Even Dictionaries need to listen & learn

It was pleasure to watch Erin Mckean’s talk at TED on redefining the dictionary. Only when I watched the presentation did I realize how long its been since I last used a dictionary.

Erin mentions in her talk that dictionaries are meant to act like a tool which provides us with words to better express our selves. Based on this definition, one would think that the dictionary should be used so much more than its current adoption. Lets try to figure out why adoption never really happened.

The traditional dictionary is a physical book with limited number of pages compiled by small number of lexicographers. Their job is to really look up words from various print sources ( books, magazines, etc – which are also compiled by a limited set of authors) and then select words based on their frequency of usage and probability of being used in the future. Hence the dictionary contains a very small subset of the entire words conversed, which limits its utility.

The constraints of the paper dictionaries could have been taken away by the online version, but even that is just a digitized version of the same form factor ( with all its limitations) with search being the only additional capability.

For the dictionary to really encompasses the richness of a language, the process of compiling a dictionary has to more about gathering every new word being used by people and not about selecting words. The process of selection should be left to writers and speakers.

Some salient features of an ideal dictionary would be:

• Allow everyone to participate in the process of gathering words by contributing words that they use and hence making them available to others.
• Automate the process of digging out new words from conversation (e.g. look through tweets,blogs,discussions, etc), store them along with a reference to the conversation
• Keep adding links to more conversations where the same word is used in a different way.

Erin and her team are working on a cool online site called Wordnik to create such a dictionary with the vision of providing an every evolving toolkit of words that will help us express our selves better.

Wishing them all the success and great to see that even dictionaries of the future will listen and learn.

Blend It !

The best way to make your customers feel a connect with your product / service offering is through a community that educates about what value the product adds to their life.

For the community to flourish, user participation is a must. To achieve good participation, companies need to create initial content that is really engaging and entertaining. This at times can be hard for product/services that add value to a customer’s daily life but may not be very exciting to use.

In such cases companies need to be innovative about their content and create a good blend of educative content along with content that create a sense of excitement and triggers initial participation.

A great example of this was the campaign run by Blendtec for promoting their line of blenders. Blending is an activity that we may all do in our homes, but may not be really exciting. What Blendtec did was create a show called “will it blend” which involved blending crazy things like iphones, matches, camcorders, etc to get viewers excited about the possibilities of what all could their blenders blend. They also made this show participatory and allowed users to put up a challenge of what they wanted to be blended.

Along with all the crazy items that were blended on the show ( for which they had a label “dont try this at home”) and put up on the campaign site , they also have a category called “try this @home” where customers were educated about some real use cases of their blenders.

This result was great adoption of the campaign. Blendtec series of videos collected a total of 83,238,033 views (an average of 967,884 views per video )

To read more about this campaign visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F

Getting Your Message Out

Nice talk by clay shirky on how any one can use new media to get any message to anyone in the world.