Last week I joked with Jeremy that I was going to start charging people an hourly fee for counseling and therapy services. Both in my personal life and my professional life here at LeapFrog, I find that I’m someone people come to with their problems. Sometimes they want some good ideas for resolving their problems, and as a fairly out-of-the-box thinker, I’m generally pretty good at that. Sometimes I think they just want someone to “feel their pain.”

Those are the people I’d like to charge for the “couch time.”

Psychology, specifically the psychology of personality, has always been interesting to me. The human psyche, what motivates people (and what doesn’t) is pretty fascinating stuff. The drivers that motivate human behavior are of critical interest to marketers.

There are several different systems out there to classify people into different personality types or temperaments, and they all have their different relative merits. But at a high level, I think it’s important to realize that they are not describing who people are. They are describing their most important strategy for behavior. People rarely surprise me with how unpredictable they are. They more often surprise me with how eerily easy it is to predict what they’ll do, sometimes before they themselves know what they’re going to do.

A personality type is a (mostly) unconscious strategy that people use to make decisions so that they don’t have to think about every action they take, and so they can get a predictable outcome to their actions. Humans love predictable outcomes, even if they’re not great outcomes. Most people use the same few basic strategies with the same basic assumptions and values. Given a good enough understanding of the most common strategies, and enough time around a person to learn what strategies they rely on, it becomes increasingly easy to predict what their actions will be. The way a long-time married couple can appear to read each other’s minds is an example of this.

In some ways, marketing is a form of this parlor trick, performed on a mass audience. The better you understand the common denominators of the largest part of your audience, the more effectively you can predict what will and won’t motivate most of them.

Which can be remarkably useful information to have handy.

I’ve always loved writing–I was one of those weird kids who even loved the essay questions in grade school. The web is a much newer passion, but just as intense.

So when I got the opportunity to work here at LeapFrog doing copywriting for the web, it was like finding out about fried ice cream: you love Mexican food, you love dessert, and now you discover you can combine the two? How great is that?

Ultimately, I love writing and the web for many of the same reasons. I appreciate the fluid exchange of ideas, the flow of communication, and the way ideas grow and develop in the process of being shared are common to both the process of writing and the medium of the internet.

Web-based self-publishing companies like Lulu.com and iUniverse have opened up new doors for writers in the same way that the internet and the long tail have opened up doors in music. Web-based events like NaNoWriMo promote writing globally, and do a little bit of good in the world to boot.

The internet began as a method for linking reams and reams of technical documentation, and sharing them collaboratively. It developed into a very visual, design-oriented medium during the first big phase of growth. Now, in the next phase of the web, relevant content is again becoming King, and the need for copy that is well-written and clear for both search engines and human visitors is apparent.

Like Bogart at the end of Casablanca, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Not to toot my own horn, but I think I’ve built some pretty “bangin’� office furniture for the new office remodel. I couldn’t be normal and get a regular desk, no, I had to “kick� it up a notch and build all my furniture out of drum related equipment.

My desk and conference table are both built on a Pearl ICON drum rack for structure. The monitor mounts are made from the same mounts used to hold drums. The lights are built from cymbal holder arms and cymbal stands. With a little wiring, drilling and thought, the Home Depot lights have a whole new life. As for the conference table, the seats are actual drummer’s thrones to fill the role.

After building so many desktops for the rest of the office, I had to be different and a little more creative. After all, I had to show others that my personal desk could be a little more creative, being a designer and all!

Till next time, keep on rockin’… or typing, depends on how you define “banging away at the keyboard�

- Jeremy

Let’s talk about AJAX. Not the detergent, although it does smell good. AJAX (in the Internet world) is a technology that allows a web browser to send and receive information to the web server without making the page you’re looking at refresh. That’s really all it is. I hear you saying “But what in the world does that mean?”

The idea is that if the page you’re viewing doesn’t refresh, and completely redraw itself a couple things can be accomplished:

1. Less information is transferred from the server. Browsers do a good job of caching things like images so that they don’t have to be downloaded again, but for every image on the page, the browser still has to ask the server if it has a newer copy. That’s a lot of talking back and forth, and it takes time.
2. The interface can be more responsive. If you’re viewing a long list of items, and you’re looking at the first page, when you click the next button your browser only has to load the next set of data — not all of the formatting, and images and what-not. Clicking on something doesn’t require everything to be reloaded again.
3. Money can be saved. (This is the part you business owners will like) Because less information is transferred overall, there will be lower bandwidth costs.

The concept behind AJAX has been around for a very long time. Swapping the processing of data from the server to the client and back again has been happening in cycles since the inception of the mainframe. AJAX in the form it is today has also been around quite some time. Around 1998 I built an application that used very similar ideas to get around having the page refresh, but in the past couple of years there has been a heavy focus by the web programming community to build code that does it in a very clean and efficient way.

As time passes AJAX will mature even further, and may become the core method in the way that browsers work, rather than simply one way of creating web sites.