Who is Farhan Lalji?

I deal with a lot of data. I sometimes find it difficult to present data in a way that allows people to really make decisions or draw insights easily. That’s why I was thrilled to come across a great graphic/flash tool from the New York Times that shows how the different demographics voted in Democratic primaries (hat tip to the boys at 37 Signals).

Pretty easy to draw some conclusions from this app. While Blacks hugely supported Obama, Whites support of Hilary was luke warm at best. And it was kind of cool to see as the segment gets younger and more educated the support for Obama grows. The educated future of America chose Obama, which makes me think even if he doesn’t win in the next election; the future looks pretty good for the country.

The simple visualisation from the NYT is a great example of providing data graphically in a way that enables people to make insights easily. Very cool.

This morning I saw a headline and story that bothered me on my feed reader,

Obama under fire after fundraiser remarks (Reuters)
Reuters - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came under fire on Friday for saying small-town Pennsylvania residents were “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion,” in comments his rivals said showed an elitist view of the middle class.

But then I went on twitter to see what Obama News had to say about it. And sure enough there’s a posting with the response from the senator in Indiana where he clarifies that:

“And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement– so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

And a YouTube clip so you can see the full context.

This is what I mean by the web facilitating democracy, it’s the transparency in stories that wasn’t there before and is there now. Before you would have seen the story in print media and had nowhere to turn. But today you see the story, and through the power of the web you hear straight from the source and make up your own mind with more information.

Cathy pointed me to the LordsoftheBlog.net today. It’s about page describes it as:

“a collaborative blog written by Members of the House of Lords for the purposes of public engagement.”

Last year I discovered David Cameron’s blog, I was skeptical (sk or sc? Seems like it can be spelt both ways) and unsure as to whether or not we would see DC blogging and posting in a years time and although the blog is being updated everyday it’s still updated more then once a week. It could be better, but it’s better then I thought it would be.

Earlier this week, I started trying twittering again to see if I can find any value in the service. One of the reasons why was the fact that Downing Street was twittering and I would be damned if Downing Street was an earlier adopter of something then myself.

Sometime between the discovery of LordsoftheBlog.net and the Downing Street Twitter I watched an address by Obama at the Google offices - sorry to lazy to find it again and link/embed it - in California.

Today it downed on me, all of these things are signs that information is being spread to people on their terms. People can engage or chose to ignore the information, but governments and officials representing government are finally leveraging the ability of the web to truly empower people. At the same time people have more access to information and the thinking behind the decisions made by government then ever before.

With blogs people can comment on posts around decisions and government officials can reply. With Twitter people can follow activities closer and respond with questions and concerns and watch the reaction to feedback. This is a giant step and I think this brings us closer to truly having government for the people and by the people.

SAI had a post the other day talking about how much the US presidential candidates were raising and spending online. The bottom line was that they were spending little but raising lots.

That’s been my whole argument around interaction and brand advertising. The candidates don’t need to spend money to get their messages online, but online is a powerful channel to make money.

Did a back of the envelope type analysis of the 3 main candidates still in the running and how they were doing on one of the most powerful channels online, YouTube. A search on “Barack Obama” brings up over 50,000 results. Just looking at the first five, there have been over a 1.2 million views, and they all average 4.5 stars. For Hilary Clinton, again over 50,000 views, the kicker here was there was one video with over 4.6 million views and nearly 25,000 comments, but the video was a mash up from the community taking the apple 1984 superbowl ad and using Clinton’s message as Big Brother, ending with a mashed up Apple logo for Barack Obama. The other four messages are fairly positive for Clinton though.

That’s the Democrats, the Republican candidate (or likely candidate, I still don’t get how this works fully) John McCain has over 11,000 videos. The first five videos all paint him in a pretty negative light.

What’s my point? It’s that you don’t need to spend online to have a huge presence online. The candidates have over 20,000 videos online, many of them put together by the community. Then there are the tens of millions of views of these videos, and hundreds of thousands of comments around these messages. Putting display ads on sites for this many views would have cost the candidates hundreds of thousands of dollars at moderate costs per thousand impressions, but they don’t have to spend this amount online. Because the message their pushing, because interaction with these brands, because the user base community driven campaigns online are much, much, much more powerful then a banner ad could ever be.

Now if only companies could focus on delivering engaging user focused interaction rather then trying to spend money on improving the brand maybe they could leverage or harness the real power of the internet.

News from the blogosphere hit one of my favourite tv shows today, ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption – I say TV show, but I listen to the podcast here in the UK. The news was that Greg Oden(GO), a basketball center with the Portland Trailblazers, had publicly endorsed Barak Obama on his blog. The post was followed by over 170 comments (mostly positive) and a bunch of other blog posts like this (mixed results).

Both hosts from PTI were giving GO dap – i.e. credit –for taking a political stance and being vocal about his political leaning. I was born during the later stage of a time when many athletes were thought leaders, to a certain extent, in the US. On PTI Michael Wilbon rattled off the names Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, and basketball players like Bill Russell, Bill Walton and Bill Bradley (who’s now in politics, not just talking politics in the locker room) who were all vocal about their political beliefs. Before these athletes there was Jackie Robinson, the black power salute at the Olympic Games, and other acts of politics and sport mixing. Whether you agreed or disagreed with these athletes you had to respect their strength in character to discuss their views. Some, like Ali, even suffering financially and reputationally (yes I know it’s not a word, don’t care) because of their views.

Today, I can only think of one other athlete, the Canadian 2 - time MVP of the NBA - Steve Nash, who also has made his political views known on occasion and has suffered some backlash for some of his views.

Personally, I think there’s too much money in endorsements for professional athletes today, and an athlete today can suffer significant financial set backs by saying the wrong thing or upsetting the wrong person. Being like Mike meant drinking Gatorade, wearing Air Jordans and buying into Brand Jordan not believing in some of the things that Mike believed in. Being like Tiger means wearing an expensive watch or investing a mutual fund or whatever else Tiger’s associated with. I’d love to see GO’s stance to be seen as a new trendsetter, one of athletes speaking their minds.

Maybe I’m a little partial to this as I’m reading Obama’s Dreams of my Father right now and I like the fact that he comes from a diverse background, something I can really relate to. Not to mention that I think he could do a whole heap of good for America’s reputation across the world and… well this wasn’t meant to be a political post so I’ll stop there. Maybe I’d feel differently if GO had endorsed McCain or Clinton on his blog. Don’t know, can’t say. But I like it in this case.

I heart Lawrence Lessig. If you want to know what I think about the American election this year check out his blog and the video clips he’s put on his site.

I especially liked this blog post - 20 minutes of excellence in my opinion.

I got a couple of slices of toast this morning from our café. I also had sushi for lunch down the road. The food was great, the packaging sucked.

I hate polystyrene packaging. Hate it. I get that it’s cheap and that for packaging cheap is good. But the fact that it takes forever to decompose (if it ever does) and that the environmental concerns around it are vast, to me means that it’s just not a viable product in the earth’s long run. Not only that but the alternatives are just nicer, a paper plate or paper container is not only classier but food, for some unknown to me reason, just tastes better.

So why do places, like Yoshino at the Japan centre, continue to serve there goods in polystyrene? If McDonalds can eliminate its polystyrene containers, why can’t others?

Obviously it’s about the bottom line and maximizing the bottom line. But when commerce acts in a way that’s against the greater good government needs to step in. Some have, some cities in the US have had bans on Polystyrene for nearly 20 years, why has the rest of the world taken so long to catch up?

Personally, I would love to see the UN step in, or heck even the EU or any other multilateral group, call for a ban on Polystyrene. Anyone know someone I can email about this?

UPDATE : Thanks to Natasja, I managed to find a ban polystyrene petition on the PM’s site. Please join me at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/banpolystyrene/

And I’ve created a facebook group calling for the ban, please join!

The wife and I often get into a heated debate about how to solve the world’s problems.

One such problem is war and violence.  My take is that things like sport and business play a vital part in progress, and that politicking and government intervention isn’t enough.

I was reminded about this as I read a posting on nba.com that talked about the Seeds of Peace basketball clinic.  The clinic invites kids from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and America to learn more about the game and play the game together.  By cooperating on the basketball court kids have to learn more about each other and hopefully form a bond.  The theory behind camps like this is that when these kids grow up they’ll take these experiences and be less likely to resort to violence against other cultures.

But waiting for kids to grow up can take time that we don’t really have.  So companies like New Generation Technology can also provide a helping hand to peace through enterprise.  Getting Israeli money to flow into Palestine links the two regions and, hopefully, means that by destroying one another they actually destroy themselves.  I love this idea.  And it seems like Sir Ronald Cohen is catching the invest in peace fever as well.

I totally think there is a place for governments and peace discussions and whatever else Tony Blair et al are trying to do; I just think roadmaps and peace plans work politically but enterprise and sport actually can work socially.

With Gordon Brown making the transition from chancellor to PM today I found myself thinking about the transition from managing the finances to being a leader. Actually it was more with the FT’s article humorously titled, “Eeyore must become Tigger of No 11” comparing business roles to characters in Winnie the Pooh. Segue: it’s interesting that the FT’s renamed the article online, but I swear that was the title in the print version! Oh, and sorry if you’re stuck outside the FT’s walled garden.

I love the comparison of finance people to Eeyore and Chief Exec’s to Tigger’s. For those who aren’t familiar with the characters, Wikipedia puts it perfectly, Eeyore is a pessimistic, gloomy, old, depressed stuffed donkey and Tigger is a cheerful, outgoing, competitive in a friendly way, and completely confident in himself Tiger.

In my (admittedly limited) experience with finance people and Chief Exec’s that’s really been the case. Sure there are exceptions, but it’s an interesting analogy. Most of the finance people I’ve come across have been Eeyore-ish and a lot of Chief exec’s have been Tigger’s. Actually let me rephrase that, a lot of the successful chief exec’s I’ve read about have been Tigger’s.

Personally, I’m a lot more Tigger then Eeyore, with a little bit of Pooh – a gentle bear who never attacked anyone, and is much loved for being playful - thrown in.

An interesting game would be “Tigger’s or Eeyore’s” looking at business personalities and politicians as characters from Winnie the Pooh. From what I’ve read I would guess that:

• Steve Jobs is a Tigger
• Jerry Yang is a Tigger
• Bill Gates is a Tigger with a bit of Eeyore hiding deep down
• Not sure what to make of any of the Google guys
• Warren Buffet is an Eeyore with the heart of a Tigger
• Mark Cuban is a Tigger
• George Bush is a Piglet (who masquerades as a Tigger and an Eeyore)
• Tony Blair is a Tigger
• Gordon Brown is an Eeyore trying to make believe he can be a Tigger

Can you convert from one personality to another, I’m not so sure. But it will definitely be interesting to see Gordon Brown try.