Hi, I’m Mike DiBenedetto

By not customizing your default image size settings in wordpress, you risk having badly sized images.

After I wrote the previous post on this blog, I was very unhappy with the tiny size that I choose for the Reddit screenshots.  Actually, I didn’t choose them at all.  It was the default settings for medium sized images in Wordpress 2.7.  I tried using the large image setting but it was too big for my column width.  Sure, I could have manually resized the image but I didn’t.

That’s because default settings are powerful things.  They determine way more of your life than you’d probably like to admit.  I will be posting a short brainstorm in the coming days about the ways that changing common default settings could drastically alter our lives.

For now, I’d like to make a few suggestions about changing your image size default settings in Wordpress 2.7.

Step 1: Click on “Media” in the Settings Menu

Step 2: Set the Medium Size width to half of the width of your main column and the Large Size width to a few pixels less than the full width of your main column.

Changing default image sizes saves time and makes your blog look better.

By having the large size correspond to your maximum width, you can easily make images take up the entire column.  And by setting medium size to half the width, you can easily insert images that can float to the left or right and have text wrap around them.

Programming, Atheism and Helping Each Other Spread Birthday Wishes?

When most people think of the social link-sharing site Reddit (those people who have heard of Reddit, at least), they think of atheist left-leaning libertarian programmers who have a soft spot for long pun threads.  However, Reddit can be a fascinating place to observe how good causes can rouse a large amount of collective action provided certain conditions are met.

Despite the fact that Reddit is primarily used to share funny, interesting and provocative links about technology and politics, many of Reddit’s most popular links are not even links to content outside of the site.  Reddit was designed to allow users to submit links that point to a comment forum created on Reddit.com.  This ability has created a culture in which users ask the Reddit community to support a cause by up-voting one of these self-referential links.

One of these rallies for support caught my eye last week.  The title was “Today is my dad’s 60th birthday, and he’s a huge fan of reddit. Not sure how far this submission will get. But in case you see this dad: Happy Birthday!“  One might expect a handful of redditors to vote this up…but at the time I saw it, ten hours after it was submitted, more than 4372 people had voted it up.  (I say more because 4372 represents its vote tally of up- and downvotes and it received a number of downvotes.)  That means for ten hours straight, this link received roughly one vote every eight and a half seconds.  Two days after I took this screenshot, the upvote count was well over 6000.

Birthday Wishes On Reddit Attract Thousands of Supporters

This is a fairly startling success for such a small scale, personal cause.  We can look to a few different reasons for its high vote count.

• The low barrier to participation: all it took to help make the user’s dad happy was a simple click.
  
• The goal was clear and attainable: getting this link and happy birthday message to the front page of reddit where the user’s dad would see it was simple and do-able.  Furthermore, each user’s participation was intimately linked to furthering the goal – the more upvotes a link gets, the more likely it is to achieve success.
• Tightness of the community: Reddit is a smaller community than similar sites like Digg.  Furthermore, it has a number of smaller groups called subreddits where people share links about particular niches.  These factors lead people to value their fellow redditors in a way that is a bit different than other larger community sites.

When I took the screenshot above, the story was in the number one spot on Reddit’s front page, but if you have ever used Reddit, you’ll notice  that I still upvoted the birthday wish.  I did so without thinking the very second I read the headline.  Why would I do that when the goal had already been achieved?  One reason might be that the three reasons above worked so fast and were so ingrained in my psyche that I didn’t stop to think about whether or not the goal was achieved.  The very act of voting on things that I support on Reddit might be so second nature that a link’s success or lack thereof doesn’t affect me at all.  Another explanation would be that I wanted to be associated, even in an invisible and meaningless way, with its success.  In this respect, success can lead to further success.  I suspect that my behavior arose out of a combination of all of these factors.

If the voting power of thousands of Reddit users can be leveraged to wish someone a happy birthday, imagine what a cause with real emotional resonance could inspire jaded internet users to do.  To be clear, part of this birthday wish’s success came from its simplicity.  Anyone can get behind a nice wish for a father.  A cause like environmentalism or cancer research is often more complex because one may wonder about the methods, efficiencies and politics of the organization at hand.  And that split second of hesitation will lead to a drastic  drop off in the level of actions taken.

I posit that mass participation is a function of a number of somewhat intangible components:

Level of Mass Participation = Clarity of Goal X Likelihood of Success X Emotional Resonance X Ease of Participation

With that formula in mind, it becomes clear why more emotionally hefty causes receive less upvotes on Reddit. It is most often a small likelihood of success and/or a lack of a clear goal that brings down web campaigns.  How else could you explain the fact that the below cause received fewer upvotes than the birthday wish?

A more serious plea on Reddit receives less support

It is up to marketers to maximize each component of the participation equation to increase the likelihood that their constituents will support and take action on behalf of their cause.

Qwidget

[note: This is a post I wrote in September of 2008 for the company blog at Qwidget, a web startup that I co-founded.  The post was less about our company and more about my personal feelings about blog comments.  Therefore, I think it's appropriate to re-post it here, where I write about how technology affects us and the world around us.]

I have been thinking a lot about the commentosphere recently.  I’ve delved into the world a bit as well, leaving a handful of comments on my favorite blogs.  But I keep running into the same problems.  I would consider myself a fairly fanatical blog reader, twitter user, and a social media addict in general.  But I’m a user at heart.  A reader.  I have a lot of opinions and I love talking about them.  But I often feel left out of conversations on blogs – even when I know as much about what everyone is talking about as anyone else.  Why don’t I participate more?  Here are three reasons:

1. Comment conversations are totally disorganized with no clear format or structure. There is no clear entry point for casual users like me.  What should my comment be about?  The post?  A related article I read?  A response to a previous comment?  Do I need to read all the previous comments before leaving mine?  Or can I just comment away despite the fact that someone else might have said/asked the same exact thing?
2. Comment sections tend to be dominated either by trolls or power users who comment a LOT.  The presence of trolls tells me: “don’t bother.”  And the power user dominance says: “Do you really belong in this conversation?” Sometimes I don’t know.
3. There is no mechanism to connect conversations across articles. As a result each article or blog post is an island unto itself with dialogues that have a short shelf life.  Which again makes the investment of time not worth it when I’m not sure if I really want to come back to that post to comment again.

To be clear, people that do leave comments often get an enormous amount of satisfaction out of it.  But it seems to me that you need to make a certain minimum level of commitment before you start seeing benefits like fulfilling conversations, new friends, etc.  And that minimum level of commitment is simply way too high for an enormous majority of web users.

That’s why we are building the qwidget: to unleash the vast human desire to communicate among casual users that has been stifled by the problems unique to commenting.

Amazon Brilliantly Leverages Other Users Behavior to Affect Yours

Attempting to draw insight from the titans of user interface design, I have been thinking about how to use technology to motivate the people we love to take better care of themselves.  If Amazon can convince us to buy books that readers with similar tastes have purchased, there must be a way to use that sort of social pressure to encourage us to listen to the warning signs of dangerous diseases.  Facebook made the process of spreading apps so intuitive and fast that many users inexplicably found themselves adding silly applications without deriving any real enjoyment out of the experience.  Can’t we similarly make taking care of ourselves viral?

The same incentive that drives app adoption on Facebook and sales on Amazon would also be effective for a health service.  It’s called peer pressure.  It made you drink beer in high school, stage zombie attacks on Facebook, buy just one more book on Amazon and, if leveraged properly, can lead you to check yourself out.  You may not be willing to take care of yourself at the expense of everything else in your busy schedule, but knowing that your mother or child is worrying about your health could be enough to drive you to get that recurring headache checked out.

The key, as always, with social apps is to make them action focused and keep the minimum amount of action required, i.e. the barrier to entry, extremely low.   With that in mind, here are a few very rough ideas of web services and apps that might help us to pay more attention to the silent screams of our bodies.

1. E-Cards – A very simple old concept revitalized for a new purpose.  We could send our loved ones cards asking them to check out specific ailments that we know bother them.  Incorporating celebrity PSA-type videos could drive the message home further.  Even more effective would be allowing users to record their pleas via their webcams.  That could go a long way to convince their mothers/daughters to check themselves out, especially if the footage was combined in Flash with other uploaded photos, graphics and text to create a simple multimedia presentation.
2. A web quiz app could question you about your own symptoms, give you a list of possible causes in a printable PDF format (that you’d bring to your next doctor visit) and ask you to forward it to your loved ones to remind them to take care of themselves.  iVillage does something similar with their symptom solver.
3. A DonorsChoose type site that lets you create a page with your case why your mom should treat herself better – stop smoking, exercise more, get more regular mammograms, etc.  Your page would be anonymous and visitors to the site could submit advice and stories about similar experiences.  You’d then forward the interesting bits of wisdom and advice you get from the crowd to your mother.  This concept has the benefit of allowing good Samaritans to wander around the site and taking a few seconds to give a bit of wisdom that might prove convincing.   You’d obviously get a ton of bad advice that you’d have to filter out.  But bad or harmful advice and other trollish behavior would be flagged and thus reflected in some sort of reputation rank for that user.  And when you did send along someone’s thoughts to your loved one, the good Samaritan would get reputation points which would show up next time they offered a suggestion to someone else.   People love giving advice, building good reputations and doing small but helpful tasks that make them feel good about themselves so I think there would be no shortage of advice givers.  As for the intended recipient of all of this unwanted feedback from strangers, they might be turned off and angered but if cleverly constructed and designed, the site would show them just how much their daughter/son/mother/father/brother/sister loved them and worried about them.  And if they got any insight from the crowd on how to get healthier without too much effort, so much the better.

These are merely kernels of ideas and there are obvious and quite major hurdles to services like the ones I’ve outlined above.

• Privacy is the biggest.  We want to protect our medical info from companies and from each other’s prying eyes.
• Fear is another.  People are often afraid to confront their symptoms because doing so makes them more real.  It also means they need to spend money on addressing the problems.

Kiva.org Enables Users to Engage in Micro-Finance

However, with further thought and development, I’m confident that it is possible to leverage social pressure online to encourage our loved ones to pay close attention to their health.  Organizations like Kiva and DonorsChoose have unlocked massive social potential by making it easy, visible and social to do small, granular acts of giving and micro-lending.  The same can be done to address a whole host of humanity’s other problems – like taking care of our bodies.  Kiva and DonorsChoose opened a giant door by pairing the social activities of the web with the social consciousness inside us all.  It’s up to tomorrow’s great social entrepreneurs to walk through that door.