While I admire what Mark Zuckerberg et. al. have accomplished, I think that “social graph” is a bit overweening and suffers from a disease that many technologists — particularly young technologists — have, which is the tendency to invent cloudy new words for clear old concepts.

In this case, the concept is serendipity.

The internet is terrific at getting you exactly what you want, when you want it and a good price: think Amazon.com, iTunes, RSS feeds and, more generally, search.

But the internet is terrible at exposing you to things that you didn’t know you wanted and might really enjoy: think the glum irrelevance of Amazon’s recommendations or the clutter of a search page when you don’t have a precise enough set of keywords in the search.

By contrast, real-world bookstores have all these wonderful aisles and shelves where people wander and happen upon things, and the clerks act like editors when they showcase staff picks on convenient shelves at eye level. I have a cognitive context for my local Borders; that context, not to mention that I’m in wander mode rather than hunt-and-acquire mode when I’m there, makes me more open to seeing new things. So, for example, I recently started reading a cute werewolf series that I happened to see displayed in the sci-fi/fantasy section at Borders. (The first one is “Kitty and The Midnight Hour” by Carrie Vaughn if you like this sort of thing.) So far, I don’t get that kind of serendipity at Amazon, and much as I like “Stumble Upon” you simply can’t go LOOKING for serendipity… it just happens.

That’s what I enjoy about Facebook: I see what my friends and acquaintances are up to, and because I like them enough to be friends with them their activities and interests come pre-equipped with relevance to my own activities and interests. So, it’s not purely random like much in search or the average banner ad: it’s framed (in the Goffman sense) and contextualized.

I’m not looking for a new book to read: I’m finding out what my friends are up to, and if one of them happens to mention a book, then I might be inclined to read it.

Generally, I tend not to like the Facebook applications that try to automate serendipity (I’m probably going to ditch Visual Bookshelf, for example) because that’s just another form of clutter.

People don’t need profundity every moment of their lives, and the idea of a social graph just sounds so dreary and like so much work. But serendipity? Now that’s a pearl of great pricel.

By the way, the greatest serendipity engine in the world is called “college,” so it’s no wonder that Facebook emerged from that even-more serendiptious, four-year environment.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

With traditional media stars like “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and Raven Symone (of “That’s So Raven” on Disney Channel), the question will be how audiences will find and keep finding this content so as to create a longitudinal and always-building fund of cognitive engagement with the content.  That’s how MacFarlane and Symone built their audiences on TV, and that’s how it needs to happen elsewhere.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I also found him performing the song solo on YouTube, a clip from the “Porchester Hall” DVD (originally broadcast by the BBC) that Missy mentioned.

I haven’t listened enough to render a judgment about this. More to come.

Recently, I bought the new Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) album, “An Other Cup.”  If you liked his old stuff, you’ll like this.  Since he left the world stage in the 1970s, Yusuf Islam has had four children, and recently that’s made me wonder how his persepective on one of his most famous songs might have changed.  That song is called “Father and Son.” (If you don’t know it, you can find the lyrics here.)  When he wrote the song, Islam/Stevens both spoke and sang most convincingly from the perspective of the son.  The father, like Polonius when he’s giving cliched advice to his son Laertes in “Hamlet,” is sealed off, providing unasked-for counsel with affection but no emotion, no interiority. In contrast, the son is agonized and you feel with and for him.

How, I wonder, would Yusuf Islam rewrite that song today? Or, would he simply perform the original with different inflection?

Looking at my bizarre career trajectory (academia, Hollywood, internet writing and marketer, marketing journalist) it seems like I’ve zigged and zagged quite a bit, and I like the claim I can make to variety. However, there’s another perspective in which I’m pretty much interested in the same thing–how the mind does things with the narratives it consumes–over and over again.

As I’ve mentioned previously, right now I’m deep in the revision of a novel called “Redcrosse” that I’ve been working on for years.  When my son started moving on his, progress on my novel stopped moving for about a year and half, and now I’m getting it to move again. One of the interesting things for me has been to return to the book after a long hiatus, to reread it and think, “Huh, what’s going to happen next… waitaminute you WROTE this!”

If you live long enough and keep returning to the same stories, you can chart your changes by how your take on them alters with time.  Sometimes this is simply a matter of growing into or out of things.  And when it comes to long-running fictions, sometimes those things change too.  I was one of the first people ever to watch Sesame Street, and it was a lot more urban, citified and had fewer Muppets back in the 1960s than it is today.  Today, the street itself could be in Connecticut. Back then, it was pure New York.  I’ve written elsewhere another another example of this: my inability to watch “E.R.” after I became a dad.

Most of this post is about how personal meanings change over the course of time, but that phenomenon also happens at the cultural level. Here is one of my favorite perspective’s on it; it’s a passage from Wilhelm von Humbolt that Heidegger quoted in “On the Way to Language”–

“Without altering the language as regards its sounds and even less its forms and laws, time–by a growing development of ideas, increased capacity for sustained thinking, and a more penetrating sensibility–will often introduce into language what it did not possess before.  Then the old shell is filled with a new meaning, the old coinage conveys something different, the old laws of syntax are used to hint at a differently graduated sequence of ideas.  All this is a lasting fruit of a people’s literature, and within literature especially of poetry and philosophy.”

And with that, I should get back to writing.

However, outside of the classroom never before have I felt such extra-narrative pressure to finish a book as quickly as possible.

“Keep reading before the ending gets spoiled!” I thought, and many others thought the same thing.  I scrupulously avoided spoilers (except for one awful headline on Slate.com that suggested which way the black/white “does he die or doesn’t he?” would go… an NO you won’t hear it from me). I didn’t talk with people about it.

While reading, I’d keep thinking, “only 100 pages to go until I’m safe. Until I know what happens FOR MYSELF.”

I’ve read tens of thousands of books and this is unique in my experience.

Most importantly, while ordinarily the cognitive back-and-forth between the experience of a fiction and the creation of that experience is pleasurable (that is, “I’m really enjoying this ‘Hairspray’ movie and– hey! that big fat Baltimore mother is played by JOHN TRAVOLTA making allusions to ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’… and hey! I only know that because I’ve seen those OTHER movies… oops, something interesting is happening… better pay attention”) in this case it wasn’t.  Something about the competing bodies of knowledge of my experience of books 1 to 6 and the massive spoilage in the media made it hard for me to engage with the fictional experience.

More on this soon.

What the heck is behavioral targeting? For Mediavorous readers who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about interactive marketing, behavioral targeting (BT) puts an advertisement in front of a user that the BT technology infers the user is interested in based on where the user has clicked in the past.

So, if you’re visiting a lot of sites that have articles about, for example, four-door Lexus SUVs with V6 engines, then the BT technology will conclude that you’re shopping for a car and might serve up an advertisement for the competing Hyundai Veracruz.

What’s interesting about BT is that it will serve up the ad when you’re visiting the sports section of NYTimes.com or somewhere else. In other words, although BT derives much of its intelligence about what the user is interested in via the content of the websites the user visits, it deploys that intelligence into situations where the content might be entirely different.

This is important for two reasons, the first of which is relevant for iMedia and the second of which is more relevant for the Mediavorous audience.

#1. It marks another AOL investment in the ad inventory business (all the blank spaces into which ads get placed are “inventory”), with prior moves including the 2004 acqusition of Advertising.com — a big network of websites where one advertiser (say, Nike) can put its ads across the network all at once — and earlier this year’s acquisition of ThirdScreen Media, another network but one focused on mobile phones.

While AOL believes and continues to invest in its own content — and even moved away from a business driven by dial-up access fees to one driven by advertising — it also has quietly built the ability to put the right ad next in front of the right person no matter what the criteria: whether an advertiser wants to buy propinquity (putting a car ad next to a highly-branded car article on AOL or the New York Times), reach (buying ads next to lots of car articles across the web) and/or frequency (exposing the prospective customer to the ad lots of times).

#2. This is another step forward in the anatomization of all content, which really started when Napster and iTunes essentially killed the album and shifted the focus of music consumption to individual songs. Of course, radio had been playing individual songs for decades, but the presumption there was that the singles were free samples for the album or CD because most of the time that’s what you had to buy to get the single. What Napster and iTunes did to music YouTube and other video sites have done to TV. Now, if you’re looking for one funny bit from The Daily Show you don’t have to watch the show itself, you just check it out on YouTube later.

I’ve written many times before, here, about eventness, but one of the other great pleasures in media involves another concept, “cognitive funding.” The first person to talk about this was Steven Pepper, a twentieth century art theorist at Berkeley. Pepper taked about funding in terms of a painting, where if you looked at the Mona Lisa three times by the final viewing you were seeing the cumulative exposures of T1 + T2 + T3, where each exposure built a cognitive and aesthetic fund.  When an object of scrutiny is sufficiently complex to reward repeated viewings, the more you look, the more you like.  This also works for serial fiction of all sorts.  Essentially, if you watch on episode of “Entourage” you aren’t getting nearly the cognitive experience as you are if you watch a whole season.

The human mind is torn between the desire for novelty and the desire for building cognitive and aesthetic funds.

What does all this have to do with behavioral targeting? It helps me to focus on what’s different now — at the beginning of an explosion of all media that will only get bigger — compared to the glory days of television that ended about 10 to 12 years ago, right about the time that cable TV got bigger and internet content started to be generally available and statistically significant.

In the old media days, funding was easy because there wasn’t that much to choose from. Today, it’s hard because there are so darn many media choices. As I’ve said before, audiences are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of things clamoring for their media attention and underwhelmed by the quality of the individual things they do watch (as Barry Schwartz has argued, the number of choices leads to opportunity costs that inevitably decrease the satisfaction of the thing eventually chosen).