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Items by Frank

Actics Blog

• 

  Actics and the Mystery of the Waterproof Pearl

  Posted: January 21st, 2008, 1:05pm PST by Frank

  Hurrah- Actics is exploding in China! According to Google Analytics, we’re attracting tens of thousands of visitors a month from all corners of the People’s Republic and are rapidly moving towards six-digit figures. Great news, isn’t it?

  Well, not exactly. As our in-house Sherlock Holmes Henrik realized, something didn’t make sense. How could it be that Actics had so much Chinese traffic but not a single Chinese user? When you have tens of thousands of visitors you would expect at least one of them to sign up, wouldn’t you? It seemed like an insoluble mystery, but Henrik put on his deerstalker, had a quick last puff of opium, and then went out and discovered the answer: 

  Actics has been copied! A Chinese site by the name of exnb has stolen our design- and as a result their traffic is now popping up in our Google Analytics reports.

  Maybe we should be upset about such blatant theft. But then again: we’re not exactly alone. As I discovered in an article in the Economist, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube all have hordes of Chinese copycats. And on a funnier note, even Harry Potter hasn’t been spared. If you want to find out more about such contemporary classics as:

  • ‘Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl’
  • ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince’
  • And the best one of all: ‘Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’

  then check out this hilarious piece in the NY Times.

• 

  Actics Banned in the United Arab Emirates

  Posted: January 18th, 2008, 1:29pm PST by Frank

  What do you do when you’re sitting around in Dubai and have a couple of minutes to spare? Exactly- you log in to Actics!

  That’s what our intrepid reporter Neils Peter from experience design lab did. Or rather: he tried to, but then he got hit by the following message:

  

  That’s right: Actics has been banned in the United Arab Emirates!

  But why? What is it about us that is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates”? Eager to find some answers, I checked out the OpenNet Initiative, which is a great site on internet filtering and surveillance, and had a look at their country profile of the UAE.

  As it turns out, the UAE are extremely active on the internet filtering front. To give a few examples: they block all sites in the top-level domain “.il” (no prizes for guessing what country that belongs to). They pervasively filter pornography, gambling, and sites promoting alcohol and drug use. And they also selectively filter sites that “express alternative political or religious views”. So is that what they found so objectionable about Actics: the fact that we “facilitate ideas” that are potentially “in breach of the general order”?

  Whatever the case, the whole affair certainly adds a nice dose of glamour to Actics. YouTube is blocked in Iran and the BBC in Myanmar- and now we have made it into the big league, too! I’m tempted to say that it calls for a drink- but since that might get us banned by another 7 countries I should probably keep quiet.

• 

  Men Are Not from Mars, Women Are Not from Venus

  Posted: December 17th, 2007, 3:57pm PST by Frank

  Do women and men live by different ethical values? I suppose the stereotypical view would be that women care more about ’soft’ values like Gentleness and Empathy, while men are more concerned with ‘hard’ values like Honour and Perseverance. So is this picture supported by the data from the Actics Community?

  Not exactly… Or to be more precise: not remotely. Here are the five most popular values, arranged in alphabetical order, of one of the sexes:

  • Empathy, Environmentalism, Integrity, Openness, Tolerance

  And here are the five most popular values, again in alphabetical order, of the other sex:

  • Empathy, Environmentalism, Integrity, Strength of Character, Tolerance

  It’s not exactly what you’d call wildly divergent, is it? One tiny difference- that is all the Actics data turns up. And now for a little quiz for anyone who’s interested: which way round do you think it is? Is it women who live by Strength of Character and men who live by Openness, or vice versa?

  In any case, the conclusion we can draw from all of the above is clear:

  Men Are from Somewhere Between Mars and Venus- and So Are Women

  But I guess that’s not exactly the sort of catchy long-live-stereotypes title (besides, the capitalization gets a bit tricky) that will catapult a book to the top of the bestseller lists.

• 

  The Mother of All Values

  Posted: December 13th, 2007, 11:53am PST by Frank

  What is the most popular ethical value these days? I have to confess that when the Actics Community started, I expected to see a neck-and-neck race between about a half dozen values. And if I’d had to put my money on any single one of them, I would probably have gone for Integrity.

  That much for my instincts… True: Integrity doesn’t score badly in the Actics Community, but it doesn’t get close to the winning value. This winning value in fact leaves all other values standing and sweeps the field in every category you can think of:

  • 36% of male community members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 25% and Openness with 21%)
  • 44% of female members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 24% and Empathy with 19%)
  • And a whopping 53% of company members live by it (ahead of Integrity with 20% and Openness with 19%)

  So is the situation any different when we look at countries? Not really. Right now most community members are from Denmark, the UK and the US- and only in Denmark does the winning value get something of a run for its money:

  • 27% of Danish community members live by it (ahead of Integrity and Openness with 24%)
  • 48% of UK members live by it (ahead of Tolerance with 17% and Integrity with 14%)
  • And an astounding 56% of US members- our largest geographical group- live by it (ahead of Integrity with 21% and Openness with 17%)

  So what is this all-conquering value I’ve been talking about? Well: I’d like to think that I’ve kept you on the edge of your seat until now, but you’ve probably already guessed: it’s Environmentalism.

  And I wonder: is this just an Actics Community phenomenon or has Environmentalism truly become the dominant value of our times?