Homophily in Social Networks

Thanks for the tip Arthur, the article you mentioned on O’Reilly about Content Relationships is an interesting read. I’m not sure where to begin, but I did very much like this: The methods I gave earlier for advertising interests (“Did you know … Joshua Schachter also competitively whittles Persian cats”) let you learn more about the people you already know. That’s an important difference from the prototypical serendipitous recommendation: “you and X should become friends!” As Liz Goodman pointed out, we’re grown-ups and have lots of friends already. What else can the software do for us besides making it even harder to keep up with all the people we know? People are conversational animals, give them more things to talk about. It reminded me of a moment I had last week when Jenn Sramek introduced herself on the CivicActions Team list. I’ve never met Jenn, and we haven’t worked directly with each other yet, so I had no way of really know what she was like or what kind of things she did outside of managing projects for CivicActions. Turns out she is into environmental sustainability and has worked on some interesting projects related to sustainability. She and I exchanged a few emails about some interesting sustainability projects and I e-introduced her to some friends of mine. Similarly, at our recent retreat in Amsterdam, I learned that Karyn Gladstone does trapeze! That is pretty cool. My girlfriend and I have talked about taking some classes in trapeze, and interest both of us have had since before we met (I make this poitn because it is not like we met...

Worldchanging, the book!

I am a frequent reader of the blog Worldchanging. It is really a wonderful source for very detailed and informative commentary about issues of sustainability from farming to autos. I’ve been waiting for Worldchanging the book to come out, and just today I got an email from my friend Sarah Pullman over at DeSmogBlog.com. It was a request from the folks at Worldchanging to make the forthcoming book a success by buying it before it comes out. It seems that the corporate publishing world is more and more like the mainstream movie world where opening weekend sales have the power to shape a movies success or failure. How does this translate to books? Well, presales on web sites like Amazon and Powells can make or break the book. I just bought my copy from Amazon (I wanted to use Powells but it was more expensive!, 4 Double tall soy lattes more expensive–ok, I know this is so not worldchanging of me to measure price differentials in soy lattes, or buy from amazon rather than Powells, but I’m in Seattle now, Amazon is our home town e-retailer, and well, Lattes seem to be the currency in this coffee town! I use my own cup for the lattes, that something, right?) Here is what Al Gore has to say about the book: “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century is a compendium of solutions, some little known but well proven, some innovative and new, some bold but as yet untried. This book not only shows what is already possible, but also helps all of us imagine what might be –...

Some more thoughts on Mass Mail: Formatting

Complex formatting in mass email is bad. There. I said it. I just don’t like it. When I look at a message (and I look at messages in a preview pane that is less than a 3rd of a screen high) and there are complex headers that mimic the website through the use of tables and all the image elements are suppressed by my mail client, it looks ugly. If the point of the message is to… well… to convey a message, I should be able to see/read that message easily. The website mimicry interferes with me getting the message. So how do you make your email look pretty? If you think it matters, use simple HTML formatting that will be easily interpreted by mail clients. Don’t use embeded images images that will be suppressed by the mail client, and link back to your site often throughout the email if you want people to come back to your site. Tests with one of our clients seem to show that over 70% of tracked opens result in a click through to the site from an inline link. The messages we send out for this client have no links in the header at all. No images. No color even. And we send out text only version and an html version that are manually formatted. Sometimes the text version doesn’t have links in the same places in order to make the text read better, but we know that when people look at the email, regardless of their mail client, they are going to see who it is from and they will be...

Rollingston: 10 Wors Congressmen

Rollingstone has an article on the 10 worst congressmen. It is great that a music/culture magazine like RS has takes up some big political issues, and, especially before the election, takes the ink to highlight some of the worst folks out there. it would be better though if they actually directed their readers to ways they could get involved in defeating these hacks, or highlighted their alternatives. Now on a technical front, it would be helpful to readers if they could search the 10 worst by state (at least) and send just a single profile to a friend (rather than the entire article). A TOC would also be a nice feature…. Give it a read and send it to your...

Mass Mail: Thoughts on “From” addresses

On a recent flight from San Francisco to Seattle, I took a few minutes to organize my personal email in box. Recently I noticed that some of my filters had stopped working. What I discovered as I cleaned them up, and added some new ones was that many of the “non-profit-yâ€? types of lists i was on has no little consistency in sender names and addresses (while most of the totally commercial ones were standard). For example, one political action committee sent me emails from no less than three different addresses, and none of them were from a particular “personâ€? so that was not the reason for the differences. A major national non profit rights group similarly used more than one sender address. A few organizations were even using “freeâ€? email addresses as the sender (think @gmail.com). Most subscribers to these lists might never notice these inconsistencies consciously, but I think that many would subconsciously pick up on the differences and the savvy amongst us would certianly notice. What does it matter? Subscribers who use filtering will run into the problems that I did. Maybe this is a good thing, since if I can’t filter it reliably into the right folder, it is more likely to sit in my inbox and maybe I am more likely to read it. On the other hand, I might just get frustrated and unsubscribe. As for the “freeâ€? email addresses, or those not similar or the same as the organization’s domain errode trust. Do i have any proof to back this up? No. Just a hunch. If i get an email from a...