Literary Safari

This post was originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

A few weeks ago, I posted “Data Crunching for Obama,” a look at the Democratic campaign’s microtargeting strategies led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at Catalist, Harold Icke’s start-up political technology company that built a national voter database of information on more than 260 million people for progressive groups, including the Obama campaign.

At Catalist, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company’s software products and services. The data banks and web-based tools he helped develop could answer questions such as: “How many Indian-Americans gave money to me, said they were an Obama supporter, voted in the last general election, own their home and live in Baltimore?”

Below the fold is a Q&A with Vijay Ravindran, where he talks about his engagement with politics, the 2008 election efforts, Catalist’s role in it, and what South Asian voter data tells us about the “brown” community.

Incidentally, the 34 year old is on a roll. Just yesterday, it was announced that as of February ‘09, Ravindran will be the senior vice president and chief digital officer of The Washington Post Company. Per the press release that went out:

“We are fortunate to have Vijay join the Company as we focus increasingly on electronic media,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “Vijay is widely recognized as one of the top innovators in the field. I am delighted that he will bring his extraordinary skills, talent and experience to our efforts to expand our digital business.” (more…)

Originally posted at Sepia Mutiny.

This article buried in the Saturday’s New York Times reports that the Obama campaign has invested heavily in microtargeting.

Microtargeting uses computers and mathematical models to take disparate bits of information about voters — the cars they own, the groups they belong to, the magazines they read — and analyze it in a way to predict how likely a person is to vote and what issues and values are most important to him. Often these analyses turn up surprising results; for instance, Democrats have taken advantage of the fact that many evangelical Christians are open to hearing a pro-environmental message.

Though this is technique has long been favored by the Republican party, especially during the 2000 Bush campaign, even Republicans agree that he “Obama campaign has appropriated it and taken it to a new level.”

One of the largest data banks is Catalist, a for-profit company that specializes in providing data for the Obama campaign. Turns out its chief technology officer is 34 year old Vijay Ravindran, former director of the ordering-services group at Amazon.com, where he led a team of about 130 engineers who built and maintained the site’s “shopping cart.

From the Washington Post:

The work being done in Catalist’s McPherson Square offices—which, with its multiscreen computer terminals, resembles a Silicon Valley start-up—is helping revolutionize the fields known as data mining and microtargeting. … Catalist was founded in August 2005 by Harold Ickes, the longtime Clinton deputy White House chief of staff, after the 2004 campaign to address the Democrats’ inability to harness data. One of the first hires was a young engineer, Vijay Ravindran. … “With my hiring, he made a decision that this was going to be a real company,” Ravindran says. As the chief data-architecture guy at Catalist, he’s part of a new trend in political technology: As data become more important in campaigning, candidates are increasingly turning to the tech industry for business-level expertise.

In a feature on political strategists and microtargeting, from fastcompany.com [via the newstab, thanks brijo1], Ravindran says:

“In the political space, I felt it was very important to build a computing architecture that would take in real-time data, get them into a standardized format, and then load them into a place where they could be snapshotted out for particular purposes. That didn’t exist before. Now we have an architecture that scales more than 15 terabytes of data while providing an interface for users to work with. We expect to leave this election cycle with a piece of permanent infrastructure that enables groups to do microtargeting more efficiently than ever before. It all boils down to one principle: Leave no data behind.”

Below the fold is a video where Ravindran talks a little bit about what he does.

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I just got back from my cousin’s wedding in India. Though the past month has been light on the blogging, in my defense I’ve been working real hard on some work projects and … an intense yet fun photobook project using the print on demand site Lulu.

I was a bit unsure about which book creator to use when I got started, so I experimented with photo book sites such as mypublisher, kodak gallery, and a new one called inkubook. At the end of the day, Lulu offered me a supereasy interface that required no additional downloads, the option to use licensed stock images from Getty for a very reasonable fee, and a range of attractive templates that allow for long blocks of text … so I went with it, even though its major shortcoming is that it doesn’t load very easily on India connections (so my cousins there couldn’t participate in the bookbuilding project).

The final product was gorgeous. Glossy paper. High definition images. And solid binding. All for the price of $46, including shipping (and delivery within less than a week).

My first self-created picture book. I look forward to more. Here’s a picture of the happy couple when they received the gift.

What’s the difference between writing for print and writing for the web? Required reading for all bloggers and online content developers is Michael Agger’s piece “Lazy Bastards: How we read online” at Slate.

“It’s a jungle out there,” Agger says, examining the ideas of Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

Nielsen, however, believes that blogs are “good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easier to write. But they don’t build sustainable value.” (Mmm… I’m not so sure about that and neither is Agger.)

I paired my reading of this piece with editor Sarah Boxer’s history of “Blogs” in the New York Review of Books. She’s the editor of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (Vintage, 2008) which features excerpts from 27 literary blogs.

Boxer tells us that there are 100 million blogs in the world.

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references—doesn’t sit happily in a book. Yes, I’m talking about bloggy writing itself.

But, sometimes blogs can sit happily in print. You’ll know what I mean if you get your hands on the quarterly magazine Artful Blogging. It features full-color photos of visually inspiring (women-run) blogs from all over the world alongside posts by their creators on the impact on blogging on bloggers’ lives, and a look at what makes a great banner. The newsstand price is $14.95, but I got my copy of the summer 2008 issue for $2 from one of those Broadway book vendors.

If you’re interested in being featured in an upcoming issue of Artful Blogging, write about your blog-inspired transformation in your own blog, and e-mail the link to Staci Dumoski, Managing Editor at sdumoski at stampington.com.

Cool kid alert: Teen entrepreneur Anshul Samar, age 14. This fiesty entrepreneurial spirit will be one of the key speakers at tomorrow’s Second Annual Teens in Tech Conference, sponsored by Sun, Microsoft, HP, and others.

Anshul is the founder and CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc. He has created a fantasy role-playing chemistry board game, Elementeo: “Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction! We don’t want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!” [more]

MSN recently featured Anshul in “Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21” (thanks to newstab posters garbanzobean and anmdavadi). How did he get started? In in his own words:

Entrepreneurship is cool, and so is chemistry! Both have lots of actions, reactions, explosions, experimentation, and most importantly, the joy and excitement of creating something new! Creating a company has been on my mind for a long time, but it was only in the 5th grade when the idea of a chemistry based card game struck me. I must have created and thrown away dozens of prototypes to get just the right concoction of education and fun. … Elementeo is a game where you create compounds, combat elements, and conquer chemistry… A game of battle, chemical reactions, and powerful scientists… And a game that kids, teenagers, college students, teachers, scientists, parents, and grandparents can all play and have fun.

The excitement Anshul has poured into his maiden entrepreneurial voyage (the game will be released this month!) is evident at his company’s homepage which is very much written in his voice … and in this video from Mark Coker of VentureBeat, taken at the 2007 TieCon conference in Silicon Valley.

Here’s to his motto of “Create, Combat, Conquer!”

[originally published at Sepia Mutiny]

One of the most fascinating reported pieces I’ve read in recent months was in the New Yorker’s Journeys issue (April 21, 2008): Up and Then Down: The Lives of Elevators, by Nick Paumgarten. It tells the heartbreaking story about a former production manager at Business Week whose life was never the same after he got stuck in an elevator.

At the same time, it delves into:

> Elevator Lore. Did you know:

“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works.”

> Elevator Etiquette. Now that I’ve read this description, I couldn’t ride the elevators at work today without noticing this pattern:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. … “

> Design principles and advances. Who knew there was such a thing as “elevatoring”?

“[It ] refers to the discipline of designing a building’s elevator system: how many, how big, how fast, and so on. … It isn’t rocket science, but it has its nuances and complications. The elevator consultant George Strakosch, in the preface to “The Vertical Transportation Handbook,” the industry bible, refers to it as the “obscure mystery.” To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its inhabitants to a kind of incremental purgatory.

> The metaphor of the elevator in literature.

“While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down? In “The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about elevator inspectors, the conveyance itself is more conceit than thing; the plot concerns, among other things, the quest for a “black box,” a perfect elevator, but the nature of its perfection remains mysterious. …”

This last section got me thinking about and trying to remember more well-known literary works, including songs, all about elevators. I was sure that there was more out there, besides the titles mentioned above and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, by Roald Dahl, which Paumgarten also brought up in the article. So, here’s what I was able to dig up.

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Those who know me well often joke that I’d make a good spokesperson for a Google ad. I can’t help it if Google has changed my life (and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way). The google desktop app has saved my writing life more times than I care to mention, and google calendar is the means by which my husband and I can always convince each other to attend otherwise resisted events (“Oh, you couldn’t make it? I had no idea. Your google calendar said you were free!”)So, of course, my curiosity piqued when I recently read about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent book deal with the University of California Press.

Per Publisher’s Weekly:

THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING: How one company is transforming culture, commerce and community – and why we should worry, showing how Google is taking on governments, organizations and entire industries – and the implications of Google knowing more about us than we know about it.

(The book began as an open book experiment sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, where Vaidhyanathan is a fellow, and was subsequently picked up for publication.)

Vaidhyanathan is a rising cultural historian and media scholar whose two previous books Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System have met with wide praise.

He is approaching the book as both a fan and as a critic, he says at his website: “I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.”

In a talk titled “The Googlization of Everything” that he gave last week at Penn State, Vaidhyanathan used the example of a google search result of the word “Siva” (the #1 result is the Smashing Pumpkins 1991 music video for “Siva,” not the Hindu god of the same name) to raise the question of just how universal Google actually is.

From an article in Penn State’s campus paper The Collegian Online:

“The Smashing Pumpkins were a once relevant band from Chicago,” Siva Vaidhyanathan said. “There are a billion Hindus … You would think that would be the most important thing. This gives us some indication that the Google universe does not map to the rest of the world.” …

[If you run the search yourself, a list of his books comes up first under Google Books, then the Smashing Pumpkins, then a wikipedia write-up on “Shiva” (the more common spelling for the Hindu god of destruction), then his website. Hmmm….] From the same article:

“Google actually has a pretty profound and perhaps disturbing role in what we consider to be valuable, true and important … “Millions, perhaps billions, of people use Google everyday. We are not Google’s consumers; we are Google’s products. The advertisers are the consumers,” Vaidhyanathan said, [criticizing Google’s collection of detailed records and user information.] … “Google knows everything about many of us and a lot about almost all of us. Google knows your interests, your passions, maybe your fetishes.” Vaidhyanathan pointed to Google’s official mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” “It’s a stunning mission statement for any company,” he said. “But it’s the universality we have to question. How universal is Google? We know it doesn’t work exactly the same way in China.”

Vaidhyanathan’s starting point is that Google is a part of our lives and that we talk about it as though it were Divine — think of the good versus evil paradigm that has been set up in the google universe — but that it is something we need to take a closer look at, especially when it comes to consumer surveillance and copyright.

From another interesting article at the U. Va. website: “Discussing the role of the consumer, Siva notes another Google illusion – that of the free service. We pay for Google with our data – our searching habits, our surfing habits – and this fuels Google’s cash cow, personalized advertising.” [link]

The book will be out sometime next year, and in the meantime, we’ll all keep using our various google apps and accounts more than ever … won’t we?

Read this post at Sepia Mutiny.