Tag Archives: 8/trust

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When sitting down at a restaurant in Minneapolis, I noticed the waiter replaced my white napkin with a black one. Apparently the tradition here is that if you are wearing black trousers or a dark skirt, the reasoning is that a white linen napkin might leave visible lint on your clothing so they immediately swap it for a black one. Such careful attention to detail surely develops law8. I wonder how many of these kind of subtle details are managed at finer eating establishments. I looked for a list on the Web and couldn’t find anything comprehensive. The closest I could find were references to chilled silverware when serving cold appetizers, but I figure there are a few more subconciously discernable practices in the presentation of a meal out there … my hunt begins.

Trust the Tempura Master

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In Chapter 8 on law8 of LOS I talk about the concept of omakase sushi whereby you leave the menu up to the sushi Master. While in Japan this week, I experienced ozashiki tempura which translates to “private room tempura” with a tempura Master.

A sushi Master deals with the raw; a tempura Master deals with the fried. Although I admit to having a guilty desire for fried food, every year as I age I find that the way my stomach settles with the grease is often not worth the fling. The tempura Master however left no harm to my stomach in his knowing way.

While he cooked, the Master explained how the shrimp used were exactly 4-months old — the perfect time to eat them. When I tried to take a picture of the shrimp as they left the oil the Master joked, “Shrimp don’t like having their pictures taken. Look! They all turned red! (Of course when heated, shrmp’s bodies change color from black to red)” We all laughed. His humble demeanor made me realize that an important aspect of achieving law8 is to have a good sense of humor.

Free Money

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When I saw Google yesterday offering a free 10 dollars for the taking, it reminded me of an experiment on law8 by my wacky friend Prof. Dan Ariely. He did an experiment where he set up a table in a public space with a bowl containing cash and a sign that said, “Free Money.” Dan found that with a pile of one-dollar bills, 10% of the passerbys would stop and take the cash; with fifty-dollar bills, only 22% took him up on his offer. His point was that “If someone is offering me something free, there must be a trick to it.”

We can be cynical in life, and assume that there really is no thing as a totally “free lunch.” To complete mis- law8 everything around you can probably lead to a lonely state of being. Well, in another browser window there I am about to “Sign up to earn [my] $10 bonus.” Free money is only a click away.

Who You Gonna Trust …

A friend pointed me to the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. As an advocate of law8 as an important property of simplicity, I thought this list to be quite relevant. Then I began to wonder about the distinction between the words trust and credibility. For some reason, I think of the word credibility as less credible than trust. That distinction may not be important.

Going through the “Ten Laws of Credibility,” I find that they all make a great deal of sense and I see ways by which I can improve this site’s credibility, as well as others I am working on. I like how the page itself embodies its own rules to a high degree. As to whether then by design you are more likely to trust me or not that remains to be determined if I am to go ahead and implement the Stanford guidelines. Perhaps I can get to it once I have more law3.

Run for Your Life!

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I wish that one of the Laws of Simplicity were to exercise more instead of less. But who needs laws when you have great services on the Web like Tak Okamoto‘s new RunLog! Yes there are many such services on the Web, but the cool thing about Tak’s system is that it uses OpenID. The concept behind OpenID is important: one login for all the things you like to do on the Web. That’s right–no more confusion about your various logins/passwords and so forth. A lot of it of course inevitably depends upon law8, but OpenID is actually well thought out in this area.

Combine Tak’s RunLog with the Map My Run service to measure your route, and you’re well on your way to a better New Year of 2007. Run!

Simplicity Symposium: Part 4

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I asked Jason Kottke to talk about the creative process for how he goes about collecting information for kottke.org. Perhaps my first encounter with Jason’s name was in a magazine article about full-time bloggers. Jason is a soft spoken person and I appreciated his calm style of presentation. He began with the assertion, “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. It makes our world unnecessarily complex.” By Jason’s estimate, there is about 7.1 quadrillion bytes generated each day by newspapers all around the world. I was surprised to learn about Jason’s strong need to maintain editorial integrity by being sure to verify his posts by checking multiple sources. I gravitate to Jason’s blog for its simplicity, and I was happy to learn of his care to instill trust in his readership.

He scans about 100 online pages and 100 real pages with a requisite “one poem per day.” This latter comment was truly poetic–pun intended. But he said that his best posts are usually found randomly through serendipity. It seems that there are a variety of random URL generator sites out there which after a few casts of the die I understood Jason’s point quite clearly.

Finally, I was excited to hear that he generally blogs with “a couple longer posts with eight shorter posts.” Jason’s site feels fairly unstructured but seems to work extremely well. I didn’t realize that it was because he has a clear sense of how each post is organize-d. It is this simple combination of trust and organization that underlies his journey to “find out what the Web is saying about the world.”