August 30, 2007

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You Are What You Play

Spurred by news of a project that is attempting to merge the web and video games by "developing 'Passively Multiplayer Online Games' where your history of web browsing defines your online character," The Huffington Post's Hugh McGuire blogs: "

All this data we are putting into the web - say, into our blogs and into facebook and elsewhere, could be used for much more than just figuring out what kind of sneaker ads we're likely to want to see. If you have a big enough and powerful enough database, and you felt like tracking more complex things than ad click-thru rates, you could start figuring out how different cues actually affect decisions, actions and opinions of specific people or groups of people.

And you could start correlating profiles with actions. Which in effect is what pollsters do, but with tiny bits of bad data from surveys and focus groups, from a discrete moment in time, and without any way to measure how responses correlate with actions. Whereas the net - and places like facebook - are enormous databases of detailed info about specific people, tracking not just static points of what they like or don't like, but also some of the things they actually do on the net, over weeks, months or years.
And that means, if you have access to that database, you might have a good platform to craft a strategy to make people do what you want them to do.

LEST WE FORGET: Who Will Kick Our Extra Points?

The Huffington Post's Caleb Powers has thoughts on how the US could get a more efficient use out of David Beckham:

Before all is said and done, soccer superstar David Beckham will be motorboating back to England with a quarter of a billion dollars piled up behind him. In his wake will be the burst bubble of American interest in a sport we'll never accept, with all the pundits talking about our "irrational exuberance" for a guy who essentially does the job of the least-respected athletes in normal American sports, placekickers. (If the movie had been "Bend It like Morten Anderson," we could be living in a very different world.)

But what's done is done. Stupid water under the idiot bridge. Now that the United States has leased David Beckham, we should at least send him where he will actually accomplish some long-term good. I'm talking, of course, about Iraq. Not to fight; insurgents wouldn't really care if we tried giving them a yellow card for tripping in Sadr City. Instead, we should send him to Iraq to play soccer. ... I hope this is part of the Petraeus report. For a paltry $250 million, the United States has an obligation to its own people, its marketers, and the rest of the world to put Beckham on a one-way flight to Baghdad. We misplace that kind of money like it was going out of style. And there's nothing David Beckham would hate more than going out of style.

Posted by Conn Carroll at August 30, 2007 12:49 PM