Posted by Stacey Gillar - October 17, 2008
In 2006, three things happened to me that changed my life. The first was the birth of my second son. The second was my job change, and we'll get to the third in a bit.
Amazingly, the job change did eclipse my son Moses' birth. I went from a long history of providing information for free, to providing information at a cost. From a librarian's point of view, this is a significant change. What precipitated this change was my movement from an internal group to an external one, from IT to Strategy.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - October 3, 2008
A few words caught my eye when scanning the news last week: "campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s." I was on a campus in this timeframe and I was not aware there was a war. What war was this? A cultural one? How intriguing.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - September 26, 2008
Music is a hot topic these days. The easiest to watch and track are the companies devising new ways to sell music and carry music. SanDisk's new slotMusic is an interesting segway to listening to music in a new way. MySpace is doing interesting things as is Amazon.
What is harder to track and look at is the underlying structure of how music gets made in the first place and why. I found a couple of leads of late and thought I'd share as they are thought-provoking.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - September 5, 2008
compete.com, September 5, 2008
Check out the web metrics on Facebook vs MySpace vs Plaxo, above in blue, red and green, respectively. Compete.com provides great metrics like this for free, more in-depth stuff for a price.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - August 29, 2008
It would be nice to make a personality quiz for people to ask them what they want out of life so that they can see themselves. Many do not really know but many know all too clearly, and sometimes, painfully.
I just read in iconoculture that a survey was conducted that asked: If you could trade your job to become an artist with no reduction in pay, would you do it? To me, quite a sizeable amount of people said they would be an artist.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - August 22, 2008
Douglas Haddow of Adbusters posted an article July 29, 2008 which warranted 1425 comment. I do not know a lot about the company Adbusters but would tend to think, just going by the name, that the people in the organization have a high sense of purpose, and maybe because of that, tend to be on the outer edges of thinking, thus, polarizing themselves and leaving little room in the middle. In blunt terms, they speak in blunt terms and maybe get others riled up about it.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - August 22, 2008
Erin Magner of the JC Report wrote a three part story on the death of trends in the fashion world, and I highly recommend you read all three articles
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - June 27, 2008
Many companies do not have researchers, but quite a few bigger companies have teams of them, and I'm talking about market researchers here, not scientific ones. For those companies that do not have this type of employee in your stable, I feel for your project teams.
Though my experience is not extensive, my eyes were opened almost immediately when attempting to answer questions about what is going on in the world, what people are doing, what do they want to do, what is that company doing, how many people are doing that thing over there and for how long. Who knew what you could find! It's a treasure of information, if you only look (and pay) for it.
Tying the information to the need to know, so that a company can be profitable and successful, makes me feel like a key partner in both the frog teams and the client team. This is because of my involvement with the Strategy team, mostly. Providing the information to the product development team, the analyst team and the design teams, let's me know that the client will get a product that is useful, timely and well-designed from every aspect.
I almost always come in to work excited by what I will find that day, and just a tad stressed because I know there are many other places to look that I just don't have time for in every project. This is saying quite a lot considering that I filter through at least 30 emails a day from newsletters I have signed up for, not to mention the few RSS feeds of information I make it through (and the almost hundred I don't have time to make it through) as well as the many sites I find while researching a project in addition to those as well as the proprietary tools, such as Nexis, that I search through, and, finally, the sad stack of magazines on my desk, which are so wonderful that every page has something great on them, but it's hard to find the time.
I am not bored.
I feel that I have actually built whole new cities of super neuron highways in my brain over the past few years.
I hope this helps those of you who don't know anything about secondary research understand a little bit more about it. For those of you who do something similar to what I do, maybe you can spare a second to tell me if your experience is similar.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - June 20, 2008
Brendan Baker contacted us about his research, called the Ginkgo Project, over at Cambridge University. He and his team are conducting research in order to answer these questions:
* To what extent have environmental impact assessment tools been adopted into commercial product design processes?
* What are the business drivers for increased environmentalism in product design?
And, you see, he'd like your help. He needs to track as many practices as possible. Take a survey, possibly win a gift certificate, and help a research project. Takes 5 minutes.
The Environmentalism in Product Design survey.
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Posted by Stacey Gillar - June 20, 2008
There's a lot of scuttle on the web of late about people not being able to concentrate anymore. Specifically, it's about people who somehow can't read books anymore or article or focus for a length of time, and how the Internet is to blame as it is affecting they and their children. But what if it was the children who affected the Internet?
First, we see the Wall Street Journal review of Maggie Jackson's book, "Distracted," and you can bet on what that's about. Next, we see the article from Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic Monthly's July/August 2008 issue entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Comments on that article led me to Newsweek's article, "Is EF the new IQ?," which brings up the crux of the issue. On psfk's site, a reader suggests that we have a real problem on our hands if we have to focus on teaching focus to children because they can't.
But see here, Wray Herbert starts this Newsweek article by stating how most people can recall being in a classroom in grade school and having at least one person in that class be the one who couldn't sit still and who fidgeted constantly and who seemed out of control. He then goes on to talk about how if you can help harness focus, that could really help a child become more successful and how this EF, Executive Function, is now being targeted and developed in schools these days.
What this says to me, after reading these articles and reading Sir Ken Robinson's book which I've talked about quite a bit here, is that people who are generally fidgety are smart in a different way than book sense and, just to put it in a nutshell, they probably grew up and invented the Internet and that's why it's in the state that it is because their specialty is not organization. However, we now have this great thing called the Internet that wouldn't have existed if we didn't have these fidgety kids causing trouble in school.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. We make our own destiny.
What would be interesting to know, is what do we do now to help those people who are not used to thinking like those scientists and engineers?
Just recalls to mind how they say that if we hadn't lost the Library of Alexandria, we could be 2,000 years more advanced now just by 'mere' organization.
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