I picked up on Danah’s post commenting on Clay Shirky’s post on ‘A Rant about women’,

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

I am usually very private and do not discuss anything personal on my blog, but this topic is too close to heart and here is what I learnt:

1. Stereotypes sometimes contain some good schemata for us to quickly categorise and ‘manage’ people,  but not always true: My experience tells me that there are men who suck as self-promotion, there are also women who put themselves out there and talk themselves up.

2. You don’t need to talk and act like a ‘man’ to get respect.  You need to be good at what you do and be proud to tell other people succinctly. This does not discount your respect for other people, but it means that you are STRONG enough to stick to your gun when you guts tell you that you KNOW what you’re talking about.  People can doubt you, but not yourself.  Same lesson for men and women.

3. Everyone has their own insecurities and things that they wish they are better at.  I am still struggling at times of projects that I have no prior knowledge to – but do I rant/share my fear?  To be honest, I would just do it.  Research, ask questions, think, use your bloody brain, talk to someone who is good, hire someone to do the part you are not sure about and focus on your strength.  At the end of the day – focus on the deliverable – if you’re passionate and conscientious about your clients’ work, it comes across.  Whether you are a man or a woman.

4.  I love how Tom Coates put it in bigger perspective,

And while encouraging people to spot the talented and the creative, we should also be considering how we shame those people who self-promote without creating. The financial collapse has taught us that rhetorical bubbles divorced from reality are a danger to us all. We’re already approaching this point – our industry has become venal, insular and dominated by marketing. We have come to value the wrong things. And if we want a continued vigorous, creative, free, open and equal environment, that’s something we have to fix. It’s not something to aspire to.

Time to get real.

5. Finally – I am not actually arguing against Clay, I just want to clarify that women and men might communicate differently, but none needs to be arrogant/ego-maniac to gain respect.  What I note is that when I work with younger people (I’m sorry to generalise), they tend to focus too much on ‘what I can learn from you’ and ‘how I can help’ instead ‘I know what I am talking about and here is what you should be doing.  I can help you with this and that’.  To be fair, I do see more men talking with the latter perspective, which is pretty handy in building confidence with people you work with.  Having said that, I do talk like that too… and I’m a woman.  Damn proud of it.

In sum, the key thing is:

Don’t let other people decide who you are.  You know best, and with trust and compassion in yourself you stand tall. A weak ego usually comes big, because they need all the fluff to fill in the room.  But there is little substance, or foundation of trust in it.  When it bursts, nothing stays because it’s all air in it.

A small but strong ego is a beautiful ego.  It is quiet.  But when it speaks, people listen.

‘Mommy what do you do?’

Pure awesomeness.

Nerding out on the packaging then write a blog post about it.  :)  But bear with me, this might be the next big finding after optical fibre…

One key thing I learnt over the holiday is that health is the most important thing and it’s like most projects, a-little-TLC (Tender, Love and Care)-a-day is way better then regrets towards the end of the ‘deadlines’, quite literally.  One of my uncles in Hong Kong has been advised by the doctor that he should start watching his cholesterol, and having porridge would help lower the cholesterol level.  Which, by the way, I always thought that was just marketing scam to make us buy more porridge.  But having seen him between half a year, with his mild exericise and regular consumption of porridge, his cholesterol reading was really coming down and he was looking really good.  So I decided that it’s a lovely habit and it’s probably not too difficult to start young, plus what’s better than a bowl of lovely hot porridge in freezing winter that keeps you full for longer!  (Oh for those who know me, yes I can eat A LOT in the morning… enough that slightly scared my developers friends back then in Yahoo!) :)

Yummy porridge aside, as a geek I study nutritional information of packing intently.  Always.  And I found the most peculiar thing on the Jordans’ packaging.  Would love to see if you think that’s a genuine typo, or, porridge is really this magical:

Sorry for the image quality – it’s taken from my iPhone.  Now the fun part, as you can see, a 100 gram of Jordan’s Porridge is only 135kcal more than a 40 gram of it.  Good news for the calories-conscious, no?  BUT the best peculiar stats – wait for it – the MORE porridge you have the LESS sugar and saturated fat there is (Sugar: 1.0 g  per 100g porridge versus 10.3g per 40g), (Saturated fat: 1.8g per 100g verus 3.1g per 40g).

Wow.  Must. Eat. Porridge. Daily.

Or maybe I should just ring up Jordan’s and see if it’s just a genuine mis-print on the packaging?  My curiosity is killing me.  Anyone?

NOTE: kudos to @NeilCrosby: it’s not a paradox. The 40g serving includes milk, the 100g figure does not. See the asterisked statement at the bottom.

Ain’t I silly!!!

Okay this might be a controversial post for the iPhone lovers here, but I have been hearing more friends of mine trying to replace their Blackberry with iPhone for work – so for the benefits of the greater good, here’s a list of what I like and don’t like about iPhone (mine: iPhone 3Gs 16GB, Operator: O2) as a business phone:

The Pros:

1. Slick interface – toggling between normal phone usage and apps is a dream come true, seamless and intuitive, one second I am navigating  using the Map app, another second someone calls me.  No brainer.

2. Long-tail of apps – lots of cool productivity apps, such as ‘awesome note‘ a great app to for hyperactive individuals like me, I’ve been using Tube Delux on a daily basis, and learning Spanish and French on the fly. And I cannot CANNOT live without the Map app on iPhone, it saves my from bears and man-eating bendy buses on numerous occassion.  I bow to it.

3. Email set-up and interaction is a bliss – it took me less than 3 minutes to set up my business email (note: hosted on Google App, not Microsoft Exchange)

4. Web browsing: iPhone works brilliantly as a mini-browser so it is a bliss to read stuff on it, especially since it’s perceived to be such a dominate player in the mobile internet market, most companies have optimised user-experience based on iPhone, so you benefit from having various options to view and use their services, such as normal website, apps, or optimised web page, such as Twitter, and Facebook.

The Cons:

1. Calendar Sync:  Clanky if you are not a fan of iCal, nor if you an Exchange user (i.e. Google Calendar as your default).  I have done a few trial-and-error set ups.  First thing first: I have two Google Calendar, one personal, one business.  First to sync with iPhone, I thought I needed to sync with my Google Calendar with iCal – done so then only to realise that iPhone permit read-only calendar via iCal.  So if I am on the go, I can’t actually amend my calendar with my phone – which was a bit of a nuisance if not completely impractical.  Then I found this wonderful blog by Ian,

NuevaSync. It is a fairly simple process. First what is NuevaSync?

NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.

It works beautifully (although still a few cliches with timezone set-up), but I know what you are thinking – what about having a third-party app handling your calendar data?  Not the perfect solution, but it’s a good work around for now.  And, oh please, let me know if you have smarter solution to this problem.

2. Keyboard: I guess this is the controversial part.  Some might say that iPhone has cracked it and created a screen-based keyboard that works, but for me, despite almost half a year of training, there’s no way I can type without staring at the keyboard, unlike a physical, tactile keyboard.  So it means that drafting an email with a bit of thought is a pain, because (rough estimate) 30% of my attention span is on keeping my fat fingers on the right buttons.  Still today I continue to hit the ‘enter’ button when I mean ‘L’ or ‘M’.  Or maybe you have delicate-daisy fingers and it works for you, but mind you, I have pretty handy hands, too, so I suspect others are suffering quietly.

3. Reception Reception Reception!! Urgh, okay so I am not sure who’s fault is it, O2 or iPhone.  I currently need to carry two phones because you just can’t do any work if you sound like you are under water in a conference call.  With iPhone coming to Vodafone and Orange, I hope to see reports on improved mobile coverage.  But as it is today, I still can’t use my phone in my home.  So.. when I have time I really need to figure out what kind of compensation I need from O2.  I hope your iPhone works better than mine!

4. Contact list Management: not a problem unique to Apple – I have my SIM-card based contacts that are mainly phone-based contacts, but I have my email contacts that are mainly email-based contacts, probably over 30% of the people have overlapped contacts and exist in parallel and yet separated.  I need to basically consolidate the two using Apple’s addressbook (confession: which I never actually really use much).  So I want to blame Apple for not making it easier for me, but okay, I admit that’s 70% my own responsibility :)

5. Power Issues: (thanks @21five) – I am so used to carrying the iPhone adapter around I didn’t even realise how little iPhone battery lasts.  Easily less than a day if you have a few conference calls and with intense usage of apps and surfing.  A big thing go consider if you are always on the go.

So for whoever going to get an iPhone for business use, I hope this list helps. ;)

My friend Sacha is putting together a SXSW panel - Living in the Matrix: Communicating past Agent ‘Smith’ based on a geek conversation we have on community moderation.  I’m sharing the ideas below and if you like it, or want to hear more about it, please vote for the panel so that I might go troll SXSW :)  Thanks!

So…

The legendary Linus’ Law states that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.  It states that with enough community scrutiny, bad content/contribution will be noticed and taken down.  From my work on the sociology of Wikipedia and experience in Yahoo!, I would add that there are three key elements to having a successful community (which a lot of designers/start-ups seem to be conveniently unaware of).

They are

(1) the Composition of your community

(2) the Tools to empower them (i.e. the system of moderation)

(3) the Timing between noticing and taking down bad content

Let me elaborate.

(1) Composition of your community

For Linux and Wikipedia, the communities are composed of many extremely smart, technical, virtually connected geeks that are experts in online communications and are very comfortable with setting up policies and norms for their communities to follow.  They are also good at developing hands on tools to execute the policies.

For example, Wikipedia community established the three core norms: Neutral Point of View (NPOV), Be Bold, and Assume Good faith.  Its developer communities built a special app, VandalFighter, to help editors monitor realtime edits among the many other useful tools,

Vandal Fighter is software that watches Wikipedia edits in real-time and has many built-in filters (multiple regular expressions can also be used) to allow users to specify exactly what types of information they would like to see. Examples: watching custom article watchlists, watching edits by non logged in (IP) editors, ignoring edits by people marked as “ok” (or, the reverse as well), and watching comments with the word “revert” in them are just a few of the almost limitless ways in which Vandal Fighter can be configured to produce custom output.

VandalFighter screenshot (source)

Basically when you have a bunch of really smart people using your community product, the plus side is they are also the key people that will help you develop and refine community policies, and even help you develop tools for moderation.  The downside is the challenge for the product people to remain open and transparent, and be liberal enough to accommodate opinions and suggestions.  In that regard, Flickr’s done a pretty good job in encouraging communities to tell them what they want and actually responding to those needs by both (1) talking to the users; and (2) implementing new features or explain why not if it’s not possible.

The problem I see is that people assume that their community will also function like the highly technical, systemic crowds above, which mostly is NOT true.  If you have a fashion community website, people may flag a button to state if they like or hate the content, but don’t expect them to fill in a form to explain why – people are usually pretty reluctant to work so hard when they are just browsing a site.  If they keep on seeing bad content, they will leave and will not try to fix it for you.  Think about the design – how can you gather data about the quality of the content without needing your users to do a lot work?

(2) The moderation system

The key to a robust moderation system is that – you can’t rely on old school customer care services alone if you know that your community is going to grow in scale.  Traditional customer care is expensive, inconsistent, and slow in turn around.  What it means is that your community is soon going to know they know better than the people sitting behind the hot desk, on both how the product works and how to game the product.  You will need to work out a moderation system that incorporates community realtime feedback, such as the Slashdot meta moderation system, where trusted users will be empowered with more karma points to help promote or suppress content.  I encourage you to read through the documentation as I know most world’s robust systems share similar principles as the Slashdot mechamism, and here’s my favourite bits,

Who

It’s probably the most difficult part of the process: Who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say “Everyone”, but I’ve chosen to avoid that path because the potential for abuse is so great. Instead, I’ve set up a few simple rules for determining who is eligible to moderate.

1. Logged In User If the system can’t keep track, it won’t work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you’re paranoid, but this system demands a certain level of accountability.
2. Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses from each logged in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average number of times. The homepage doesn’t count either. It then picks users from the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just happened to read an article this week.
3. Long Time Readers The system throws out the newest few thousand accounts. This prevents people from creating new accounts to simply get moderator access, but more importantly, means that newbies will have to be part of the community for a few weeks before they gain access to the controls to a system they don’t understand.
4. Willing to Serve If you don’t want to moderate, just visit your user preferences, and set yourself as ‘Unwilling’
5. Positive Contributors Slashdot tracks your “Karma” (see the FAQ). If you have non negative Karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts.

So the end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average, positive slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually) the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a proportionate amount of eligible users “Tokens”. When any user acquires a certain number of tokens, they become a moderator. This means that you’ll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody can abuse the system, and that only “regular” readers become moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;)

Basically when you start to develop a new system with communities of users, remember to add the above top five variables trackable into your backhand – even though you may have only a handful of kitties using your site, if in the fortunate even of your community taking off, these data WILL come in handy.

(3) Notice and taking down time

Cannot emphasise this enough – remember when you were a kid at school, there were teachers that pupils respected as opposed to those who were bullied by kids or just completely be ignored?  What made the difference?

The answer is the consistency of treatment and the responsiveness in delivering rewards and punishment.  Forgive my Pavlovian tone here, but online communities rely even stronger on fairness, consistent treatment, and timely response since people cannot see one another in person.  Lots of emotional information is missed out, hence collective community behaviors are shaped by the system, not just by the people.  If you let a few trolls take over your sites, your community suffer.  In the normal life cycle of events, communities will moan and seek help, and if nothing happens, they may stay and tolerate the bad content, which would leave a sour taste and encourage people to act in a uncivilized manner – trolling the trolls.  Other light-minded members will leave because it’s not fun anymore.  So – when you design your community – make sure you have factor in the notice and take-down time by incorporating first two points by defining the nature of your community and tools for empowerment first.  These are not nice-to-have – these are necessarily conditions for any online communities to succeed.

Okay I’ll be a bit hardsell here and repeat myself – If you’d like to hear more on community management, please vote for my friend’s Sacha SXSW panel

Living in the Matrix: Communicating past Agent ‘Smith’
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/4414

I am probably missing a lot of the core details as well, will be filling this in from your comments and links and hopefully this will build into some sort of useful documentation.  ;)

This is very slick from MIT.  It’s pretty accurate, too, except I’m not sure where the yellow sport tag comes from unless you count yoga as a sport?

Would you please track back if you are blogging your ‘MIT’ characters, too?  I am curious about how the analyser works on you as well :)   So excited! /geek

Have been researching more on the business side of social media due to a recent project and it seems really challenging to wrap the space so I am keen to share with you the thought process.

1. Social media, like all media, is a medium for people to connect
2. Social media is defined as digital medium that allows people to distribute information to one another or to many in a low-cost, parallel distributed way (i.e. once a message is sent, it can easily be cascaded and spread out)
3. Human beings intrinsically connect to satisfy their emotional and social needs, and seek empathy when something elicit their emotional response (e.g. fall in/out of love, winning a competition, had a bad day at work, best friends getting married, stress of moving homes etc)
4. Just like it is comfortable to watch episodes of Friends where it feels like people you knew all along are there with you, Facebook/Twitter or even your old school emails provide you with a digital venue to meet and greet and connect with people that you like (hence interested in what they are up to)
5. Social media, hence, is an extension or convenience for us to connect, just like a community cafe in the town where you read newspaper and get greeted by familiar faces on Sunday mornings
6. Social media also provides ample information for people to compete and distribute their achievements (linkedin profiles) for social capital gain (oh I know this person who can help our company does that), but at the same time can back fire as a medium on ego-stroking oneself (e.g. facebook updates on how someone bought another race car with photos etc..)

Now the business side is what boggles me.

1. Marketing sees that when there’s something that everybody looks at and ‘ENGAGEs’ with, it is a channel (the ‘billboards’ where they can make a lot of money in getting people to notice and buy a product)
2. Marketing sees that ’social media’ is one of these venues
3. Now how does marketing ‘capitalises’ and ‘leverages’ social capital?

Here I hope we can take a step back and look at the human side of social media.  If your product helps me connect and share my feelings/thinking (e.g. Wordpress), I would genuinely really like you and I would spread the word for you when someone asks me what blogging platform I recommend.  Or if my good friend develops an iPhone app that rocks, I would gladly review the app and put some good words (genuine, of course) in the app store, not because I am doing that for you per se, but if I find something useful, I would want to share and help other people find the same thing too.  But if the app sucks, I would help my friend to improve by giving him offline recommendations because I know online reputation counts.

Now what I am not sure is if a big brand comes along and ask me to re-skin my blog to promote their brand so that my visitors would constitute their ‘page impressions’.  This is where traditionally marketing having a hard time to understand.  Social media is NOT a traditional billboard.  It is an intimate part of my daily life.  Imagine if you are a new father/mother, you won’t ‘brand’ your kid with Pampers outfit to promote the brand, but if Pampers works really well for your child’s skin, you would naturally recommend it to other parents (whether via social media or just a simple chat over coffee).

In a nutshell, social media allows users to get their words out fast and more exponentially, but ultimately your product needs to deliver.  Get the product right, then people would do the talking for you.  Social media helps getting the words out faster, but that’s both for good and for the worst.

Here is a Chinese story,

There were two brothers who lived on the 80th floor of a building.

They went out together for a party without noticing there’s no lift service on the day.  The brothers were very frustrated when they realised that they were kind of doomed, but they decided to slowly start climbing the stairs flight by flight.

By the 20th flight, they decided that they were going to drop their heavy knapsacks and planned to pick them up the next day.

By the 40th flight, they started to blame and yelled at one another for not being attentive and missed the notice.

By the 60th flight, they came to accept fate, slowly and peacefully they inch up and eventually reach to their door.

Only then, they realised they left their keys in the knapsacks…

If the keys are like our dream and passion and vision when we have in our 20s: With all the pressing needs in life, like paying off loans, getting a mortgage, finding a partner, raising children, many of us decide to set our dreams aside.  Eventually we work hard and move up, from the beginning till the end, in our 40s we start blaming one another for not having the vision and strength to carry forward.  And then we come to accept fate and become serene for the rest of our journeys in our 60s.  At the end, do you have the keys with you?

Where are you and your keys?

I read the story and something switched today, thought it’d be nice to share with you.  Thanks for swinging by.

The ‘World wide web’ is a romantic concept -

• World: belongs to everyone
• Wide: no boundary
• Web: links everyone together.

But my romantic interpretation has been interrupted by the not so romantic everlasting online abuse problem and hence the proposed CAPTCHA feature in a work meeting.  Now here’s my view (supported by some research)…

1. Captcha punishes a vast amount of people

…(and money they make) who deserve extra consideration on web accessibility

Isofarro has helped me dug out some useful stats:

Between 15% and 30% of the population have functional limitations that can affect their ability to use technology products (50 million in US, 750 million worldwide). It is estimated that people with disabilities control a discretionary income of over $175 billion annually in US alone.

US$175 billion discretionary income?? Now accessibility is not a fancy ‘feature’, it matters to your business and you can tell your boss that quoting CSUN, in case they have ‘no time’ for egalitarian beliefs :)

2. All in all – I just see that CAPTCHA should not be a feature requirement

…or at least clear warning should be given to the publisher before they decide to implement for two key reasons: (1) accessibility: it keeps good users away and (2) CAPTCHA is easily solvable by those who want to: it does not stop the evil spirite to contrary to most people’s belief.

(1) Accessibility:

Users hate CAPTCHA. In our user research many told us that they would not bother to comment if they have to go through CAPTCHA. So CAPTCHA essentially turns away the light contributors who are pivotal in enriching the community with a more general, diversified tone of voice, while retaining the more troll/spam-ish users who would do anything to make themselves heard. In all, CAPTCHA turns users away as an extra step to contribute when sometimes your product already requires a sign-in system to comment.

(2) CAPTCHA would NOT help the problem of spam:

Multiple research has demonstrated that CAPTCHA is known to not helping in deterring spam. I am citing two academic research to illustrate.

(I) Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

‘It is important to note that, like seemingly every security system that has preceded it, this system can be defeated by those who benefit most from doing so. For example, spammers can pay a programmer to aggregate these images and feed them one by one to a human operator, who could easily verify hundreds of them each hour. The efficacy of visual verification systems is low, and their usefulness is nullified once they are commonly exploited.’

I easily found something is hiring CAPTCHA solving team, http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/NET-Website-Design/fast-captcha-project.439814.html, for instance.

(II) A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/jeff.yan/msn_draft.pdf

‘It took on average ~80 ms for the attack to completely segment a challenge on a desktop computer with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 CPU and 2 GB RAM. As a result, we estimate that this Microsoft scheme can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%. ‘

60% success rate in hacking the system is almost as same as success rate from average users, so again, CAPTCHA does not keep spammer away while making our sites inaccessible to.  My own sucess rate of CAPTCHA is probably 50% haha.  I’m worst than a bot you see.

But What are we gonna do without CAPTCHA??? Recommendations:

Why do we need CAPTCHA? It’s because we want to get rid of spam. With all the research I have put together and discussing with engineers from all cross of life, I’ve distill the following potential routes:

1. We’d need some sort of reputation system that will surface trusted users content (algorithm based, factoring in variables such as membership length, history of abuse/content removed, human-filters such as community manager assigning special reputation levels).  Askimet does this rather well and they offer both commercial and free to use API for private use.
2. Comments with similar syntax and semantics should be analysed with a variable confidence level for spam filtering

Of course this is a filtered version that I can share openly.  At work I have been documenting everything to a point where I am called the ‘abuse lady’.  How I love my job! :)

Okay finally I have noticed new strands of suspected Wordpress spam:

‘Dear there! how are you?
thanx for such opportunities to readers.They are with very appriciable advantage in changing readers mind and makes them wise-men.at the same time I want to appriciate for the one who gave comment in no3 above.I hope such persons stand to be globalistic and fully rational.
Thanx once again’

‘Hi there !how are you ? are you fine? I hope so .Here below is the comment I want to give for your advise shared me>these words of the wisemen shared to readers are realy valuable.They are just like daily shool room concepts like a good teacher giving you course in the class.I understand this in such a way that i am happily saying you are realy great men and make this your custom to share us as daily breakfast so that we can have global concepts.’

It took me a few serious moments to consider if they are actual comments or not, but my conclusion is that they look too much like machine generated text based on my blog content, similar to those generated by Dada Engine (created by Andrew C. Bulhak at the Monash University)* – an engine that randomise phrases to create post-modernist text.

Hmm.. now that get me into thinking how an open source, global, scalable solution would be like…. /headache

*Nassim Nicholas Taleb. (2004) Fooled by Randomness. p73. Penguin Press

Someone made me happy today, and I thought I was happier and I defined that as (1+x%)happy. And then I was asked ‘can you be more than 1 happy?’

Got me thinking,

Happiness is a 1/0 thing.
Imagine you are a happy person, you make someone happy, and that someone makes someone else happy, like butterfly effect it triggers down.

1/0 happiness seems like a probable notion. Sorry it does sound like an xkcd strip :).

But something said by a yogi inspired me the other day, ‘Have no fear. Not courage, because courage is a reaction to fear. Have no fear, and peace be with you. And that is beautiful’.

So it got me to conclude that ‘Be not sad. Not happy, because being happy is a reaction to sadness’.

Well doesn’t make too much sense, does it? I think it’s time for a good glass of wine.

A wonderful thoughtful exercise created by Erik on Flickr, beautiful.