Watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson educate Richard Dawkins on the importance of understanding context when “teaching” others. Tyson makes a wonderful point about the difference between information and persuasion.

It’s a clear reminder that users/customers/consumers whatever you want to call them, feel they have a stake in your brand.  Sometimes they feel their stake is as much as the actual owner’s. It’s yet to be seen if the new owners of Delicious can make enough changes to keep users attracted to their site, or if they’ll drive away existing users and do little to encourage growth. One thing is clear, they may have misjudged the passion and expectations that many of their customers have for their brand and service.

• Environmentalism
• Rock Climbing
• Spicy Foods
• Singles
• Food types
• Baseball

Beautiful series of infographics by Peter Orntoft about how the Danish people feel about a number of pressing social issues. Though shortfalls of time, budget, and creativity force us to revert to PowerPoint Smart Art, it’s inspiring to see work that challenges what an infographic can be.

Eric Fischer’s recently-posted Flickr photoset relies on 2000 Census stats and OpenStreetMap data, depicting racial and ethnic divides in a few dozen major American cities. His work was inspired by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago’s racial and ethnic divides. The visualizations for Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Houston are particularly striking, and most maps feature some explanatory notes through use of mouse-overs.

"Race and Ethnicity - Long Beach" By Eric Fischer

This is great work, and I hope to one day see an update based on 2010 Census data to see, among other things, the changes in concentration of Hispanic-Americans, the differences in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the evolving makeups of Southeastern cities.  This is fascinating data and imagery that really makes one think about what a difference a decade makes.

• Someone to post fliers for you around their college campus
• Astrological readings
• Transcription Services
• Custom created birthday cards
• Voiceovers
• Advice
• Exposure for your website

While much of it is silly, it’s a sign of how the web creates personalized products and services, micro-services if you will. While $5 might not seem like much, if someone can perform a $5 task several times in an hour or leverage the power of their own social network to advertise over and over again, they might make a little bit of extra money. More importantly, services like this and Kickstarter continue to lower the time and money investment needed to start something new.

Today on my way in, I heard a radio spot for a body groomer for men. The ad highlighted two things: 1) the company will plant a tree for each unit sold and 2) you can go to their website to create an avatar, a virtual shaved you. Honestly, what’s the point? They have a series of humorous videos to both explain the product benefits and drive interest, that makes sense to me.  But the social/green aspect feels out of place.

First, if your brand wants to go green, that’s great. But don’t greenwash. If you go green it needs to be related to your product. So if you plant trees but still use toxic chemicals or kill indigenous plants and birds to make your stuff, that’s no good. How could a body shaver go green? Maybe they could make the product more energy efficient or use a high percentage of recycled plastic in making it. Those would both be relevant. Otherwise, don’t bother.

Second, not every product needs or deserves a community. Using a viral video to highlight benefits, drive interest, etc. makes sense. If it’s cheap and you think it will have any impact, do it. The problem is do I really want to be in a community for a product like this? Do I need an avatar just for me? Does any guy really talk to their friends (or strangers for that matter) about grooming and how they look?  The answer is not really. So while you might think it’s great for your customers to talk to each other about your product or brand, you still need to understand if they’re actually going to do it.

I’ll give some brands like this credit though. They provided a few how-to videos to let guys escape embarrassment and learn about new ways of using the product on their own.

Green and social were new and interesting and have become “expected.” However, as with anything else in life, they’re only worth doing if you do them well.”

Imagine your iTunes filled with everything you could ever ask for, but that’s taking no hard disk space. I know what you’re thinking – so, what if I’m out and there’s no reception on my iPhone, or I have lost Internet in my house? Well, then you can download your playlists to an offline mode that will act just like any MP3 player, even if you are connected or not. Pure brilliance. Unfortunately, they haven’t released it in the US yet – Spotify is fighting with licenses and bigger record companies for access, and it shouldn’t be too far now. My way (and many others that are living in the US) around it is; I registered for free in Sweden while I was there, and when I’m now a subscriber every month ($10) I get a premium account which let’s me ‘travel’ with the service indefinitely–otherwise it would shut me down after 2 weeks abroad.

The new update (called ‘The Next Generation’) features pure awesomeness. With your own individual profile on Spotify you can now connect with your friends on Facebook, or whomever you’d like – and share tracks, playlists and artists with easy clicks. With your own inbox you can send and receive songs – you can ‘star’ favorites and let your wireless connection share info between your devices. It’s now even more about sharing, and who doesn’t want great, daily recommendations from other music lovers around their social network? Read about the release and get excited. Soon, when the US will get access, I’m seriously saying that Apple and iTunes will have a hard time competing. This is by far one of the greatest softwares I have ever experienced, and I do like to pride myself in good things that are Swedish. Let the music free!

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!

In the rush to go to market with new line extensions and ads and products, there are a few lessons that companies could learn from the idea of Crop Mobs: simplicity, social interaction, providing value, etc. Offer your consumers value and give them a seat at the table.

Check out a Flickr gallery of the Crob Mob here.

Both are interesting examples of non-traditional story telling.