, who welcomed Sofia Louise into the world on Friday morning. Have you ever seen such a blissed-out looking new dad?
Sofia, although less hairy, is also pretty cute, too:
Marty shows yet again why he is one of the keenest observers in the nonprofit technology space:
Direct online interaction robs the very important inattentive trust building components to relationships. Twitter, facebook, etc. provide a unique window into watching someone without paying direct attention to them. How many of you log on to do work late at night and “see” in AIM list and Skype list folks that are still online working. Does that over time build your relationship with that person in any way? Does a facebook update on someone going hiking at a place you have hiked before influence your interaction with that person next time you meet even thought you never discuss the hike? Yes.
What if they were taking jazz lessons? What if they twittered they picked up a new Hummer? or bagged a black bear on the first day of the season? You might never bring it up in a work context or direct interaction but you know it is there and your brain files it in the mix. It is inattentive. They were not telling you. They were not looking for a reaction. They were just letting you see if you cared.
One of the key components of network health is social ties. There may be passive network building strategies that should be tested and deployed within a campaign context that help foster building inattentive trust. Such activities might include micro blogging activities and work, shared calendars, regular questions asked about non-campaign related activities and republishing the information back across the network.
The tools are catching up very slowly to all the complex needs we have to understand one another. We need to be aware of the opportunity they present to enable us to build more powerful network capacity even in inattentive and passive ways.
This feels really right to me.