From Lewis Menand’s review of Smart, Faster, Better, I learned that all self help books have the same goal — to get us to be the people we know we should be. These books don’t have have any new solutions — they just reiterate common sense through the current cultural or businesses lenses. Menand points out that Dale Carnegie’s famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People (which I love) could be summed up in the sentence “If you are nice to people, they will like you.” But, he continues, the purpose of these books is not “What would Jesus do? but How, exactly, would He do it?” Carnegie’s book has some great tips on how to be nice to people like, “Be a good listener and focus on what the other person is interested in.” To me, it’s a fundamental point that none of these books, as much as they try, have the answer — we already know the answer. But they do have some good tips and tricks on how help us anyway.
We’re Already in the Future of Virtual Reality: When I go to Disney World I always go to the Carousel of Progress — Walt Disney’s tour of American ingenuity through the decades. It ends with a Future scene (produced in 1993) which involves virtual reality and speech recognition. If you take a look at the video, you’ll see that with virtual reality and an Amazon Echo, we’re just about to surpass it.
Use Your Phone: I have an iPhone which hasn’t yet come up with it’s own VR accessories so I’ve been using a Mattel Viewmaster. If you’ve got a Samsung phone Samsung Gear is a lot better and if you have a Google Pixel, the Daydream headset looks pretty great. Either way, it’ll give you a pretty great way of seeing what all the fuss is about. These sites are especially useful:
Demo an HTC Vive at the Microsoft Store: I’ve tried a few different VR systems but they didn’t put me much more in “The Matrix” than Google Cardboard. Then I tried the HTC Vive at the Microsoft Store. It’s really amazing. You can walk around in the environment and it totally feels like you’re there. Pretty mind blowing.
Hear: — This is an awesome app that does Augmented Sound. It’s a truly incredible experience. Roman Mars highlighted the company’s first app, RJDJ, it in one of the first episodes of 99% Invisible. Listening to the world through Hear really changes your perception of the world. A door slamming or the pings on an ATM start to have a musical lyricality that you’d never heard before. It’s a really wonderful experience. I’ve never done mushrooms but all the review on their site say, “It’s like Mushrooms without the mushrooms.”
We are currently in an attention economy. Companies like Google, Facebook and many others are trying to convince you to spend as much time as possible on the web viewing ads. This is not in your best interest.
My Solution: (Go to Medium for the Full Story): I figured out how to use micropayments to replace Google Display ads with my To Do list. Building on an idea Matt Cutts had on his blog, I used Google Contributor and Remember The Milk to substitute advertisements with my To Do list. Now I have my To Do list follow me around the Internet. It’s just like a persistent targeted ad that won’t leave me alone. It’s Awesome!
Manoush Zomorodi’s Solution: Manoush Zomorodi has a podcast called Note to Self where she focuses on how people relate to technology. There’s a great video of Manoush from the GEL conference which talks about how to disconnect from the internet. If you want to learn more about how to reclaim your time and be more creative take a look at Bored and Brilliant and Infomagical.
The Ethics of AI: We are becoming more and more reliant on Artificial Intelligence, mostly because it keeps getting better more quickly than anything else. More and more, we’re relying on AI systems to make important decisions like who to hire at work or who to release from prison, even when these models may have strongly ingrained biases based on the training data. And as self driving cars become more of a reality, we will continue to become more reliant on machines. This brings up an interesting ethical question on self driving cars in specific — in an accident that can not be avoided, how does the car prioritize the life of the driver and passengers vs. others? How many injuries would need to be avoided of the car to prioritize the bystanders over the driver. Mercedes has already come up with a statement on this question “You could sacrifice the car. You could, but then the people you’ve saved initially, you don’t know what happens to them after that in situations that are often very complex, so you save the ones you know you can save. If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car.” Whether or not it’s the right answer, people will want their self driving cars to do everything possible to save their own lives.
Note: Right after I posted this, Google Contributor completely changed so this is no longer possible.
The Idea in 150 words:
When I’m surfing the web I want to get something done — but ads want me to do something else (like buy something). I can’t get upset at the ads because that’s their job
My attention is a valuable and scarce resource that marketers want to purchase. Essentially I am paying for content with my attention
Paying for content with micropayments might be a solution but that just takes the ads away — getting people to “pay for nothing” (or the elimination of something) is a hard value proposition
I figured out how to use micropayments to replace Google Display ads with my To Do list. Building on an idea Matt Cutts had on his blog, I used Google Contributor and Remember The Milk to substitute advertisements with my To Do list
Now I have my To Do list follows me around the Internet. It’s just like a persistent targeted ad that won’t leave me alone. It’s Awesome!
We’re in an attention economy right now. Time is our most valuable resource. As Randy Pausch of Last Lecture fame said in his Time Management Lecture, “Americans are great at managing their money, but significantly worse at managing their time.” Which means that most Americans would rather pay for their content with their time (free with ads) than their money.
Why Are Ads So Annoying?
Because it’s their job. An advertisement’s job is to change behavior and convince people to buy something. This can be in increasing awareness, interest or desire in the product. However it’s being done, it takes me away from my task and thinking about the product.
Sometimes my goals are in line with the advertisers. If I’m looking for cool toys for my kids, a suggestion for a similar product from Amazon or an ad from Google could be incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, many advertisements are low quality and look more like the ads in the back of old comic book magazines.
What most web advertisements feel like the ads in the back of comic books
Fixing the Problem
A Page Starts by Looking Like This
The Page Without Alteration
Option 1: Eliminating Ads
In order to avoid these annoying ads, many people have switched to ad blockers — essentially taking the content but avoiding paying for it with their attention. This doesn’t work long term as the ad supported sites will be starved by revenue.
A better model is micropayments. Instead of advertisers paying for each page view, the consumer would pay for it. These models are very hard to put together, requiring both the consumer and the website to buy in.
Ad Blocker
Option 2: Replacing Ads with Something Else
One of the most promising micropayments platforms is Google Contributor. Google Contributor allows consumers to “buy back” their ads from Google. This allows Google to leverage its massive relationships with websites. Matt Cutts has a great description of Google Contributor on his blog, but the key points are:
1. You support the sites you visit
2. You see fewer ads
3. (And this is the cool part) you get to decide what to show in that ad space instead of ads
Google Contributor still feels like a bit of an experiment at this point. The main reason is that there’s nothing that people are really replacing their ads with of value. Right now Contributor defaults to a “Thank You” message that’s blank with other options like pictures of cats. People don’t seem to like the absence of paying for things very much — it feels too much like paying to be bored. Even though there’s a huge amount of value in actually being bored.
Standard Google Contributor
Option 3: Replacing Ads with Something Useful (My Favorite One – This is Where Things Get Really Cool)
As I said before, the purpose of advertising is to get you to change your behavior. But instead of letting the ads change my behavior to buy things, why don’t we use ads to focus me on what I want to do. Wouldn’t it be great to have your “To Do” list follow you around the internet instead of ads. These work for 2 reasons:
Advertisements are great at following you around the web and interrupting you. Instead of interrupting you to buy things, you get your To Do list — reminding you of what you need to get done
To Do lists can be context sensitive (e.g., when you’re at your computer, these are the things that you’d like to do)
Google Contributor With My To Do List!
What I’ve Learned:
While this is just a small prototype, there’s a lot of things I learned from it:
It’s quite useful. I’ve only been using this for a few weeks but it really does get me laser focused on my To Do List — especially when I’m mindlessly surfing the web
There are a few issues with using Google Contributor for this purpose but net-net for $5 a month to get less distracted by extraneous things AND actually let me focus on the things I want to get done — that’s HUGE. All this while contributing to the media that I want to thrive.
How I Set It Up
Note that Google Contributor no longer works this way so this is here for more historical reasons.
Detailed Instructions for Connect Google Contributor to Remember The Milk:
Create a custom list inside RTM for your Google Ads
Create a List
Log in to m.rememberthemilk.com from your web browser to set the cookie to access your URL. Note: You will not be able to log into Remember The Milk from inside a Contributor window — this seems to be a security feature to avoid capturing data from an ad.
Find the URL of your To Do list by going to m.rememberthemilk.com and displaying your To Do list
· Point the Google Contributor custom URL to the Remember The Milk list
· Now your To Do list follows you around the web!
Some Further Improvements
Some sites like the New York Times get a very high CPM and have pretty good ads. You can eliminate contributor contributions by clicking on the + sign…
Finding the right To Do list is difficult. Remember The Milk is pretty good at this but there might be better ones. m.rememberthemilk.com doesn’t seem to follow a drag and drop prioritization, so you’ll need to move items up and down in your list using the “prioritization” flag. This is particularly important because most ads will only show between 2 and 5 list items.
The trickiest thing is finding a To Do list that will display nicely in the ad space. m.rememberthemilk does a nice job by using very little room on the top and no navigation. To get this really right, you’d likely have to call and API for RTM and do a custom display.
Ideally, it would be good to customize the way that the To Do list displays based on the display size (e.g., if the space is too small, don’t try to display the To Do List).
I only need to see my To Do list once per page. If I have more than one ad on a page, I might want to have an inspirational quote in the other ad space.
We spend a lot of time running from place to place trying to get things done. It’s worth it to take a minute every so often to rebalance in the middle of the day. One Moment Meditation is a fun silly app to help do that. I also heard some good advice from Only Human on WNYC. They advise that before doing something important, like picking up the kids or going into an important meeting, take three minutes of silence to emotionally transition and prepare — you’ll get a lot more out of the experience. And remember that picking up the kids is actually an important experience.
