• [from steve_portigal] Lending Coming Soon for Kindle [Kindle Forum] – [This announcement from Amazon produced a lot of skepticism on the important caveat – that lending will be dependent on the publishers. Nice move that allows Amazon to raise their eyebrows innocently, "Oh, sure, we're allowing people to share eBooks. It's those greedy publishers that won't let you do it. But don't look at us!"] Later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable – this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.
• [from steve_portigal] Proposing a Taxonomy of Social Reading [Institute for the Future of the Book] – [Bob Stein opens the conversation on how we can further the dialog about what it means to be social in reading. The wiki-like format he's used allows for discussion but is pretty difficult to navigate. I've linked here to the overview page that summarizes the current entries in the taxonomy] In recent months the phrase “social reading” has been showing up in conversation and seems well on its way to being a both a useful and increasingly used meme. While I find this very exciting, as with any newly minted phrase, it’s often used to express quite different things…In order to advance our understanding of how reading (and writing) are changing as they begin to shift decisively into the digital era, it occurred to me that we need a taxonomy to make sense of a range of behaviors all of which fit within the current “social reading” rubric.
• [from steve_portigal] Cross-examining your interview skills [Slideshare] – [Discovered through Google Alerts since it quotes me, but shared here because it's a great reference for a lot of fundamental interpersonal (and other) aspects of interviewing]
• [from steve_portigal] Some crayons belong in kids’ mouths [Seattle Times Newspaper] – [Old news perhaps, but new news to me. A surprising brand name for a beverage!] In 2003, Seay bought the Crayons trademark for use with food and beverages from someone who had been tinkering with using it with juices on the East Coast. The crayons trademark is not the same as Crayola, a company that sells a popular brand of the colorful writing instruments known as crayons. Coincidentally, another local company — Advanced H2O on Mercer Island — uses the Crayola brand name for a bottled-water line called Crayola Color Coolerz.
• [from steve_portigal] HP’s Slate specs slated by bloggers [Boing Boing] – [As Homer Simpson said, it's funny cuz it's true] it's just a pretty keyboardless netbook. Its most interesting characteristic is a bizarre slide-out tray that exists only to display the Windows 7 licensing information. It's like something from some kind of screwball comedy about awful product design: HP was apparently obliged to do this because it didn't want to mess up the exterior with this compulsory information panel.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows of the early Louis Cheskin work, a recent Stanford study established that the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes.

Expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.
…
“We have known for a long time that people’s perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price,” said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

When we worked with a wine brand recently, we sought to understand the complete wine “usage” process, from planning, through shopping, to storage, to opening, to serving and drinking. We looked specifically at people who were interested in lower-priced wines and most of them were limited in their knowledge and/or experience.

In other categories when the customer is new and is presented with enormous product choice (the amount of wine choice dwarfs most other categories I can think of) we might feel sympathetic for the learning/selection/usage learning curve they would face; with wine people spoke very enthusiastically about the journey. Each trial experience involved drinking wine…something they liked to do! A social, tasty, and rewarding experience. Even a wine they “didn’t care for” (the typical critique) wasn’t a failure, because it still carried all the symbolic meaning.

The marketers were hampered by a limiting view of their customers; the market had been sliced into ridiculously narrow price points and this inevtiably drove discussions of people characterized exclusively within those $3 slots (as in, “I’m a $7.99 to $10.99 drinker”). While our client no doubt had cash register data to support their segmentation, it was completely at odds with how people saw themselves. They purchased across a much broader price range, and their primary concern was their own knowledge and accumulated experience. We were given a great opportunity to offer this different view and illustrate some of the unmet opportunities this presented.

I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow to give a talk about user research and cultural insight to a group of people working in the food industry (primarily) as sensory scientists; smell-and-taste researchers who I think work on groovy stuff like “mouth feel” and so on. Sounds like a great group; they’ve got a lot of registrants for our workshop and we’re going to do a bit of an observational walk-around exercise in some different neighborhoods in Toronto. I’m looking forward to it, despite taking a red-eye flight tonight.

The New York Times looks more closely at the “alternative” breakfast cereals, including where the money goes, what ingredients they contain, what those ingredients do or don’t deliver, and who really owns these companies.

General Mills owns Cascadian Farm, and the name behind Kashi is Kellogg. Barbara’s Bakery is owned by Weetabix, the leading British cereal company, which is owned by a private investment firm there. Mother’s makes clear that it is owned by Quaker Oats (which is owned by PepsiCo). Health Valley and Arrowhead Mills are owned by a natural food company traded on the Nasdaq, Hain Celestial Group; H. J. Heinz owns 16 percent of that company.

The cereals sold under the Peace label are owned by Golden Temple, a for-profit company owned by a nonprofit group founded by the late Yogi Bhajan, who made his fortune from Yogi Tea, Kettle Chips and a company that provides security services.

Of the companies that made the cereals tested, only Nature’s Path, a Canadian company, has no parent company.

Don Sayles, a retired manufacturer and typical New York skeptic, was recently shopping in the cereal aisle at a Whole Foods in New York. He buys alternative cereals ‘because we believe the hype to a certain extent about whole grains.’