I ‘ve had my Sharp Electronic Dictionary for a couple of years and I use it a lot. It’s much handier than a printed dictionary, thesaurus or dictionary of quotations, which it replaces with a PDA-like device with an LCD screen. The electronic books come from the Oxford University Press which means that the contents are pukka - they have provenance and scholarly authority. My only regret is that it doesn’t contain the full Oxford English Dictionary but you can get that by online subscription to the OUP for £200 a year. I typically use it when I want to see the full definition of a word or want to check US vs. British spelling.

I like Visual Thesaurus. It’s a graphical browser for words. I prefer it to the unadventurous thesaurus that’s in Word. It comes in two flavours: an online version and one that is downloaded and integrated into Word. You can try it for free but a full subscription costs $20 a year. The coolest thing is seeing all the words shuffle around.

Full disclosure: having been a customer for about nine months already, I was very flattered when they asked me to write a regular column for their online magazine for subscribers.

There is a little-known feature in Word that displays readability statistics as part of the spelling and grammar check. Specifically, it tells you how many passive sentences there are and gives scores for Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

I’ve written about readability metrics before. They’re not going to make you a great writer but they can stop you being a dreadful one. Find out how to switch on readability statistics in Microsoft word.

I see that the first person has been evicted, following a public vote, from the Big Brother house this week. Two others have left. One because he had a breakdown, the other was thrown out for ‘cheating.’ This pathetic circus is a kind of collective vacuity. But is there such a thing as collective intelligence?

When I was at college, I read a terrific book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. There’s a telling story of an 18th century stock swindle where subscribers were persuaded to invest in “A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” I don’t suppose much has changed since then - look at the dotcom boom. Or Big Brother.

Well, one thing has changed. Today some people think crowds are wise. James Surowiecki is one. He wrote The Wisdom of Crowds which was published in 2004. His contention is that, contra Charles MacKay, crowds know something that individuals don’t.

Actually, I think they both have something important to say. My hunch is that crowds are wise when you are looking for regression to the mean and that they are foolish you use them to find the extreme outliers. In market terms, they are good guides if you want to be safe but not if you want to be greedy.

This is also why commercial flights have two pilots: not so you get the best skill of two pilots but so you avoid the worst mistakes. Apparantly they are now working on planes that can land themselves if a pilot is incapacitated, but that’s another story.

This crowd thing is a bit of a media meme. At least at Stibbe towers. There’s a first-class article in The Atlantic Monthly about management consultants. The following quote reveals the author’s prejudice:

…the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.”

Then there’s a new buzzphrase: ‘crowdsourcing’. There’s a good article on Wired about this phenomenon. It means, broadly speaking, using the power of the internet to harness the skills of low-paid, highly-skilled amateurs. The photo library, iStockPhoto, is one example of this. Disclosure: I use them for most of the pictures on this site.

There’s even a site where you can set up your own online markets to harness the power of collective intelligence. Check out inkling.

But there are dissenting voices. I particularly enjoyed an article subtitled The Wisdom of Chimps on The Register this week. Here’s a snippet:

The self-selecting nature of participation in computer networks simply amplifies groupthink. Facts that don’t fit the belief are discarded.

I also liked the reference to Chris Anderson’s “faith-based economic theory.” But you’d expect the editor of Wired to tout the web. It’s part of his job description. Another disclosure: I am a regular contributor to Wired. Don’t fire me Chris.

The article closes with the assertion:

The media, and Time is a great example, espouses the rosy view that our public networks are in rude health. I’m confident that this utopian view carries little weight with a public frustrated with pop-ups, viruses and spam.

Crowds: wise or not? You decide.

I was sorting out my bookmarks over the weekend (oh yes, my weekends just fly by when I don’t have any deadlines) and I came across an old favourite: The Fleet Street Forum Journalist Anti-FAQ. This contains ‘advice’ for PR companies. To illustrate, here is one of my favourites:

18. Maintain multiple lists of journalists according to their importance to your clients. Make sure the journalists know who’s on each list and where they rank. Journalists like to know their place.

Perhaps because I’m doing less journalism and more corporate work, my views on PR companies are softening. Maybe it’s a case of poacher turned gamekeeper.

However, once again a PR company reminded me just how poor they can be a couple of weeks ago. It’s a long story involving a forgotten invitation to a client’s meet-and-greet dinner. Needless to say it was my old friends: see Annoying PR Tricks and How to Annoy a Journalist (item 14).

Iuse a managed anti-virus software. Today it popped up a message to say that it had detected a virus in an email and asking if I ‘wanted to manage this incident’ with two buttons: ‘yes’ and ‘no.’

To my mind this is an impossibly confusing message. Of course I want the situation ‘managed’ so I want to click ‘yes.’ But I’m paying for a ‘managed service’ so if I click ‘yes’ does that mean I’m taking over from the a/v software which would otherwise ‘manage’ it for me without any intervention.

I think of myself as a security specialist so if I’m confused what about normal people who just want it to work?

It’s one of those category error brain teasers like “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party,” or “do you intend to overthrow the government of the United States by strength or guile.” The ‘or’ in both cases make a simple ‘no’ impossible. Or the warning “Wet paint” which I always want to interpret as an order.

P.S. After writing this I found a good post on Presentation Zen about non sequiturs. It ties in nicely and it’s got a lot more good stuff.

On the train today: a woman with the word ‘WAR’ written in block capitals on her hand. Why?

I write reminders on my hand. For example, the rotation speed when I’m taking off in an unfamiliar plane or when I have to buy a pint of milk for my tea (equally important). But ‘war’? Oh well.
When we were in Goa, Aileen had mehndi henna tattoos on her hand, like the picture, which looked lovely.

I’m sure somebody has already auctioned their hands as an advertising medium on eBay, but if not, I’m volunteering.

Sometimes, I write for Wired. The hardest thing about writing for them is getting their attention with the initial pitch. I can have a great story or idea in mind but if I don’t communicate it to them clearly, they don’t commission the story. Ironically, the more words I use, the less success I have. Ultimately, it’s about writing good headlines. Which is not my best thing.

It’s very much in my mind at the moment because I am editing a 28-page magazine for an Articulate client and coming up with the right headlines and subheads is a struggle. Too literal, too cute, too verbose, too boring, off-message etc. Sometimes a good headline just clicks but most of the time it’s a slogging match.

I met Darren Strange yesterday. He writes the Office Rocker blog. We had a great chat about Microsoft and blogging and other cool stuff. Really interesting, intelligent chap (which shows in his blog).

In passing, he told me that one of his most popular posts had the most arresting headline: “Bill Gates Runs Like a Girl.” Which just shows the power of headlines, especially on blogs where the headline is often all you have to get someone to click on your post in their RSS reader.

The whole thing reminds me of that Wendy Cope poem: “Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis”:

I had a dream last night.
Some record seemed vital.
I didn’t think much of the poem,
But I loved the title.

Which brings me to the ultimate Wired headline: “Man bites robotic dog.” Now all I need is a story to match the headline.

Working for Articulate Marketing’s clients, I write a lot of case studies. I try to tell a story that shows how my client’s product or service helped a business. Stories being hard-wired into the human brain, this is a better way of getting the point across than a facts-only product description.

However, in thinking about the last couple of days’ posts - which have been about what motivates people - I’ve been thinking about other ways of approaching the case study format. One possibility is the ‘anti-case study’. If I can tell a story of TWO companies, one with the product and one without, I could show the benefits more distinctly and (the main point) I could create a sense of opportunity, fear of making a bad decision and show cost savings or profit gains. Ambition, fear and greed. Powerful stuff.

One example of an anti-case study came to mind. (I am a private pilot and write about flying in my other blog: ModernPilot.com). The contrast between traveling by airline and traveling on a private jet is very clear: it’s more luxurious and more efficient. Here are a couple of private jet companies who have really good ‘anti-case studies’. I’m going to see if I can find a way to do this for one or my clients in the next couple of months and I’ll report back on the results.

• Gold Air has a great minute by minute breakdown of a business day by private jet vs. commercial flights with pictures. Full disclosure: a couple of years ago they took me on a trip in one of the LearJets to the South of France. Very swish.
• Bombardier has a neat series of price comparisons with commercial flights which try to show that private aviation can actually save money.

Continuing my mission to understand people’s behaviour and the writing triggers that drive it, I’m reading Lewis Wolpert’s “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.” There’s a nice quote about confirmatory bias: ‘Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.’

Then there’s an interesting article on Slate about whether we should buy supplementary car insurance. What? Doesn’t sound like the most interesting thing. But an economist’s take on whether you should insure a $900 risk for $5 a day when you rent a car is genuinely insightful. And yet somehow Hertz and the rest manage to persuade people to pay up for this. Risk aversion and the fear of doing something stupid is a powerful motivator.