The Governer of Wisconsin is writing a blog. It looks, feels and smells like a real blog written by an actual person. Very cool. [Thanks to Frank for the link.]

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Eric does research on the behavior of shoppers and browsers.

Defaults matter (he says) because people like to be able to make choices, but they don’t want to have to make choices. E.g., if the form for new employees that lets them opt into a 401K plan starts out with 3%, lots of people will take that “choice.” E.g., XP defaults to having firewalls off. The biggest change they could make would be to pre-check the box on the form where you make the settings.

People are very loyal. The average time people spend on Amazon decreases on repeat visits. That’s because we get better at navigating Amazon. This locks us in. And in travel, most people book at the first place they look.

He shows data that if you use clouds as the background of your web site, people are willing to spend 15% more for furniture. [Damn lizard brain!]

Remember, he says, that we’re very different from our customers. The customer wants appropriate defaults; “defaults are the most important you can make” to shape behavior. The customer wants to minimize search. And the customer wants to pay in ways that minimize psychological cost — that is, paying $20 for product and shipping together is different than paying $15 for the product and then paying an added $5 for shipping.

Q: How do we go from $0 to $0.01, which you’ve said is the biggest hurdle?

A: Have them pay for added services.

Q: How about subscription prices?

A: Give ’em a two-part tariff.

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Dave Sifry, everyone’s favorite techie, is talking about Technorati. “It’s a search engine for conversations,” he says. [Disclosure: I’m on their board of advisors.]

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I’m in MetaCarta‘s break-out session. CEO John Frank is presenting. MetaCarta finds all the references to places in large bodies of documents and then enables users to find all the documents that refer to a particular place.

Disclosure: I’m on their board of advisors and worked a bit on this presentation. Because of that, I’m not going to blog it. But, I will say that this is very cool technology with immediate application. Go out and buy several now. Thank you.

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Steven Johnson gives a great talk on the topic of his book, Mind Wide Open. [I wish I could write like Steve. Total author envy.]

First he recounts the result of his own brain scans: When he was floundering, trying to come up with an idea, much of his brain lit up. When he was focused, the amount of brain activity went down. “People say that it’s a shame that we only use 10% of our brains. But that’s like saying that in many words, Shakespeare only uses 10% of the alphabet…how much better it would be if he used all the letters in every word.”

He says that dopamine causes the brain to explore its environment it has been disappointed in an expectation. Fascinating.

He ties this then to why video games are addictive. Video games have a clear reward structure, and frequently the reward is the desire to explore new areas (“I just need to play another 4 hours to unlock the next level of Myst!”). [Hmm, now that I think of it, shouldn’t the desire to explore new territory be tied to the failure to get a reward?]

Q: Are you now a determinist?

A: It’s important not to have discussions of the brain’s physiology get turned into determinism. We’re a mix of culture and genetics. The brain evolved to capture the idiosyncracies of an individual life.

Q: [Cory Doctorow] How can we neuro-amateurs distinguish crap from non-crap?

A: The Symphony in the Brain is a good book on the topic.

Q: [Neal Stephenson] Did the scan show any activity in your cerebellum.

A: No.

Q: Has this knowledge made you a better person?

A: Not really. You can recognize some patterns and that can be helpful.

Q: Who’s winning, the reductionists or the emergence-ists?

A: I tried to stay away from the question of the origin of consciousness, an incredibly difficult question.

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Each of the innovative companies presenting this afternoon has 30 seconds to tell us why we should come visit them:

Convoq – the power of web conferencing delivered onto your desktop

Informative – Identify “influentials” to expand your brand.

Intelligent Results – Make meaning out of telephone reports

Language Weaver – Statistical machine translation

MetaCarta – Find all the documents about a place

Mind Fabric – Natural Language Processing to listen to what customers are saying

N8 Systems – Helping IT and businesspeople understand one another

Scalix – “Delivering on the future of email”

Technorati – Searching the part of the Web that changes all the time (= blogs)

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Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security) says security is primarily social. The techno solutions don’t work if the social environment doesn’t support them. Much of the stuff being done in Homeland Security isn’t worth the cost; cost isn’t considered.

Robert Liscouski from Dept of Homeland Security says that they do consider cost.

Bruce: Wrong economic model. It’s not the cost of loss. Take Iraq. It cost us $200B to invade and occupy Iraq. Doing it was good, but was that the best use of the money? Did we get our $200B’s worth?

David Johnson of NY Law School, explains the Accountable Net proposal that came out of a meeting at the Aspen Institute. It would let you know that you’re dealing with an authenticated person and enable trust networks while staying decentralized. Here’s Esther’s description from her NY Times column on the topic:

The idea is simple: People on the Internet should be accountable to one another, and they are free to decide whom to interact with. The goal is not a free-for-all, anarchic Net, but one where good behavior is fostered effectively — and locally…

The basic rule is transparency: You need to know whom you are dealing with, or be able to take proper measures to protect yourself. The accountable Net is a complex system of interacting parts, where users answer not just to some central authority, but to the people and organizations whom they affect.

John Palfrey puts it this way:

We think the internet will become more orderly over time, but we do not agree that the internet needs, or will easily yield to, more centralized authority — private or public. To the contrary, we believe a new kind of online social order will emerge as the result of new technologies that enable a more powerful form of decentralized decision-making. These technologies will give private actors greater control over their digital connections. They will enable both end users and access providers to establish connections based on trust, rather than connecting by default to every other network node and trying to filter out harmful messages after the connection has been made. Because of these new developments, participants on the internet will be more accountable to one another than they have been in the past.

…As long as ISPs, enterprises, and individuals use systems that require those who interact with them to authenticate themselves and/or provide acceptable reputational credentials — using a contextually-appropriate mode of authentication — then everyone can decide when to trust someone (some source of bits) and when to filter someone else out of their online world

[Allowing users to do this themselves is far preferable to letting governments or ISPs do it, of course. But in establishing my web of trust, am I simultaneously turning the rest of the Net into a web of distrust? How much will we give up in cuttting ourselves off from that? I don’t know the answer to this question, but John’s use of the phrase “their online world” instead of “our online world” is worrisome to me. On the other hand, this proposal — which I don’t understand well — is coming from people I trust completely and who do understand it. So, I have no trust in my knee-jerk reaction. I definitely want to learn more about this.]

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Kenneth Hess talks about the lessons from the Columbia investigation. After showing some startling video — an animation of the failure and video of the pieces streaming to earth — he says that the investigation concluded the problem ultimately was with NASA’s culture. NASA got over-confident. Corporate politics had set in. They looked to prove flights were unsafe, not that they were safe. There was overt and subtle time pressure. These factors caused them to ignore the indications that there was a problem with the foam.

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[sketchy notes]

Eric Schmidt is being interviewed. He says that Google has lots of ways to get better. He points to two. First, Google doesn’t always put the right link in the first slot. Second, there’s what others — not Eric — call the “deep Web.”

Orkut is part of their strategy to learn how to collect information [from the social networks], as well as building their ours. The privacy issues will only get worse. For example, Google is getting sued by people for making available public documents that show they were convicted of crimes. But when push comes to shove, the company’s policy is “Don’t be evil.” He says people generallly agree about what is evil. [Say wha’? Could the opposite be any clearer? The fact that it doesn’t seem that way to Google is an artifact of their homogeneity. Which also means that they just haven’t happened to hit an issue that rends that homogeneity. I hope they have a set of back-up policies stored in a “In case of ambiguity break glass” container.]

Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (265M users) says that social networks can help people synthesize information and create an affinity group of people who may have never met but who can share knowledge and make searches more precise.

Jon Miller says that AOL traps about 3B spams a day. Esther suggests that the user should pay the ISP: you get, say, 100 free emails a month. Yahoo says spammers would still find it worthwhile. Eric suggests that we’ll have public and unlisted emails.

Q: Thanks for Google News. And will you do Google for the home?

Eric: Google News has had an ever bigger effect outside the US. And we’ve done some work on Google for the home, but we haven’t solved that problem.

Q: [Tim O’Reilly] I tend to think technology advances through hacks. Social networks are currently bad hacks that tell me we really need to add P2P protocols to address books so you can visualize your real social network instead of building a faux social network.

Eric: It’d have to be connected to some sort of server to manage all the different devices you’re using. The current social networks are simply trees of information that computers could construct on their own if we simply gave them permission. It’s more a permissions issue. The current SN’s will probably evolve into being more than simply introduction services.

Esther: The problem is “friend inflation.” And, also, these SN’s require you to make social relationships explicit. [Right on.]

Eric: Social networks will get better as we figure out what problem they’re intended to solve.

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Tim O’Reilly (one of my heroes) leads a panel on “the reality of Internet and politics.”

The panelists are Jonah Seiger who worked with EFF, Bob Epstein of GetActive.com, and Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com. It takes Esther asking a question from the floor to get them to address what I think is the fundamental issue: Ordinary people feeling they can own a campaign.

Eventually, I asked if they each could find even a single sentence about how the Net is making a difference to politics, without using the word “money.” Scott did, but the others two couldn’t. “The Net lets us do old things in new ways,” one concluded.

That may well be the whole truth. But I refuse to be stripped of all hope. Without hope there is no action.

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