I’ve been thinking a lot about privacy, lately. Consider what has become the norm in the past couple of years:

• social networking is becoming the prevailing source for information about family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers
• bloggers spill their deepest thoughts into public posts
• Youtube and Flickr host thousands/millions of videos and pix of intimate family moments

For a culture that apparently prides itself on its right to privacy, this shift is intriguing.

Personally, I want the ability to post whatever I choose on the web about myself. Posting mainly to my friends, family, co-workers, etc. For their benefit, mainly. However, there are definitely people I don’t know that come across and read my blog posts. But when asked, I would definitely say that I value my privacy and don’t want people using this information for nefarious reasons.

Consider Twitter or Facebook statuses. A bunch of ordinary folks are posting to the world-at-large the minutia of their day.

• Angie is not feeling so hot
• Angie is wishing she could go to the beach
• Angie wants you to read this…
• blah, blah, blah

Seems boring, right? Initially, while pondering whether we want to participate and divulge all our feelings, thoughts and activities to our entire network, it seems preposterous. “Who really cares what I’m doing right now?” We think, “Who could be interested in my boring life?” Or the (more) narcissistic think, “Will enough people really pay attention?” In general, privacy isn’t necessarily top of mind.

In a recent NYTimes article, this phenomenon was discussed in great detail.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, said. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

Each individual bit of social information our friends post about themselves is insignificant on their own. Pretty mundane and boring. And especially not that important relative to our privacy. But taken as a whole, as an aggregation, these bits become themes and stories about us, posted and logged like an electronic journal of our day-to-day lives.

It is almost as if we have re-created the structure of small-town living, where everyone knows your business, but on a big-world scale.

In this context, privacy becomes more important, yet increasingly complex. What if government agencies start aggregating and mining this data? What if marketing agencies do, if they are not already? Would we mind? Could we stop it from happening? As always our laws and policies are years behind the technical and social movements.

It’s an interesting dilemma. Do we abstain from the social media and leave our networks to those that we can see and touch (or call up once in awhile)? For myself, who really doesn’t like talking on the phone that much, I have reaped the benefits of staying in touch with people that are miles away. All my friends from school, my family, etc are scattered across the country and the world. Yet, those that are in my network, I feel like they are closer than before. We are re-creating the neighborhood, the small-town over the web.

In the same NYTimes article, Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London, contemplates where this will lead us as a culture and asks, “Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?”

Gen Y’ers, probably the most embedded generation of the small-town internet, seem at once vigilant and laissez-faire about their privacy. If a company is found out to be “posing” in the blogosphere or in the social networks, they can be revealed and quickly lose their reputation. Yet, more than any generation, this group reveals the most intimate aspects of their life on Youtube and Flickr, for the whole world to see.

We do so in the hopes that only the “right” people are looking at it. That it’s all done in good faith and no one will use that information for harm. And we just figure we can’t control it all and continue to form our networks and share with them.

Will something we did when we were a kid be held against us later in life? Can we ever escape the history that we’re creating and publishing for all to see. Doubtful.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for our small-town life.

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.

In a recent alert on Jakob Nielsen’s site, the “guru of usability” helps us understand the really important website analytics and how to interpret them better. He then helps us understand the ways in which to improve our analytics, particularly the dreaded Bounce Rate.

The bounce rate of a site is measured by calculating those who enter through any page and leave from the same page versus those who enter through any page and click-through to another page.

Recent research has shown that an increasing number of people are entering sites not though the home page, but through some deeper, interior page. This can be due to the increase of social bookmark sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, which points the web user to particular content. As a result, the bounce rate of most sites is going up.

To better understand one’s own bounce rate and how to reduce it, Nielsen recommends understanding the bounce rates of particular visitors. Alas, not all bounce rates are equal, just as not all visitors are equal.

There are basically 4 categories of visitors:

1. Those entering from the likes of Digg. These are the least important to you because they are a fickle bunch and will have unusually high bounce rates.

2. Those who enter from direct links from other websites. These visitors are in essence receiving a recommendation from some other site. People who follow these recommendations may not have been looking for your site or product directly. They have some degree of interest, but if the usability of the site is poor or does not match their expectation, the bounce rate will be high.

3. Those entering from search engine traffic (whether it be SEO or paid links) will have a specific interest in your brand and your product. They are actively searching and wanting to engage with your company. Nielsen state, “If they leave immediately, there is something wrong with your landing pages.” Check your usability, your copywriting, and don’t forget to modify keywords.

4. Loyal users are those that return repeatedly to your site. This is your core consumer audience. If they return repeatedly, they may only be checking for new content on the site. Upon finding it, they will engage longer with your site than many other visitors. As long as they keep coming back, it’s okay if this user has a low page count.

All in all, Nielsen recommends shifting your attention from the “unique visitor” as the gold standard for a site’s success. Because the majority of unique visitors will be of the #1 and #2 variety above. Instead, count loyal customers and convert them with new content, new products, new special offers just for them. And try your best to convert the unique visitor into a repeat visitor.

Make sure the site doesn’t have confusing navaigation and is light on the copywriting. Insure that there is a clear path for the visitor to follow and provide them with next steps. Don’t force them to guess where the special product or offer is, expose it.

Full Disclosure - I’m not sure if you’ll believe me, but I started this blog BEFORE Stan Rapp and Rick Milenthal each gave separate presentations on the future of the Collaborative Model, of Engauage, to us here at Engauge Digital (formerly Spunlogic).

I’m certainly not anything special. And certainly not as visionary as the leaders of this new Engauge agency model. In retrospect, what I think happened is that in the past three months that I have been here, I have observed how Spunlogic sets itself apart by its level of effective collaboration. AND, that is exactly why Stan, Rick and the other leaders of Engauge thought we were such a great fit to this new agency model. It was synchronicity!

Wiki, Basecamp, Video Conference, GoTo Meeting, Sosius, Joyent, etc. are tools that help us collaborate. But, can tools make collaboration successful in and of themselves? Absolutely not.

Effective collaboration is impossible without the existence of important human factors. Teams made of members, equal in their contribution, all offering a unique skill set and points of view, come together to form an effective and efficient organism. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, sometimes. Stan Rapp made a great point by saying that true collaboration occurs when “specialists voluntarily join together to provide amazing results.”

That’s the power of collaboration. While tools can facilitate the communication and organization of the team, there is no substitute for true passion, skill, and camaraderie.

One of the wonderful things about Wiki is that everyone can contribute. It provides equalization of information, democracy in action, freedom of speech. This is what everyone finds so liberating about these tools. But we all know what speech can be like if collaboration breaks down. Silence, probably the best option, or worse, hurtful, discriminating and demoralizing speech impacting the entire group. What the best tools can do is to aid in the access and ease of information and knowledge sharing. What we humans have to do is the hard part.

So what makes human collaboration effective?

+ Atmosphere of trust & respect
+ Creativity
+ Open, regular and organized communication
+ Understanding everyone’s roles & responsibilities
+ Highlighting everyone’s strengths
+ Have fun: laugh and play
+ Learning from each other
+ Everyone feels empowered to make decisions
+ Everyone is after a common goal

When does collaboration breakdown?

+ CYA: paranoia amongst team members
+ Process for the sake of process
+ No fun! It’s all work, work, work
+ Meeting for the sake of meeting
+ Silos of communication
+ Decisions can only be made top-down
+ Everyone has their own goals they are trying to achieve through the group

No tools can prevent or promote these things. This has to come from us. If we don’t protect these things then the door is wide open for breakdown to creep in.

So the next time you are meeting with a colleague, thinking about how to solve a problem, constructing a project plan, remember the power of effective collaboration and amazing results will ensue!