NPR interviewed Dr. Paul yesterday about his book and his continued (no, he never dropped out) campaign for the Republican nomination. The web version of the story includes a great excerpt from the book. Here are a couple of my favorite bits:
A substantial portion of the conservative movement has become a parody of its former self. Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters, it now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers.
When we agree not to treat each other merely as means to our own selfish ends, but to respect one another as individuals with rights and goals of our own, cooperation and goodwill suddenly become possible for the first time.
My message is one of freedom and individual rights. I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should be used only defensively. We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion. That, and not a desire for “economic efficiency,” is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason.
The Association of Visual Artists (AVA) Gallery on Frazier Avenue is now featuring an exhibit called “Design @ Work”, sponsored by AIGA. The exhibit features commercial graphic design case studies, including one co-developed by yours truly. The case study, developed with my friend (and future business partner… shhh!) Wes Barker, examines our packaging revamp/re-branding for the flagship Clarity Professional telephone. The exhibit is open through the end of June and also features design work by the illustrious local firms Coptix, Widgets and Stone and Tricycle. If you’re on the North Shore, stop in and take a look.
Note: I haven’t had a chance to snap any photos of the exhibit, but I’ll post some as soon as I can.
My high school roommate (seriously… that was over a decade ago?) Raman has a funny post about his daily desktop architecture projects. I have some catching up to do in the stylish cubicle department. In other Raman news, he has finally succumbed to Twitter.
The always interesting Seth Godin encourages the New York Times, and all of us, to “do what you’re great at.” It’s a simple, but often ignored, branding concept. It’s much easier to expand, expand, expand than to maintain a tight focus. I love his two suggested opportunities for the Times to excel at: what is true, and what is important. He puts it best when he says that there is “Lots of noise online, not so much truth.” I’m tucking those two away for an upcoming collaborative blog project.
Finally, did a leaked AT&T email reveal the launch timeframe for the 3G iPhone? And, should I be getting my Apple news from Fake Steve Jobs? Well, he’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than the dedicated Apple rumor blogs. Just look at this post about “the Hildebeast” bowing out.
Paths Forward is my new recurring series featuring interesting links and stories from around the web. Woohoo! Let’s get started:
The Accuracy of Web Analytics (Marketing Pilgrim) takes a look at research on whether you should implement your JavaScript tag at the top or bottom of your page source, depending on the load time of your page. It’s interesting, and I’m all for greater accuracy in measurement, but I can’t help referring you to Accuracy or Precision, which is jump-started from Jim Novo’s theory that precision (repeatable and reproducible) is more important than accuracy (error-prone and doubtful). I happen to agree. Web analytics data isn’t 100% perfect, but if you can generally expect it to be imperfect in the same ways, so you should be able to derive the actionable insights you need.
Penelope Trunk shares Research That Reveals News Paths to Productivity. The most interesting to me was the suggestion to “stop obsessing over your choices and just decide” since most people tend to overestimate the regret we’ll feel after an emotionally involved choice.
The Dieline has a great post on Sennheiser Eco-Friendly Packaging. It’s a couple weeks old, but I was really excited about it for a couple of reasons. One, it’s consumer electronics, and that’s the industry I spent two years in doing graphic design, including packaging, among other things. The second reason is that as much as I love The Dieline, they seem to focus primarily on food and health/beauty products. It was great to see a change of pace.
Finally, Get Rich Slowly has a post on Personal Currencies. My personal currency for many months was, of course, the iPhone. That is, until my lovely wife bought me one as a “Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary” gift.
Genia and I are in New York City through Monday to celebrate her 30th birthday. So, to keep up with our travels, check out my Twitter feed or check my photos on Flickr or Facebook (links at right).
I have some cool post ideas in the works, but regularly scheduled FNR content is on hold until late next week.
If you’ve been following web analytics commentary in the blogosphere (talk about a micro-niche), you’re probably aware of the ongoing debate about Eric Peterson’s proposed Engagement model. Peterson and fellow analytics guru Avinash Kaushik have respectfully disagreed back and forth on their blogs about the nature and value of such a metric for some time, and I have been torn between the two perspectives. It seems well suited for a site that is not commerce-driven, so I decided to just give it a try and see for myself whether or not it was worthwhile.
I spent a bit of time on Friday working in WebTrends to see how easily I could put together the different components and start tracking Engagement on our site. It wasn’t going too well, and I commented about it on Twitter. A brief conversation ensued with Chris Grant and by the end of the day, our conversation was referenced in a blog post by Aaron Gray of WebTrends about Eric Peterson’s dismissal of Twitter as a marketing tool.
I commented on Aaron’s post to come out in favor of Twitter, but also to say that I disagreed with Eric when he implied that something could not be valuable if it were not instantly measurable. For whatever reason, this stuck with me as I went about my afternoon until finally it hit me. The engagement model is trying to create a qualitative metric out of quantitative metrics. I thought this was a revelation until I reread Avinash’s post on Engagement, where he says basically the same thing:
“At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative. Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative.”
At the end of the day, I think I’d be better off looking for a way to bring in real qualitative data from our users and letting my quantitative metrics be quantitative. Next up on Friday Night Running, I’ll take sides in the “Web Analytics is Easy/Hard” debate.
Via Grace and Orange Clogs, I found this YouTube video of Dr. Tim Keller speaking at Google HQ about his new book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. The entire hour is worth watching for those interested, but there were a couple points in which I took particular interest. Keller argued that there is a sort of three rung ladder which people often climb as they move towards belief in God. The three rungs he described are as follows:
Disbelief is as much a leap of faith as is belief
Disbelief actually takes more faith than does belief
Belief takes more than just reason; it requires a personal commitment
In justifying the first rung, Keller made a great point about many of the common objections to the existence of God. Namely, that they often make assumptions about the nature of God before even being willing to admit God might exist. A related point, which he also discussed, was best worded by Bright Eyes a few years ago: “If you swear that there’s no truth, who cares? How come you say it like you’re right?”
Shouldn’t I have posted this about four months ago? Sure. But posting about my first experience with Muxtape made me want to throw this out there as well. So, in no particular order, here they are:
Arcade Fire Neon Bible
Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha
Over the Rhine The Trumpet Child
BRMC Baby 81
I suppose if I had to pick one album that I couldn’t live without, it would be Neon Bible.
Muxtape has been all the buzz for several weeks now, and I finally got around to putting together my first mix. It’s actually a condensed version of my annual mix cd, which I typically spend weeks compiling and then run out of steam before mailing out. So, thanks to the magic of the internets, you can still enjoy the fruits of my labors. These are mostly a few of my favorite tunes from 2007, with the notable exception of a new tune by Jon Foreman, which I just discovered about two weeks ago and hasn’t left my inner soundtrack since. It’s called A Flask Filled With Hope, and featured artists include: Arcade Fire, Spoon, Andrew Bird, Over the Rhine and BRMC, among others. Check it out at: http://jehawbaker.muxtape.com
