I bought last month’s Atlantic magazine while I was wasting some time in the airport a few weeks ago. The cover caught my attention: Is Google Making us Stoopid?

I read through the article and couldn’t help sympathizing with the author, Nicholas Carr, who is experiencing weaker and weaker concentration and finding that he can’t read more than 3 paragraphs of anything anymore without being overwhelmingly distracted, wanting to jump to the next thing. Of course, he contends, this epidemic of distraction (can anyone say Attention-Deficit Syndrome?) plaguing our modern world is partly due to the distraction-friendly behavior that the Web induces. “Hyper”-linking, after all, is the very nature of the web.

As of now, all of this is just anecdotal. No scientific studies are confirming our decrease in intellect. Friends are asking each other “Hey is it harder for you to stay focused on single piece of writing for any length of time.” Friends are sharing their experiences.

Carr says,

“Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. ‘I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,’ he wrote. ‘What happened?’ He speculates on the answer: ‘What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?’”

It’s not new to understand the relationship between human thought/behavior and technology. The two are linked. The way that humans processed information prior to the printing press was very different than after the widespread dissemination of the printed word.

Today, I caught myself in the act of surfing the web. Mid-stream I spontaneously thought, “This would be a great example of our HYPER-linking behavior.” What does it look like? Here’s only about 15 minutes of my day:

• Scanning nytimes.com
• Article entitled “Advertising: Woman to Woman, Online” catches my eye
• Intrigued by the title and the relevance to my work in online marketing, I read the first 3 paragraphs of the article. The journalist begins by describing Dooce, a blog created by Heather Armstrong, who eventually could quit her day job because marketers began paying her to advertise there.
• Curious, I stop reading the nytimes article and skip over to Dooce.com
• Check out Daily Photo, Daily Chuck, and the FAQs
• Read the HA-larious “About this Site” section (which I read in full, mind you)
• Then look at a section called Mastheads, which are banner-esque monthly musings of language and design by Armstrong.
• This led me to google “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, which happens to be Armstrong’s August masthead. (And the design for which looks uncannily like the new United Airlines television campaign. If you haven’t seen it, you must not be watching the Olympics.)
• In googling “A Pacific Ocean of Crap”, I see in the results an article called, “Our Oceans are Turning into Plastic…are we”
• After reading about 4-5 paragraphs, when I couldn’t find the answer to the title question, I scanned through the article. There was a nice graph that helped me a bit and big caption that read, “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contribuing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world.”
• Becoming disheartened with this topic, I used the back button (twice) to get back to the funny and irreverent Dooce.com

At this point, I stop dead in my tracks. Nicholas Carr was correct. We don’t read anything longer than a few lines anymore. Are you still reading this blog???? Congratulations.

In the Atlantic magazine article Richard Foreman, a modern playwright who is documenting his own cognitive and intellectual changes as information becomes ubiquitous, says “[As we are drained of our] inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Which leads me to the last click (the Back button) in my 15 minutes of surfing the web, “Pull a chair up with the hyrup”, Amstrong’s latest blog post on Dooce.com, which describes how she can’t serve her daughter pancakes because she doesn’t know how to make them. This blog post includes a funny youtube video about making pancakes, which I spent a good 3 minutes watching.

I think I’m stoopider than I was 15 minutes ago.

As a new visitor to the Engauge Digital Blog, I decided to start by reading the existing posts in an effort to avoid duplicate discussions. With numerous articles and limited time, my experience consisted of multiple visits where I would read a few articles before having to leave to focus my attention elsewhere. I began each return visit by asking, “Where did I leave off?” The answer would be found after scanning several posts and pages requiring a growing amount of time and effort. I don’t spend much time on blogs, but I have had similar frustrations and thought I would post to see if my experience is common.

THE QUESTION: Has anyone seen a blog that easily allows users to indicate what posts have been read, easily locate unread posts, and search within the posted content?

Indicating where the user is and where they have been in a web experience is a basic best practice, but in my experience it’s commonly void within blogs. The fact that users do not have to select every post prior to viewing does make the typical visited link identification difficult. However the presence of a “Read” check box with every post, an “Unread” filter or category option, and a search field could help answer “Where did I leave off?”

As a parent, I’m well aware of this busy part of the year – it’s back to school time for our kids. Retailers are feeling it too since they’re trying to entice shoppers with their Back to School sales. For this year’s Back to School promotion, retailing giant Walmart is catering to our youngsters with virtual worlds and Miley Cyrus, a busy teen celebrity that’s a singer (well, you be the judge of that) and television actress in a show called Hannah Montana.

Miley is selling gear from her show Hannah Montana including a line of clothes and accessories, backpacks, lunch boxes, etc. To promote the gear, Walmart has created a Hannah Montana virtual world where you can design an avatar, or a 3D representation of you, that can dress up in Hannah Montana clothes. Your avatar can also decorate that room with a Hannah Montana bedspread, posters, etc.

Walmart is driving people to the site via a print ad in their weekly circular — the ad contains a link to the virtual world site. They also created a micro-site where you can get Miley (aka Hannah) to call your child and remind them to go back-to-school shopping at Walmart.

So can this promotion be a success for Walmart?

There are indicators that virtual worlds are more than just a game. For starters, virtual world proponents have argued that these environments mimic real life. This argument is backed up by virtual world gamers reporting that they have real-world emotions or ties when they engage in virtual activities, such as a virtual marriage. And beyond emotions, the exposure to a virtual environment has influenced the purchasing decision of online shoppers. In the case of Land’s End, the integration of a virtual dressing room into their eCommerce engine demonstrated a 13% improvement in the shopping cart totals and a 26% increase in online purchases.

So while Walmart’s social media experiment two years ago never did more than generate buzz for the company, their foray into a virtual world with the backing of a teen celebrity has the makings of a successful marking campaign.

My final task at Engauge was to look back on my 8-week summer internship and reflect through a blog (I know, big shocker, blogging is so rare for this company ). Though I learned A LOT this summer, I decided to create a top 5 list that describes my time spent interning in the Behavioral Research Department (aka, the BRD).

1. What are you doing on Facebook? I’m working! Always choose an internship where Facebook research is encouraged.

2. When the BRD wants to celebrate, they’re going to do it right. They decorated my cube with Clemson tiger prints! (Go Tigers!)

3. Social Networks and Virtual Worlds: stop trying to avoid them and just give in. (Read my blog if you need any justification )

4. If you learn how to use a video camera, you will be tasked with fun “Researcher on the Street” assignments. But don’t bring the camera to the Marta station or the Marta police will come after you. Trust me!

5. Interning in the BRD will give you multiple personalities.

On a slightly more serious note, after completing this internship, I am now even more thankful that I have a major in Psychology and a minor in Business Administration. I now know that I want to pursue a career in Behavioral Research. What company wouldn’t want a team of psychologists? We’ll pick the consumers’ brains, study their habits, and we can even analyze our own data!

I would like to thank everyone on the BR team. Y’all helped me learn so much more this summer than I could ever imagine learning in a class. Preparing documents + Creating surveys + conducting user experience testing = an amazing learning experience. Thanks for helping release my inner geek.

I happened across a seemingly ordinary slashdot.org article talking about a conceptual Mozilla browser, codenamed Aurora. While this browser is a long way from reality and does build on some older concepts, I am noticing a pattern in how we are building our applications. I find it intriguing, novel, and fun… but I’m unsure about the problems to be exposed in this new paradigm.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Visual Organization and an Embrace of the Scroll Wheel

The first interesting piece of this demo is the use of more visual techniques in grouping and/or relating information. We’ve seen this technique in everything from Tag Clouds to the graphical flipping between iPhone music and Vista applications. Instead of simple text based categorization/reference of objects, everything is moving to graphical thumbnails of objects that can be scanned pictorially instead lexically. Tag Clouds are still a primarily lexical representation but they did bring in the notion of using size, color and transparency to emphasize strength and relevance. Pictorial representations typically use the same notions of size and transparency to convey the same information. What I am most excited and forlorn about is the relatively new introduction of depth into these efforts to help us relate complicated and disparate information. Demonstrated in spectacular ways by Microsoft’s Photosynth or even Google Maps and Earth, applications are developing with the notion of relevance and frame of context by a depth characteristic. Our two dimensional world of yesterday is quickly becoming and antiquated notion in lieu of a new third dimension to store and relate even more data.

Will this new way of thinking leave me cluttered in another dimension?

Kinetic Gestures and Wrist Weights for Exercise

The second big shift is coming from the advent of Wii and iPhone among others. Everything is becoming so much more energetically interactive as we make our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) devices momentum and gyro aware. We can shake our devices, sling them, and elicit different behavior based on the speed and direction of our actions. HP has release it’s new line of “TouchSmart” PC’s that offers scrolling ability and speed based on the swipe of your hand and the speed of your swipe. The above video as well as the others on Mozilla Labs demonstrate this new capability in all facets of Browser design.

Are we moving towards forced exercise in all of our computer interactions as we speedily try to navigate and pull detail information to the forefront of our screens? Maybe they should start making our Wiimotes and Gyro-Mice in 2lb, 5lb, and 10lb sizes.

Well, they say 4th time’s the charm.  I finally got my new 16GB 3G iPhone this weekend.  I really loved spending early Saturday morning in line at Lenox Mall.  Thank you Apple!  What else would I have done with those 4 hours?

So let me just say that the phrase “learned behavior” has taken on a whole new meaning for me.  I had no idea how ingrained my last 6 years of BlackBerry use was, which resulted in some awkward trials this weekend.

Don’t get me wrong, I am delighted with some of the new features my iPhone offers.  But I totally miss the way you speed dial from your BlackBerry by hitting one button (ah, the buttons…), or the amazing battery life (this once a day iPhone charge is never going to work) or the actual keypad where I was a one-handed SPEED typer.

On the flip, the iPhone display is amazing and the fully integrated apps ROCK - it’s particularly nice to consolidate my ipod mini and my phone. The email readability is tops, and I love to finally browse in style. And I thought the BlackBerry was crack.

But why can’t we get the best of breed phone? Wouldn’t that be ideal?

And has anyone else made the switch and still find themselves looking for the blinking red light on your phone?

In 2006 Conan O’Brien was on Charlie Rose and made a comment to the effect of being in “The Golden Age of TV”.  I’ve heard several people in the last few years mention this Golden Age of Television – the idea that  with high competition from a multitude of cable/satellite channels and saturation of the internet, networks are being forced to break out of the mold.  It makes sense, right?

I watch a lot of television, and I think we are in yet another Golden Age of Television*.  However, this might be the last Golden Age of Television on the actual television. And by that I mean the next wave of great episodic, small screen, short format, motion pictures (my new definition of TV Shows**) will be all digital and delivered in a variety of avenues, not just on your TV set.

The networks (finally) realize this, so they’re pushing out the best content in years to keep you tuned in, but I think this latest Golden Age of Television is helping accelerate the migration.  The shows are so good and so discussed – both online and off – that normal viewers are changing their behavior to consume them.  Now, admittedly, I’m not a normal viewer, but I do use several of the outlets that are becoming more commonplace.  I have Tivo, ReplayTV, and Apple TV.  I also “Slingbox” from a DirectTV/DVR and watch YouTube on my iPhone (or Wii ) when I’m bored.  But most recent - and now my most popular choice - is watching shows directly from network websites.

This last outlet is the one I want to discuss in more detail, because I believe it’s the future, and possibly the only place networks will be able to run when TV as we know it goes away.  Now, I mentioned watching shows online as being a recent thing, but it isn’t really for me or anyone else, I just mean that it’s finally a viable option.  Basically, all the other things I mentioned, from Tivo to Apple TV, are crutches, hybrids, mere toys that are helping me along until the inter-web catches up.  It’s close now with the quality of video players that are showing up on network sites and the increase in bandwidth to homes across the land.  At this point we’re only lacking a way to easily put these sites up on our current TVs; my Apple TV*** and Wii get me close but not quite there (and that’s a whole article in itself).

So why are network (and other online) video players the future?  It’s the ability to control content and display sophisticated advertising, as well as other benefits like tracking, ease-of-use, social networking, and instant gratification which the web provides.  On-demand content through cable/satellite providers come close, but lack some of these aspects.  And by the time they catch up, the game will have changed again.

Back to networks. Through my online video player, not only can I serve up specifc episodes instantly, I can incorporate ranking and recommendations from the community, promote other content properties that I own, and pull in complentary content (games, wikis,etc…) that reinforce the brand.

Example: I can watch Burn Notice on USA and sit through all the commercials (12 - 16 minutes worth), I could watch it on AppleTV for $1.99 through iTunes, or I could watch it on usanetwork.com (1 - 3 minutes of commercials, never more than 30 seconds per break).  Even if I Tivo’d Burn Notice (which I do on occasion) assuming I remembered or had it scheduled, I still have to fast forward through 8 or so commercial breaks, which typically equates to more time fast forwarding than the 3 minutes online.  When I do end up watching on USA’s site, I’m served up ads that I usually don’t mind watching because they’re more targeted.  I also get links to a Burn Notice game, Burn Notice character profiles, and I get to see a funny clip for Monk (which I might start watching now).

I’ll touch more on this in the days to come; I’d really like to look at what networks are doing right and doing wrong in the way they broadcast their content on the web.  For now, I would love any comments you have, especially video players and sites you’ve visited.  If nothing else, go watch something: NBC, USA, TBS, ABC.

*All you TV historians will probably classify this as the “Third: Golden Age of Television”.
**Give me some slack, it’s a work in progress. I probably need to take out “small screen” once my new contacts make it irrelevant.
*** If I could bring myself to hack my Apple TV I think I would have the technology part of this equation solved, but I don’t want to risk it and it’s not easy for the average user.

Facebook was launched when my older sister was in her senior year of college.  I remember her saying she avoided the social network because she “didn’t need another distraction.”  That’s an admirable decision; I personally have spent many hours browsing bumper stickers to avoid term papers.  I’ve had multiple friends suspend their profiles for months at a time because they “can’t get on a computer without getting on Facebook.”

A recent survey stated that “22% of firms ban social networking websites.”  Their reason?  Facebook lowers productivity.  I completely agree.  However, what would all of us do if we couldn’t get on Facebook once or twice (OK, ten times) a day? The end of the article does note that some firms use Facebook for actual work purposes, so a ban would not be feasible. Here at Engauge, we need to have access to Facebook to study it as marketers.  So what’s next?  Will there be a way for firms to add a filter to their employees’ Facebook pages so that only “approved” pages can be viewed?

I think it would be interesting to conduct an experiment where you could baseline the productivity of employees at work and college students at school.  Then, suspend their Facebook accounts and re-measure their productivity after a few months.  Are they more productive now?  Or, did they find another way to procrastinate? (Word of Warning: good luck finding participants, I know I won’t be volunteering!)

Now take a step back and think about this.  We’re addicted to a social network.  Not a website that tells us what’s going on in the world, but a social network that tells us that “Sally is excited for the weekend” and which of your friends are attending (or “maybe attending”) the party on Saturday night.  Have you ever tried to explain Facebook to someone who isn’t on Facebook?  Chances are you got the same look my parents gave me, which is utter confusion and astonishment at the amount of time I’ve invested being on Facebook.

So why do we invest all of this time and energy into Facebook and other social networks (keep in mind that many of us are maintaining multiple social networking accounts)?  Below is a picture of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Maslow says that there are five levels of needs; each level needs to be fulfilled before we can move on (and up) to the next level.

So if you’re on Facebook, it can be assumed that your Physiological and Safety needs have been met, otherwise, how and why are you on a computer?  The next level is Love and Belongingness (i.e., Social Needs). Does Facebook really make us a sense of love and belongingness? I believe it does. When your friends write on your wall or send you a bumper sticker, it means they were thinking about you.  Come on, admit it, you love getting notification emails from Facebook.

Recent research has indicated that in-world interactions in virtual spaces have improved users real world social skills.  So I believe that Facebook, while still the primary cause of my procrastination, has its benefits.  Facebook is similar to other virtual worlds or online games in this respect: it gives shy users a level playing field.  While some people may be too shy to go out and interact with strangers, the use of a computer makes the situation much less intimidating.

So in the end, we all must decide for ourselves if Facebook is a friend or foe.  I vote friend!

As a huge fan (and three-year member) of the social networking site Facebook, I try to keep in the loop when updates are being made. Back in March (2008), Facebook noted that they would be making updates to the Facebook Profile. They created a “Facebook Profiles Preview” page to allow users to subscribe to updates regarding these profile changes.

Every week, The Facebook Team provided updates to their most loyal fans, seeking their thoughts and feedback on the changes being made. Screen shots were uploaded followed by over 600 comments with “I love it” or “I hate it” responses of varying degrees. As adjustments were made, they provided commentary and updated screen shots.

When Facebook first decided to change the layout everything, my initial thought was “Why mess with a good thing?” but quickly remembered the advancements made with the news feed, applications, etc. I figured I’d give the new layout a chance, and I found that I don’t hate it. It will definitely take a day or two to get used to the changes:

Homepage Before Screen shot | After Screen shot

The biggest difference is the layout and spacing of the different sections. In the old layout, content seems concise and put together. In the new layout, there’s a lot of white space on the page. I don’t know that I feel it’s necessarily cleaner…but it does take advantage of the amount of space on the page. Rather than having the secondary navigation (search and applications) on the left, everything is now on the right. Moving the search bar to the top right corner follows standard site design, so it’s not surprising to see this move. And the newest navigation change is moving from the ‘Profile’ button to a link using the user’s name.

Profile Before Screen shot | After Screen shot

The new profile design, in my opinion, is cleaner. You’re not forced to have all of your profile content on one page. It’s broken up to help you sort out the information you’re looking for. Rather than scrolling down the page to read someone’s wall – it’s the first tab you see. From there, you have the option of filtering what you see “All Posts”, “Posts by User”, or “Posts by Others.”

Next is the Info tab, which contains your basic, personal and information, education/work history, as well as groups/pages. Standard information, but not the most important to the users.

Photos are by far my favorite thing to look at/share on Facebook. Within the new layout, they’ve made it easier to access your friends’ photos, as well as your own, since they’re now located on their own tab too.

With the addition of applications, profile pages started getting messier and messier. Fear not, with the new profile layout – they’re on their own tab and no longer on the main profile view.

Overall, I’m pleased with the new look and feel of the site. The one thing that I haven’t seen Facebook promoting is that the changes are going to occur. For those users that aren’t part of the “Facebook Profile Preview” group – there was a bit of confusion when I mentioned the new layout. I think Facebook should look at past roll-outs and realize that making sudden changes that impact the site will cause uproar amongst users. They’ve noted the change will be in the coming weeks, but I think they should start preparing everyone for what those changes will be.

What are your favorite works of inspiration? I love creating illustrations and sifiting through works by other artists. Here are a few of my favs:

• Joe Sorren
• Nicoletta Ceccoli
• Adriane Johnson
• Mattiasa
• Jamsan Project
• StartDrawing.org
• The Daily Monster
• Yoshinoya Singapore
• James Ulmer

Also, check out this month’s [July] issue of Communication Arts. For those of you in this office, swing by the creative room to see our copy.