Jan Jannink

Updates to playlist: Deep Fried Turkey

Jan Jannink — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 05:15:32 -0000

trying the pure digital camera with imeem

Jan Jannink — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:48:23 -0000

Ten meter platform bike stunt

Jan Jannink — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 05:59:39 -0000

heart crushing spider sculpture

Jan Jannink — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 06:01:27 -0000

Las Vegas

Jan Jannink — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 10:07:18 -0000

What must it feel like for an inhabitant of Las Vegas to leave it? When everything is so over the top in your everyday experience, does the outside world feel drab, unworthy of your attention?

I can't imagine. I have a certain admiration for the people who keep extending the vision that is Las Vegas. It's not my vision, not my universe, but it is something quite unique.

Web pastiche

Jan Jannink — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 03:50:06 -0000

Cut and Paste seem to inspire more people than any of the muses of old these days. The web has become the scaffolding for a wave of creative expression unlike any other ever unleashed on human society. In this tidal wave of expression the truly original ideas have become harder and harder to identify, but they are there. Even with our shortened attention spans they will withstand the test of time.

Mars

Jan Jannink — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:00:09 -0000

11/22/2005 11:33:24 PM GMT

Mars could be one of the true stepping stones to the stars. Once we get there, we'll have mastered 99% of what we need. I hope I'm alive to see it happen!

Isn't it weird that only the oldest half of the people in the world have seen men on the moon?

Selected to PAY for the National Leadership Award

Jan Jannink — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 02:11:42 -0000

The RNCC has a sweet little phishing operation that targets small businesses. They scour business registries around the country and tell you that you've won their award complete with certificate, and all you have to do is "defray" the $300 cost of publicizing the announcement of the award. The good news is that I won! The better news is that I googled all of the poor souls who were proud of their award. The best news is that my $300 are still in my pocket, and I feel much better than if I had accepted the award. I didn't realize that people trying to swipe my paypal account information on the internet were politicians in training :P

Emergent behavior

Jan Jannink — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:30:39 -0000

I went to a concert last week and witnessed first hand what some people call emergent or 'viral' behavior. It starts off really small, an isolated event here and there. After a while you start to notice that it's more than one thing here and there, it's a little stream of events. At a certain point it's everywhere, the whole atmosphere is saturated with something that few people even took notice of just a small time before.

Some marketing genius decided that plastic seat cushions would be a great thing to hand out at a concert that lasted 12 hours. The crowd of course, realized over time, that they were actually sitting on frisbees, and began using them that way. All it took was a few uninhibited influencers, and the concert frisbee meem literally took off.

It's not like it happened all at once, but between the last set of the concert and the encore, it was like a snowstorm of seat cushions was falling on the crowd and the stage. It was beautiful, and sadly I couldn't get a photo of it, but the thumbnail of this post is a picture of one of those seat cushions.

If there is a point to any of this it is that you may not notice that you are part of an emergent behavior until everyone is doing what you are doing. If you can see the growth happening, you are both ahead of the curve and you have a leg up on anyone who cares about trends.

Long tail mystique

Jan Jannink — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:58:51 -0000

The reason Carl Sagan was so popular and great was that he could take scientific topics and make them accessible to everyone without perverting the truth that he was describing.

Sadly, the same is not true of most techies and marketers trying to make a quick buck off the latest trends and buzzwords. One of the victims of this venial attitude is the so called "long tail."

The fact is, virtually all artifacts of evolutionary processes organize themselves according to distributions that are commonly called power laws. The most common things are orders of magnitude more frequent than the rare ones. If you arrange these things in order of frequency from common to rare, you get a graph that drops off quickly and tails off slowly, hence the nickname "long tail."

Words in a language were the first things that were recognized to be in such a distribution (by Zipf), and more recently web page links. There is no magic to the long tail, except that most people never consider the distribution of the things by frequency as an organizing principle. Google's page rank algorithm is a great example of a technique that embraces the long tail distribution as an organizing principle. That is why it works so well.

The lesson is simple; don't get hypnotized by hype and mystique. If you know your data, you can take advantage of the natural ways that it organizes itself.