A story about true love found on the Internet done up all West-Side-Story-style-ie.

I don't know about you, but this has seriously got to be one of the most disgusting-looking "high-end" food images I've ever come across.

In case you're wondering, it's the Williams Sanoma Jalapeno Pepper Roaster, a contraption that's ostensibly designed to hold stuffed jalapeno peppers upright over your grill. I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time, but in reality...heck, if they look this gross in the food-styled shot in the catalog, one can only imagine how unappetizing they'd look on your grill at home.

Yuck!

Business Week discusses the importance of taking your time to observe with decisions that aren't your forte and ends up giving good advice in general. In short, look before you leap. But it's more than that:

Most interpretative patterns are fashioned unconsciously and with lightning speed, throwing you into action before you can ask yourself: "Is my explanation for what is happening correct? What are some alternative hypotheses?"

If you do not question your own and your team's preferred interpretations, you may unintentionally end up avoiding the difficult tasks that need to be tackled in order to make real progress.

Once you have made an interpretation derived from your observations, what are you going to do about it? Will you share your interpretation during a meeting, try it out with a small group, or just wait? Your next move, your intervention, should reflect your understanding of the problem and your hypothesis about the best way forward.

Making Decisions Outside Your Repertoire - Business Week

...but I figured why not give our readers nightmares for a while?

Here's one of the most wonderful examples of the ever-popular "locally-produced commercial" I've ever seen.

Fantastic lessons from Bud Caddell:

We’ve come across things people want us to do, that we do well (or at least better than the competition) that we really don’t want to do. This is perhaps the most fatal trap for any business I’ve worked in. These are the sirens calling you to shipwreck. You’ll hemorrhage your best people, you’ll stop loving what you do, and you’ll lose the passion that built your business in the first place. Start saying ‘No.’

From The Harvard Business Review:

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia.

There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ⁱⁱ. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool.

This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Twitter catches a lot of flak for reasons of various legitimacy, but I will say that as an occasional user of their service, I have to agree with this one-to-many outlook. People are fundamentally more interested knowing that they've been heard than hearing.

On a related note, David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals) was interviewed in Forbes on his controversial opinions regarding web 2.0 companies:

Hansson would say that YouTube's financial hole is there not despite its popularity but because of it. When you give away your products, users are a cost center instead of a profit center, and so each new one puts you further behind. Facebook is spending so much money to store users' pictures that it's not clear that the company can ever make a profit.

A business model where each new user is a profit center? Crazy! Though it seems lack of a competent business model hasn't prevented David from embracing Twitter.

Labels: 37 Signals, Busines, Business Strategy, Forbes, Harvard, Twitter

I love to see "conventional widsom" myths get busted, so I was really excited to see that Social Computing Journal recently published a fascinating article that looks at who's really using all the "Web 2.0" stuff such as Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn. It turns out that it's not the 18-24 year olds who are the biggest users of these technologies but rather the 30+ crowd that's really down with social networking.

So much for what the "kids" are doing, huh?

Maybe the best thing to come out of the current recession is a return to common sense. More and more it seems like people are coming out of the woodwork to point out that the Emperor's naked. I think that most reasonable people have had a feeling that things are f****d up for a while now, but we all had a problem putting our finger on exactly what it is. Now it seems like we're finally hearing from people who are able to put a voice to all of our discontents.

My latest hero is Neva Goodwin, co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. She's a proponent of what she calls "Contextual Economics," a view of the "dismal science" that doesn't reduce everything to impersonal market forces. Instead, her view takes into account how culture influences the economy and (perhaps more importantly) how economics influences our culture.

Here are some of the highlights of an interview with her in Tufts Journal:

Q: We’re in the worst economic situation since the Depression—how did we get here?

...The impacts on the culture, both through advertising and through political contributions and other political influence, are critically important. They persuade people to buy more than they can afford—persuade them that they are going to look bad to their neighbors or the people they care about if they don’t appear wealthy. And they even persuade [former Federal Reserve chairman Alan] Greenspan that he ought to reduce the interest rate to keep people buying houses and other things to keep the bubble going.

Q: Could it be argued that this growth model inevitably leads to the crisis we’re seeing now?

...A good test is what embarrasses people. The New York Times this morning quoted a person who had worked for AIG who was asked, ‘Do you mind all this publicity?’ And he said, ‘Yes, it’s terrible. I feel as if I’m stripped naked.’ He didn’t say, ‘It’s terrible—people are suffering.’ But he was embarrassed. It’s gotten to be very, very hard to embarrass a corporate executive by saying, ‘You’re doing harm to people, to the environment.’ That has not been taken as embarrassing for quite a long time.

Q:If we’re at this inflection point, how would it change things for the better?

...Shrinking inequality is the essential first step for turning this around. I do think that the current temper of the country, for the first time since 1980, is really trending toward believing that continued growth in inequality is not a good thing. And if you have less inequality in both income and wealth, you also have less psychological drive to consume, because people don’t have these big differentials to compare themselves to.

Q:What else has to change?

To make our economy more sustainable, we need to examine the quantity and type of production and consumption. There is more throughput in the economy than the environment can sustain in absolute terms. The total quantity probably cannot continue growing for very much longer, because we live in physically finite world. But it probably can continue growing for a while.

Q: How do government subsidies play into this [people being more rational about what they're spending and what they're spending it on]?

There are a lot of black subsidies rather than green ones, like the subsidies that encourage mega-farming rather than sustainable farming. You don’t have to subsidize the sustainable farming—just take off the subsidies for the other. People complain about the subsidies going to rail transportation, which needs it, but other means of transportation have been highly subsidized—road building and airports are very much subsidized by governments. In some cases, just taking off the black subsidies would do it. In other cases, shifting them would make things move even faster.

Q:One advantage of an economic downturn is that people might be getting their values back in line, but many people are out of work, and those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale are suffering the most.

...We’re in this deep recession now, and let’s make the best of it. By making the best of it, let’s see if we can take this opportunity to make some pretty deep cultural changes, going back to values that were very much American values in the 19th century—of thrift and making do and a sense of responsibility to one’s employees.

Thrift is either alien or positively unattractive to a lot of young people today. You look really bad or nerdy if you are saving and careful with your money. That could change. It has changed before. But we’ve had a tremendously strong engine bringing us to where we are now, which was the motive of the corporations to sell ever more stuff.

Brilliant stuff, and (I think) vitally important. The "economy" is not some set of physical laws that exist outside the realm of human experience. Instead, the "economy" is human experience. Artificially separating economics from the cultural context it exists in seems to me like some remarkably simplistic 19th century dualistic impulse. The economy can't exist without people and people are complicated. Economics isn't about math as much as its about psychology and sociology. As Goodwin implies, its impossible to really understand the economy without understanding the people that make up the economy.

Market forces are people. Don't forget it.

Hey, I've done it. I've spent lots of time hanging out with these folks. I know these are true. I offer these as a public service to anyone who gets taken in by people who make their living writing business advice columns online.

1. Don’t trust anyone who says they work for a “Media Lab.”
2. If there are more than 2 books published on the same subject that claim to offer some stunning new insight, it’s over.
3. Disregard all “Keynote Speakers.” They’re sponsoring the conference.
4. Always do the opposite of what the cover of “Wired” says you should do.
5. Disregard all advice rendered as catchphrases.
6. Don’t trust any adult who tells you what the “kids” are doing.
7. If an article touts an idea that is somehow related to a startup, the author has an interest in that startup.
8. Nobody under 30 knows how to run a company. Any success otherwise is pure luck.
9. If the VC’s start blogging about it, run.
10. Twitter is not a business model.
11. Ignore business advice from anyone who quotes business books on the NYT Best Seller list. It’s too late.
12. If you heard about it first on NPR, it’s so last year’s tech.
13. When you go to see a popular speaker if all you remember later is their hair, forget everything you heard.
14. Technology journalists have no idea what regular folks are doing.
15. Any gadget review by someone who didn’t buy the gadget is suspect.
16. If you can’t tell what someone does in the first 15 seconds of their description (or within the two sentences of their bio), they’re full of crap.
17. If anything is followed by a version number (i.e. “Web 2.0”) it’s bullshit.
18. If the person you’re reading doesn’t get paid to write then they’re doing it to sell you something. Beware.
19. Earnest, black and white headshots are the surest sign that someone’s pulling your leg.
20. Nobody gives away “secrets” because they want to help you.

Bonus Tip: 21. If they're so smart, why are they being paid substandard wages to write a column about it?