A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

When it comes down to listings for a website, taxonomy is an essential tool to filter search results. Let me give you an example… Sorry OpenTable but, Coco Loco is not Caribbean, then Cuban restaurant. Coco Loco is known for their Cuban food. Caribbean is too much of a broad term to describe their food… And Caribbean does not include Cuban. What about The Flying Biscuit? I thought that it is American, but I guess the one on Northside Pkwy is Southern.

Taxonomy describes the category the establishment falls in. This helps users find the correct listing according to the search criteria. For example, is Holiday Inn an inn or a hotel? I would categorize it as a hotel. What about you?

Now, I have found that are a few places that are hard to categorize. As I wrote before, what is the difference between a café and a coffee shop? Now I came up with one even harder to differentiate… grocery store and supermarket. Wordnet.princeton.edu defines supermarket as a large self-service grocery store selling groceries and dairy products and household goods. www.kesko.fi defines a grocery store as a self-service food store that sells the full range of the above groceries. Food accounts for about 80% of grocery stores’ … Is there a difference?

Taxonomy is one of the most important aspects of a listing. It is what answers the question; will the user be upset if I categorize McDonald’s as an American restaurant, or as a fast food…

The methods by which people make decisions seem to remain very much the same, though the fields they do it on change rapidly.

Around the office, we call it the “3rd Grade Schoolyard Effect”, and it could be argued to be the basis is in fundamental sociology.  At the risk of over-simplifying the process, it breaks down as such:

1. People group together for protection, productivity, and a feeling of belonging to that which many people agree with.  As we look for affirmation, we find others to learn from, and that group makes the most sense.
2. A group, by its very nature, is a small collection of leaders followed by the majority that is everyone else.
3. What the leader approves of doing, the group learns as acceptable behaviour and repeats as they feel necessary or are encouraged to do so in order to remain a member of the group.

Personally, I was the kid who explored my own thing and refrained from playing all the games or whatever anyone else did.  And while that sounds like the making of an independent person, I have to point out it made for many a lonely game of tag.  But I digress.

This breakdown of behaviour is absolutely operating in current social networks.  The same process appears: Identify the group.  Find its leader.  Influence that leader, and the group follows suit.  That sounds all simple enough.  But let’s examine it in practice.

Twitter.  A sociologists playground, in my opinion.  Patterns of behaviours and group dynamics are not just witnessed, they are recorded, searchable, and even recreatable.  The easiest groups to identify are those in a geographical area (”Atlanta, George, USA”) or those involved in the trending topics (”#iranelection”, “#jonasbrothers”, “#fathersday”).  To this, step 1 is accomplished - a group has been formed.

Step 2 is where the group identifies a leader.  With a mechanism like Twitter, multiple leaders are very feasible and sometimes even encouraged.  When a region or topic is large enough, it actually appears to become infeasible to have few leaders and more emerge (for instance, during the different time-periods of a day).  But if you take the turmoil surrounding the election in Iran, those who are the best informed and quickest to bring it to the rest of the group, seem to be the defacto leaders (those in the area are leaders perhaps only because their being their gives them better insight and thus are more informed.  My belief is that an insulated Iranian would be as unlikely to be a leader as a person living afar though happened to still be well-informed).  Everyone interested in the topic follows the words of the leaders, typically those in Iran.

Which brings us to step 3, which has the leaders performing a behaviour and the rest of the group following suit.  This is clearly evident in two simple methods.  Firstly, the moment a leader says anything, it is immediately spread (”re-tweeted”) throughout the networks to cover all others interested.  Additionally, the moment a person is identified as a leader, the number of other users following that person climbs at an accelerated rate.

But to use that for other purposes (e.g., promotion), the first task is identifying where the groups are.  Involve yourself until you can easily identify the leaders.  Then, engage them in conversation, showing the entire group that those leaders approve of you.  As long as you continue to offer tangile benefits (in Twitter, that would be consistently offering good content), you will be viewed of as a leader-approved follower or perhaps a leader outright.

So the next time you have a club party you wish to promote in your area, try this with you Twitter account.  Search for people in the area, and identify as many people as you can who would fit your party.  Look at their conversations, and identify either that they are a leader or are following a leader.  Engage that leader, and get him(her) to approve you to the community.  Then, the community will follow your encouragement and then you can begin counting how many actual guests your corousing has acheived in bringing.  Additionally, if you speak and offer enough content regarding clubs, perhaps you will find yourself in charge of your own community, and able to influence them directly.

In closing, I must offer that if you are in the 3rd grade, it might do you well to at least play a few games so the cool kids know who you are.

How would you classify someone as “dumb”? Low IQ? Bad GPA? No common sense? Webster defines intelligence as, “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations.” Obviously, this makes way more sense than our attempt at quantifying intelligence, which I think the generations before us are starting to realize is impossible. It’s sociological too. We think if you can’t add 2+2 you’re unintelligent, but I’m sure other cultures think if you can’t weave a blanket out of bamboo then you’re unintelligent. Our society has managed to create a system in which your inability to conform to their interpretation of intelligence could possibly ruin your life (e.g. bad SAT scores=no college= no career = poverty), while the so called “impoverished” cultures have a system in which intelligence determines your ability to survive by giving you real skills.

There has been talk that our generation is the dumbest of all thanks to social networking and the internet. Basically it has ruined our ability to concentrate and become educated, and also destroyed our social skills.

Our “now” mentality makes the everyday learning of school boring. Learning about the Civil War becomes boring because it’s not about “me”. Unfortunately what education fails to comes to terms with is how completely out of touch with reality it is. Sitting in a classroom and listening to the endless babble of the monotone teacher about how Thanksgiving exists because the Indians and Pilgrims loved each other is not only boring but completely inaccurate. So what if we think sitting in a classroom listening is boring?! If I can talk to a Native American about what happened when America was “discovered” (quite the euphemism for “taken over by murdering everyone there” huh?)  not only will that be much more educational, but also more interesting. Learning should be interactive and now with the internet, it has the potential to be.

People need to teach people, not teachers teaching people. If teachers are getting paid 50K in areas with high tax bracket families, and 20K in areas with the lowest tax bracket, it’s pretty easy to see why the quality of education is so unequal. Who came up with this whole entire educational system that puts the rich on top and the poor on bottom? Certainly not my generation…

Then there’s the argument that conversing over a computer all the time completely diminishes your real life people skills. The generation’s prior to us only had the institutions of their parents, their school, their friends and most likely their church to influence what they did. Who your parents hung out with determined your school and your friends, and you grew up in this tiny bubble never really knowing what anyone thought outside of your world, and never really caring because you had no means to find out. What you thought, essentially, was what everyone around you thought. Unfortunately that was a small group of people.

Now, not only do I have the original institutions, but my generation get’s to be influenced by this whole new institution: The Internet. Not only allowing me to connect instantly with my friends, but also their friends, and their friends, and so on. I have the opinions and views of millions of more people than I would have had originally. I can learn about other cultures, other religions, other interpretations, and therefore form my own, genuine opinion.

I would like to argue that prior to the internet, the generation before was essentially replicas of their parents. You had the occasional free thinker, but generally people had the opinions and views of their parents because that’s all they had the ability to be exposed to. Now we can all be free thinkers. Which will also make it much harder for our society to be manipulated, or influenced.

It is also easy to argue that our generation is much more tolerant than the one’s prior. With all this access to people nothing like us, this makes perfect sense. Tolerance, in essence, should lead to peace. Acceptance of religious difference, sexuality difference, thewayyouliveyourlife difference, will inevitably lead to a society with less war, less poverty, and less crime. Our society is much closer to achieving that than any one prior. It’s all thanks to this giant database of information and people that we’re lucky to have.

In the end, we look to the past and we see, segregation, wars, failing economies, and poverty. Then we look to the future and see it being more equal, fair, and intelligent now that we can all influence one another, think freely, and form our own opinion.

If my generation wasn’t able to do that, I would be calling the new one dumb too. After all, when I was in kindergarten and someone drew a better picture than me, I called them dumb.

I’d be jealous too, Mark Bauerlein.

If Three Dollar Café really is a Café, then what is a Café?

From the point of view of a person that was not born in the continental US and has influence from many different cultures, I can say that a Café and a coffee shop are not alike in any way. According to thefreedictionary.com, a coffee shop is a small restaurant where drinks and snacks are sold. Now, the definition of a Café, according to hometravelagency.com, is a small restaurant serving coffee.

I’ve observed that Cafés and Coffee shops are not the same. Now, where I’m from, a café is, yes a small restaurant, but instead of serving just coffee, they also serve, but don’t limit to, deli style meals like sandwiches and salads. But where I am from, the only coffee shop we have is Starbucks..

From my point of view, a coffee shop is the definition for Starbucks or Caribou. Whenever I hear coffee shop I think about a place where mostly coffee is served. I recently learned that Starbucks, or Caribou for that matter, is actually not a coffee shop, it is a café. What I don’t understand is how can you differentiate between those two?

So what would be your definition of a coffee shop and a café?

I’m a caffeinatic and I would like to read your point of view.