Foursquare’s general manager, Evan Cohen, is giving a talk at the ILM conference I just spoke at.

He says there have been 381,000,000 check-ins so far. In every single country. The last country to check in was North Korea. The biggest single event was the Rally to Restore Sanity. “The most basic user experience is simply when friends check-in to their current location to find their friends.” “We help engineer serendipity” in which you discover a friend is nearby.

Their value proposition: Discovery, encouragement, and loyalty.

Discovery: They want to push people out into the real world. They’ve just launched an “explore” tag, a recommendation engine. It uses info about what your friends like to do, what people like you like to do, what people are saying in the “tips” review feature, etc. “We want to be like that best friend who knows every cool bar in Chicago, or every restaurant…”

Encouragement: Use gaming mechanics to get people to do what they wouldn’t have done otherwise. The mayor races have become really competitive. If someone loses it, they’ll go back to the place over and over. Their badges also encourage people to go out. E.g., go out to the gym a few times a week and you’ll get the gym rat badge. They have also improved their leader board. The Ambassador program enables users to bring merchants onto Foursquare.

Loyalty: They encourage merchants to offer rewards of various types. They’ve relaunched this part of the platform: easier for merchants, for users, and new “specials” types. They’re now offering “flash specials” to drive traffic when the place is under-utilized. Not all specials are discounts. “It’s an experience.” They also have a “friends special” that only works if you show up with some number of friends. Over 250,000 venues have verified on the merchant platform. Merchants have done creative things with Foursquare. Even when Starbucks offered a mere $1 off a frappucino to the local mayors, checkins jumped by 50%. “It’s about the experience and recognition as much as anything.”

They have a full and easy API, modeled on Twitter’s.

[I find Foursquare fascinating. To the users it's a game. To the merchants, it's a form of marketing. And as a blending of the virtual, the real, gaming, and marketing, it's amazing.]

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Well, here’s an application of some of the ideas in Everything is Miscellaneous that I wasn’t expecting: The US GAAP Taxonomy. A post at the XBRL Business Information Exchange says:

The US GAAP Taxonomy was built by the accounting standards setter, the FASB. It was built by accountants. It is a consensus-based product. Not one SEC XBRL filer uses the US GAAP Taxonomy as is to file with the SEC. Every SEC reorganizes the US GAAP Taxonomy.

But the US GAAP Taxonomy is not built to be reorganized. The structure of the taxonomy is more like a book. Can the US GAAP Taxonomy be reorganized? Of course it can. But it is certainly not optimized to allow for reorganization and reorganization is not even mentioned in the design characteristics. As such, it will cost more and be harder to create and maintain these reorganizations.

So how do you make it easier to reorganize? Many smaller pieces which can be put together as needed is vastly easier for a computer to deal with than having one large piece and trying to break that piece apart. That is one example of what can be done. Another is communicating the metadata which exists in the taxonomy, for example the information modeling patterns employed. A third is to make the existing metadata real metadata, rather than burying it in the labels of the concepts. Another is to add more metadata.

The post points out that it’s not that everything about that taxonomy should thrown into a big pile. There are key data points required by law and to achieve financial integrity. Still, this is not a place I would have thought miscellanizing would help. It seems, however, that I may well be happily wrong.

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Pew Internet reports that 65% of American Net users (75% of the people they contacted) have paid for online, digital content. Ever. And there’s no category of goods in which more than one third of the respondents have ever paid for content.

The content could include articles, music, software, or anything else in digital form. Here are the results for the fifteen different types of content Pew asked about:

• 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online

• 33% have paid for software

• 21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers

• 19% have paid for digital games

• 18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports

• 16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows

• 15% have paid for ringtones

• 12% have paid for digital photos

• 11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it

• 10% have paid for e-books

• 7% have paid for podcasts

• 5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games

• 5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games

• 5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services

• 2% have paid for adult content

The first three are way lower than I would have expected. That 15% have paid for ringtones I find bewildering and just a little depressing. That 2% report having paid for “adult content” I take as meaning 2% actually responded, “Yeah, I pay for porn. You gotta problem with that?”

Overall, there are a number of different conclusions we could draw:

1. The survey was flawed. (The survey questions are here [pdf]). But Pew is a reputable group, and not in service of some other group with an agenda.

2. There is such a wealth of goodness on the Net that in no single category do a majority of people have to use money to get what they want.

3. This a sign of disease: So few people are paying for anything that entire categories of goods-provisioning are going to die, taking the abundances with them.

4. This is a sign of health: New business models based on minority participation are and will emerge that will keep the categories alive, and, indeed, flourishing.

5. Most of what’s available on the Net sucks so much that we won’t pay for it.

6. We are just so over paying for things, dude.

FWIW, I find I’m willing to pay for more content these days, in part out of a sense of responsibility, in part because the payment mechanisms have gotten easier, and always if I can sense the human behind the transaction. (This is a self-report, not a principled stand.)

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Harvard Business Review yesterday posted my piece on why American business leaders (and those who write about them) so often claim integrity as the most important property of leadership. (Blog posts at HBR are free to access.)

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About two minutes ago I discovered that I was at the end of an EXTREMELY rough first draft of the chapter on decisions. If forced to lay odds, I’d say it’s about 12:1 that I will be doing a major rewrite of it, since I went through it with only a provisional idea of what I was going to say and how I was going to structure it. For example, I believe I may have the structure exactly backwards, and that the long first sections should be dropped or turned into a paragraph or maybe into a cute line drawing of a kitten.

This is the last chapter before the Grand Summation, of which we shall not speak, mainly because it causes formication over all areas of my exposed skin. In the current chapter I am writing about decision making because it is one of two proof points. The previous chapter is about science. Both that one and this one are intended to see if all the jibber jabber about networked knowledge that the reader has slogged through so far actually holds up in areas where we really really have to know what’s right and wrong. So, when we make a decision, does networked knowledge help? What happens when the rubber hits the node, so to speak?

The chapter as it stands begins by spending way too much time on the nature of distributed leadership. I spend page after page talking about Jack Welch as a counterexample (this will almost surely be cut drastically) to make the argument that modern business leaders take integrity as the chief attribute of leaders because organizations are Too Big to Be Led. Since you can’t be sufficiently competent in everything you would need to be, you claim that simply being a truthful, authentic person is enough. Yeah, sure. The fact that the memoirs of successful business leaders are often among the most inauthentic, squirmtastic writings around is just icing on the cake.

Anyway, I then argue that leadership, too, is becoming a property of networks, albeit it unevenly and certainly not in every case. I have a brief case study of the Army’s leadership center at West Point, based mainly on an interview with Lt. Col. Anthony Burgess. (The link is to a piece he wrote up after the interview.) I just don’t know if I’ve successfully sold the reader that an extended discussion of leadership is directly relevant to the topic of networked decision making.

I then make the point that I think I should begin the section with: If you look at decision-making as the isolated moment in which the bit is flipped, then you miss the networking of decision-making that goes on before and after that, even if the organization has no networked decision-making structures in place. Even when the decisions are made by the person at the top, they are made within a network that takes on many of the tasks and properties decision makers shouldered alone. So, the decision may still be a flicking of an leader’s thumb up or down, but that gesture may now occur within a network that has helped inform it, will carry it out, and will support it.

The final section takes a surprising turn for the practical. I was not expecting to end up there, but, when I checked my original outline, sure enough, that was exactly where I thought I’d be. I suppose that’s a good sign. Anyway, this final section’s premise is that to make smart decisions, we need smart networks (not in David Isenberg’s sense!). So, I quickly look at a bunch of properties of networks and loosely tie them to practices that will help make the network smarter than the smartest individuals in them. Nothing you haven’t heard before, which is, of course, a problem.

So, a very very very rough first draft that I may throw out tomorrow. Yay?

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Netflix has a 128-slide deck, meant to be read not talked through, that explains the company’s culture, including why they don’t award a fixed number of vacation days. I find it liberating, humane, and slightly scary.

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I don’t know enough about the Slater incident to have an opinion, beyond unease at lionizing someone for dealing with a-holism by being an even bigger a-hole. — if that’s what happened.

But I do want to say that a couple of weeks ago I had an unguarded conversation with a Jet Blue flight attendant who had no reason to lie to me, and who went on for about half an hour about what a great place to work Jet Blue is. The perks are generous, the flexibility of scheduling is phenomenal, the people are fantastic.

You don’t often hear that type of enthusiasm. I already like Jet Blue’s respect for its customers. That they treat their employees with respect makes me want to use their services all the more.

BTW, the fact that one of their attendants cursed out an a-hole passenger and then jumped out the slide does not have the same effect on me.

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Next Monday, 12/7, the Berkman Center is hosting a book launch of Berkman Fellow Andrew McAfee’s new book “Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges” at 6:00PM in Pound Hall 102. Andrew will give a brief-ish talk. I heard him give a talk last week, and it was a great blend of big picture and practical implications.

See you there!

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Art Kleiner on how to create cultural change in large corporations:

Nadia El-Imam talks about whether the Web is changing who we are, starting with Couchsurfing as an example.

Robin Chase, a founder of ZipCar, explains why she thinks mesh networks will connect people, cars, and the “smart grid.” [article here]:

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That’s the title of Dave Winer’s most recent post. To which I say: Amen.

Bunches of people who work for a company are going to be doing it primarily for the money. That’s how our economy works. But if you’re at the top and you’re doing it just for the bucks, you’re depressed and you don’t know it. And you’re going to communicate that attitude down.

Oh, there are undoubtedly exceptions. But they’re the exceptions. And I know that there are CEOs who are turned on not by products but by processes. I’ve worked for some, and they did a fine job. At least they’re excited about something. But, it’d be better for the company if they got giddy about what their company does. Then maybe the rest of the company would think their product is worth building, worth extending, worth supporting. And CEOs are in a privileged position for making connections difficult for those who don’t get to stick their toes into so many corporate pools…if they care enough to have crazed ideas running through their heads as they lather up in the shower.

A somewhat related story: I certainly didn’t always agree with Michael Powell when he was head of the FCC, but I heard from someone who worked there that Powell was a gadget guy: Whatever the newest tech was, he wanted installed in his office so he could try it out. That made me feel much better about his tenure. At least he wasn’t a functionary, a bureaucrat, a time-server. I still disagreed with him, but I also felt that our disagreement was further up the stack and thus more resolvable.

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