File this under, “I’m not quite sure why this is interesting but I know it is.”

A few days ago Hunch , Caterina Fake’s new startup that tries to help you make better decisions by showing you data from others trying to decide the same thing, “launched an “academic version of their API . As you can see in their example, this version allows you to search their database of more than 4 million answered questions and not only see the answer, but also see the answers that most highly correlate with the answer you chose. (Users who prefer laptops are most closely correlated with users used a Polaroid camera and users who would cook burgers on the grill are most closely correlated with users that think casual Fridays are awesome.)

Not sure what to do or think about it, but seems kind of awesome. Also kind of reminds me of some of what I’ve been doing with Brand Tags (and Battle Mode ). The idea of making research fun and using the data it spits out to better understand how the world works makes me happy.

Oh, and if you want a Hunch invite, I have a few. Just leave a comment. First left, first served.

COMMENTS OPEN

Jackie Mason on the internet :

All the geniuses with computers love to tell you you can talk to people all over the world if you’re on line. Who wants to? You want to talk to people all over the world? People don’t talk to the guy next door. . . . People are standing in an elevator – do you talk to anybody? A guy calls you up and he’s got the wrong number – do you start a conversation? Do you ever say, “Sure glad you got the wrong number!” You’re gonna holler, “You got the wrong number!” And God forbid he calls you again: you think he’s a stalker, you call the police.

Reminds me of a quote from Thoreau’s Walden that I read in Amusing Ourselves to Death

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

I’ll leave these without comment.

via Peter Feld

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Kottke points to an article in the New York Times about magazines raising their subscription costs to try to soften the advertising fallout . As the article acknowledges, “Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy.”

Funny enough, I mentioned just this last week in my exchange with Johnny : “I think there’s something funny about the newspaper industry crying about their product being undervalued when they’ve been the one undervaluing it for years (ahem 12 issues of a $5 magazine for $12).” The media industry set the value of news at free, meaning it’s really hard to blame consumers for not giving it much value.

via kottke.org

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• They can be used as vacuum cleaners
• They can be used as showers
• They are pretty much not around anymore

Four things that have taken up some of my headspace over the last few weeks.

Some of these might turn into full posts later, but this is just a quick rundown of some things I’ve been thinking about lately.

Counterintuitive

This morning I was thinking about two things I’ve posted lately, about anti-drug messages and spammers building better artificial intelligence , and realized that as a category the things I find the most interesting are the counterintuitive. Not sure why this is important, but I figured I’d share it anyway.

Remind Me

I think I’m going to write an article/entry about this, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the how everything you can buy that’s not out yet should have an easy email reminder service. For instance, today I heard about a new St. Vincent album coming out in like two weeks . I went over to the site to see if I could pre-order (which I couldn’t find) and I also couldn’t find a giant box to put my email in so they could remind me when it’s actually released. All I got was the regular mailing list (which I signed up for). Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if the album was available for download on file sharing sites, and of course it was. It should not be easier to download an album for free two weeks before it comes out than to get reminded the day it comes out (and hopefully have a link in the email to go direct to the place to buy it). It’s simple and I think you can apply the principle across the board. (As a side note, NPR is streaming the album , but it’s still not easy enough!)

Trolls

Alan wrote a piece about trolls in the advertising industry and specifically mentioned some comments in a piece I was interviewed for in Adweek . While I appreciate the support, I generally think that there are trolls everywhere and the very worst thing to do about them is to let them bother you (especially if they don’t even comment with their real name). I also thought a bit about the way this frames the problem of trolls. The fact is for me, the vast majority of the comments I receive are good and thoughtful (thanks guys) and I don’t really like the idea of the world thinking otherwise. Just like telling kids to not do drugs by making them think all their peers are doing it, talking about people being nicer to one another by making them think all their peers are going around making terrible comments anonymously is probably the wrong way to go. (Just as a side note, I haven’t discussed this with Alan and don’t mean to single him out, it’s just been top of mind. Hope I cause no offense Alan, I appreciate what you were doing.)

Disappeared

I was having a conversation over beers the other night with Ryan and we started talking about the amount of stuff that actually disappears on the web. While the popular trope is that “everything on the internet lives forever” the reality of the situation is probably the opposite: Since we’re creating more data today than at any other time in history it would make sense that we’re also losing more data than ever before. Now most of this stuff doesn’t matter (I wrote about this a little in a post over at GE Adventure ), but still, The Internet Archive can’t possibly save everything.