Interesting article which I think has some profound statements on..... ooh look, a squirrel.

As a kid I got used to growing up with popular comparisons: “the height of Nelson’s column”, or “the size of 10 double-decker buses” or “as much as a whole tennis court” or “about the size of Wales”.

All of these stand the test of time (sort of – I mean, Nelson’s Column really isn’t that big).

But with the speed of innovation in the tech sector, somehow it just doesn’t impress me as much. So it’s cool that the NSA collects more than a Library of Congress worth of data per day but I have no idea what that means anymore. For all I know, my Home Server might store that amount... The latest 5 Bazillion MP camera probably has snaps of me with more data than that...

A couple of particularly great posts from Seth in the past week or so. One I noticed because of it’s relation to the motivation for a recent post where I bemoaned our loss of language.

But the other is this list of questions for leaders:

Great stuff. For me, even outside of the heat of the daily battle, it is difficult to be categorical in response to most of these.

Today has been one of those “wild speculation” days – various subjects. It always seems to be the ill-informed who write the most on a subject. Maybe it’s something to do with the lack of clarity to drive brevity.

Anyway, I wondered if there was scope for a service called trust.me (note the very trendy .me extension – that domain is for sale it appears) which would be like a ‘Like’ button but would only appear on a blog post some 90-days after publication to enable readers to decide whether a particular random prediction had any merit. So you’d end up with some kind of “accuracy index” or a series of badges (yeah – I’m there) such as “Mystic Meg Badge: for a run of 20 inaccuracies” and so on.

Trust.me could partner with Instapaper to deliver a summary of previously read articles now past the ‘dodgy prediction’ phase for attention by those readers.

I’m only half-joking. Oh, and when someone turns it into a $100Bn company – you heard it here first web fans.

Funny how a number of unrelated events can end up pointing to the same thing: in this case game mechanics.

Firstly, @markjo pinged me a link to the above “Gamification” presentation which reminded me of the recent Game-based Marketing book (the deck itself references other books like Drive and Fun Inc. I read this a little while ago, but got excited about it again so kewed it (that’s my term for adding it to my Kindle reading list) and then whipped through it again in SF.

Definitely recommend a read of the book which dives into “frequent flyer” schemes and how they drive motivation to engage. It also covers the Bartle gaming archetypes (Killer, Explorer, Socialiser, Achiever). The deck above is more direct in how that relates to the current plethora of web applications and services that utilise game mechanics (obvious examples being Foursquare and Farmville)

Then one of my new colleagues Catherine pointed to “Reality is Broken” which is effectively more on the same subject. Doesn’t appear on UK Kindle yet, but is in the US. I had a quick flick through the contents and it looks very interesting.

Anyway, all of this is against a backdrop of starting to understand life in the US which is heavily driven by game mechanics when it comes to best retail deals and service. As an example, Game-based Marketing points out that you’re levelling up in Starbucks when they start to make your coffee in advance, and the various ‘rules’ that govern the ability to level up (e.g. you need to be consistent in your order and friendly!).

On the SEA –> SFO flight, one of my colleagues (with excellent MVP Gold status with Alaska Air) was able to boost me into First Class on the outbound route. I noticed on this journey that when the flight is full, some of the carry on bags need to be checked which would seriously slow down the journey. Not a problem in 1st Class of course. But I made a mental note that this may be an issue on the way back.

Fortunately, I’m not dumb and managed to throw 2 special moves on the return journey: 1) check-in online on that flight as soon as humanly possible to get best available seat and 2) do some queue stalking with best guess to ensure you’re on the plane fastest when they’re boarding (thus gaining the overhead bin space).

This is small beer, but I had to execute 2 things effectively and would need to do the same again and again – this is relatively ‘stressful’ in the sense that success is uncertain. My levelled up colleague doesn’t need to worry about that. Net effect: I have a desire to level up quickly to remove this pain and hopefully enjoy some other advantages too, so I spent some time investigating the Alaska FFP.

So the attributes of positive intrinsic motivation were at play here: It’s a CHALLENGE to level up/get the best seat, I can CO-OPERATE to make others feel good (at least temporarily), I have some element of CONTROL over my travel experience and I am RECOGNISED by both the airline and fellow customers for my prestige status.

This is just a simple example but it leaves me thinking one thing: I need to level up.

I’m sure this was one of those ideas I dreamed up ages ago (like this sort of thing) but I’ve searched and can’t find a blog post so maybe I didn’t.

Anyway, I like the principle behind X-pire which intends to add digital expiration dates to photos which means those embarrassing photos will actually fade away from the internet – so decreasing the half-life of such radioactive incidents. I’m sure it could also be subverted so you control your personal profile (like, I know I’m still a really good looking bloke, but I’m sure I looked better 10 years ago so we’ll leave the expiration dates off that one). There’s probably a load of technical challenges to implement this kind of thing, but good luck to them.

I was thinking a while ago that it might be nice for databases to have “data erosion” features. So for instance, locations, addresses, dates and so on “erode” over time and become less specific. It would actually make me feel more comfortable about entering that kind of specific into the current set of location-aware services as – eventually – I wouldn’t need to worry that I’d be exposing too much personal information if the service was hacked (or whatever).

Similarly, the same kind of erosion could occur with loose relationships such as social graphs – friends are only actually friends if you interact with them right? Presumably this is the kind of smarts that services such as Facebook already have, but it would be cool to have simple datatypes that handled this stuff automatically: e.g. “Weighted Relationship” or “Erodable Date/Time”.

You heard it here first. Probably.