It occurred to me as I looked at this picture that the pattern recognition required to perceive a the head of leopard behind that grass comes naturally to humans--and would be exceedingly hard for computers. Spotting potential predators hiding in the grass was vital for our ancestors. And even if we spend 99.9% of our days in cities or suburbs, that uncanny ability has been handed down to us.

I should note that a tour guide spotted this animal. We stopped when we saw his halted bus, and he pointed it out to us. So despite our ability to see a leopard through the grass, we probably wouldn't have seen this one on our own. When it comes to some of these survival skills, we're a little rusty.

He might also be spotting a cool place to play hide and seek. I'm reminded of an interview in which filmmaker Werner Herzog recalled his childhood in post-war Germany. Here's a snippet:

He noted ... that while growing up in the ruins of a city was hard on adults, it was satisfying for a child. "Kids in the cities took over whole bombed - out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. . . . Everyone I know who spent their early childhood in the ruins of post - war Germany raves about that time. It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow. We had to invent everything from scratch."

Now imagine launching an editorial operation, an online newsroom with maybe 6 people, including a seasoned professional or two. You could do that (and even pay their health care) for $1 million. That's 7.5 seconds of a Superbowl ad. This news staff could produce great stories and videos, and some of them will go viral, perhaps reaching millions (if not a Superbowl-sized crowd) on Facebook or Twitter. Is it any wonder, as Tom Foremski writes in Silicon Valley Watcher, that corporate-generated media is booming?

You'd think that their stuff would be crap. A decade or two ago, it would have been. But they see themselves as media companies now, at least in part. Their reputation is at stake. Equally important, if they produce propaganda, it won't go viral--and denunciations of it just might. That doesn't mean they don't push their point of view. But they've always done that, under every business model.

This is what I've never liked about practicing or, for that matter, consuming most journalism. Journalists often take themselves too seriously and edit out the fun. I have a feeling that I've blogged about this at one point, but when I was at BusinessWeek I would call my wife on a Wednesday morning and tell her how many of my "jokes" had been squeezed out of a story. In each article, I'd generally have three or four little turns of phrase, allusions or funny quotes that amused me. I called them jokes. And as far as I was concerned, they were the reason I bothered to write the thing. Most of them died in editing. ("We need to get the earnings projection in here... Do we really need this reference to Positively 4th Street?")

This was a big reason I got into blogging and writing books. I could have more fun. And sometimes when I read comments reviews of Numerati and Final Jeopardy, it strikes me that even some of those who appreciate them didn't get the jokes.

Glass's point is much bigger than just having fun. His idea is that journalism used to command our attention by default. If you wanted to hear what was happening in London during the Blitz, you listened to Edward Murrow on CBS. He had great responsibility, and tried his best to be authoritative. And there was nothing wrong with that.

But today we can get our news from thousands of different sources, most of them free and few of them thriving. There's an industry-wide battle for our attention. Naturally, we turn to the stuff that amuses us. It doesn't have to be funny. It can be beautiful, poignent, brilliantly argued, but it has to offer something special to claim control over us for a few minutes--and lead us to share it with others. Journalists who figure out how to create such work will thrive in the coming years. Glass argues that they'll do it by following their own tastes and interests.

(hat tip to Jeff Jarvis, who linked to this)

Facebook of course has enough going for it, including a billion networked members, to make a good business in advertising. Revenues top $4 billion. But despite its towering strengths and limitless potential, the company struggles to please traditional advertisers and investors. The company reminds me of a brilliant student who's following the path his parents have mapped through med school, even though he'd rather be building skyscrapers or writing songs.  

The difference, though, is that Facebook is capable of transforming the very industry it's trying to fit into. You could argue that that's already happening, as I'll detail below.

Clearly, in the short and medium term, Facebook has little choice but to pursue a career in advertising. At the moment, no other business model can raise billions, which the company needs to build a global enterprise with huge data centers, employing thousands of brainy engineers and scientists. Still, there a sense that Facebook's mission is bigger, and perhaps more transformative, than advertising. “If Mark Zuckerberg didn’t have to pay back the venture investors and run the risk of losing his talent, he would have taken a different route,” says Rishad Tabaccowala, chief innovation officer at VivaKi, a digital arm of Groupe Publicis.

In fact, Facebook's very strengths lead the company along a different path. The ads that work best on social networks represent a new model, a blend of advertising, word of mouth and viral connections. These defy traditional definitions and measurements. One example. If you're an American woman over the age of 45, you might have seen cute photos of kittens and puppies pop up next to your news feed. Those are ads. Click one, Facebook gets around 25 cents, and at least in this case you subscribe to updates from Petflow, an e-marketer. The company has 620,000 followers now. In the news streams that carry updates about their neighbor's pork roasts and cousin's birthday parties, those people also receive several updates from Petflow. And if they click "like" on one of them, Petflow's news flows out to all of their friends. It goes viral. Should Petflow want the update to linger longer in news feeds, reaching more of its followers, it pays $500 to $2,000 for a promoted post. Petflow's co-founder, Alex Zhardanovsky, says the company generates more than 30% of its sales from Facebook.

Nonetheless, success that justifies a $100 billion market cap will come only when the big traditional advertisers, like Proctor & Gamble, Apple and the car companies, move from social media toe-dipping and take the plunge. To satisfy them, Facebook has taken extraordinary measures. The company has teamed up with Datalogix, which has a vast  database of customer loyalty cards. The two companies have matched the ads people see on Facebook with the purchases they register with customer loyalty cards in the physical world.

The link is the common e-mail address. Many of them show up on both Facebook and the supermarket lists. To shield identities, the two companies have devised a convoluted process, hiding both the consumers and their loyalty cards behind numbers known as hash tags. (More details from TechCrunch and Facebook itself.) The point is not to track the individuals (nor to find themselves in another bruising privacy battle), but simply to demonstrate that anonymous beings are more likely to buy certain soaps or cereals after seeing ads on Facebook. So far, according to Sean Bruich, Facebook's head of Measurement Platforms and Standards, the response more than justifies the ad spend. They have carried out 50 studies for big advertisers, he says. In 70% of them, the return on investment reached at least three times the ad spend. On 49% of them, it was 5X or better.

Still, the numbers-driven ad market will press relentlessly for more data. That's the nature of the Numerati world. It never stops. The goal is to monitor and measure all of the stimuli that lead us make a decision, such as whether to buy a certain bar of soap. The way it is  now, a person sees different ads on TV, billboards, in newspapers, and a sponsored post on Facebook, and each one of those media players claims a portion of the credit--probably more than its share. Now, Facebook and others developing a complex analysis called "multi-touch." The idea is that it will divvy up the credit for each interaction, and each media player will be able claim its share.

We've already seen how this ends. The more data that arrives, tracing our movements and activities, the more analysis it generates and questions it raises. Arguments are inevitable. The losers will hunt down more data of their own launch their own studies, challenging the status quo. As a result, we're be scrutinized in remorseless detail. The market would have it no other way. The process is barely begun. And no matter how much they know, advertisers, on Facebook and elsewhere, will always come up with reasons to dig deeper and a little more. In the process, they learn more about us--and perhaps that process, or insights derived from it, will lead them into entirely new businesses.

Below, today's Times story. A few minutes ago I saw a bit of blue reflected in the front door. I ran out to the driveway and grabbed the analog version of the paper, which resonates for me emotionally. (I broke into journalism writing on manual typewriters, after all.) But then I promptly get to work with my camera and computer to render it back to digital.

It turns out that we're just not that good at anticipating change. I find this when I talk to people about the future of technology. Often what I get is simply a continuation of what we have now. Computers will be smaller, cheaper and more powerful, cars will be more fuel-efficient, etc. Lots of things will be more of what they are now. What's missing from this vision are the disruptive technologies that lead us into new directions. Most of us aren't Jules Verne or Vannevar Bush. 

I just called up an episode of the Jetsons, to see how cartoonists in the '60s fared. I was startled to see George Jetson suffering with application that behaved much like Apple's Siri. He wanted information about a small animal that his son, Elroy, had brought back from an asteroid. He started to ask the virtual encyclopedia, and the machine kept giving him wrong answers. When George complained, the machine accused him of mumbling. Then it gave him a bunch of facts about the animal that George already knew. Felt very familiar.

Perhaps the most startling novelty in The Jetsons is the dog as an upright biped

David Pogue has a column about predicting the future. The worst thing you can do, he writes, is to predict that something will never happen. When it does, you look like a dunce. If, on the other hand, you predict that something will happen, and it doesn't, you can always argue that eventually it will.

This happened to me. In the late '90s, I wrote admittedly hype-nourished visions for BusinessWeek about the impact of mobile technologies. Here was one from 1999:

A 15-year-old girl strolls through London's Berkeley Square. Suddenly she hears a beep from her cell phone and looks at the screen. A message sponsored by Starbucks informs her that two friends from her "buddy list" are walking nearby. Would she like to send them an instant message to meet for coffee at the nearest Starbucks around the corner? She merely has to click "yes" on her smart phone to send the message. And she gets an electronic coupon worth $1 off a Frappuccino.

Following the Dotcom crash, I took a lot of grief from that one. I deserved some of it, because I predicted that this technology was just around the corner, instead of a decade away. Even so, it didn't take a fortune-teller to come up with that scenario. The mobile industry in Europe was busy putting the foundation technologies in place and anticipating a wave of innovative apps.

The real trick, as Tierney writes, is to envision a future that doesn't follow a clear line from now.

 

One thing I know: I would read a lot more if I gave up sports on TV. And considering the downward trend of my Philadelphia teams, it might come closer to happening in the coming year.