Filthy Commerce

Attribution and attrition on Pinterest

So I'm on Pinterest, and I am fascinated by it. Watching how people curate things is an ever-living lesson in human behavior. Here my general impressions so far:

1. The bookmarklet that lets you "pin" whatever image you want on a Web page is wonderful for getting people to slap things up on Pinterest the minute they see them. Kudos to in-browser ubiquity!

2. That bookmarklet is hell on someone trying to find a primary source for an idea. This is because a lot of tumblrs, lifestyle blogs and picture-heavy sites are curators first, original content creators second* and they have no problems republishing photos. When Pinterest participants hit a blog and like what they see, they just click the bookmarklet. Subsequently, the Tumblr that's reproduced a photo is getting referenced in someone's pinned entry, as opposed to the original source.

Here's an example from my Pinterest board. I saw this pin of a Christmas candy cane bouquet and liked it. I wanted to know how to make it, so I went to the cited source in the pin. It's a Tumblr that had lifted the picture from another Tumblr blog, and that one had lifted the picture from the how-to entry on Ecopolitan Bride. It took me, what, three links to get to the original source of the content?

I'm touchy about primary sources right now because I just finished crunching through the O'Reilly Radar's "Strata Week: The mortality rate of URLs," with its sobering statistic that approximately 50% of 1997's URLs are dead today.

Link rot is a very real problem for the Web. It pokes holes in the contextural, curatorial nets we weave via our surfing. Link rot is going to make blogs less of a repository for information and more of a series of flat, decontextualized text files. It is going to alter information landscapes. It will make research more difficult.

We already deal with link rot in our bookmark files. How many times have you saved something to your bookmark file, found the specific bookmark months or years later, then clicked, only to find a 404?

As a visual way to organize your bookmarks, Pinterest is great. I have entire folders in my bookmarks file I plan on revisiting and pinning; for some types of content, seeing the item explains better why you saved it than whatever's in the page title.

As a way to get people to port more of their desktop data to the cloud, Pinterest is brilliant. Imagine the data mining Pinterest could do. Users tend to stick to the suggested "boards" Pinterest has set up, and all of them -- "Products I Love," "My Style Pinboard," "Favorite Places and Spaces," "Books Worth Reading," "For the Home," Eats" -- can be mapped to very lucrative consumer sectors. Imagine being able to sell a retailer information on which products of theirs resonate with specific demographics! Pinterest will be able to do that. What about working with a media company to track how many of their features get referenced in a given time period? The metrics will be there.

The question will be: How good is the information? Few users are going to bother drilling back to an original source. I don't do it 100%. I trust that some curators -- Apartment Therapy or Design Sponge, for example -- are "responsible" Web citizens who keep their site organized and published. That trust is largely unfounded.

But what Pinterest tells me overall: People love using the cloud as a way to sort and share data that is meaningful to them. They don't care about data hygiene or who's profiting. There isn't a good reason to yet. In a way, it's almost like 1997 all over again.

 

* I'm aware that one can argue that the specific curation of a collection is, in and of itself, a form of content. I agree. But that's not relevant here.

Four fingers back at the employers

Companies became more productive by doing more with fewer workers. Some asked staffers to take on a broader array of duties - duties that used to be spread among multiple jobs. Now, someone who hopes to get those jobs must meet the new requirements.

[...]

The broader responsibilities mean it's harder to fill many of the jobs that are open these days. It helps explain why many companies complain they can't find qualified people for certain jobs, even with 4.6 unemployed Americans, on average, competing for each opening.

-- "Unemployed Find Old Jobs Now Require New Skills," WaPo, Oct 11, 10

To recap: Companies are sitting on unprecedented amounts of cash. They used the recession as a great excuse to slice entire job categories out of the org chart. They're persistently low-balling salary offers, and complaining that Americans don't want to work at the wages being offered. And now, it turns out that these poor companies are struggling to find candidates who are able and willing to do the work that used to require several different jobs.

A billion years ago, I worked at a pre-IPO startup and when the founders showed the employees the road show they were giving for investors, one of the PowerPoint slides they used to sell the company's fabulosity was the fact that they persistently under-paid us all by about 20% compared to the industry average. "We do more with less," beamed one of the founders, apparently forgettting who was sitting in the audience.

After that day, it became harder for that company to continue doing more, because the less suddenly had an idea of what they were worth and began gauging their output accordingly.

I don't know what "We do more with less" moments will be required to shake up the current workplace/worker situation. But I won't be surprised when people figure out a way to break the cycle of being asked for more while getting less -- and I may not grieve what gets broken in its wake.

You make the call: evil genius idea or "What the --?"

WEAR TODAY GONE TOMORROW is a new national women’s clothing rental website that specializes in designer dresses, tops, jackets and skirts, from designers including Vera Wang, Etro, DVF and Tracy Reese. It provides a weekly rental system similar to movie and accessories rental websites, but instead with the highest quality, most current designer clothing, at 90% off retail, and with no monthly membership or late fees.

WTGT will help women break free from the cost burden of constantly having to purchase new expensive clothing. It gives the customer the benefit of spending less money while obtaining the use of more quality designer clothing.

-- "Former Lucky Magazine Fashion Editor Creates National Designer Dress Rental Website"

(Emphasis mine.)

Run by evil geniuses: Ben & Jerry's

So check out the email I just received from them:

One of our competitors (think funny sounding European name) recently announced they will be downsizing their pints from 16 to 14 ounces to cover increased ingredient & manufacturing costs and help improve their bottom line. At Ben & Jerry’s we think downsizing pints is downright wrong. We understand that in today’s hard economic times businesses are feeling the pinch. We also understand that many of you are also feeling the same, & think now more than ever you deserve your full pint of ice cream.

We are even more committed today to lead with our values through the quality of our ingredients & how we source them to make the best ice cream possible. So, while our competitor may be experiencing a bit of shrinkage, rest assured that your Ben & Jerry’s will still be standing tall in the freezer. Enjoy!

Pointing out the shortcomings of a rival while stressing that you're a great, consumer-friendly value is a total evil-genius move. Anyone who's getting an email from Ben & Jerry's is already susceptible to paying up for premium ice cream; this just provides a sweet incentive to select a specific brand, doesn't it?

Vapiano: Run by Evil Geniuses

So I'm currently in Florida, and one of the dominating features of the landscape here is the lack thereof, as the sago palms and sawgrass have all been displaced by big box stores and housing developments. On Sunday evening, a group of us went out to eat at Vapiano. It's what trade pubs commonly refer to as a QSR -- quick-service restaurant.

The young man who handed me a menu and a plastic swipe card barely restrained his snigger as he explained how things work at Vapiano: You seat yourself. You read the menu. When you are ready, you and your plastic card trot over to one of four main stations -- pizza, salad, pasta or desserts. You give your order to someone at the station, and they swipe your card. Then, you pick up your silverware, you get your own drink, you pick up your food, and you eat. And when you're done, you take your plastic card back to the front and you pay.

My Caesar salad and glass of water cost me $12.50. As I choked back a whimper and paid, I reflected on what a diabolical set-up Vapiano's is: you get QSR-quality food (all of the food was prepackaged; I watched the kids behind the counter "cook" by slicing open plastic packages of premeasured, pre-seasoned portions), you pay QSR-range prices, and you do nearly all the work. These guys have managed to reduce the amount of staff they need in their restaurant by 50% -- but there's no reflection of that in their prices! As their corporate site says:

Vapiano is a fast casual restaurant with a twist - customers use a "chip card" to personally order their food or drinks from the bar or from the individual fresh pizza, pasta or salad stations. With this new innovative technology, Vapiano is going to change the way restaurants do business!

I was so inspired by the brazen manner in which these folks managed to separate people from their money, I've had to create a new category for this blog. What run-ins with capitalism's evil geniuses have you had lately?

(For a different take on Vapiano, read QSR's May 08 profile.)

Tupperware: Run by Evil Geniuses

Here is how dedicated I am to you: I am interrupting my lunch to bring you this post.