Noah Brier's Barbarian Blog

The Odds of a YouTube Breakout

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:21 -0400

Over at Slate Chris Wilson runs the numbers on your video getting its big break on YouTube :

On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views—that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.

Yup, I’ll buy that.

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Why Old People Think Young People are Spoiled

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:02:17 -0400

There is a great series of posts over at A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book that attempts to answer the question of why older folks think everyone younger than themselves is spoiled ( part 2 ).

The author, a PhD student and blogger at The Panhandler’s Guide breaks it down into four economic reasons: Inflation ($900 in 1974 is worth $3,892 today), substitution (kids today buy phones, but they also don’t buy records), diffusion (as a technology becomes more mass the inflation-adjusted price declines) and increasing standards (“Increasing standards mean that the utility of many goods and services is constantly decreasing”).

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The Chaos in Your Head

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:02:16 -0400

Neuroscience and networks, two topics I can’t resist.

And here they are all wrapped together in an article about how your brain constantly walks on the edge of chaos . Apparently, the chaotic cascades inside your head are what drives intelligence and people who let chaos take over more often (though not too much) are smarter (at least from an IQ perspective).

The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.

Oh, and apparently your brain has 13 degrees of separation. Who knew?

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The Value of Shared Information

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:02:25 -0400

A few weeks ago I pointed out a study that explained, “groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members.”

Today I ran across some research on how celebrities stay popular for so long that sheds further light on the subject. Essentially people talk about more famous people more because it’s a social lubricant to have a shared topic, therefore making the famous more famous.

I’ve been spending some time thinking about how you break this cycle. Especially at work, it’s important to share ideas that everyone doesn’t know about yet as they may hold information that could push things forward in new ways. No answers yet, but it’s interesting to think about.

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Recommendations, Networks, Etc.

noah@barbariangroup.com(Noah Brier) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:02:31 -0400

Just some random things I’ve been thinking about lately (and an apology for the lack of long-form posts).

Partly because I haven’t written anything of any length in awhile and partly because I’ve been thinking about a bunch of different stuff lately, I’ve got an entry chock full of random thoughts.

So, where to begin …

Paying for Recommendations

I’ve been turning this idea over in my head lately that all these sites fighting for rights to media are nice and all, but the real play might be to bypass all that stuff and just charge for the recommendations. I would pay a few dollars a month for Netflix access without any movies or anything just to get the recommendations and the queue. Not totally sure what to do with that yet, but it’s a thought.

Networks Popping Up

I recently went back and found this quote from a Wired piece Bruce Sterling wrote a few years ago called Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future . In it, Sterling imagines the world in 2017 and writes:

The best thing about being a top-tier geo blogger is that everyone knows where you are. When the buddy list tells folks you’re in town, they ping to offer you dinner and invite you to sleep on the couch. They’re my homies in a world where the entire planet is home. I love all you guys! (Shout-out to my driver, Leo, who’s putting me up tonight. And his wife: You haven’t met me yet, Sue, but thanks.)

While he was imagining eight years from now, that’s actually pretty close to now. I know many folks who have exactly this experience (including myself): As soon as you land in a place you let the world know, via Twitter or Facebook that you’ve arrived, which of course many knew since you’re connected on Dopplr and then you find yourself sitting in a bar with three folks who you’ve mostly not ever met before and best of all they’ve never met either. It’s kind of an amazing thing to watch a network coalesce in a new place (as I did in Hong Kong) and even more amazing to feel as though you’ve left things slightly more connected than when you arrived (I introduced three people in Hong Kong who had never met and I hope will stay in touch). That’s a good feeling.

Desire Lines

So I’m still playing around with my desire line idea and I feel like I’m constantly edging closer to a definition and description I really like. Watching things like the naturally forming dance party I posted a few weeks ago, which was essentially an opportunity to see a mass behavior from a scale we seldom see in person, was the basic idea. The big thing that separates the web, and the opportunity for us as people, is the ability to observe this sort of herd behavior constantly from the helicopter view. We can look down and watch how people move and adapt to their environments that was all but impossible before this. I think this accounts for the fascination in data visualization (the desire to chart this newfound angle on the world), behavioral economics (the recognition that when you watch things from this angle everything works a little differently than you might have expected) and … Well, maybe that last one was a stretch, but I’m still working on this one, so sue me.

That’s it for now. Also, I’ve been thinking about writing a short post about public speaking but must admit that I feel a bit embarrassed about it because it just feels kind of douchey. If you’re interested let me know and I’ll go ahead with it.