SURVEY SAYS!

It's been a few months since my lucrative side gig of writing fake amazon reviews was brought to an untimely end, and the painful memories of Black Thursday have finally started to fade. So what do I get in my e-mail inbox?

Dear Amazon.com reviewer:

Who are the people writing reviews at Amazon.com? Why do they do it? And how often?

Answers to such questions can enable designers of online forums to better facilitate participation. As a participant at Amazon.com you can help us by taking a few minutes to share your experiences.

We are academic researchers in the Information and Decision Sciences Department of the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota... working on an academic research project to examine individual behavior in online forums.

Despite breaking into the vaunted top 2000 reviewers during my brief yet meteoric run, I'm not entirely sure I'm the person they're hoping to reach here. The survey asked a lot of questions about whether you've included your Amazon reviews on your resume and/or to get a job. Call me a cynic, but somehow I doubt pointing a prospective employer to a page like this would really help get your foot in the door.

WOO-WEE! LOOK AT ALL THEM TALL BUILDINGS!

Went up to New York City earlier this week for a magazine awards ceremony (the short version of the story: a bodyguard-adorned Martha Stewart won, we didn't). I spent a beautiful spring afternoon wandering around, catching up with friends and taking a Clark Griswold-like 55-minute sprint through the newly reopened MOMA, which now looks 45% more like the Paramus IKEA, only without the helpful pre-painted footprints to vector you into the Swedish meatball buffet line at the kafeteria.

Every time I go to NYC, there's at least one "only in New York" moment, and this trip was no exception. As I was walking past Penn Station towards Chelsea, the entire station disgorged itself -- apparently an underground track fire prompted a mass evacuation, and suddenly there were thousands of additional people out on the streets. Or maybe everyone was just trying to score scalped tickets for that evening's Duran Duran concert at Madison Square Garden. It was kind of hard to tell.

What was telling, though, was the absolute lack of panic--if anything, people were amused by the disruption. Of course, if the same thing had happened at, say, Metro Center in DC, you'd see nothing but throngs of attorneys attempting to beat each other back with their Blackberrys as they tried to fight their way up the (broken) escalators.

va-mem-map

MEMORY MAPS

I've always been obsessed with maps. And since all the Interweb kool kidz are doing it these days, I couldn't resist quickly throwing together a couple of memory maps made with Google's satellite imagery, complete with the requisite hipper-than-thou annotations from my not-quite-so-kool life (click on each image above to see them). Would-be stalkers, grab a magnifying glass and prepare yourself for hours of squint-rific fun!