Phillip Nones

Electronics Before Bed = Up All Night?

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It’s common knowledge that Americans are getting too little sleep on a daily basis. Studies have shown that the average hours of sleep have been declining pretty steadily in recent years. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that three out of four Americans are sleep deprived. Often, people scrimp on sleep each night of the week … then try to make it up on the weekends.

No wonder hospitals and other organizations are doing a land-office business in sleep studies. In fact, polysomnography is one of the biggest growth segments in the healthcare field.

Now, here comes along a new idea as to what might be contributing to our sleep-deprived state. It’s the cornucopia of consumer electronics we use – computers, laptops, smartphones and iPads – up until the moment we hit the sack.

With these devices shining brightly into our eyes, it turns out they’re tricking our bodies into thinking it’s still daytime.

According to sleep specialists, exposure to these electronic devices can disturb sleep patterns and contribute to insomnia. Phyllis Zee, a neuroscience expert and director of the Center for Sleep & Circadian Biology at Northwestern University, is one who contends that light emanating from an iPad or a laptop “can be sufficiently stimulating to the brain to make it more awake and delay your ability to sleep.”

The iPad, Apple’s latest sensation, comes in for special attention, as it’s a device many people like to use when reading before bed … at the very time the brain thinks the environment should be dark. Unlike the Kindle, the iPad’s light-emitting screen shines directly into the reader’s eye, making it more likely to disrupt sleep patterns.

Not surprisingly, people are affected differently. Elements like the brightness of the light and whether there is extensive blue light – which is common during the day but also emitted from computer screens – are seen to play a role. One way to counteract the “blue light effect” is to wear orange sunglasses which are purported to negate the effect of the blue light; although this might help, it probably won’t do anything for the wearer’s fashion sense!

An easier but equally effective approach might be to simply swear off the computer, iPad or smartphone in the last hour before bedtime. Chances are, your body will thank you in the morning.

Social Media: The Newest Addiction?

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Social media: The latest addiction?With the burgeoning popularity of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, some observers are beginning to wonder if a new type of addiction is now in our midst.

So-called “Internet addiction disorder” came to the fore in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with social scientists contending that some people were neglecting their interpersonal relationships, and instead were spending hours of time online every day.

Of course, since social media is about interrelationships, perhaps likening it to the solitary pursuit of web surfing might not be an apt comparison. But a recent study demonstrates that social media, too, appears to have addictive aspects.

The online consumer electronics shopping and review site Retrevo commissioned an independent study of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers distributed across age, income, gender and geography. Guess what? The study revealed that many people appear to be obsessed with their social media circles all throughout the day … and also checking in throughout night.

About half of the respondents reported that they check Facebook or Twitter feeds just before going to bed, during the night, or as soon as they wake up. Nearly one in five admitted checking in with these sites “any time I wake up” during the night.

It’s not a huge surprise to learn that owners of iPhones are more involved with social media; they use Facebook and Twitter more often and in more places.

Moreover, nearly one in five respondents actually view these two social sites as their most important sources for the news they consume, rather than Internet news sites, TV/cable programming, the radio or the daily newspaper.

As a truer measure of “addiction,” the study’s respondents were asked to estimate how long they could go without checking in on Facebook and Twitter. While about four in ten reported they could avoid checking in over “a long time,” a similar percentage indicated they could not make it any longer than five or six hours at a stretch without checking in on these sites. (The balance felt they would need to check in at least once a day.)

And how about tolerating electronic messages that interrupt their activities? Half of respondents under the age of 25 in the Retrevo study didn’t mind being interrupted during a meal. One-fourth don’t mind the interruption happening on the job or during a meeting. And a die-hard 10% don’t even mind an interruption during – you guessed it – lovemaking.

As for how respondents over age 25 answered these same questions, they’re only about half as tolerant, so it’s easy to see how the propensity for social media addiction might manifest itself more with the younger set.

Since the online social media revolution is a relatively new phenomenon, one might wonder if the attraction of social media bordering on addiction is just a passing fad in part because of its novelty.

That might be true. But it’s difficult to see exactly how behaviors and attitudes will change dramatically over time. After all, television viewing was extremely high when TVs first came out … and those numbers stayed high for decades thereafter. Social scientists started making rumbles about the phenomenon of TV addiction early on … leading some people to refer to television sets as the “idiot box” or “boob tube.”

And actually, with social media the temptation for “total immersion” is even stronger. After all, the TV viewing public was forced to watch whatever programming went out over the airwaves. But in social media, the content is whatever the participants choose it to be – and it’s interactive to boot.

YouTube channels McDonalds: “Billions and billions served.”

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YouTube logoIn case anyone doubts the significance of YouTube as a media platform … the video sharing service just announced that it is now serving in excess of 2 billion video views per day.

For an entity that’s barely five years old, this statistic is pretty incredible. But it becomes easier to believe when the full extent of YouTube’s video inventory is understood.

In fact, these days nearly 24 hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than 34,000 hours of video each day.

Plus, there appears to be no end in sight to the growth of YouTube’s video library, as the rate of uploading has increased by nearly 20% over the past year.

The fact that the vast majority of YouTube videos are hardly worth the time it takes to watch them makes little difference. Far more than Yahoo Video or Hulu, this site has become the “go-to” place for finding everything from old TV commercials to short clips from movies or shows. Or to engage in the guilty pleasure of browsing around and viewing everything from news anchor bloopers to boring college commencement speeches and embarrassingly bad student dance recitals.

Actually, the number of people who visit YouTube to “channel surf” is astonishingly large. It’s become the new pastime that TV watching once was.

And the “social” aspect of YouTube is important as well, as people love to pass links to their favorite videos on to their friends. Or to “broadcast yourself,” as the site’s tagline states. YouTube makes that process easy and effortless, contributing to the burgeoning inventory of new video material.

When Google acquired YouTube in 2009, more than a few industry observers wondered about the rationale behind the purchase and questioned the effectiveness of YouTube’s business model. Looking back one year on, it’s hard to understand what the fuss was all about!

And just yesterday, Google announced ambitious new plans for YouTube. It’s begun converting the entire library of videos to its new WebM video format that incorporates VP8, special codec compression software that facilitates the delivery of smooth, high quality video images.

In yet another swipe at its rivals, Google is offering VP8 royalty-free, in a bid to knock Flash (Adobe) and H.264 (Apple) platforms off their current top perch. Will they be successful? Well, based on history …

A mobile society? We’re not there again yet.

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U.S. Population MigrationLast year, I blogged about a startling development in the mobility of Americans: fewer of us moved in 2008 than in any year going back decades.

If there was any proof of the recession’s toll on the lives of many Americans, this is surely it. Not only that, it reflects the lost allure of many of the “magnet” states of recent decades, particularly Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida.

Now, new data covering 2009 have just been released by the U.S. Census Bureau. The latest information reveals that more Americans moved in 2009 than in 2008 … but it was just a small uptick.

Moreover, the increase in mobility was almost entirely the result of people moving within their home counties – nearly eight times more prevalent than migrating from state to state.

What does this mean? In many instances, intra-county mobility may be the result of people who have moved in with family or to nearby rental properties after having lost their homes to foreclosure.

And the low rates of mobility in general may reflect the unwillingness or inability of people to move because they owe more on their mortgage than their home’s current value, thanks to the collapse of the housing market.

William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, sums it up this way:

“These data show that the great migration slowdown, which began three years ago, shows no signs of revising to normal U.S. patterns. Since labor migration is often seen as the grease that spurs the flow of goods, capital and job creation, these new numbers are not encouraging.”

Mobility almost always declines during periods of economic hardship. But it’s now clearer than ever that this particular recession has caused the biggest drop in mobility rates America has seen since the days of the Great Depression.

Craigslist riding high … but clouds on the horizon?

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Craigslist logoNow here’s an interesting statistic about Craigslist, the online classified advertising phenomenon and bane of newspaper publishers across the country. Online publishing consulting firm AIM Group is forecasting that Craigslist will generate nearly $125 million in revenues this year.

But here’s the real kicker: Craigslist is on track to earn somewhere between $90 million and $100 million in profits on that revenue. That kind of profit margin is basically unheard of – in any industry. And the fact that it’s happening in the publishing industry is even more amazing.

What’s contributing to these stratospheric results? After all, Craigslist bills itself as a “free classified” site. That may be, but the publisher derives a huge portion of revenue – more than 50% – from paid recruitment advertising, much of it coming straight out of the pockets of the newspaper industry.

And the rest? Chalk up most of that to advertising let’s euphemistically label “adult services.” (AIM Group calls it something else: “Thinly disguised advertising for prostitutes.”)

Of course, these lucrative revenues and profits have come at a price. Craigslist has developed a reputation – not wholly undeserved – of being a virtual clearinghouse for anonymous hook-ups and other forms of vice. Complaints of Craigslist becoming a haven for scam artists, thieves – even the occasional murderer – have become more common as the site has expanded its reach into more cities and regions — now in excess of 500 communities.

And here’s another interesting finding from AIM Group. It reports that Craigslist’s traffic peaked in August of last year (~56 million unique visitors that month), but has fallen since then. In fact, monthly traffic has dropped and now plateaued at ~48 million since February.

Why? AIM speculates it’s the result of an “antiquated” user interface, along with a proliferation of “spam & scam” advertising. You start getting a lot of that … and you’re bound to start driving some people away.

Still, it’s pretty hard to argue with profit margins hovering around 75%.

Computer security measures: A whole lot of heat … and very little light?

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Cyber-security ... how effective is it in relation to the all the effort?If you’re like me, you have upwards of two dozen sets of user names and passwords associated with the various business, banking, shopping and social media sites with which you interact on a regular or occasional basis.

Trying to keep all of this information safe and secure – yet close at hand – is easier said than done. More often than not, passwords and other information end up on bits of paper floating around the office, in a wallet … or in (and out of) your head.

And to make things even more difficult, if you paid attention to conventional advice, you’d be changing those passwords every 30 or 60 days, making sure you’re following the guidelines regarding creating indecipherable permutations of numbers, letters and symbols so as to throw the “bad guys” off your password’s scent.

Now, here comes a paper written by Dr. Cormac Herley, principal research analyst at Microsoft Corporation, that calls into question how much all of this focus on password protection and cyber-security is really benefiting anyone.

Dr. Herley’s paper is titled So Long, and No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users. In it, the author contends that the collective time and effort involved in complying with all of the directives and admonitions regarding computer security add up to far more cost than the cost of what is actually caused by cyber-security breaches.

[For the record, he estimates if the time spent by American adults on these tasks averages a minute a day, it adds up to ~$16 billion worth of time every year.]

Here’s a quote from Herley’s paper:

“We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice, we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot.”

It would be one thing if this screed was written by some outré blogger operating on the fringes of the discipline. But it’s coming from a senior researcher at Microsoft.

To illustrate his point, Herley summarizes the whole area of password rules, which he contends places the entire burden of password management on the user. To wit:

 Length of password
 Password composition (e.g., letters, numbers, special characters)
 Non-dictionary words (in any language, not just English)
 Don’t write the password down
 Don’t share the password with anyone
 Change it often
 Don’t re-use the same passwords across sites

How much value each of these guidelines possesses is a matter of debate. For instance, the first three factors listed above are not consequential, as most applications and web sites lock out access after three or four incorrect tries.

Changing passwords often – whether that’s quarterly, monthly or weekly – is never often enough, as any attack using a purloined password will likely happen within a few seconds, minutes or hours of its acquisition, rather than waiting days. On the other hand, for users to change their passwords regularly requires time and attention … and often leads to frustration and lost productivity as people hunt around for the “last, best” misplaced password they assigned to their account.

And as for those irritating certificate error warnings that pop up on the computer screen with regularity, Herley contends that most users do not understand their significance. And even if they did, what options do people have when confronted with one of these warnings, other than exiting the program?

As it turns out, there’s not much to fear, as virtually all certificate errors are “false positives.” With certificates as well as so many other issues of cyber-security, Herley maintains that the dangers are often not evidenced-based. As for the computer users, “The effort we ask of them is real, while the harm we warn them of is theoretical,” he writes.

Herley’s main beef is that all of the energy surrounding cyber-security and what is asked of consumers is a cost borne by the entire population … but that the cost of security directives should actually be in proportion to the victimization rate, which he characterizes as miniscule.

An interesting prognosis … and a rather surprising one considering the source.

Newspapers crash … Online news soars.

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The latest annual News Users report by Outsell, Inc. predicts additional declines in print newspaper circulation as consumers continue to gravitate to online news. It is the third annual report issued by this marketing and communications research firm, which is developed from findings gathered in consumer surveys.

Outsell projects that Sunday newspaper readers will drop to ~43 million by 2012. That would represent a decline of some 20 million readers from Sunday papers’ circulation heights in the 1990s.

But what’s even more noteworthy is the continuing evolution in online activities. Today, nearly 60% of consumers report that they go online for “news right now.” That’s up from 33% just a few years ago.

And where are people going for their online news? By a large margin, it’s to aggregator sites like Google News, Yahoo and Drudge Report rather than to newspaper sites. As an example, 44% of the people who go to Google News scan the headlines there, without clicking through or accessing the newspapers’ individual sites.

Other key findings from the Outsell survey:

• One in five consumers now go to online news aggregators for their “first in the day” news, up from 10% three years ago. TV/cable still leads with 30%, but that margin has been shrinking dramatically.

• Paid online content is not a picking up the slack for newspapers, with participation rates of no more than 10% of consumers.

• Newspapers retain strengths in reporting local topics (e.g., local news, sports and entertainment), even as national topics have gone pretty much all-digital.

That being stated, if a valued local online news site were to put up a pay wall – or require a paid subscription to the print paper in order to gain free online access – three out of four respondents claimed they would go somewhere else to find the news free of charge. (That’s despite the fact that good alternative news sources at the local level are usually not so numerous.)

The Outsell study found that consumers continue to believe printed news is worth paying for … but they expect the news they get online to be free of charge.

The big problem: It looks like it’s too late for publishers to “transition” reader willingness to pay for print news over to now paying for that same content online.

Nope, that train’s already left the station.

An Address: The Next Human Right?

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The flag of the Universal Postal Union, the UN agency that coordinates postal policies for member nations.
The flag of the Universal Postal Union, the UN agency that coordinates postal policies for member nations.
Food, shelter, clothing. These are considered basic human rights. But what about a personal address? Is that a human right, too?

That’s the contention of Charles Prescott, a former Direct Marketing Association official who is in the midst of forming a new transnational organization to promote universal “addressability.”

“The consequences of existence, or lack thereof, of an address – especially in the developing world – are dire,” Prescott says. The new group he is organizing (the name isn’t finalized yet – the International Address Data Association is being considered) will promote the adoption of a Universal Postal Union resolution calling for all countries to adopt formal address systems, including change-of-address systems that are available at an affordable cost.

Prescott notes that the cost of change-of-address systems range widely at present, from just a few cents per name in the United States to as high as ~80 cents per name in The Netherlands. If costs are too great, businesses won’t bother using them.

In the U.S., highly addressable mail isn’t that big of an issue, although it’s probably true that a great many catalogues and other printed materials end up in landfills because they’re not addressed to the correct location and never find their way to their intended recipients.

But it’s a huge issue in the developing world. “Address coordinates which can be associated with an individual are extraordinarily important for fostering economic, social and political development,” Prescott emphasizes. But how does this play out in parts of the world where the address descriptions are vague … or non-existent?

I recall when I visited Mumbai, India in the late 1970s, I stayed in a dwelling known as Motiwala Mansion in the Mahim District of the city. Its address was simply “Opposite Shree Cinema.” I asked about the address of the movie house across the street and was told that it was “Opposite Motiwala Mansion.” How’s that for confusion in a city of millions if you don’t know where either one of these buildings is located?

Even more challenging are the slum districts that pepper the world, where addresses basically don’t exist. Today, with the explosion of mobile technology, cell phones reach into every nook and cranny of the world. In fact, cell phones are ubiquitous in the favelas, back alleys and other transient communities that have sprung up in and around every major third-world city. These phones can track the coordinates where someone is living, thereby tagging him or her with an “address” of sorts.

Sound far-fetched? It’s actually happening today, such as with one Brazilian department store chain that is extending store credit to people residing in these localities – once their physical location is known.

But Prescott contends that mobile phone coordinates represent only a partial solution – one that doesn’t allow for the delivery of physical mail. It also doesn’t solve other barriers existing in some countries that have a direct bearing on the economic opportunities for poorer people. One example: the need to show a birth certificate to register children in school … hobbled by the inability to obtain that birth certificate without having a formal address.

Obviously, any new push for a universal “address” initiative faces challenges. As illustrated by the Mumbai example above, addresses will need to be developed using systematic logic that is consistently applied from community to community inside a country. That’s a lot easier said than done.

But as an evangelist for providing every person on the planet an address as a basic human right, Prescott is clearly serious in his endeavor. The advisory board he’s formed includes key thought leaders from business organizations, academia and government in the United States and Europe. This initiative bears watching.

Stanford Weighs In on Web Credibility

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Web credibility.With more than 200 million web sites in cyberspace these days, what makes the difference between the good ones and bad ones? That’s what Stanford University has sought to find out through a multi-year research project.

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab conducted research with a cross-section of more than 4,500 web consumers over a three-year period. Distilling the mountain of information gleaned from this sample, the Lab issued its Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. It boils the research findings down to ten basic guidelines that, if followed, mean that a web site will be viewed as credible and authoritative.

In reviewing the Stanford guidelines, some of them stand out to me as ones that are too often missed by web developers. In particular:

Show there’s a “legitimate” organization behind the web site. Listing a physical address – not a P.O. Box – is one way to do this.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of information. Third-party citations and data references, along with links to other respected web sites, are ways to accomplish this.

Make sure the site is “intuitive” and easy to navigate. People’s tolerance level for a web site that doesn’t follow a clear, logical thought path is low.

Update site content often. People put less credibility in sites that look like they’re informationally static or stale.

And especially important: Stanford’s research found that content errors should be fixed, no matter how inconsequential they might seem. It turns out that broken links, bad spelling, poor punctuation and other typos negatively affect the credibility of web sites more strongly than many other factors — and yet they’re among the easiest items to fix.

When you look at the overall web credibility guidelines from Stanford, they aren’t particularly challenging – and they shouldn’t be hard to put into practice.

But when you consider how lame many web sites actually are, it’s another reminder of how – in web design as in so much else in business and government – “best practices” too often fall victim to expediency or just plain slipshod execution.

Online Customer Review Sites: Who’s Yelping Now?

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The news this week that social networking and user review web site Yelp® will now de-couple the presentation of reviews from advertising programs comes as a rare victory for businesses that have been feeling more than a little pressured (blackmailed?) by the company’s strong-arm revenue-raising tactics.

The web has long had something of a “Wild West” atmosphere when it comes to reviews of businesses helping or (more likely) hurting the reputation of merchants.

Yelp is arguably the most significant of these sites. Since its inception in 2004 as a local site search resource covering businesses in the San Francisco metro area, Yelp has expanded to include local search and reviews of establishments in nearly 20 major urban markets. With its branding tagline “Real people. Real reviews®,” Yelp is visited by ~25 million people each month, making it one of the most heavily trafficked Internet sites in America.

Yelp solicits and publishes user ratings and reviews of local stores, restaurants, hotels and other merchants (even churches and doctor offices are rated), along with providing basic information on each entry’s location, hours of operation, and so forth – with nearly 3 million reviews submitted at last count.

Predictably, user ratings can have a great deal of influence over the relative popularity of the businesses in question. While most reviews are positive (ratings are on a 5-point scale), Yelp also employs a proprietary algorithm – some would say “secret formula” – to rank reviews based on a selection of factors ostensibly designed to give greater credence to “authentic” user reviews as opposed to “ringers” or “put-up jobs.”

Not surprisingly, Yelp hasn’t disclosed this formula to anyone.

So far, so good. But Yelp began to raise the ire of companies when its eager and aggressive advertising sales team began pitching paid promotional (sponsorship) programs to listed businesses that looked suspiciously like tying advertising expenditures to favorable treatment on reviews as a sort of quid quo pro.

Purchase advertising space on Yelp … and positive reviews miraculously start appearing at the top of the page. Decide against advertising … and watch the tables turn as they drop to the bottom or out of site altogether.

Concerns are so strong that three separate lawsuits have been filed this year already, culminating in a class-action lawsuit filed in February that accuses Yelp of “extortion,” including the claim that Yelp ad sales reps have offered to hide or bury a merchant’s negative customer reviews in exchange for signing them up as Yelp sponsors.

“The conduct is an offer to manipulate content in exchange for payment,” Jared Beck, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, states bluntly.

As for whether Yelp’s announcement of new standards will now curb the rash of lawsuits, it seems clear that this is the intent. But so long as Yelp offers to do any sort of manipulation or reshuffling of reviews in exchange for advertising, the lawsuits will probably continue – even if there’s only the appearance of impropriety.

Oh, and don’t look for Yelp to provide any additional revelations regarding how reviews are sequenced to appear on the page. Too much transparency, and it’ll only make it easier for people to figure out how to “game” the ratings.