Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

A Telling Map of Job Losses

Slate's Moneybox has an interactive map that shows job creation and loss throughout the US for the past two years. Watching it flow through each month's up and down definitely made the employment situation in the country clearer to me. Like any great visualization image and the legend make it very clear what's happening. Here's Slate's explanation of how they created this:

Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America. Because the data are not seasonally adjusted for natural employment cycles throughout the year, the numbers you see show the change in the number of people employed compared with the same month in the previous year. Blue dots represent a net increase in jobs, while red dots indicate a decrease. The larger the dot, the greater the number of jobs gained or lost.

The country begins a awash with blue (job growth) in January 2006:

By February 2009 job loss looks like:

Slate is using readily available public data, but presenting it in a much more digestible form than what you see in this table of similar data from the Labor Department:

The table is good for diving in to see a specific data point, but the map draws us out and shows us a larger story in motion. I hope that story goes back to blue soon.

At Where 2.0 in May we will hear from a number of speakers who create these types of maps. Matthew Ericson of the New York Times will discuss the maps they used in their election coverage and Michal Migurski of Stamen Design will be explore data sources for maps. Registration is still open; you can use whr09rdr for 25% off.

Waking Up from the 'Nightmare on Tech Street'

Reading Om Malik's Nightmare on Tech Street piece, I wonder if we're actually just waking up from the nightmare. Yes, the abrupt collapse of demand for consumer electronics and their ilk will hurt tech companies--I'm bracing my own for the slowdown--but the icy bath that brings down a killing fever trades pain for gain.

In a recent conversation with my daughter Arwen and son-in-law Saul Griffith, Matt Webb remarked that he'd like 2008 to be remembered as the year of "peak consumption." Saul pointed out, though, that the term "peak waste" is perhaps more accurate. In an analogy to peak oil, he suggested that maybe we've reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I do wonder if we will look back at the past few decades as a kind of sick aberration rather than a golden age, with good times we want to get back to. Like Saul, I'm hopeful that we can get rid of the waste, and get back to creating things of lasting value.

I've so often been struck by the incongruity of vast Chinese factories producing millions of truly useless goods, from tourist tchotchkes to marketing gimmickry. (I've often wondered: "What do they think of us, so rich that we can afford to spend money on so much that is useless!" And now we find that perhaps our wealth too was rooted in illusion.) And even when it comes to consumer electronics, we've built a throwaway culture rooted in waste. As Saul likes to say, you can't imagine handing down "your grandfather's iPod" the way you could your grandmother's watch, or tools, or furniture, or books. It doesn't have to be that way. Yes, technology improves and old devices get left behind, but there are so many innovations that could reduce waste, improve usability and create lasting value, things like standardized power adapters, open source hardware that is re-usable, modifiable, and repairable, as well as technology that is simple and robust enough to pass the test of time.

We've had a shock, yes, with more to come. But let's hope it wakes us up. Let's not lament it. Let's embrace it, and use it to change our priorities. As I've said before, the best response to the downturn is to work on stuff that matters!