Close Your Mouth When You Talk

Observe without Affecting

July 23rd, 2008 at 09:20pm Eloy Zuniga Jr.

Thumbing through Google Reader and I ran into this website courtesy of Happy Katie.  She’s a rock star when it comes to the do’s and don’ts of the interwebs.  She defines trendy within the blogosphere and is a people hugger in general.

But this post isn’t about Katie, this post is about the website I found via Katie.  A website called “We all Hate Quickbooks.”

What does this one web page do?

This one web page looks at conversations coming from Twitter.  The website filters out (pulls) conversations that mention Quickbooks.  It’s an interesting way of observing what people have to say about Quickbooks without ever making them fill out some survey or poll.  In other words these are people giving their honest opinion [, well about as honest as it can get].

What fascinates me is that they’ve managed to completely bend [, maybe even break] what Werner Heisenberg has to say about close observation.  It’s been stated that you can’t observe anything closely without affecting it.  I think that’s exactly what this web page is doing, until it gets too popular of course.

Someone who might massage your brain a bit more is Jane Goodall (the chimp lady), she ran into this same dilemma as well.

This observation seems pretty close to me, but maybe I just misinterpreted the statement and they’re only referring to close in regards to physical proximity.

I just thought they idea was clever, there is so much information being flung from the corners of this world you really don’t have to ask (bug) for it anymore … just know where to find it and organize it into a usable, non-bias, digestible format.

This idea may just set a new standard for performance ratings and quality assurance surveys.  No more filling out that form that doesn’t give me immediate results but yet somehow manages to make me feel guilty enough to fill out.  Ok I’m lying, I never fill it out … but someone has to … why else would they keep making them?

Entry Filed under: Not So Popular, Thinking Out Loud