The Gong Show

I’m going to Spoon and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (CYHSY) on back-to-back nights (Dec 30th and Dec 31st respectively). I’m really excited for both shows.

I’ve been a huge spoon fan for about 4 years now, but I have not had the chance to see them live until now. “Stay Don’t Go” has been haunting me for years; the background beat-boxing too catchy to resist. Every time I listen to that track I get the urge to “rock out with my cock out” (see picture to right).

I have had the privilege of seeing CYHSY live earlier this year at summerstage. But, on this upcoming NYE show, Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett of Arcade Fire) will be opening, which has me writhing in fits of joy. Should be a sweet show.

CYHSY has a new album coming out at the end of January. Here’s a few tracks from the upcoming album that CYHSY put up on their website:

• Check out Love Song No. 7
• Check out Underwater (You and Me)

I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston today. It used to be a cramped little museum hidden in a retrofitted firehouse in the Bay Back. However, a few weeks ago, the ICA opened in a brand new South Boston building right on the water. The combination of the building the the collection makes the ICA the best destination in Boston, no contest.

I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the ICA’s new location: the NYTimes ran a rave review a few weeks ago.

Ocean Deck

The ICA used its bay-front property well by building a large deck (pictured above) that hovers above the water. It’s open to the public (free, no ticket required), so I’m certain it will become a social refuge for Bostonians in fairer weather.

Media Center

My favorite room in the whole building is the media center (pictured above). It is a sloped room with a computer cluster built into tiers of stairs. At the bottom of the room, all that is visible is water; no horizon or building. It’s a surreal experience. Here is the NYTimes commentary on this fantastic room:

That entrancing image sums up the museum’s goal of resensitizing its audience to the world’s tactile surfaces, its patterns, its range of scales — whether the subject before us is the city or a solitary work of art. It is the architecture of empathy, welcome therapy for a self-involved age.

Those are beautiful words, but the room must be experienced in person to really understand the effect it has on the viewer.

Entry Mural: Gas

I apologize for the quality of the image above as it doesn’t represent the true colors of the entry way mural entitled: Gas. There is a 360-degree’s interactive capture of this mural that you can use to see the massive scale of this work of art.

It’s a very odd and particularly noteworthy piece depicting a naked sprite releasing a “divine fart.” The beauty, scale, and subject matter are all jarring in a way that works together well. Again, it really must be experienced in person.

If you find yourself in Boston in the near future, for business or for pleasure, you have to check out the new ICA.

At Union Square Ventures, we spend substantial time thinking about customer service. I know it sounds like a rather narrow subject in the larger picture of aiding portfolio companies and making investments. However, as customers cross the barrier from being consumer to being prosumers (producer + consumer), customer service is more important than ever. Inspiring customers to make the prosumer leap requires giving customers a sense of ownership in the company, a desire to want aid the company in content creation, moderation, and even customer service.

Good customer service can drive your customers to evangelize for your product. Once customers have figured out a solution to their problem, if you foster your customers to feel a sense of ownership, then they will go out and act as customer service agents for other users having the same problem. Etsy is a champion in this respect. However, all these good feelings and customer cooperation is contingent upon good customer service experiences. Bad customer service can blow up in unanticipated ways.

Why is this relevant right now? Well, I was previously employed at Homestead, a value-added hosting company in Menlo Park. Justin Kitch, the CEO of Homestead, began blogging earlier this year, and he posted a rather controversial story about cutting relations with deviant and extraordinarily difficult customers. It’s a common practice in service businesses, but it is also tacit.

A disgruntled Homestead customer picked up on the story and blogged about it. He recounts specific difficulties he had with Homestead and details his dissatisfaction with Homestead customer service’s response to his requests. Then, his post made the front page of Digg, which gave his dissatisfaction a megaphone.

Justin responded in a personal email and phone conversation to the blogger which can be found in the comments. Justin also posted a more public response on his blog.

Justin’s response is well-thought out and takes the middle ground, stating that Homestead serves the greatest number of customers as best as possible with the limited resources that all businesses have to work with:

Let’s return to the general topic of putting employees ahead of customers, and rejecting the hackneyed philosophy of “the customer is always right.” The topic seems to have struck a chord with… business owners who feel customers have been falsely empowered to act like jerks, sapping their resources and energy, and hurting their ability to serve their non-jerk customers (most people) and build great businesses. This response is entirely predictable, because in my experience almost all businesses feel this way–they are just afraid to say it. I’m not.

It’s a brazen position, and before you react strongly to the comment, it would be best to read the quote in the context of the rest of the article.

The story of Homestead’s now-very-public practice of “firing customers” is an important lesson in the development of great customer service. However, one has to wonder if the bad publicity generated by the digged blogpost can be avoided while still being reasonable with the resources accessible to customer service departments. It’s a tough line to walk, and all the articles above help guide the boundaries.

Pentagram Design re-branded Christmas. Complete with sharp sans-serif font, five-note musical signature (Think: “Intel chime”), and hot brandable name, x.mas is Christmas 2.0 (Yes, of course they used the phrase “Christmas 2.0″). Companies would pay to rep the brand with their own logo (see image on the right). They claim they are embracing the commercialism of Christmas. NYTimes has the details.

…The designers did their best, first identifying the three chief problems with the brand: it’s divisive, ugly and, of course, overcommercialized. Next they came up with a big idea to try to fix these problems. It was not to rename Christmas, exactly, but to streamline it by creating what might be thought of as an “overall umbrella brand,” Mr. Bierut said, one that sounded contemporary, hip and, most important, Internet-ready: x.mas.

I am in no way in favor of preserving tradition; that’s not why I object to this idea. However, if one is going to re-make Christmas, why does it have to be so commercial? Pentagram could have easily chosen to emphasize the family element of going home for the holidays. Something more wholesome instead of… whore-ish. Of course, that would not have the same shock-value, and probably would not have generated an NYTimes article (or this blog post). *Sigh* I guess I’m just feeding the beast.

Premise
Two nights ago I started building a list of “best albums of 2006″ lists. I thought the aggregate of the data would be interesting to capture. I find reading best albums lists fascinating because I can completely agree with one choice and be totally turned-off by the next. I found myself reading so many of these lists, that I thought I should do a more formal deep dive.

Sources
I ended up compiling a list of 180 “top albums of 2006″ lists. Some are from old media: (think: SPIN). Some are from new media: (think: Pitchfork). Some are just bloggers. Some aren’t even bloggers, but left a “best albums of 2006″ list in the comments section of a blog.

My sources for finding lists were del.icio.us, technorati, my own OPML, music mags online that I like, and this excellent blog post I stumbled upon from somewhere.

I do not by any means claim this list to be complete or even comprehensive. For example, I didn’t go check out Rolling Stone online, that would be an important data point, but I got tired.

However, I do think I have enough lists to be interesting. I don’t know how many lists I would need to be statistically representative of the music community online; if someone with a stats background has the answer I would be curious.

Methodology
I did not descriminate based on readership, domain, nationality, or language. However, the content did have to be online (I didn’t feel like buying any magazines).

I only collected lists that ranked their lists in order of preference. Top 10 lists that didn’t have any numbers next to the entries didn’t quality because they didn’t provide enough information to do anything fun with the aggregate data.

I only collected lists that rated the best albums of 2006 without qualifications. For example, lists that said stuff like “the best hip hop albums of 2006″ don’t qualify because it is limited to a specific genre of music.

I only collected lists that mentioned bands and albums that were actually from 2006. Very few lists were removed based on this qualification, but some did get the axe. For example, one person on live journal listed the OK Go album as their favorite of 2006. This was actually released in 2005 so it didn’t qualify. I’m sure there are albums on this list that are not from 2006, and if you identify any please let me know and I’ll remove them. I only removed the ones I knew violated the rules.

Once I had my lists, I thought the obvious cool thing to do first would be to find out what is the general concensus on the best album of 2006. I had 180 sources to work with, so I simply copied the #1 album (and artist) on every list by hand into an Excel doc. A few pivots later I had my results.

Results
The following table shows the number of times a given album appeared in the #1 spot on a “Best Album of 2006″ list:

And here’s the long tail histogram of the table (labels removed for x-axis for readibility, but obviously it’s the albums in order of their rank):

Conclusions
Well, duh, the first conclusion to draw is that if a whole bunch of critics and bloggers were given one vote each, they would choose TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain to be the best album of 2006. However, Return to Cookie Mountain represents less than 8% of the vote. Chris Anderson would be happy.

The second conclusion is rather anecdotal (though one could prove it with some analysis and more screen scraping): the aggregate of everyone’s number 1 choice looks very similar to people’s individual lists. If I get motivated over the break, I’d like to formally prove the correlation I’m describing, but after looking at 180 “best albums” lists I can say with confidence that taking only the number #1 pick from everyone’s lists is very representative of the average individual’s top 10 albums.

There’s a ton more that can be done with this stuff…. For example, if I did the same analysis on everyone’s #2 pick, would TV on the Radio come out on top again? Probably not because 8% of the lists would already have it picked in the #1 spot. Would The Knife be most picked at #2 (which would be a step towards proving my second conclusion)? Again, I’m skeptical, because ~5% of the people would have already selected it at #1…

Also, I think this table can be used for recommendations. If an album got at least 3 votes at the #1 album of the year, and you have not listened to it yet, then that’s probably something worth paying attention to. Indie geeks who think their tastes aren’t represented by mainstream culture might be turned off by that notion. So what. I know I enjoyed all the albums in the top 10 rank on this table that I have listened to, so I’m super excited to check out the ones I have not heard.

In closing, I should note that my own top albums of 2006 list was not included in this post because I never made one. However, if I did make one, I think I would put Girl Talk’s Night Ripper on top.

Finally, some humor to reward you for reading all the way down here.

References
My references (ie the links to all the “best albums of 2006″ lists) are all in the excel doc I made, which is yours to play with if you desire. If you do extend it in anyway, don’t keep it to yourself. Show me what you’re doing just cause I’m curious.

I found out yesterday that I am a new member of the 9rules content network.

Whenever I’m looking for new, interesting blogs on a very particular subject I turn to three sources:

1. 9rules
2. Top Ten Sources
3. Google Blog Search

I’m glad to get increased distribution for The Gong Show, and I’m glad to be a part of what I consider to be one of the best sources for new, interesting blogs.

Penny Arcade has a great post up that explains the origins of the hit web comic (scroll down to the post “I’d like to thank God…”).

Apparently Tycho and Gabe were rebuffed Next Generation after Next Generation called out to their readers looking for people to write a comic about gaming. Next Generation never chose any other comic strip over Penny Arcade, they simply rejected Tycho and Gabe in favor of nothing at all. The only site they could get to publish their work was some random gaming mag with online distribution called Loony Games. Great story.

The origins of the name “Penny Arcade” straight from Gabe and Tycho:

[Loony Games' rep] said he wanted to run the comics and he asked if the strip had a name. Well it didn’t of course. So I looked over at Tycho who was sitting at his computer on the other side of our shitty little apartment and said “hey, what should we call the comic?” He stared at the wall above his monitor for no more that thirty seconds and then said “Penny Arcade you know because it’s just cheap thrills”.

So appropriate.

Also, if you’re looking for a charity to donate to this year, you should consider supporting Child’s Play, the excellent charity that buys video games for kids in hospitals, which was created by Penny Arcade.

At Stanford I majored in Symbolic Systems. The elevator pitch on Symbolic Systems (or SymSys for cool kids in the know) it is the study of the intersection between humans and computers, which can include logic, rational thought, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, articifial intelligence, computer-generated music, neuroscience, etc… you get the picture. The major includes courses from the following departments: computer science, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and even education.

SymSys now has its pop culture icon: Yul Kwon, a SymSys major, just won the 13th season of Survivor. Congrats Yul! From Valleywag’s coverage:

Kwon tells the [San Francisco Chronicle] he nearly bailed on the show after learning that producers planned to focus on his race, not his washboard. But perseverance, hard schoolwork and lots of Risk got him through. Too bad the article doesn’t answer his fans’ burning question: Does he prefer iteration or recursion?

Needless to say, Yul’s physique (the aforementioned “washboard”) is not typical of SymSys majors…

The NYTimes has an article on the developing habit of venture capitalists asking their children for opinions on consumer-facing web services. The article is generally disparaging about the VC due diligence process.

It’s no secret that this practice occurs. For many web services these days, asking the children of venture capitalists for their opinions is as good as a customer call because many of these web services target children. That being said, I hope the companies (whether they be potential deals or portfolio companies) aren’t relying on VC’s children as their only source in the user feedback loop (which the article implies in the case of StarDoll). Ad hoc opinions from the child of a venture capitalist is no substitute for a thorough round of user testing.

The article claims the increasing practice of VCs asking children for their opinions is based on the following environment change:

Then, investors were immersed in the very technology they were financing, ordering books on Amazon, downloading music from Napster and buying and selling on eBay. But now, in the so-called Web 2.0 era, venture capitalists’ personal interests have strayed from the sweet spot of innovation: Web sites like MySpace intended to connect people, free Internet calling tools like Skype or software for mobile phones.

I disagree with the reasoning behind this statement (though the conclusion is close to right). Successes in both web 1.0 and 2.0 require significant technical innovation (particularly in scalability and unique leverage of accepted open standards). It’s not like technical due diligence is irrelevant today. That being said, a strong user experience and presentation layer on top of technical innovation is more important than ever (more so in 2.0 than in 1.0). The increasing importance of user experience requires VCs to look outside their own personal opinions and experiences.

I wonder if VCs interest in user experience will ever go so far that VCs will installs user testing labs in their firms. That would make me happy considering my background in usabililty :)