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We’re not gourmet anymore…or are we? A recent article in the New York Times serves as an interesting follow-up to a recent W5 blog post regarding the cancellation of Gourmet magazine. According to the NY Times and publishing company Conde Nast, we haven’t see the last of the lauded foodie mag.
Gourmet’s second chance at survival arrives neatly wrapped in a digital package as an iPad application called “Gourmet Live.” The app will be fully loaded with recycled cooking tips and recipes from Gourmet’s current archive while an occasional sprinkling of new content will be used to spice things up.
Interestingly, the app is not intended to serve as a digital form of the magazine, but as a new way for consumers to engage with the brand. Given Gourmet’s dedicated following and the widespread disappointment with the magazine’s cancellation, repackaging the magazine in the form of an app appears to be a brilliant move. Not only will the app reintroduce a trusted brand in an entirely new way, it will fill the void for dedicated readers who have yet to find a satisfactory substitute. In addition, the app well help the brand reach a younger, tech-savvy audience. The trick will be keeping the content fresh enough to attract new readers and familiar enough to satisfy older fans. With Gourmet’s culinary legendary expertise and reputation, balancing old tastes with new textures should be as easy as cooking “Easy Seafood Paella“.
I gave up reading books that can be found in the business/advertising/marketing section of the bookstore a while back. Most of the books you find in that section should have never been written in the first place: authors rehashing their previous work, self-help for the cubicle crowd, and whatever flavor of behavioral psychology is cool this month. I also posit that the original, interesting books in this section are likely to be rambling, 300 page tomes that would work better as 8 page articles in the New Yorker.
So, with few exceptions, the New York Times Business Bestseller List is dead to me. One of those exceptions is Rework, from the founders of 37signals (and the masterminds behind the best blog in the world, signal vs. noise).
Rework is essentially a collection of a hundred or so brief essays on how they do business. Anyone who has read their blog knows that they are feisty, irreverent, critical, and, in the end, brutally honest and usually right. The essays are no different. From advice on how to nurture office culture, to their thoughts on the futility of meeting and conference calls, they lay it all out there for the reader to do with as they please.
I have a strong suspicion that anyone who read this book and tried to follow their lead word for word would fail – miserably. Taken with a level head and grain of salt, however, the book is filled with provocations that will change the way they go about their life at work.
Here is a brief PDF excerpt from the book. Enjoy.
We see a lot of data and present it in a lot of different ways, so when someone is out there analyzing the analysis it brings out the research geek. I tripped across Junk Charts today, a site dedicated to highlighting some of the worst in infographics. You can also follow the site on twitter, here.
I’ve recently come across several organizations and websites that aggregate and track facts. The Long Now is a foundation that claims as its goal the fostering of long-term thinking (blog), and companies like Ambient Devices offer cool consumer electronic products that are designed to “datacast,” constantly streaming real-time facts that by their nature are always changing, like the weather, the stock market, oil prices, traffic congestion, etc. (They go well beyond kitchen-window digital thermometers, the “Orb” on the right is one of their products.)
But Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow at the Harvard Medical School and associated with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, started a fascinating website and blog earlier this year that focus on “mesofacts,” facts that change slowly over time, but which are challenging to track. I’ve been checking the blog periodically to see the various charts and subjects they post.
“These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.” – Excerpt from Boston.com article by Arbesman
I’ve always felt a little challenged by retention of facts. So much of my personal approach to learning has been focused on comprehension and understanding, and pattern recognition, that the details sometimes seem to go, pardon the cliches, “in one ear and out the other,” or are “stuffed into the back of my mind somewhere.” I can’t remember jokes to save a party, and I’m not even as good at music trivia as my friends expect me to be. I studied International Relations in undergrad, but learned about the UN of the 90s, and the political climate of the post-Cold War world; it’s been challenging keeping up with foreign affairs and the state of international communications over the past ten years.
You don’t have to be a trivia buff, a librarian, or a passionate scholar to appreciate tracking of mesofacts of some kind. We all have our interests and challenges in keeping up with the evolution of knowledge on those topics. Your focus may be more academic, historic, entertainment, or even outright silly, but do remember to keep thinking and push yourself to keep up!
Note: We’re always seeking comments for our blog posts, but few people actually submit them! Feel free to tell us about your fact-watching, and especially your sources for keeping up-to-date, in the thread below!
Kudos to The Awl for two fairly recent charts featuring publishing statistics from the past decade. The images are too tall to just recopy in a single post here, but click through to check them out. This trend data, sourced from the Magazine Publishers of America and Audit Bureau of Circulations, respectively, is very interesting, but I’m particularly fond of how they’ve crafted the charts – in a tall, blog-friendly format rather than on a standard wide frame:
I keep reading articles that state how companies don’t get social media. As I look for solutions for my personal social media organization I think I realize why. There’s a lot out there to keep up with and figure out. I plan to write more on the topic, but for now I think this map from Brian Solis’ PR 2.0 website is a good start at trying to make sense of it all.
Everyone has a blog these days. They’re sprouting up like mushrooms, covering every walk of life, topic, niche interest, and viewpoint (even market research). It’s interesting that while some tools like WordPress here are getting more robust there are also tools on the other end of the spectrum.
I recently discovered (thanks to my wife) Posterous. A blogging tool that is so simple, it seems infinitely powerful. The site bills itself as “a dead simple place to post everything.” Essentially all a user has to do to set up and blog is e-mail their thoughts, pictures, files, etc. to Posterous and they’re off and blogging.
While part of it will mean more meaningless pictures from last night or odd bigfoot-style celebrity photos, I wonder if this kind of blogging will result in more and more instant complaint sites. Didn’t get satisfaction at the local fast food chain, don’t call 911, instantly complain via your not-so-microblog. Brands thought Twitter was rough, imagine what one would be able to do with more than 140 characters.
The Techneos team have started a blog in the past few weeks to publish their thoughts about trends in the mobile survey research world.
We’ve found mobile survey research very useful in the past for studies that are aimed at B2B targets, or highly mobile and/or tech-savvy consumers. With the growth of smartphone and netbook usage, particularly over the past couple of years, this methodology seems more and more vital. It’s great to be able to connect with research participants while they’re on the go, or engaged in their lives (whether for work or play) – not just when they find time to check their email or call back for a phone interview.
We find that expertise in both questionnaire design and data management is absolutely necessary to do in-depth analysis on data collected through this medium. It’s important to be concise in wording your questions and answer options, and you need more than just quick polling data to illuminate insights that lie beneath and behind survey responses. But that’s why we’re here – to recommend a technology solution if and when it’s appropriate for a research initiative, and to exercise our skills and perspectives to take the strategic insights to the next level.
