It all started with StepRep. A while back, as part of our Great Dog Food Experiment, I “adopted” a used bookstore called the Book Bin, in Salem, Oregon. I created an account for the Book Bin and started monitoring their reputation using StepRep. Why? To get a feel for how everyday users interact with the product. To catch bugs. To come up with ideas for how it can be improved.

This week in my top keywords list I noticed something strange.

What the…?

That’s weird.

Clicking through to the page in question, part of an online pamphlet called The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order by end-of-the-world expecter Peter Goodgame, I tried to figure out what this weirdness was doing among my search results.

Goodgame’s thesis is that “militant Islam has been a card played by the global elites of the dominant Anglo-American establishment to achieve the long-term goal of a world government.” If you’re wondering whether the Freemasons, the British royal family, and the Bilderberg Group have a part in this plot, rest assured – they do. But how is Salem’s favourite used bookstore tangled up in the conspiracy?

With the help of Ctrl+F, I found the following passage:

However, bin Laden’s time in London has since been confirmed by Saudi-based journalist Adam Robinson in his book Bin Laden – Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Then this:

[I]n 1973 the Islamic Council of Europe was created with headquarters in London. The Council’s long-time Secretary General was a prominent Muslim Brother by the name of Salem Azzam …

So there you go. The name of the business, plus the name of the city where it’s located, appearing together on a single page. For a small business without a lot of online mentions, that’s enough to make it into this week’s top keywords list.

You see, at its core, StepRep is pretty simple. It collects data through queries to Google, Bing, and all the other major search engines. If you didn’t mind submitting multiple queries to multiple search engines all day long every single day, and sorting through all the hits to eliminate duplicates, you could get the same results StepRep does.

After the results are gathered, StepRep does some data analysis to determine sentiment and relevancy. But as the Bin Laden example illustrates, it’s not foolproof. The problem is that StepRep isn’t smart enough (yet) to figure out from context that the phrase “his book Bin Laden” has nothing to do with a store called the Book Bin.

Is that a damaging confession for me to make? Well, how would you do it? …How would you design a search algorithm clever enough to screen out bad results like “his book Bin Laden” without also screening out good results like “His Book Bin excursion was a success…” or “The Book Bin, laden with rare finds…” Bear in mind, this algorithm also has to work for every other business name in the English-speaking world.

If you’ve got a solution, you should definitely get in touch with us, because we’re looking for smart people to help us improve the relevancy of our searches. I thought this story was worth sharing because it illustrates just how difficult it is to achieve perfect accuracy. StepRep is getting stronger and stronger, but (unlike the Bilderberg Group) it’s not all-powerful…yet…

Yesterday I found myself reading Shipping Out, Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s article about his adventures on a seven-day luxury cruise of the Caribbean. He describes an “odd little essaymercial” by the author Frank Conroy that appears in the cruise line’s promotional brochure. The essay is “graceful and lapidary and persuasive”, but “also completely insidious and bad”:

In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

This upsets me, because my great respect for Wallace makes me fear there’s something to his argument, which I would otherwise wave off as the predictable anti-consumerism of the Adbusters crowd.

Here’s my view. We’re all in agreement that King Lear is a work of art and that the latest Mountain Dew ad isn’t. In between, things get fuzzy. Is an indie film like The Kids Are All Right art? What about the current number one movie in North America, Inception? What about Spike Jonze’s 30-minute short film I’m Here, sponsored by Absolut Vodka? What about those Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like clips that went viral not long ago?

Wallace’s comments imply that there’s a straightforward heuristic one can use to differentiate art from non-art. I don’t think there is one. I think there are elements of art, craft, and commerce in all the works mentioned above.

Having experience in both advertising and art-for-art’s-sake, I can identify only one real difference between them: advertising is way harder. When you’re making art you have to please yourself and your audience – and if you don’t mind being a starving artist, you can settle for just pleasing yourself. But when you’re making an ad, in addition to pleasing your audience, you have to sell them something.

It’s tough. You have to think about every word and every image from two totally different perspectives. It’s tempting to compromise on one side or the other – weaken the pitch to make the ad more entertaining, or toss out the entertainment and focus on the selling message. But there can be no compromise. If your ad isn’t pleasing, your sales pitch will flop. But if your ad is pleasing and your sales pitch still flops, that’s it. You’ve flopped.

That’s why most advertising is so terrible. It’s not because marketers are hacks. It’s because it requires exceptional talent to make a good ad. I haven’t made one yet. I keep on trying, because it’s a challenge, but also (let’s face it) because I have to – marketing is the only career where a semi-talented writer like me can make a decent living. If I decided to join the righteous ranks of the artists, I’d be living in a cardboard box within a year.

From the excerpts Wallace supplies, I’d say Frank Conroy’s “graceful and lapidary and persuasive”  Caribbean cruise essay is an unusually good ad. Did Conroy get any satisfaction from the assignment? In a footnote, Wallace reports that he got in touch with the author to ask him how he got into the “essaymercial” biz. The reply: “I prostituted myself.”

What would happen if all the talented writers in the advertising biz quit prostituting themselves and became artists? There would be a whole lot more mediocre novels sitting unread in people’s desk drawers. There would be a whole lot more undernourished authors living in their parents’ attics. And there would be just as many ads – only they’d be that much worse than they are already.

I wish David Foster Wallace were still alive to have this disagreement with.

Artist unknown. Photo by k1ng. CC licensed.

That’s what we’ve taken to calling the little faceless creatures who currently dwell on the main page of StepRep:

The Weebles have been there ever since the site was redesigned back in February. Given the many permutations the main page has gone through since StepRep launched back in January 2009, the Weebles have demonstrated surprising staying power. We’ve often talked about how we’d like to replace them, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. We want to make sure that whatever illustration we put in the Weebles’ place, we’ll be happy with it for a good long time.

To this end I’ve been trading ideas with our graphic designer, Marie-Louise. A couple weeks ago I enlisted our office manager Tiffany to stick a rolled-up paper tube in her ear and pose for me. (Tiffany has lately taken on the role of StepRep social media coordinator, so she was the logical choice to model.) Here she is monitoring the online chatter:

Maybe Marie-Louise will find a way to refine that image so it fits the style of the website, or maybe the idea will be tossed onto the junkheap along with our earlier failed attempts. Meanwhile, if you’ve got any suggestions for how we can communicate the benefits of reputation intelligence in a single illustration, please send them along. We’ve got some other design changes coming to the site in the coming weeks, so now’s the time to send the Weebles wobbling on their way.

When this question comes up, we laugh and quickly change the subject to David Hume, with whom we feel on firmer ground. But I’ve been reading Burke lately and may finally be able to answer this pressing question.

First some background. The Agile Manifesto spells out the principles of Agile design, which favours:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Agile is usually contrasted with the so-called “waterfall” method, whereby a plan is conceived by the bigwigs at the top of the org chart, then tumbles down to the folks on level two, who add their contribution before sending it down to the peons on level three, who pass it on to the schnooks on level four, and so on, until it arrives at the bottommost level, by which time the bigwigs have all been fired and their replacements have started work on an entirely different plan.

In an Agile environment, the bigwigs work alongside the peons on cross-functional teams that plan, design, and implement one or two small improvements at a time, in a series of short intervals called sprints, lasting a week or two. At the end of every sprint, a working piece of software is released, and the team pauses to consider the results and to set objectives for the following sprint.

Edmund Burke was a parliamentarian, pamphleteer, and the foremost English critic of the French Revolution. He’s sometimes smeared as a reactionary, but  in fact he was a gradualist, who favoured measured change within a constitutional framework over all-encompassing plans dreamed up in a philosopher’s salon.

In Reflections on the Revolution in France he spells out the superiority of the gradualist approach:

[I]n my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. By a slow but well-maintained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first, gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series. We see, that the parts of the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we reconcile, we balance…. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.

Of course, by its very name, Agile would seem to be in conflict with the precepts of gradualism. The whole point of Agile is to allow for rapid adaptation to changing circumstances.

But that apparent conflict is an illusion, as Burke’s history teaches us. The French Revolution was the quintessential waterfall project, in which a small group of visionaries, untroubled by any practical concern for how governments and economies function, arbitrarily rewrote the entire body of their nation’s laws. Their plan, so elegant in the abstract, fell apart at its first collision with the reality of human behaviour. The inalienable Rights of Man gave way to factiousness, bloodshed, and tyranny. Almost a century passed before a stable French republic emerged.

In software terms, the French Revolution was a flashy new release that was so buggy and unpopular that it bankrupted the company.

Meanwhile the British, by an Agile process of small fixes and improvements, continued their “slow but well-maintained progress” toward universal democracy. Even now the Brits don’t have a written constitution, and they seem generally untroubled by the deficiency. You could say they favour “responding to change over following a plan”.

It might seem like a paradox, but Agile is a gradualist approach. Edmund Burke, it turns out, would approve.

Coming soon: Montaigne on Flash versus HTML5.

Then came the printing press, the telephone, the internet, social media, and at last we’ve reached the apex of technological achievement – MashedIn, which allows people to identify common friends and interests across multiple social networks.

We’ve finally caught up with the dogs.

I’m not a real artist; my freehand drawings look like something a third-grader’s mom would hang on the less-visible side of the fridge. I illustrate by tracing from photos. Yet somehow even when tracing from photos I manage to get some faces completely wrong.

It’s funny. Sometimes I just slash in a couple lines and discover, to my surprise, the intended face staring back at me from the screen. Other times I spend hours – well, I could spend hours, though I usually give up after twenty minutes or so – anyway, I spend a whole bunch of time tweaking and erasing, but no matter where I push the lines, the drawing still doesn’t capture the essence of its subject. The pieces are all there, but somehow they don’t add up.

I suppose real artists must know some tricks that I never learned. They could look at the pictures below and explain why cartoon Jeff doesn’t look anything like real-life Jeff. Something in the nose, maybe? The lips, the eyes? All the above?

My guess is that a proper portrait artist will know how to select the one or two features that are most characteristic of the subject and subtly exaggerate them in a way that seems true-to-life – even though it departs from the actual lines of the face. That’s just a theory. But what is Jeff’s most characteristic feature? I can’t decide.

I had a request to post these drawings of some of my VendAsta workmates, created for a recent MashedIn cartoon, on the blog, and with mild trepidation I oblige. Of the sixteen I think about nine turned out pretty well. To the other seven subjects, I apologize.

(Click through for larger versions.)

Each frame consists of multiple layers. For instance, this image of me checking my wallet contains a layer for my face, another layer for my beard, a layer for my shirt, and a layer for my hands. (The microphone is another layer, but it’s a static unchanging picture, so it only had to be drawn once.)

My hands, luckily, are only visible for about a quarter of the cartoon. I used various shortcuts to avoid having to do my shirt over and over, but it still had to be drawn a few hundred times.

So there are, to be conservative, about 5,000 individually drawn images in the cartoon. It took between thirty seconds (for the beard) and two minutes (for hands and faces) to draw each of these pictures. So, once again guessing conservatively, call it an average of a minute per frame.

5,000 minutes is about 83 hours.

Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. 83 hours is only two weeks of work, give or take. And I worked on this cartoon, off and on, for almost two months. So why’d it take so long?

Well, bear in mind, that’s 83 hours of pure, mechanical, repetitive drawing. That doesn’t include any time for reflection, aesthetic evaluation, leaning back in the chair and stretching, or pausing to make tea and bring up a new artist on iTunes.

Nor does it include all the extra work involved in filming and editing the original video, hunting down sound effects, tracing my co-workers’ faces for the “virtual wallet” section, and making all the elements flow together smoothly.

I’m not complaining. I consider myself very lucky that I’m getting paid to do this stuff. But I often wonder if the investment of time is worth it. How many people, in the end, will ever see this cartoon?

Of course, every time we create a video, it’s a gamble. We’re gambling a few weeks of my time on the chance that the video will find a wide audience. If it doesn’t – and so far, none of them have – we can still throw the video up on one of our blogs for the amusement and edification of people who wander by.

Still, it makes me wonder. Are we gambling wisely? A couple months back, Brendan pointed me to this Social Media Revolution video. At the time, it had been seen by a few thousand people. “We should make a video like this!” he enthused. And his instincts were bang on – before long the video went viral, and now it’s got 1.8 million hits.

But what would “Social Media Revolution” look like if I made it? Instead of Fatboy Slim it would have a soundtrack by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. And instead of graphics that flew by almost as fast as you could read them, it would have a stammering voiceover by yours truly. And instead of 1.8 million hits, it would have 180.

Last week Jason and Dave were down at the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. While they were there they showed off a new app that the MashedIn team developed, which we’re calling Flutter.

It’s a mobile app for location-aware phones. Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar place – maybe at a conference in a faraway city – heck, say you’re at the Chirp conference in San Francisco. So you pull out your iPhone (or whatever), point your browser to Flutter, and bingo – up comes a list of people who’ve recently tweeted (or accessed Flutter) using their mobile phones in the vicinity of the conference center.

But this is where we seem to lose people. The exciting thing about the MashedIn technology that powers Flutter is that it reveals connections across social networks. For instance, if you’re a Facebook user who’s never heard of Twitter, you might nevertheless discover you’re connected, through a mutual friend, to a Twitter guy who isn’t on Facebook.

So let’s take another look at that list of people who’ve recently tweeted from the conference center. Right at the top of the list you’ll see the people you’re connected to – your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contacts, sure – but also people you don’t know directly but whom, based on mutual connections, you might want to meet.

What you do with this information is up to you. The Techi blog speculated that Flutter could be useful for stalking people. Well, I guess…but if Flutter is the best stalking method you can come up with, you really need some stalking lessons.

No, we think the main benefit of Flutter is that you can meet new people in strange locations. You might not know anyone at the Chirp conference in San Francisco, but think about how many connections Flutter could potentially reveal…

Maybe Flutter reveals that you’re connected via your ex-boss Cindy to a fellow conference-goer named Amber. So you fire Amber a message – “Hey, I used to work for Cindy. You want to grab a coffee and talk about that freaky hair-helmet of hers?”

Will it work? Maybe, maybe not…but it beats slouching back to your hotel room to watch old Friends episodes on TBS.

Before Jason and Dave left for San Francisco I dashed off a press release to see if we could generate some buzz for Flutter. I guess in retrospect I should’ve spent a little more time obsessing over the wording, because some people, like the guys at Techi, seemed to miss the point.

But we’ll win ‘em over. Just watch us.

But I’m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. The video has appeared in a bunch of blogs written in a bunch of languages that I can’t read.

Thanks to StepRep’s Reputation Monitor, I receive regular updates on my band’s virtual tour of the Old World. Today I was alerted to the fact that our video had appeared on the French blog Fumez La Moquette (“Steam The Carpet”).

“Un travail de titan pour un résultat bluffant,” reads the caption – “A titanic labour for an awesome result.” Nice.

Having by now seen my video praised as well as belittled in numerous online forums, I hardly needed to strain my tenth-grade French skills to interpret what the commenters were saying about it. Most of them liked it, some snarked about it, and a few wondered how many trees were chopped down to make it. (The answer is “many”.) But this comment piqued my curiosity:

sinon le bassiste dans la vidéo me fait pensée à l’acteur dans Very bad trip le beau frère louche

(“By the way, the bassist in this video makes me think of the actor in Very Bad Trip, the dissipated brother-in-law.”)

It took some Googling to figure out that Very Bad Trip is the title under which the film The Hangover was released in France and Belgium. Isn’t that weird? Instead of translating the word “hangover” into French, the distributors released the film under an English-language title that was different from the original title! Why would they do that?

Anyway, this commenter is saying that Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall looks like the co-star of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis. See the resemblance?

Zach Galifianakis and Andrew Hall

Mmm…maybe a little in the beard area?

This is just one more example of the fun that can come from using StepRep to monitor your online reputation. And that’s my contribution to StepRep’s marketing efforts for today. Now where’d I put that crossword puzzle…?

Alas, it’s not so easy. The movement in the foreground of an animated cartoon lets you get away with simple solid colours behind, whereas a comic, I’ve discovered, looks empty unless you put some scenery behind the characters. As another example, when I was making the Spokesmonster cartoons we always saw him from the same head-on perspective, so I just re-used the same three monster heads over and over again; comics demand a little more variation in the perspective, so each individual figure needs to be drawn.

Having spent many hours over the past few weeks creating this comic for my co-worker’s band Sexy Mathematics, and many more hours creating this other comic for the StepRep platform for online business directories, I have a renewed respect for real comic book artists, who have to churn out a twenty-page issue every month. Of course, they’ve got an unfair advantage over me: they actually know how to draw. Me, I have to take photos of my subjects and painstakingly trace them.

So thanks to Chris and Liz from Sexy Mathematics, and to Nicole and Tavis who posed for the StepRep comic. (Consider growing sideburns, Tavis. Seriously.)