VOICES FROM THE INTERNET Selling ideas WHEN you're trying to sell your idea, it's natural to assume that the people you're selling to think the way you do. If you can only show them the facts and stories that led you to believe what you believe, then of course they'll end up where you are... believing. The problem, of course, is that people don't always think like you. Go watch some videos of people of different political ideologies talking about why they support a candidate other than your candidate. These people are stupid! They can't conjugate an idea, they have no factual basis for their beliefs, they are clueless, they are ideologues, they are parroting a talking head who knows even less than they do! (And those epithets apply to anyone you disagree with, of course). In fact, they're saying the same thing about you. Same goes for diehard fans of the other brand, or worse, the clueless who should be using your solution, but don't even care enough to use your competitor's product. If they only thought like you, of course, and knew what you know, then there wouldn't be a problem. The challenge doesn't lie in getting them to know what you know. It won't help. The challenge lies in helping them see your idea through their lens, not yours. Marketers of successful ideas rarely market the facts. Instead, they market stories that match the worldview of the people being marketed to. (There's an alternative, one that you might want to think hard about: perhaps you should only market your idea to people who already think the way you do. After all, you're not running for president, you don't need a majority. Screen people by their behavior – what they read, what they buy, how they act – and only tell your story to the people who will embrace it. That's a lot easier to do that than it's ever been before.) – sethgodin.typepad.com PhotoDNA MICROSOFT announced on Dec. 15 that it would donate PhotoDNA, a technology developed by Microsoft Research, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which will use it to identify and eliminate images of child sexual abuse and exploitation. PhotoDNA works by analyzing the properties of an image and using that to create a unique signature, also known as a hash. PhotoDNA then compares the digital image's signature with another image to determine if the two are a match, even if the latter image has been somehow altered by being saved in a different format, resized or digitally edited. Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics technology at Dartmouth, apparently developed some of the computational tools used by Microsoft and NCMEC to refine PhotoDNA. PhotoDNA is also automated, allowing NCMEC to scan through millions of images online in order to quickly find matches. Farid suggests that the technology can process even a billion images in a relatively rapid fashion. Once NCMEC begins assigning PhotoDNA signatures to explicit images, then online service providers can use those signatures to ferret out any other copies of those images on their networks. According to Microsoft, NCMEC has reviewed and analyzed almost 30 million such images, along with video, since 2003. – microsoft
