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Ka du se hvad jeg har lavet mor? Sagde min 12-årlige efternøler der har haft Snapchat i 3 mdr. Hun har lavet denni sløjd😀👍🏻

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Til projekt Malene Wonsbek

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til projekt Malene Wonsbek

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Brugerundersøgelse/Jesper

Jeg mødte op till en AGF-kamp et par timer før kampstart for at finde nogle fodboldtilskuere at tale med. Det lykkedes.

Tre AGF-tilhængere på 24-25 år:

»Jeg følger klubbens fanklub via Facebook, og så er der Agf’s egen hjemmeside. Så er der fodboldnyheds-sites. Bold.dk, etc. Jeg bruger slet ikke aviser.«

Hvad gør I når I går ind på FB?

»Jeg går ind og finder klubbens fangruppe og liker dem. Så kommer det automatisk op på den side. De smider ting op. På FB er der en algoritme, så det, du holder mest øje med, dukker automatisk frem. Det er der, jeg får alle nyheder om AGF.«

Hvor stammer nyhederne fra?

»De er fra AGF-fansene egen side. De laver nyheder og artikler. Jeg får også fra AGF’s egen hjemmeside og fra Aarhus Stiftstiden. Det sidste er links.«

Går du så ind på Stiften?

»Ja, nu og da, hvis overskriften fanger. Det er meget de sociale medier, vi får nyhederne fra. Jeg er tit inde på bold.dk. men jeg går ikke ind på JP, Stiften og andre aviser og læser. kun hvis det kommer frem på min FB-feed. Måske klikker jeg så videre. Jeg går ikke aktivt ind på aviserne hjemmesider og læser.«

Hvad læser I typisk?

»Jeg læser alt om AGF, der kommer op. Lige fra resultater til spillerhandler til bestyrelsens arbejde. Alt der har med klubben at gøre. For at læse historierne i aviserne, skal man jo abonnere. Jeg er ikke god til at gå ind på avisernes sites. Jeg tror, at mange bruger Stiften til at læse om AGF. Jeg ved ikke, hvad der skal til, for at jeg skal bruge det.«

»Det er det, der dukker op, man lige ser. Der er ikke et foretrukket medie, synes jeg. Det skal selvfølgelig være troværdigt, det man læser. «

Hvilke typer historier foretrækker I?

»Når det går godt…der er ingen præferencer som sådan. Lidt grundigere historier vil jeg gerne læse. Det er der ikke så meget af…for at læse avisernes historier skal man jo have abonnement. Det vil jeg ikke investere i, når jeg kan finde nyhederne så mange andre steder. Vi er jo studerende.«

Hvad kunne I tænke jer at læse om?

»Så skulle det nok være mere dybdegående sager.«

»Jeg synes ikke, at AGF’s ungdomshold får så meget opmærksomhed. De går det jo godt. Måske mere om det. Det gør AGF heller ikke selv så meget. Mere fokus på ungdomsholdene. Der er mange ungdomsspillere på landsholdene, og man kender ikke engang deres navne. Måske se nærmere på, hvorfor AGF ikke har solgt så mange talenter i de seneste 10 år, når andre klubber kan gøre det, en slags liste over de største talenter de seneste 10 år og hvordan det er gået dem… «

»Jeg ved ikke, om så mange andre vil læse den slags. «

»Vi ser Agf på hjemmebane og på udebane, når det er tæt på Aarhus. På tv ser jeg ikke så meget Superliga, så hellere noget andet sport.«

»Nyheder får vi via mobil. Af og til på pc, hvis man lige har den tændt i skolen.

To Silkeborg-fans:

Bold.dk som den hurtigste, og så læser jeg på Silkeborgs Facebook-side. Så trykker jeg på links der til deres hjemmeside. De har deres egen YouTube-kanal. Jeg bruger et fanforum til sladder. Men primært bold.dk på mobilen. Altid på mobilen. Min pc er sjældent åben i fritiden.

Jeg læser kun reportager fra kampene. Der stopper min interesse for klubben. Det er meget faktuelt. Papiraviserne læser jeg på arbejdet, Politiken, Stiften og JP. Jeg bladrer lige igennem. Men kun efter kampene er spillet.

Bold. Dk dækker alt, hvad der rør sig i fodbold. Jeg mangler ikke noget. De har lavet noget, der hedder Drømmen, nogle otte minutters videoer, som de har lavet. Det kan jeg huske, jeg så.

Man glemmer det hurtigt, når man scroller ned.

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Forenklet og tidsbesparende planlægning af mad!

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KOKKENS hverdagsmad - Sund aftensmad til hverdag

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Få mere tid til familien med nem og sund aftensmad leveret til hjemmet

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Mofibo - Læs alt det du har lyst til for 129,- pr. måned

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Mofibo giver dig alt det du har lyst til at læse. Og med tusindvis af bøger på hylderne, garanterer vi at du finder nye og gamle favoritter for hele familien til kun 129,- kr. om måneden.

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Simpel måde at anskue et forholdsvist lille datamateriale. Og endda med en quiz indlagt

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The Deadliest Jobs in America

The U.S. Department of Labor tracks how many people die at work, and why. The latest numbers were released in April and cover the last seven years through 2013. Some of the results may surprise you.

Which of these workers is most likely to die on the job?

Which of these jobs is near the top of the list for fatalities but near the bottom for pay?

Loggers have one of the worst job fatality-to-pay ratios. They die more often than police ofﬁcers and ﬁreﬁghters, but are paid less.

Loggers have one of the worst job fatality-to-pay ratios. They die more often than police ofﬁcers and ﬁreﬁghters, but are paid less.

Among transportation-related occupations, pilots assume more risk, but are better compensated.

Agricultural workers are near the top of the list for fatalities and at the very bottom for pay.

Which occupation has the highest number of deaths due to violence?

Garbage collectors

These workers die on the job about four times more often than ﬁreﬁghters and security guards. Transportation incidents are the biggest cause, accounting for 69% of fatalities.

It's safer to be the boss...

Construction laborers die at a rate of 18.8 per 100,000, the 12th-most dangerous job overall. Their managers, who spend time at the office in addition to being on site, have a fatality rate of just 3.7 per 100,000.

...or maybe not

Retail sales is low-risk work, though supervisors die more frequently than their subordinates (3.2 vs. 1.3 per 100,000).

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The Deadliest Jobs in America The U.S. Department of Labor tracks how many people die at work, and why. The latest numbers were released in April and cover the last seven years through 2013. Some of the results may surprise you. Which of these workers is most likely to die on the job?

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Svenskerne i Paradise Papers. Fantastisk måde at fremstille data på

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Svenskarna i Paradisläckan

Paradisläckan, eller Paradise Papers, består av 13,4 miljoner dokument från juristbyråerna Appleby och Asiaciti samt 19 bolagsregister i skatteparadis och territorier med begränsad insyn. SVT har i samarbete med nyhetsbyrån TT hittat 2000 svenskar i de läckta dokumenten. Det finns olika skäl till att förekomma i läckan och det måste inte innebära att man gjort någonting olagligt.

Scrolla ner för att fortsätta.

Vad vet vi om dem?

Sammanfattningsvis har vi alltså identifierat 1.180 personer av de 2.000 svenskar som hittats i Paradisläckan. Majoriteten, 87 procent, av dem är män. Åldrarna varierar stort, den yngsta är 12 år och den äldsta 84. Av de som vi har hittat en taxerad inkomst för år 2016 så tjänade nästan 80 procent mer än medianlönen för samma år. Den som angett högst inkomst taxerade mer än 61 miljoner år 2016. 1.000 av personerna har bolagsengagemang på Malta. 1.035 av svenskarna vi identifierat i Paradisläckan är folkbokförda i Sverige. Gå vidare till kartan för att se var.

Linda Larsson Kakuli

Detta är Paradisläckan

* Paradisläckan, eller Paradise Papers, består av 13,4 miljoner dokument från två juristbyråer samt bolagsregister i 19 av världens skatteparadis och slutna territorier.

* Läckan kom först den tyska dagstidningen Süddeutsche Zeitung till del. Dokumenten delades sedan med det internationella journalistnätverket ICIJ, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, som tillsammans med 382 journalister från 67 länder har granskat innehållet. Tre svenska redaktioner är en del av samarbetet. Uppdrag granskning, SVT Nyheter och nyhetsbyrån TT.

* Datan består av handlingar som rör 180 olika länder. Det handlar bland annat om bolagshandlingar, passkopior och e-post. Informationen i dokumenten spänner över nästan 70 år, 1950 till 2016.

* De flesta av de läckta dokumenten kommer från juristbyrån Appleby som har kontor i flera av världens skatteparadis. Förutom Appleby har även dokument läckt från en annan juristbyrå - Asiaciti Trust i Singapore.

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Paradisläckan, eller Paradise Papers, består av 13,4 miljoner dokument från juristbyråerna Appleby och Asiaciti samt 19 bolagsregister i skatteparadis och territorier med begränsad insyn. SVT har i samarbete med nyhetsbyrån TT hittat 2000 svenskar i de läckta dokumenten. Det finns olika skäl till att förekomma i läckan och det måste inte innebära att man gjort någonting olagligt.

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New York Times kombinerer 360 graders video med grafik, historiske fotos lyd osv

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Firsthand Account: The Assassination of Malcolm X

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The civil rights leader Malcolm X was killed Feb. 21, 1965, at a rally in New York City. Hear from a witness and visit the site of the assassination - in the past, present and in 360 video.

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Supernytt instastory. Nærvær og interaktion

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Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

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The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie.

But on Twitter, there is a version of Jessica that none of her friends or family would recognize. While the two Jessicas share a name, photograph and whimsical bio - "I have issues" - the other Jessica promoted accounts hawking Canadian real estate investments, cryptocurrency and a radio station in Ghana. The fake Jessica followed or retweeted accounts using Arabic and Indonesian, languages the real Jessica does not speak. While she was a 17-year-old high school senior, her fake counterpart frequently promoted graphic pornography, retweeting accounts called Squirtamania and Porno Dan.

All these accounts belong to customers of an obscure American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

The accounts that most resemble real people, like Ms. Rychly, reveal a kind of large-scale social identity theft. At least 55,000 of the accounts use the names, profile pictures, hometowns and other personal details of real Twitter users, including minors, according to a Times data analysis.

"I don't want my picture connected to the account, nor my name," Ms. Rychly, now 19, said. "I can't believe that someone would even pay for it. It is just horrible."

These accounts are counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence, reaching into virtually any industry where a mass audience - or the illusion of it - can be monetized. Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter's reported active users - nearly 15 percent - are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower.

In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world's largest social media platform. These fake accounts, known as bots, can help sway advertising audiences and reshape political debates. They can defraud businesses and ruin reputations. Yet their creation and sale fall into a legal gray zone.

"The continued viability of fraudulent accounts and interactions on social media platforms - and the professionalization of these fraudulent services - is an indication that there's still much work to do," said Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating the spread of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

Despite rising criticism of social media companies and growing scrutiny by elected officials, the trade in fake followers has remained largely opaque. While Twitter and other platforms prohibit buying followers, Devumi and dozens of other sites openly sell them. And social media companies, whose market value is closely tied to the number of people using their services, make their own rules about detecting and eliminating fake accounts.

Devumi's founder, German Calas, denied that his company sold fake followers and said he knew nothing about social identities stolen from real users. "The allegations are false, and we do not have knowledge of any such activity," Mr. Calas said in an email exchange in November.

The Times reviewed business and court records showing that Devumi has more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models. In most cases, the records show, they purchased their own followers. In others, their employees, agents, public relations companies, family members or friends did the buying. For just pennies each - sometimes even less - Devumi offers Twitter followers, views on YouTube, plays on SoundCloud, the music-hosting site, and endorsements on LinkedIn, the professional-networking site.

The actor John Leguizamo has Devumi followers. So do Michael Dell, the computer billionaire, and Ray Lewis, the football commentator and former Ravens linebacker. Kathy Ireland, the onetime swimsuit model who today presides over a half-billion-dollar licensing empire, has hundreds of thousands of fake Devumi followers, as does Akbar Gbajabiamila, the host of the show "American Ninja Warrior." Even a Twitter board member, Martha Lane Fox, has some.

At a time when Facebook, Twitter and Google are grappling with an epidemic of political manipulation and fake news, Devumi's fake followers also serve as phantom foot soldiers in political battles online. Devumi's customers include both avid supporters and fervent critics of President Trump, and both liberal cable pundits and a reporter at the alt-right bastion Breitbart. Randy Bryce, an ironworker seeking to unseat Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, purchased Devumi followers in 2015, when he was a blogger and labor activist. Louise Linton, the wife of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, bought followers when she was trying to gain traction as an actress.

Devumi's products serve politicians and governments overseas, too. An editor at China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, paid Devumi for hundreds of thousands of followers and retweets on Twitter, which the country's government has banned but sees as a forum for issuing propaganda abroad. An adviser to Ecuador's president, Lenín Moreno, bought tens of thousands of followers and retweets for Mr. Moreno's campaign accounts during last year's elections.

Kristin Binns, a Twitter spokeswoman, said the company did not typically suspend users suspected of buying bots, in part because it is difficult for the business to know who is responsible for any given purchase. Twitter would not say whether a sample of fake accounts provided by The Times - each based on a real user - violated the company's policies against impersonation.

"We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as false or spam accounts," Ms. Binns said.

Unlike some social media companies, Twitter does not require accounts to be associated with a real person. It also permits more automated access to its platform than other companies, making it easier to set up and control large numbers of accounts.

"Social media is a virtual world that is filled with half bots, half real people," said Rami Essaid, the founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company that specializes in eradicating bot networks. "You can't take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems."

Including, it turns out, Devumi itself.

Last year, three billion people logged on to social media networks like Facebook, WhatsApp and China's Sina Weibo. The world's collective yearning for connection has not only reshaped the Fortune 500 and upended the advertising industry but also created a new status marker: the number of people who follow, like or "friend" you. For some entertainers and entrepreneurs, this virtual status is a real-world currency. Follower counts on social networks help determine who will hire them, how much they are paid for bookings or endorsements, even how potential customers evaluate their businesses or products.

High follower counts are also critical for so-called influencers, a budding market of amateur tastemakers and YouTube stars where advertisers now lavish billions of dollars a year on sponsorship deals. The more people influencers reach, the more money they make. According to data collected by Captiv8, a company that connects influencers to brands, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn an average of $2,000 for a promotional tweet, while an influencer with a million followers might earn $20,000.

Genuine fame often translates into genuine social media influence, as fans follow and like their favorite movie stars, celebrity chefs and models. But shortcuts are also available: On sites like Social Envy and DIYLikes.com, it takes little more than a credit-card number to buy a huge following on almost any social media platform. Most of these sites offer what they describe as "active" or "organic" followers, never quite stating whether real people are behind them. Once purchased, the followers can be a powerful tool.

"You see a higher follower count, or a higher retweet count, and you assume this person is important, or this tweet was well received," said Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, a company that makes search engine optimization software. "As a result, you might be more likely to amplify it, to share it or to follow that person."

Twitter and Facebook can be similarly influenced. "Social platforms are trying to recommend stuff - and they say, 'Is the stuff we are recommending popular?'" said Julian Tempelsman, the co-founder of Smyte, a security firm that helps companies combat online abuse, bots and fraud. "Follower counts are one of the factors social media platforms use."

Search on Google for how to buy more followers, and Devumi often turns up among the first results. Visitors are greeted by a polished website listing a Manhattan address, displaying testimonials from customers and a money-back guarantee. Best of all, Devumi claims, the company's products are blessed by the platform for which they are selling followers. "We only use promotion techniques that are Twitter approved so your account is never at risk of getting suspended or penalized," Devumi's website promises.

To better understand Devumi's business, we became a customer. In April, The Times set up a test account on Twitter and paid Devumi $225 for 25,000 followers, or about a penny each. As advertised, the first 10,000 or so looked like real people. They had pictures and full names, hometowns and often authentic-seeming biographies. One account looked like that of Ms. Rychly, the young Minnesota woman.

But on closer inspection, some of the details seemed off. The account names had extra letters or underscores, or easy-to-miss substitutions, like a lowercase "L" in place of an uppercase "I."

The next 15,000 followers from Devumi were more obviously suspect: no profile pictures, and jumbles of letters, numbers and word fragments instead of names.

In August, a Times reporter emailed Mr. Calas, asking if he would answer questions about Devumi. Mr. Calas did not respond. Twitter forbids selling or buying followers or retweets, and Devumi promises customers absolute discretion. "Your info is always kept confidential," the company's website reads. "Our followers look like any other followers and are always delivered naturally. The only way anyone will know is if you tell them."

But company records reviewed by The Times revealed much of what Devumi and its customers prefer to conceal.

Most of Devumi's best-known buyers are selling products, services or themselves on social media. In interviews, their explanations varied. They bought followers because they were curious about how it worked, or felt pressure to generate high follower counts for themselves or their customers. "Everyone does it," said the actress Deirdre Lovejoy, a Devumi customer.

While some said they believed Devumi was supplying real potential fans or customers, others acknowledged that they knew or suspected they were getting fake accounts. Several said they regretted their purchases.

"It's fraud," said James Cracknell, a British rower and Olympic gold medalist who bought 50,000 followers from Devumi. "People who judge by how many likes or how many followers, it's not a healthy thing."

Ms. Ireland has over a million followers on Twitter, which she often uses to promote companies with whom she has endorsement deals. The Wisconsin-based American Family Insurance, for example, said that the former model was one of its most influential Twitter "brand ambassadors," celebrities who are paid to help promote products.

But in January last year, Ms. Ireland had only about 160,000 followers. The next month, an employee at the branding agency she owns, Sterling/Winters, spent about $2,000 for 300,000 more followers, according to Devumi records. The employee later made more purchases, he acknowledged in an interview. Much of Ms. Ireland's Twitter following appears to consist of bots, a Times analysis found.

A spokeswoman said that the employee had acted without Ms. Ireland's authorization and had been suspended after The Times asked about the purchases. "I'm sure he thought he was fulfilling his duties, but it's not something he should have done," said the spokeswoman, Rona Menashe.

Similarly, Ms. Lane Fox, a British e-commerce pioneer, member of Parliament and Twitter board member, blamed a "rogue employee" for a series of follower purchases spanning more than a year. She declined to name the person.

Several Devumi customers or their representatives contacted by The Times declined to comment, among them Mr. Leguizamo, whose followers were bought by an associate. Many more did not respond to repeated efforts to contact them.

A few denied making Devumi purchases. They include Ashley Knight, Mr. Lewis's personal assistant, whose email address was listed on an order for 250,000 followers, and Eric Kaplan, a friend to Mr. Trump and motivational speaker whose personal email address was associated with eight orders. A Twitter account belonging to Paul Hollywood, the celebrity baker, was deleted after The Times emailed him with questions. Mr. Hollywood then sent a reply: "Account does not exist."

Over two years, the Democratic public relations consultant and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen bought more than a half-million fake followers from Devumi. Ms. Rosen previously spent more than a decade as head of the Recording Industry Association of America. In an interview, she described the purchases as "an experiment I did several years ago to see how it worked." She made more than a dozen purchases of followers from 2015 to 2017, according to company records.

Other buyers said they had faced pressure from employers to generate social media followers. Marcus Holmlund, a young freelance writer, was at first thrilled when Wilhelmina, the international modeling agency, hired him to manage its social media efforts. But when Wilhelmina's Twitter following didn't grow fast enough, Mr. Holmlund said, a supervisor told him to buy followers or find another job. In 2015, despite misgivings, he began making monthly Devumi purchases out of his own pocket.

"I felt stuck with the threat of being fired, or worse, never working in fashion again," said Mr. Holmlund, who left in late 2015. "Since then, I tell anyone and everyone who ever asks that it's a total scam - it won't boost their engagement." (A Wilhelmina spokeswoman declined to comment.)

Several Devumi customers acknowledged that they bought bots because their careers had come to depend, in part, on the appearance of social media influence. "No one will take you seriously if you don't have a noteworthy presence," said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.

Not surprisingly, Devumi has sold millions of followers and retweets to entertainers on the lower and middle rungs of Hollywood, such as the actor Ryan Hurst, a star of the television series "Sons of Anarchy." In 2016 and 2017, he bought a total of 750,000 followers, about three-quarters of his current count. It cost less than $4,000, according to company records. Mr. Hurst did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Devumi also sells bots to reality television stars, who can parlay fame into endorsement and appearance fees. Sonja Morgan, a cast member on the Bravo show "The Real Housewives of New York City," uses her Devumi-boosted Twitter feed to promote her fashion line, a shopping app and a website that sells personalized "video shout-outs." One former "American Idol" contestant, Clay Aiken, even paid Devumi to spread a grievance: his customer service complaint against Volvo. Devumi bots retweeted his complaint 5,000 times.

Mr. Aiken and Ms. Morgan did not respond to requests for comment.

More than a hundred self-described influencers - whose market value is even more directly linked to their follower counts on social media - have purchased Twitter followers from Devumi. Justin Blau, a popular Las Vegas-based D.J. who performs as 3LAU, acquired 50,000 followers and thousands of retweets. In an email, Mr. Blau said a former member of his management team bought them without his approval.

At least five Devumi influencer customers are also contractors for HelloSociety, an influencer agency owned by The New York Times Company. (A Times spokeswoman said the company sought to verify that the audience of each contractor was legitimate and would not do business with anyone who violated that standard.) Lucas Peterson, a freelance journalist who writes a travel column for The Times, also bought followers from Devumi.

Influencers need not be well known to rake in endorsement money. According to a recent profile in the British tabloid The Sun, two young siblings, Arabella and Jaadin Daho, earn a combined $100,000 a year as influencers, working with brands such as Amazon, Disney, Louis Vuitton and Nintendo. Arabella, who is 14, tweets under the name Amazing Arabella.

But her Twitter account - and her brother's - are boosted by thousands of retweets purchased by their mother and manager, Shadia Daho, according to Devumi records. Ms. Daho did not respond to repeated attempts to reach her by email and through a public relations firm.

While Devumi sells millions of followers directly to celebrities and influencers, its customers also include marketing and public relations agencies, which buy followers for their own customers. Phil Pallen, a brand strategist based in Los Angeles, offers customers "growth & ad campaigns" on social media. At least a dozen times, company records show, Mr. Pallen has paid Devumi to deliver those results. Beginning in 2014, for example, he purchased tens of thousands of followers for Lori Greiner, the inventor and "Shark Tank" co-host.

Mr. Pallen at first denied buying those followers. After The Times contacted Ms. Greiner, Mr. Pallen said he had "experimented" with the company but "stopped using it long ago." A lawyer for Ms. Greiner said she had asked him to stop after learning of the first purchases.

Still, records show, Mr. Pallen bought Ms. Greiner more Devumi followers in 2016.

Marketing consultants sometimes buy followers for themselves, too, in effect purchasing the evidence of their supposed expertise. In 2015, Jeetendr Sehdev, a former adjunct professor at the University of Southern California who calls himself "the world's leading celebrity branding authority," began buying hundreds of thousands of fake followers from Devumi.

He did not respond to requests for comment. But in his recent best-selling book, "The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells," he had a different explanation for his rising follower count. "My social media following exploded," Mr. Sehdev claimed, because he had discovered the true secret to celebrity influence: "Authenticity is the key."

Among the followers delivered to Mr. Sehdev was Ms. Rychly - or at least, a copy of her. The fake Rychly account, created in 2014, was included in the purchase orders of hundreds of Devumi customers. It was retweeted by Mr. Schenker, the economist, and Arabella Daho, the teenage influencer. Clive Standen, star of the show "Taken," ended up with Ms. Rychly's stolen social identity. So did the television baker Mr. Hollywood, the French entertainer DJ Snake and Ms. Ireland. (DJ Snake's followers were purchased by a former manager, and Mr. Standen did not respond to requests for comment.)

The fake Ms. Rychly also retweeted at least five accounts linked to a prolific American pornographer named Dan Leal, who is based in Hungary and tweets as @PornoDan. Mr. Leal, who has bought at least 150,000 followers from Devumi in recent years, is one of at least dozens of customers who work in the adult film industry or as escorts, according to a review of Devumi records.

In an email, Mr. Leal said that buying followers for his business generated more than enough new revenue to pay for the expense. He was not worried about being penalized by Twitter, Mr. Leal said. "Countless public figures, companies, music acts, etc. purchase followers," he wrote. "If Twitter was to purge everyone who did so there would be hardly any of them on it."

Devumi has sold at least tens of thousands of similar high-quality bots, a Times analysis found. In some cases, a single real Twitter user was transformed into hundreds of different bots, each a minute variation on the original.

These fake accounts borrowed social identities from Twitter users in every American state and dozens of countries, from adults and minors alike, from highly active users and those who hadn't logged in to their accounts for months or years.

Sam Dodd, a college student and aspiring filmmaker, set up his Twitter account as a high school sophomore in Maryland. Before he even graduated, his Twitter details were copied onto a bot account.

The fake account remained dormant until last year, when it suddenly began retweeting Devumi customers continuously. This summer, the fake Mr. Dodd promoted various pornographic accounts, including Mr. Leal's Immoral Productions, as well as a link to a gambling website.

"I don't know why they'd take my identity - I'm a 20-year-old college student," Mr. Dodd said. "I'm not well known." But even unknown, Mr. Dodd's social identity has value in the influence economy. At prices posted in December, Devumi was selling high-quality followers for under two cents each. Sold to about 2,000 customers - the rough number that many Devumi bot accounts follow - his social identity could bring Devumi around $30.

The stolen social identities of Twitter users like Mr. Dodd are critical to Devumi's brand. The high-quality bots are usually delivered to customers first, followed by millions of cheaper, low-quality bots, like sawdust mixed in with grated Parmesan.

Some of Devumi's high-quality bots, in effect, replace an idle Twitter account - belonging to someone who stopped using the service - with a fake one. Whitney Wolfe, an executive assistant who lives in Florida, opened a Twitter account in 2008, when she was a wedding planner. By the time she stopped using it regularly in 2014, a fake account copying her personal information had been created. In recent months, it has retweeted adult film actresses, several influencers and an escort turned memoirist.

"The content - pictures of women in thongs, pictures of women's chests - it's not anything I want to be represented with my faith, my name, where I live," said Ms. Wolfe, who is active in her local Southern Baptist congregation.

Other victims were still active on Twitter when Devumi-sold bots began impersonating them. Salle Ingle, a 40-year-old engineer who lives in Colorado, said she worried that a potential employer would come across the fake version of her while vetting her social media accounts.

"I've been applying for new jobs, and I'm really grateful that no one saw this account and thought it was me," Ms. Ingle said. Once contacted by The Times, Ms. Ingle reported the account to Twitter, which deactivated it.

After emailing Mr. Calas last year, a Times reporter visited Devumi's Manhattan address, listed on its website. The building has dozens of tenants, including a medical clinic and a labor union. But Devumi and its parent company, Bytion, do not appear to be among them. A spokesman for the building's owner said neither Devumi nor Bytion had ever rented space there.

Like the followers Devumi sold, the office was an illusion.

In real life, Devumi is based in a small office suite above a Mexican restaurant in West Palm Beach, Fla., overlooking an alley crowded with Dumpsters and parked cars. Mr. Calas lives a short commute away, in a penthouse apartment.

On his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Calas is described as a "serial entrepreneur," with a long record in the tech business and an advanced degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Mr. Calas's persona, too, is a mixture of fact and fantasy.

Mr. Calas, who is 27, grew up in South Florida, where as a teenager he learned web design and built sites for local businesses, according to earlier versions of his personal web page available on the Internet Archive.

Eventually he taught himself techniques for search engine optimization - the art of pushing a web page higher in search results. While in high school, he began taking classes at Palm Beach State College, where he earned an associate degree in 2012, according to a school spokeswoman. Within a few years, Mr. Calas was claiming to have built dozens of online businesses serving 10 million customers, now under the Bytion umbrella.

"I started this company with a thousand dollars in the bank, without investors, and only the burning passion for success," Mr. Calas wrote last year on the job-listing site Glassdoor.

As Mr. Calas's ambitions grew, so did his embroidery. A copy of his résumé posted online in 2014 claimed that he earned a physics degree from Princeton University in 2000, when he would have been about 10 years old, and a Ph.D. in computer science from M.I.T. Representatives for both schools said they had no record of Mr. Calas's attending their institution. His current LinkedIn page says that he has a master's degree in "international business" from M.I.T., a degree it does not offer.

According to former employees interviewed by The Times, turnover was high at Devumi, and Mr. Calas kept his operation tightly compartmentalized. Employees sometimes had little idea what their colleagues were doing, even if they were working on the same project.

The ex-employees asked for anonymity for fear of lawsuits or because they were subject to nondisclosure agreements with Mr. Calas's companies. But their comments are echoed in reviews on Glassdoor, where some former employees said that Mr. Calas was uncommunicative and demanded that they install monitoring software on their personal devices.

Dozens of Devumi's customer service and order fulfillment personnel are based in the Philippines, according to company records. Employing overseas contractors may have helped Mr. Calas hold down costs. But it also appears to have left him vulnerable to a kind of social identity theft himself.

Last August, Mr. Calas sued Ronwaldo Boado, a Filipino contractor who previously worked for Devumi as an assistant customer support manager. After being fired for squabbling with other members of his team, Mr. Boado took control of a Devumi email account listing more than 170,000 customer orders, Mr. Calas alleged in court papers. Then Mr. Boado created a fake Devumi. (Some details of the lawsuit and of Devumi were previously reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.)

His copycat company used a similar name - DevumiBoost - and copied the design of Devumi's website, Mr. Calas alleged. The fake Devumi even listed the same phantom Manhattan address. Over a stretch of days last July, Mr. Boado, posing as a Devumi employee, emailed hundreds of Devumi customers to inform them that their orders needed to be reprocessed on DevumiBoost. Then he impersonated the customers, too, emailing Devumi under different aliases to ask that Devumi cancel the original orders. Mr. Boado, according to Mr. Calas, was trying to steal his customers. (Mr. Boado did not respond to emails seeking a response to Mr. Calas's claims.)

Mr. Calas's lawsuit also revealed something else: Devumi doesn't appear to make its own bots. Instead, the company buys them wholesale - from a thriving global market of fake social media accounts.

Scattered around the web is an array of obscure websites where anonymous bot makers around the world connect with retailers like Devumi. While individual customers can buy from some of these bare-boned sites - Peakerr, CheapPanel and YTbot, among others - they are less user-friendly. Some, for example, do not accept credit cards, only cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

But each site sells followers, likes and shares in bulk, for a variety of social media platforms and in different languages. The accounts they sell may change hands repeatedly. The same account may even be available from more than one seller.

Devumi, according to one former employee, sourced bots from different bot makers depending on price, quality and reliability. On Peakerr, for example, 1,000 high-quality, English-language bots with photos costs a little more than a dollar. Devumi charges $17 for the same quantity.

The price difference has allowed Mr. Calas to build a small fortune, according to company records. In just a few years, Devumi sold about 200 million Twitter followers to at least 39,000 customers, accounting for a third of more than $6 million in sales during that period.

Last month, Mr. Calas asked for examples of bots The Times found that copied real users. After receiving the names of 10 accounts, Mr. Calas, who had agreed to an interview, asked for more time to analyze them. Then he stopped responding to emails.

Ms. Binns, the Twitter spokeswoman, said the company did not proactively review accounts to see if they were impersonating other users. Instead, the company's efforts are focused on identifying and suspending accounts that violate Twitter's spam policies. In December, for example, the company identified an average of 6.4 million suspicious accounts each week, she said.

All of the sample accounts provided by The Times violated Twitter's anti-spam policies and were shut down, Ms. Binns said. "We take the action of suspending an account from the platform very seriously," she said. "At the same time, we want to aggressively fight spam on the platform."

The company also suspended Devumi's account on Saturday after the Times article was published online.

Yet Twitter has not imposed seemingly simple safeguards that would help throttle bot manufacturers, such as requiring anyone signing up for a new account to pass an anti-spam test, as many commercial sites do. As a result, Twitter now hosts vast swaths of unused accounts, including what are probably dormant accounts controlled by bot makers.

Former employees said the company's security team for many years was more focused on abuse by real users, including racist and sexist content and orchestrated harassment campaigns. Only recently, they said, after revelations that Russia-aligned hackers had deployed networks of Twitter bots to spread divisive content and junk news, has Twitter turned more attention to weeding out fake accounts.

Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked on security and user safety at Twitter before leaving in late 2015, said, "Twitter as a social network was designed with almost no accountability."

Some critics believe Twitter has a business incentive against weeding out bots too aggressively. Over the past two years, the company has struggled to generate the user growth seen by rivals like Facebook and Snapchat. And outside researchers have disputed the company's estimates for how many of its active users are actually bots.

"We're working with completely unregulated, closed ecosystems that aren't reporting on these things. They have a perverse incentive to let it happen," said Mr. Essaid, the cybersecurity expert. "They want to police it to the extent it doesn't seem obvious, but they make money off it."

In January, after almost two years of promoting hundreds of Devumi customers, the fake Jessica Rychly account was finally flagged by Twitter's security algorithms. It was recently suspended.

But the real Ms. Rychly may soon leave Twitter for good.

"I am probably just going to delete my Twitter account," she said.

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The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie.

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Både Ålgård og Stokka erfarte i løpet av sommeren at det var nødvendig å bruke mekaniske tvangsmidler på pasienter, slik som beltelegging.

- Tvang er noe av det vanskeligste vi jobber med, men noen ganger er det situasjoner vi ikke kan løse på annen måte, og da er det viktig å være profesjonell, prate med pasienten og forklare hvorfor vi gjør det vi gjør, sier Stokka.

- Når man må iverksette tvangsmidler, kjenner jeg på et ubehag, og det er ikke noe jeg tar lett på, legger Ålgård til.
Har du tips om tvang i psykiatrien?

Tips VGs journalister eller bruk VGs krypterte tipsportal

Lovkrav om bemanning

Jurist Marius Storvik forsker på bruk av tvangsmidler i psykiatrien, og påpeker at sykehusene har plikt til å ha nok personell og faglig kompetanse, til å i størst mulig grad forhindre bruk av tvang - året rundt.

- Tidligere har det ikke vært kjent at tvangsbruken har hatt slike sesongvariasjoner. Dersom institusjonenes bemanningsnivå er årsaken til tvangsbruk, oppfylles ikke lovens krav til at institusjonen kan bruke tvang. I et slikt tilfelle må enten institusjonen planlegge bemanningen annerledes, eller de må miste tillatelsen til å bruke tvang, sier han.

Han mener kontrollorganer og tilsynsmyndigheter bør være oppmerksomme på bemanning og hvordan sykehusene planlegger driften gjennom året.
- Sykehusenes forklaring om at økt bruk av beltesenger skyldes økt bruk av vikarer, er en erklæring om at institusjonene ikke driver faglig forsvarlig, mener Storvik.
Jusprofessor Karl Harald Søvig mener at årsvariasjoner trolig kan forklares med både bemanning og i pasientenes forhold.

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VG avslører: Se hvordan bruken av tvang varierer ut fra hvem som er på jobb

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Både Ålgård og Stokka erfarte i løpet av sommeren at det var nødvendig å bruke mekaniske tvangsmidler på pasienter, slik som beltelegging. - Tvang er noe av det vanskeligste vi jobber med, men noen ganger er det situasjoner vi ikke kan løse på annen måte, og da er det viktig å være profesjonell, prate med pasienten og forklare hvorfor vi gjør det vi gjør, sier Stokka.

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Språkapp

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Learn a new language with the world's most-downloaded education app! Duolingo is the fun, free app for learning 40+ languages through quick, bite-sized lessons. Practice speaking, reading, listening, and writing to build your vocabulary and grammar skills.

Designed by language experts and loved by hundreds of millions of learners worldwide, Duolingo helps you prepare for real conversations in Spanish, French, Chinese, Italian, German, English, and more.

Whether you're learning a language for travel, school, career, family and friends, or your brain health, you'll love learning with Duolingo.

Why Duolingo?
* Duolingo is fun and effective. Game-like lessons and fun characters help you build solid speaking, reading, listening, and writing skills.

* Duolingo works. Designed by language experts, Duolingo has a science-based teaching methodology proven to foster long-term language retention.

* Track your progress. Work toward your language learning goals with playful rewards and achievements when you make practicing a daily habit!

* Join 300+ million learners. Stay motivated with competitive Leaderboards as you learn alongside our global community.

* Every language course is free. Learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Esperanto, Polish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Hebrew, Welsh, Arabic, Latin, Hawaiian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, English, and even High Valyrian!

What the world is saying about Duolingo:

"Far and away the best language-learning app." -The Wall Street Journal

"This free app and website is among the most effective language-learning methods I've tried... lessons come in the form of brief challenges - speaking, translating, answering multiple-choice questions - that keep me coming back for more." -The New York Times

"Duolingo may hold the secret to the future of education." - TIME Magazine

"...Duolingo is cheerful, lighthearted and fun..." - Forbes

"Our favorite language app..." - CNET

If you like Duolingo, try Super Duolingo for 14 days free! Learn a language fast with no ads, and get fun perks like Unlimited Hearts and Monthly Streak Repair.

If you choose to purchase Super Duolingo, payment will be charged to your Apple account, and your account will be charged for renewal within 24-hours prior to the end of the current period. Auto-renewal may be turned off at any time by going to your settings in the App Store after purchase. Any unused portion of a free trial period, if offered, will be forfeited when the user purchases a subscription to that publication, where applicable.

Privacy Policy: https://www.duolingo.com/privacy
Terms of Service: https://www.duolingo.com/terms

Our mascot owl, Duo, is trading in his usual diet of mice for bugs this week. Yup, we're squashing those pesky bugs to make the experience better for all of you.

For more Duolingo news, contests and product releases, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @duolingo.

Editors' Choice

With its friendly approach and awesome updates, Duolingo's long been one of our favorite apps for learning another language. Its secret: making the process genuinely fun. Engaging mini-games test your reading, writing, and speaking skills, and joining a club (where you can encourage and compete with others) adds a great social element. Bonus: all those languages and games are available for free!

Italiano è buono

I love Duolingo, but I can't stand the child's voice and one particular man's voice. The child's voice is often unintelligible while accompanied by poor audio. The man's voice I mentioned is ridiculously fast for students who are trying to learn proper pronunciation of a new language. I often have to intentionally fail the lessons to find out what these two are saying. There is a woman's voice used for the majority of the examples in the comment section that is clear and articulate. I always listen to her example to practice my pronunciations. The comment section is closed. It is helpful to read the comments, but it is impossible to ask questions or leave new comments. I highly recommend Duolingo as a beginner language course.

Update, Duolingo starts out promising, but once you get past the basics you'll soon find yourself translating random sentences that lack any sort of conversational context. Duolingo is a game designed to keep you engaged. There are much better apps for learning languages that will teach you to speak conversationally. Duolingo is not one of them. That being said, I still participate in Duolingo daily, but I've made astounding progress using another app after over 225 days of Duolingo that taught me nothing about having basic everyday conversations. It's like doing a crossword puzzle. You learn a lot of words without engaging in any sort of conversation. Isn't having conversations what language is all about?

Fun to practice everyday

This app is truly fun and is a great supplement to a French language immersion class I am taking. I do have a hint and some suggestions. Hint to those newly downloading: take advantage of the 1-MONTH trial because if you don't, you'll only see the 2-week trial for Plus after that initial period. Don't delay!
I truly enjoy the variety, not only lessons but the stories and the listening and there's even a Podcast! Truly satisfying app - the stories crack me up, and I love hearing pronunciations from other native speakers, not just Estelle and Paul.
Suggestions to enhance learning/app, while it's great that there are flags and learns and those come back up in practice sessions, I wish there was a bookmark feature for specific tips or one that would allow you to flag even specific test. I take screenshots but would rather it be available all in one place in the app. And the other big suggestion is, there are times when I select the word, and it doesn't say it. It does happen in one kind where you place 2 words and place both within a sentence (i.e. aime-aimer) but it doesn't happen when you have three separate words to select and check - this is where I would like to hear the word. Maybe these features are unlocked in Plus, but if it doesn't underline a word after It's accepted and I press continue, why can't I listen to the sentence again after the continue prompt is available?

The developer, Duolingo, indicated that the app's privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

Compatibility

iPhone

Requires iOS 15.0 or later.

iPad

Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later.

iPod touch

Requires iOS 15.0 or later.

Mac

Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.

Languages

English, Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Dutch, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

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‎Learn a new language with the world's most-downloaded education app! Duolingo is the fun, free app for learning 40+ languages through quick, bite-sized lessons. Practice speaking, reading, listening, and writing to build your vocabulary and grammar skills. Designed by language experts and loved by...

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Bringing science & development together through news & analysis
https://www.scidev.net/global/

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SciDev.Net offers news,analysis and information about science and technology for global development; including agriculture, environment, health, governance, and more.

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Japan Objects

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For arts and traditional crafts, make your way to the northern end of Yamato-dori. Here, the street's name changes to Nawate-dori. Two parallel streets join Nawate-dori from the east, Furumonzen-dori and Shin Monzen-dori. This area is home to a high number of art galleries, antique shops, art sellers, kimono stores and other shops selling traditional crafts. Many businesses are housed inside the historic machiya Kyoto is so well-known for, including the antiques dealer Yumekoubou. Yumekoubou is one of the most prominent antiques businesses in the area, dealing in everything from lacquer and metalwork to sculpture and tea ceremony utensils.

It's not just traditional arts, the Gion district is a great place for contemporary arts too!

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Gion Kyoto: 3 Must-See Highlights of the Geisha District

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For arts and traditional crafts, make your way to the northern end of Yamato-dori. Here, the street's name changes to Nawate-dori. Two parallel streets join Nawate-dori from the east, Furumonzen-dori and Shin Monzen-dori. This area is home to a high number of art galleries, antique shops, art sellers, kimono stores and other shops selling traditional crafts.

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Teenageliv: Julie er online hele dagen lang (selvfølgelig)

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Perfektionismen kommer også til udtryk ved, at Julie - som alle sine venner - ikke smider hvad som helst om sig selv ud via de sociale medier. Man deler ikke svære eller triste tider, og når man er allermest ked af det, kan man næsten have ekstra stor lyst til at sende Snapchat-beskeder om, at man er helt vildt lykkelig, forklarer hun. På de sociale medier vil hun gerne fremstå som en naturligt glad og stærk håndboldpige, og det er også det, hun er for det meste.

"Men på de sociale medier skal man være perfekt på alle tider af døgnet," understreger Julie med et vidende smil.

"Har du set, at alle tre U14-hold skal på påskestævne, Julie," spørger mor, der kigger op fra sin telefon.

Hun er selv kommet på Facebook, efter at børnenes håndboldklub begyndte at sende alle kamp- og holdoplysninger ud via en gruppe der.

Det havde Julie ikke set.

"Der kom du lidt på bagkant, hva', Julie," spøger mor, der ikke er vant til at være den, der ved noget nyt først her i huset.

Hun og hendes mand har i det hele taget oplevet noget af et vidensskifte, efter at Julie har fået en smartphone. Det er Julie, der har forklaret dem, at en app er et program til telefonen, og hun er i det hele taget lynhurtig til at lære sig selv nyt på den teknologiske front. Far Jan griner tit af, hvor rap hun er på telefonens tastatur, mens han selv kan have besvær med overhovedet at finde de forskellige bogstaver, når han skriver sms'er. Men forældrene kan se, at Julie vokser af at kunne dele sin viden med dem, og samtidig giver hun dem en indsigt i den verden, hun for dem at se bruger så meget tid på.

Men der er regler for hjemmets teknologi. Telefoner må aldrig være med ved spisebordet, og al kommunikation på telefonen skal slutte kl. 21, så Julie ikke forstyrrer nogen eller kommer til at ligge vågen den halve nat. Den første regel overholder hun altid. Den næste regel er vist lidt i skred, er hun og forældrene enige om.

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Teenageliv: Julie er online hele dagen lang

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Julie Bjerk Jørgensens telefon er som en kropsdel, hun nødigt vil undvære. Likes på sociale medier er reel valuta, og venindebilleder styrker hendes venskaber. Kristeligt Dagblad har fulgt den 14-årige pige en dag - fra morgen og til aften - for at tegne et portræt af en vaskeægte digitalt indfødt.

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Why Millenials are screwed

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WHOA!

Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past.

I am 35 years old-the oldest millennial, the first millennial-and for a decade now, I've been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven't had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.

What's a millennial anyway?

We've all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don't have on things we don't need. We still haven't learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention "millennial" to anyone over 40 and the word "entitlement" will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

But it's not just the numbers.

What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence-education, housing and health care-has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life-the ones that boomers lucked into-are being lifted out of our reach. Add it all up and it's no surprise that we're the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. "Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest," says Jimmi Matsinger. "I'm 25 and I'm still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage." Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn't keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

It's tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover. But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America's.

Understanding structural disadvantage is pretty complicated. You'll need a guide.

hat Scott remembers are the group interviews.

Eight, 10 people in suits, a circle of folding chairs, a chirpy HR rep with a clipboard. Each applicant telling her, one by one, in front of all the others, why he's the right candidate for this $11-an-hour job as a bank teller.

It was 2010, and Scott had just graduated from college with a bachelor's in economics, a minor in business and $30,000 in student debt. At some of the interviews he was by far the least qualified person in the room. The other applicants described their corporate jobs and listed off graduate degrees. Some looked like they were in their 50s. "One time the HR rep told us she did these three times a week," Scott says. "And I just knew I was never going to get a job."

After six months of applying and interviewing and never hearing back, Scott returned to his high school job at The Old Spaghetti Factory. After that he bounced around-selling suits at a Nordstrom outlet, cleaning carpets, waiting tables-until he learned that city bus drivers earn $22 an hour and get full benefits. He's been doing that for a year now. It's the most money he's ever made. He still lives at home, chipping in a few hundred bucks every month to help his mom pay the rent.

In theory, Scott could apply for banking jobs again. But his degree is almost eight years old and he has no relevant experience. He sometimes considers getting a master's, but that would mean walking away from his salary and benefits for two years and taking on another five digits of debt-just to snag an entry-level position, at the age of 30, that would pay less than he makes driving a bus. At his current job, he'll be able to move out in six months. And pay off his student loans in 20 years.

There are millions of Scotts in the modern economy. "A lot of workers were just 18 at the wrong time," says William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and an assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor in the Obama administration. "Employers didn't say, 'Oops, we missed a generation. In 2008 we weren't hiring graduates, let's hire all the people we passed over.' No, they hired the class of 2012."

You can even see this in the statistics, a divot from 2008 to 2012 where millions of jobs and billions in earnings should be. In 2007, more than 50 percent of college graduates had a job offer lined up. For the class of 2009, fewer than 20 percent of them did. According to a 2010 study, every 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate the year you graduate college means a 6 to 8 percent drop in your starting salary-a disadvantage that can linger for decades. The same study found that workers who graduated during the 1981 recession were still making less than their counterparts who graduated 10 years later. "Every recession," Spriggs says, "creates these cohorts that never recover."

'07 grad '09 grad

By now, those unlucky millennials who graduated at the wrong time have cascaded downward through the economy. Some estimates show that 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. A university diploma has practically become a prerequisite for even the lowest-paying positions, just another piece of paper to flash in front of the hiring manager at Quiznos.

But the real victims of this credential inflation are the two-thirds of millennials who didn't go to college. Since 2010, the economy has added 11.6 million jobs-and 11.5 million of them have gone to workers with at least some college education. In 2016, young workers with a high school diploma had roughly triple the unemployment rate and three and a half times the poverty rate of college grads.

Once you start tracing these trends backward, the recession starts to look less like a temporary setback and more like a culmination. Over the last 40 years, as politicians and parents and perky magazine listicles have been telling us to study hard and build our personal brands, the entire economy has transformed beneath us.

For decades, most of the job growth in America has been in low-wage, low-skilled, temporary and short-term jobs. The United States simply produces fewer and fewer of the kinds of jobs our parents had. This explains why the rates of "under-employment" among high school and college grads were rising steadily long before the recession. "The way to think about it," says Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and author of The Great Risk Shift, "is that there are waves in the economy, but the tide has been going out for a long time."

The decline of the job has its primary origins in the 1970s, with a million little changes the boomers barely noticed. The Federal Reserve cracked down on inflation. Companies started paying executives in stock options. Pension funds invested in riskier assets. The cumulative result was money pouring into the stock market like jet fuel. Between 1960 and 2013, the average time that investors held stocks before flipping them went from eight years to around four months. Over roughly the same period, the financial sector became a sarlacc pit encompassing around a quarter of all corporate profits and completely warping companies' incentives.

The pressure to deliver immediate returns became relentless. When stocks were long-term investments, shareholders let CEOs spend money on things like worker benefits because they contributed to the company's long-term health. Once investors lost the ability to look beyond the next earnings report, however, any move that didn't boost short-term profits was tantamount to treason.

The new paradigm took over corporate America. Private equity firms and commercial banks took corporations off the market, laid off or outsourced workers, then sold the businesses back to investors. In the 1980s alone, a quarter of the companies in the Fortune 500 were restructured. Companies were no longer single entities with responsibilities to their workers, retirees or communities.

Businesses applied the same chop-shop logic to their own operations. Executives came to see themselves as first and foremost in the shareholder-pleasing game. Higher staff salaries became luxuries to be slashed. Unions, the great negotiators of wages and benefits and the guarantors of severance pay, became enemy combatants. And eventually, employees themselves became liabilities. "Corporations decided that the fastest way to a higher stock price was hiring part-time workers, lowering wages and turning their existing employees into contractors," says Rosemary Batt, a Cornell University economist.

Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they're almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of "contingent" arrangement like this-from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is "temporary help services"-all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.

The effect of all this "domestic outsourcing"-and, let's be honest, its actual purpose-is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt's papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they're "re-classified" as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart "lumpers," the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there's enough work for them that day.

"This is what's really driving wage inequality," says David Weil, the former head of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor and the author of The Fissured Workplace. "By shifting tasks to contractors, companies pay a price for a service rather than wages for work. That means they don't have to think about training, career advancement or benefit provision."

This transformation is affecting the entire economy, but millennials are on its front lines. Where previous generations were able to amass years of solid experience and income in the old economy, many of us will spend our entire working lives intermittently employed in the new one. We'll get less training and fewer opportunities to negotiate benefits through unions (which used to cover 1 in 3 workers and are now down to around 1 in 10). Plus, as Uber and its "gig economy" ilk perfect their algorithms, we'll be increasingly at the mercy of companies that only want to pay us for the time we're generating revenue and not a second more.

But the blame doesn't only fall on companies. Trade groups have responded to the dwindling number of secure jobs by digging a moat around the few that are left. Over the last 30 years, they've successfully lobbied state governments to require occupational licenses for dozens of jobs that never used to need them. It makes sense: The harder it is to become a plumber, the fewer plumbers there will be and the more each of them can charge. Nearly a third of American workers now need some kind of state license to do their jobs, compared to less than 5 percent in 1950. In most other developed countries, you don't need official permission to cut hair or pour drinks. Here, those jobs can require up to $20,000 in schooling and 2,100 hours of instruction and unpaid practice.

In sum, nearly every path to a stable income now demands tens of thousands of dollars before you get your first paycheck or have any idea whether you've chosen the right career path. "I was literally paying to work," says Elena, a 29-year-old dietician in Texas. (I've changed the names of some of the people in this story because they don't want to get fired.) As part of her master's degree, she was required to do a yearlong "internship" in a hospital. It was supposed to be training, but she says she worked the same hours and did the same tasks as paid staffers. "I took out an extra $20,000 in student loans to pay tuition for the year I was working for free," she says.

All of these trends-the cost of education, the rise of contracting, the barriers to skilled occupations-add up to an economy that has deliberately shifted the risk of economic recession and industry disruption away from companies and onto individuals. For our parents, a job was a guarantee of a secure adulthood. For us, it is a gamble. And if we suffer a setback along the way, there's so little to keep us from sliding into disaster.

Becoming poor is not an event. It is a process.

Like a plane crash, poverty is rarely caused by one thing going wrong. Usually, it is a series of misfortunes-a job loss, then a car accident, then an eviction-that interact and compound.

I heard the most acute description of how this happens from Anirudh Krishna, a Duke University professor who has, over the last 15 years, interviewed more than 1,000 people who fell into poverty and escaped it. He started in India and Kenya, but eventually, his grad students talked him into doing the same thing in North Carolina. The mechanism, he discovered, was the same.

We often think of poverty in America as a pool, a fixed portion of the population that remains destitute for years. In fact, Krishna says, poverty is more like a lake, with streams flowing steadily in and out all the time. "The number of people in danger of becoming poor is far larger than the number of people who are actually poor," he says.

We're all living in a state of permanent volatility. Between 1970 and 2002, the probability that a working-age American would unexpectedly lose at least half her family income more than doubled. And the danger is particularly severe for young people. In the 1970s, when the boomers were our age, young workers had a 24 percent chance of falling below the poverty line. By the 1990s, that had risen to 37 percent. And the numbers only seem to be getting worse. From 1979 to 2014, the poverty rate among young workers with only a high school diploma more than tripled, to 22 percent. "Millennials feel like they can lose everything at any time," Hacker says. "And, increasingly, they can."

Here's what that downward slide looks like. Gabriel is 19 years old and lives in a small town in Oregon. He plays the piano and, until recently, was saving up to study music at an arts college. Last summer he was working at a health supplement company. It wasn't the most glamorous job, lugging boxes and blending ingredients, but he made $12.50 an hour and he hoped he could step up to a better position if he proved himself.

Then his sister got into a car accident, T-boned turning into their driveway. "She couldn't walk; she couldn't think," Gabriel says. His mom wasn't able to take a day off without risking losing her job, so Gabriel called his boss and left a message saying he had to miss work for a day to get his sister home from the hospital.

The next day, his temp agency called: He was fired. Though Gabriel says no one had told him, the company had a three-strikes policy for unplanned absences. He had already missed one day for a cold and another for a staph infection, so this was it. A former colleague told him that his absences meant he was unlikely to get a job there again.

So now Gabriel works at Taco Time and lives in a trailer with his mom and his sisters. Most of his paycheck goes to gas and groceries because his mom's income is disappearing into the family's medical bills. He still wants to go to college. But since he can barely keep his head above water, he's set his sights on an electrician's apprenticeship program offered by a local nonprofit. "I don't understand why it's so hard to do something with your life," he tells me.

The answer is brutally simple. In an economy where wages are precarious and the safety net has been hacked into ribbons, one piece of bad luck can easily become a years-long struggle to get back to normal.

Over the last four decades, there has been a profound shift in the relationship between the government and its citizens. In The Age of Responsibility, Yascha Mounk, a political theorist, writes that before the 1980s, the idea of "responsibility" was understood as something each American owed to the people around them, a national project to keep the most vulnerable from falling below basic subsistence. Even Richard Nixon, not exactly known for lifting up the downtrodden, proposed a national welfare benefit and a version of a guaranteed income. But under Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the meaning of "responsibility" changed. It became individualized, a duty to earn the benefits your country offered you.

Since 1996, the percentage of poor families receiving cash assistance from the government has fallen from 68 percent to 23 percent. No state provides cash benefits that add up to the poverty line. Eligibility criteria have been surgically tightened, often with requirements that are counterproductive to actually escaping poverty. Take Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which ostensibly supports poor families with children. Its predecessor (with a different acronym) had the goal of helping parents of kids under 7, usually through simple cash payments. These days, those benefits are explicitly geared toward getting mothers away from their children and into the workforce as soon as possible. A few states require women to enroll in training or start applying for jobs the day after they give birth.

The list goes on. Housing assistance, for many people the difference between losing a job and losing everything, has been slashed into oblivion. (To pick just one example, in 2014 Baltimore had 75,000 applicants for 1,500 rental vouchers.) Food stamps, the closest thing to universal benefits we have left, provide, on average, $1.40 per meal.

In what seems like some kind of perverse joke, nearly every form of welfare now available to young people is attached to traditional employment. Unemployment benefits and workers' compensation are limited to employees. The only major expansions of welfare since 1980 have been to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, both of which pay wages back to workers who have already collected them.

Back when we had decent jobs and strong unions, it (kind of) made sense to provide things like health care and retirement savings through employer benefits. But now, for freelancers and temps and short-term contractors-i.e., us-those benefits might as well be Monopoly money. Forty-one percent of working millennials aren't even eligible for retirement plans through their companies.

And then there's health care.

In 1980, 4 out of 5 employees got health insurance through their jobs. Now, just over half of them do. Millennials can stay on our parents' plans until we turn 26. But the cohort right afterward, 26- to 34-year-olds, has the highest uninsured rate in the country and millennials-alarmingly-have more collective medical debt than the boomers. Even Obamacare, one of the few expansions of the safety net since man walked on the moon, still leaves us out in the open. Millennials who can afford to buy plans on the exchanges face premiums (next year mine will be $388 a month), deductibles ($850) and out-of-pocket limits ($5,000) that, for many young people, are too high to absorb without help. And of the events that precipitate the spiral into poverty, according to Krishna, an injury or illness is the most common trigger.

"All of us are one life event away from losing everything," says Ashley Lauber, a bankruptcy lawyer in Seattle and an Old Millennial like me. For most of her clients under 35, she says, the slide toward bankruptcy starts with a car accident or a medical bill. "You can't afford your deductible, so you go to Moneytree and take out a loan for a few hundred bucks. Then you miss your payments and the collectors start calling you at work, telling your boss you can't pay. Then he gets sick of it and he fires you and it all gets worse." For a lot of her millennial clients, Lauber says, the difference between escaping debt and going bankrupt comes down to the only safety net they have-their parents.

But this fail-safe, like all the others, isn't equally available to everyone. The wealth gap between white and non-white families is massive. Since basically forever, almost every avenue of wealth creation-higher education, homeownership, access to credit-has been denied to minorities through discrimination both obvious and invisible. And the disparity has only grown wider since the recession. From 2007 to 2010, black families' retirement accounts shrank by 35 percent, whereas white families, who are more likely to have other sources of money, saw their accounts grow by 9 percent.

The result is that millennials of color are even more exposed to disaster than their peers. Many white millennials have an iceberg of accumulated wealth from their parents and grandparents that they can draw on for help with tuition, rent or a place to stay during an unpaid internship. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, white Americans are five times more likely to receive an inheritance than black Americans-which can be enough to make a down payment on a house or pay off student loans. By contrast, 67 percent of black families and 71 percent of Latino families don't have enough money saved to cover three months of living expenses.

And so, instead of receiving help from their families, millennials of color are more likely to be called on to provide it. Any extra income from a new job or a raise tends to get swallowed by bills or debts that many white millennials had help with. Four years after graduation, black college graduates have, on average, nearly twice as much student debt as their white counterparts and are three times more likely to be behind on payments. This financial undertow is captured in one staggering statistic: Every extra dollar of income earned by a middle-class white family generates $5.19 in new wealth. For black families, it's 69 cents.

Want to get even more depressed? Sit down and think about what's going to happen to us when we get old. Despite all the stories you read about flighty millennials refusing to plan for retirement (as if our grandparents were obsessing over the details of their pension plans when they were 25), the biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy. It is compound interest.

In the coming decades, the returns on 401(k) plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a 25-year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did. Oh, and she'll have to do it on lower wages. This scenario gets even more dire when you consider what's going to happen to Social Security by the time we make it to 65. There, too, it seems inevitable that we're going to get screwed by demography: In 1950, there were 17 American workers to support each retiree. When millennials retire, there will be just two.

There's one way that many Americans have traditionally managed to build wealth for themselves, to achieve some kind of dignity and comfort in old age. I'm talking, of course, about homeownership. At least we've got a shot at that, right?

Whenever Tyrone moves into a new apartment, he lies down naked on his living room floor.

It's a ritual, a reminder of the years he spent without a floor underneath him or a ceiling above. He was homeless for four years in Georgia: sleeping on benches, biking to interviews in the heat, arriving an hour early so he wouldn't be sweaty for the handshake. When he finally got a job, his co-workers found out that he washed himself in gas station bathrooms and made him so miserable he quit. "They said I 'smelled homeless,'" he says.

Tyrone moved to Seattle six years ago, when he was 23, because he'd heard the minimum wage there was almost double what he made in Atlanta. He got a job at a grocery store and slept in a shelter while he saved. Since then, his income has gone up, but he's been pushed farther and farther from the city. First stop was subsidized housing in Kirkland, 20 minutes east across the lake. Then a rented house in Tacoma, 45 minutes south, sharing a bedroom with his girlfriend and, eventually, a son. The breakup is why he's now in Lakewood, even farther south, in a one-bedroom right next to a freeway entrance.

And it's already such a strain. Tyrone earns $17 an hour as a security guard at a building site, his highest wage ever. But he's a contractor (of course), so he doesn't get sick leave or health insurance. His rent is $1,100 a month. It's more than he can afford, but he could only find one building that would let him move in without paying the full deposit in advance.

Since rent is due on the 1st and he gets paid on the 7th, his landlord adds a $100 late fee to each month's bill. After that and the car payments-it's a two-hour bus ride from the suburb where he lives to the suburb where he works-he has $200 left over every month for food. The first time we met, it was the 27th of the month and Tyrone told me his account was already zeroed out. He had pawned his skateboard the previous night for gas money.

Despite the acres of news pages dedicated to the narrative that millennials refuse to grow up, there are twice as many young people like Tyrone-living on their own and earning less than $30,000 per year-as there are millennials living with their parents. The crisis of our generation cannot be separated from the crisis of affordable housing.

More people are renting homes than at any time since the late 1960s. But in the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. Between 2001 and 2014, the number of "severely burdened" renters-households spending over half their incomes on rent-grew by more than 50 percent. Rather unsurprisingly, as housing prices have exploded, the number of 30- to 34-year-olds who own homes has plummeted.

Falling homeownership rates, on their own, aren't necessarily a catastrophe. But our country has contrived an entire "Game of Life" sequence that hinges on being able to buy a home. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. Fin.

This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy. In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at 29. It was 1973, he had just moved to Seattle and his job as a university professor paid him (adjusted for inflation) around $76,000 a year. The house cost $124,000 - again, in today's dollars. I am six years older now than my dad was then. I earn less than he did and the median home price in Seattle is around $730,000. My father's first house cost him 20 months of his salary. My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine.

Here's your city. Here's downtown. That's where lots of the good jobs are.

Most people want to live fewer than 30 minutes from work. So, for much of the 20th century, big cities built housing close to jobs.

When the inner ring of suburbs filled up, cities built freeways to whisk workers to the next.

But then those suburbs filled up. Traffic got worse. Thirty-minute commutes became 45-minute commutes.

Demand for houses close to downtown exploded.

For a long time, that's what cities did. They built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes.

But in the 1970s, they stopped building. Cities kept adding jobs and people. But they didn't add more housing. And that's when prices started to climb.

So much of this can be explained by one word:

At first, zoning was pretty modest. The point was to stop someone from buying your neighbor's house and turning it into an oil refinery.

But eventually people realized they could use zoning for other purposes.

In the late 1960s, it finally became illegal to deny housing to minorities. So cities instituted weirdly specific rules that drove up the price of new houses and excluded poor people-who were, disproportionately, minorities.

Houses had to have massive backyards. They couldn't be split into separate apartments. Basically, cities mandated McMansions.

We're still living with that legacy. Across huge swaths of American cities, it's pretty much illegal to build affordable housing.

And this problem is only getting worse.

That's because all the urgency to build comes from people who need somewhere to live. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes.

For homeowners, there's no such thing as a housing crisis.

Why?

Because when property values go up, so does their net worth. They have every reason to block new construction.

They do that by weaponizing environmental regulations and historical preservation rules.

They force buildings to be shorter so they don't cast shadows. They demand two parking spaces for every single unit.

They complain that a new apartment building will destroy "neighborhood character" when the structure it's replacing is... a parking garage. (True story.)

All this extra hassle means construction takes longer and costs more.

Which means that the only way most developers can make a profit is to build luxury condos.

So that's why cities are so unaffordable. The entire system is structured to produce expensive housing when we desperately need the opposite.

The housing crisis in our most prosperous cities is now distorting the entire American economy. For most of the 20th century, the way many workers improved their financial fortunes was to move closer to opportunities. Rents were higher in the boomtowns, but so were wages.

Since the Great Recession, the "good" jobs-secure, non-temp, decent salary-have concentrated in cities like never before. America's 100 largest metros have added 6 million jobs since the downturn. Rural areas, meanwhile, still have fewer jobs than they did in 2007. For young people trying to find work, moving to a major city is not an indulgence. It is a virtual necessity.

But the soaring rents in big cities are now canceling out the higher wages. Back in 1970, according to a Harvard study, an unskilled worker who moved from a low-income state to a high-income state kept 79 percent of his increased wages after he paid for housing. A worker who made the same move in 2010 kept just 36 percent. For the first time in U.S. history, says Daniel Shoag, one of the study's co-authors, it no longer makes sense for an unskilled worker in Utah to head for New York in the hope of building a better life.

This leaves young people, especially those without a college degree, with an impossible choice. They can move to a city where there are good jobs but insane rents. Or they can move somewhere with low rents but few jobs that pay above the minimum wage.

This dilemma is feeding the inequality-generating woodchipper the U.S. economy has become. Rather than offering Americans a way to build wealth, cities are becoming concentrations of people who already have it. In the country's 10 largest metros, residents earning more than $150,000 per year now outnumber those earning less than $30,000 per year.

Millennials who are able to relocate to these oases of opportunity get to enjoy their many advantages: better schools, more generous social services, more rungs on the career ladder to grab on to. Millennials who can't afford to relocate to a big expensive city are ... stuck. In 2016, the Census Bureau reported that young people were less likely to have lived at a different address a year earlier than at any time since 1963.

And so the real reason millennials can't seem to achieve the adulthood our parents envisioned for us is that we're trying to succeed within a system that no longer makes any sense. Homeownership and migration have been pitched to us as gateways to prosperity because, back when the boomers grew up, they were. But now, the rules have changed and we're left playing a game that is impossible to win.

The most striking thing about the problems of millennials is how intertwined and self-reinforcing and everywhere they are.

Over the eight months I spent reporting this story, I spent a few evenings at a youth homeless shelter and met unpaid interns and gig-economy bike messengers saving for their first month of rent. During the days I interviewed people like Josh, a 33-year-old affordable housing developer who mentioned that his mother struggles to make ends meet as a contractor in a profession that used to be reliable government work. Every Thanksgiving, she reminds him that her retirement plan is a "401(j)"-J for Josh.

Fixing what has been done to us is going to take more than tinkering. Even if economic growth picks up and unemployment continues to fall, we're still on a track toward ever more insecurity for young people. The "Leave It To Beaver" workforce, in which everyone has the same job from graduation until gold watch, is not coming back. Any attempt to recreate the economic conditions the boomers had is just sending lifeboats to a whirlpool.

But still, there is already a foot-long list of overdue federal policy changes that would at least begin to fortify our future and reknit the safety net. Even amid the awfulness of our political moment, we can start to build a platform to rally around. Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation. Roll back anti-union laws to give workers more leverage against companies that treat them as if they're disposable. Tilt the tax code away from the wealthy. Right now, rich people can write off mortgage interest on their second home and expenses related to being a landlord or (I'm not kidding) owning a racehorse. The rest of us can't even deduct student loans or the cost of getting an occupational license.

Some of the trendiest Big Policy Fixes these days are efforts to rebuild government services from the ground up. The ur-example is the Universal Basic Income, a no-questions-asked monthly cash payment to every single American. The idea is to establish a level of basic subsistence below which no one in a civilized country should be allowed to fall. The venture capital firm Y Combinator is planning a pilot program that would give $1,000 each month to 1,000 low- and middle-income participants. And while, yes, it's inspiring that a pro-poor policy idea has won the support of D.C. wonks and Ayn Rand tech bros alike, it's worth noting that existing programs like food stamps, TANF, public housing and government-subsidized day care are not inherently ineffective. They have been intentionally made so. It would be nice if the people excited by the shiny new programs would expend a little effort defending and expanding the ones we already have.

But they're right about one thing: We're going to need government structures that respond to the way we work now. "Portable benefits," an idea that's been bouncing around for years, attempts to break down the zero-sum distinction between full-time employees who get government-backed worker protections and independent contractors who get nothing. The way to solve this, when you think about it, is ridiculously simple: Attach benefits to work instead of jobs. The existing proposals vary, but the good ones are based on the same principle: For every hour you work, your boss chips in to a fund that pays out when you get sick, pregnant, old or fired. The fund follows you from job to job, and companies have to contribute to it whether you work there a day, a month or a year.

Small-scale versions of this idea have been offsetting the inherent insecurity of the gig economy since long before we called it that. Some construction workers have an "hour bank" that fills up when they're working and provides benefits even when they're between jobs. Hollywood actors and technical staff have health and pension plans that follow them from movie to movie. In both cases, the benefits are negotiated by unions, but they don't have to be. Since 1962, California has offered "elective coverage" insurance that allows independent contractors to file for payouts if their kids get sick or if they get injured on the job. "The offloading of risks onto workers and families was not a natural occurrence," says Hacker, the Yale political scientist. "It was a deliberate effort. And we can roll it back the same way."

Another no-brainer experiment is to expand jobs programs. As decent opportunities have dwindled and wage inequality has soared, the government's message to the poorest citizens has remained exactly the same: You're not trying hard enough. But at the same time, the government has not actually attempted to give people jobs on a large scale since the 1970s.

Because most of us grew up in a world without them, jobs programs can sound overly ambitious or suspiciously Leninist. In fact, they're neither. In 2010, as part of the stimulus, Mississippi launched a program that simply reimbursed employers for the wages they paid to eligible new hires-100 percent at first, then tapering down to 25 percent. The initiative primarily reached low-income mothers and the long-term unemployed. Nearly half of the recipients were under 30.

The results were impressive. For the average participant, the subsidized wages lasted only 13 weeks. Yet the year after the program ended, long-term unemployed workers were still earning nearly nine times more than they had the previous year. Either they kept the jobs they got through the subsidies or the experience helped them find something new. Plus, the program was a bargain. Subsidizing more than 3,000 jobs cost $22 million, which existing businesses doled out to workers who weren't required to get special training. It wasn't an isolated success, either. A Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality review of 15 jobs programs from the past four decades concluded that they were "a proven, promising, and underutilized tool for lifting up disadvantaged workers." The review found that subsidizing employment raised wages and reduced long-term unemployment. Children of the participants even did better at school.

But before I get carried away listing urgent and obvious solutions for the plight of millennials, let's pause for a bit of reality: Who are we kidding? Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are not interested in our innovative proposals to lift up the systemically disadvantaged. Their entire political agenda, from the Scrooge McDuck tax reform bill to the ongoing assassination attempt on Obamacare, is explicitly designed to turbocharge the forces that are causing this misery. Federally speaking, things are only going to get worse.

Which is why, for now, we need to take the fight to where we can win it.

Over the last decade, states and cities have made remarkable progress adapting to the new economy. Minimum-wage hikes have been passed by voters in nine states, even dark red rectangles like Nebraska and South Dakota. Following a long campaign by the Working Families Party and other activist organizations, eight states and the District of Columbia have instituted guaranteed sick leave. Bills to combat exploitative scheduling practices have been introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures. San Francisco now gives retail and fast-food workers the right to learn their schedules two weeks in advance and get compensated for sudden shift changes. Local initiatives are popular, effective and our best hope of preventing the country's slide into "Mad Max"-style individualism.

The court system, the only branch of our government currently functioning, offers other encouraging avenues. Class-action lawsuits and state and federal investigations have resulted in a wave of judgments against companies that "misclassify" their workers as contractors. FedEx, which requires some of its drivers to buy their own trucks and then work as independent contractors, recently reached a $227 million settlement with more than 12,000 plaintiffs in 19 states. In 2014, a startup called Hello Alfred-Uber for chores, basically-announced that it would rely exclusively on direct hires instead of "1099s." Part of the reason, its CEO told Fast Company, was that the legal and financial risk of relying on contractors had gotten too high. A tsunami of similar lawsuits over working conditions and wage theft would be enough to force the same calculation onto every CEO in America.

Source: Bankrate Money Pulse survey, July 2015. Percentage is for young adults ages 18-29.

And then there's housing, where the potential-and necessity-of local action is obvious. This doesn't just mean showing up to city council hearings to drown out the NIMBYs (though let's definitely do that). It also means ensuring that the entire system for approving new construction doesn't prioritize homeowners at the expense of everyone else. Right now, permitting processes examine, in excruciating detail, how one new building will affect rents, noise, traffic, parking, shadows and squirrel populations. But they never investigate the consequences of not building anything-rising prices, displaced renters, low-wage workers commuting hours from outside the sprawl.

Some cities are finally acknowledging this reality. Portland and Denver have sped up approvals and streamlined permitting. In 2016, Seattle's mayor announced that the city would cut ties with its mostly old, mostly white, very NIMBY district councils and establish a "community involvement commission." The name is terrible, obviously, but the mandate is groundbreaking: Include renters, the poor, ethnic minorities-and everyone else unable to attend a consultation at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday-in construction decisions. For decades, politicians have been terrified of making the slightest twitch that might upset homeowners. But with renters now outnumbering owners in nine of America's 11 largest cities, we have the potential to be a powerful political constituency.

The same logic could be applied to our entire generation. In 2018, there will be more millennials than boomers in the voting-age population. The problem, as you've already heard a million times, is that we don't vote enough. Only 49 percent of Americans ages 18 to 35 turned out to vote in the last presidential election, compared to about 70 percent of boomers and Greatests. (It's lower in midterm elections and positively dire in primaries.)

But like everything about millennials, once you dig into the numbers you find a more complicated story. Youth turnout is low, sure, but not universally. In 2012, it ranged from 68 percent in Mississippi (!) to 24 percent in West Virginia. And across the country, younger Americans who are registered to vote show up at the polls nearly as often as older Americans.

The fact is, it's simply harder for us to vote. Consider that nearly half of millennials are minorities and that voter suppression efforts are laser-focused on blacks and Latinos. Or that the states with the simplest registration procedures have youth turnout rates significantly higher than the national average. (In Oregon it's automatic, in Idaho you can do it the same day you vote and in North Dakota you don't have to register at all.) Adopting voting rights as a cause-forcing politicians to listen to us like they do to the boomers-is the only way we're ever going to get a shot at creating our own New Deal.

Or, as Shaun Scott, the author of Millennials and the Moments That Made Us, told me, "We can either do politics or we can have politics done to us."

And that's exactly it. The boomer-benefiting system we've inherited was not inevitable and it is not irreversible. There is still a choice here. For the generations ahead of us, it is whether to pass down some of the opportunities they enjoyed in their youth or to continue hoarding them. Since 1989, the median wealth of families headed by someone over 62 has increased 40 percent. The median wealth of families headed by someone under 40 has decreased by 28 percent. Boomers, it's up to you: Do you want your children to have decent jobs and places to live and a non-Dickensian old age? Or do you want lower taxes and more parking?

Then there's our responsibility. We're used to feeling helpless because for most of our lives we've been subject to huge forces beyond our control. But pretty soon, we'll actually be in charge. And the question, as we age into power, is whether our children will one day write the same article about us. We can let our economic infrastructure keep disintegrating and wait to see if the rising seas get us before our social contract dies. Or we can build an equitable future that reflects our values and our demographics and all the chances we wish we'd had. Maybe that sounds naïve, and maybe it is. But I think we're entitled to it.

Credits

Michael is a contributing writer for Highline.

Jason is an art director and graphic designer based in suburban New Jersey.
He is also a part of the lettering sketch blog Friends of Type.

Becky is an 8-bit creation living in Brooklyn. You can find her Kickstarter here.

Story Editor Rachel Morris

Senior Designer Pablo Espinosa

Senior Developer Chris Lam

Interaction Designer Sophie Lee

Head of Production Conrad Blight

Account Manager Steph Coulton

Sara Bondioli, Alexander Eichler and Ani Vrabel

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WHOA! Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past. I am 35 years old-the oldest millennial, the first millennial-and for a decade now, I've been waiting for adulthood to kick in.

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Hvordan tyske gatenavn forteller historien om Tyskland

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Lesen Sie diesen Text auf Deutsch

Street names are stories of life. They tell us something about how the people in a given place work and live, what they believe in and their dreams. There are more than a million streets and squares in Germany. ZEIT ONLINE has compiled a database of the roughly 450,000 different names used. Some street names are used hundreds of times and others only once. But none of the names were chosen at random. Each individual name reveals something about how the lives and attitudes of people in Germany have transformed over the centuries. Taken together, they also shed light on the things we like to remember and what we would prefer to forget.
Although there are countless route planners and navigational devices out there that can be used to find individual streets or addresses, this new database is a novelty for its ability to allow users to analyze all German street names using search terms and to generate a graphic illustration of their regional distribution.

What things does Germany tend to commemorate in its street names? Take the example of last year's terrorist attack on a Christmas market in a Berlin square located next to the city's famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Thanks to the attack, everyone in Germany knows today that the square is named Breitscheidplatz. But how did it get its name?

Street names are an expression of the mindset of a given period and that's still true today. But the names don't solely express the successes of their respective eras. They can also be reflective of a society's deficits. Just under 70 years ago, the new German constitution stated that, "Men and woman shall have equal rights." But if you look at a street map of Hamburg today, it's difficult to discern anything approaching equality. The city has named 2,500 streets after men, but not even 400 carry the name of a woman.

In East Germany, street names reflected socialist doctrine, with terms used like Bodenreform Street, christened after the German Democratic Republic's land reform laws that saw the expropriation of private property. German-Soviet Friendship Street. Solidarity Street. On top of that, of course, came the socialist personality cult, with names like Marx and Engels, German Communist Party co-founder Karl Liebknecht or former Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann, who was killed on Hitler's orders at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Many of these street names were changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. But in some towns, the old ideals persist today. You can still find a street these days called Thälmannpionierestraße, so named after the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organization, East Germany's youth organization for children aged 6 to 14. A town called Wiesenau in the eastern state of Brandenburg still even has a street named after Klement Gottwald, the Stalinist dictator of Czechoslovakia.

At the end of the 18th century, French revolutionaries recognized that street names could be used for the purpose of political communication. Ever since, those in power have been using them as a means for perpetuating their propaganda. This is particularly visible when it comes to the streetscape of Berlin, a city shaped by an empire, the Weimar Republic and two dictatorships.

Traces of all these periods can still be found today. Even if many of these names were later eradicated on a large scale, there are still remnants. In the streetscape across Germany, all street signs bearing the names of leading figures in the Nazi era have been removed. You won't find any signs for an Adolf Hitler Street or Hermann Göring Square. But especially in western Germany, you can still find streets with names or terms that were assigned by the Nazis and typify their ideology.

But the era of grand ideologies seems to be behind us. Today, people in many places have retreated to more harmless subjects for their street names. Trees, birds, composers and poets tend to characterize the street names of many newly built areas, although the trend isn't entirely new. People began using those kinds of terms at the end of the 19th century, when industrialization fueled large-scale growth in the cities. In total, we found around 20,000 thematically linked groups of streets. Baumviertel (or tree quarters) and Vogelquartiere (bird quarters) can be found with particular frequency.

What are the most common names used in groups of streets?

Most groups of streets are named after trees, birds, composers and poets. The terms that appear most frequently within these thematically grouped streets are illustrated below.

But even nondescript names refer to something that is key to Germany's identity. If you go by the number of times the word comes up in street names, it isn't the oak, but the birch that is the most archetypal German tree. And the Germans' favorite composer is apparently an Austrian: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Originally, street names were meant as descriptive directional aids. Deichstrasse led along the dike, Kirchgasse went to the church and Leipziger Chausee pointed the way to Leipzig. As the world changed over the centuries, many of these names survived - and today they bear witness to a long-lost past.

There are many more patterns hidden in the data. Help us find them! In the search field, you can enter terms of your own and then look at the pattern generated. We're excited to see what you find!

Find out more about street names in Germany (texts in German)

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Streetnames: Streetscapes - Mozart, Marx and a Dictator

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Lesen Sie diesen Text auf Deutsch Street names are stories of life. They tell us something about how the people in a given place work and live, what they believe in and their dreams. There are more than a million streets and squares in Germany.

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Svarte hull og singularitet for dummies

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HESKEY

"Kane is worth his weight in gold to England"

Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country.

In a 'golden generation' of dazzling individual English talent, he was the unflashy personification of humility and hard work. Michael Owen, for whom he acted as a tireless and selfless foil, still names him - without hesitation - as his best strike partner.

Now 43, Heskey finds himself back at Leicester City, beginning his coaching career where he started out as a player. But he is not, as might have been expected, taking those early steps with Brendan Rodgers' UEFA Champions League-chasing men's team. His expertise is instead being utilised with the club's women, who this season earned promotion to the increasingly star-studded WSL 1, topping the second tier with two games to spare.

Heskey is relishing the coaching experience, too, and explained why in an interview in which he took time to reflect on his England career and assess the Three Lions' current generation.

Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country.

Now 43, Heskey finds himself back at Leicester City, beginning his coaching career where he started out as a player. His expertise is being utilised with the club's women, who this season earned promotion to the increasingly star-studded WSL 1, topping the second tier with two games to spare.

Heskey is relishing the coaching experience, too, and explained why in this exclusive interview.

FULL INTERVIEW

DONOVAN

"I measure success in living to our values"

Landon Donovan will be forever synonymous with his playing career on the USA national team, having been a ubiquitous protagonist in many of the country's modern successes on the international stage.

But he's started writing a new chapter in his life: Coach Landon Donovan. Or, to be precise: Executive Vice President of Soccer Operations and Manager of San Diego Loyal Landon Donovan. Taking charge of a new club - the Loyal compete in the United Soccer League (USL) Championship, a division below Major League Soccer (MLS) - in his hometown was an opportunity he could not turn down.

Donovan has been rightly praised for assembling a coaching staff consisting of both men and women. One of his most trusted confidantes is Carrie Taylor, who describes the USMNT legend as being "like a brother to me." Taylor was the first female coach in professional men's soccer in the USA.

FIFA.com caught up with the 39-year-old in the middle of preparations for his second season in charge to hear about his coaching journey so far, his guiding philosophies, and to gain insight on how Donovan the coach is different to Donovan the player.

Landon Donovan will be forever synonymous with his playing career on the USA national team, having been a ubiquitous protagonist in many of the country's modern successes on the international stage.

But he's started writing a new chapter in his life: Coach Landon Donovan. Or, to be precise: Executive Vice President of Soccer Operations and Manager of San Diego Loyal Landon Donovan. Taking charge of a new club in his hometown was an opportunity he could not turn down.

FIFA.com caught up with the 39-year-old in the middle of preparations for his second season in charge to hear about his coaching journey so far, his guiding philosophies, and to gain insight on how Donovan the coach is different to Donovan the player.

FULL INTERVIEW

LARSSON

"I'm proud of the career I've had"

In recent weeks, the headlines in the Swedish press have been all about the return of Zlatan Ibrahimovic for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ qualifying, five years after he announced his international retirement in the wake of the UEFA EURO.

Sebastian Larsson was one Zlatan's team-mates at France 2016, where the Blagult failed to make the knockout phase after finishing bottom of Group E. Thirty-one at the time and already an international for eight years, it would not have been a surprise had Larsson also called time with Sweden.

But five years later Larsson is, at 35, still indispensable to the team. Moreover, he wore the captain's armband during the opening qualifiers for Qatar 2022, as Sweden kicked off their Group B campaign with two wins.

In conversation with FIFA.com, the midfielder talks freely about his country's ambitions. He also reminisces about the 17 years he spent in England, and shares his memories of training with Thierry Henry and his pride at pulling on Sweden's famous yellow jersey more than 120 times.

In recent weeks, the headlines in the Swedish press have been all about the return of Zlatan Ibrahimovic for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ qualifying, five years after he announced his international retirement in the wake of the UEFA EURO.

Sebastian Larsson was one Zlatan's team-mates at France 2016. Thirty-one at the time and already an international for eight years, it would not have been a surprise had Larsson also called time with Sweden.

But five years later Larsson is, at 35, still indispensable to the team. Moreover, he wore the captain's armband during the opening qualifiers for Qatar 2022, as Sweden kicked off their Group B campaign with two wins.

In conversation with FIFA.com, the midfielder reminisces about the 17 years he spent in England and shares his pride at pulling on Sweden's famous yellow jersey more than 120 times.

FULL INTERVIEW

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
HESKEY Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country. In a 'golden generation' of dazzling individual English talent, he was the unflashy personification of humility and hard work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
HESKEY

"Kane is worth his weight in gold to England"

Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country.

In a 'golden generation' of dazzling individual English talent, he was the unflashy personification of humility and hard work. Michael Owen, for whom he acted as a tireless and selfless foil, still names him - without hesitation - as his best strike partner.

Now 43, Heskey finds himself back at Leicester City, beginning his coaching career where he started out as a player. But he is not, as might have been expected, taking those early steps with Brendan Rodgers' UEFA Champions League-chasing men's team. His expertise is instead being utilised with the club's women, who this season earned promotion to the increasingly star-studded WSL 1, topping the second tier with two games to spare.

Heskey is relishing the coaching experience, too, and explained why in an interview in which he took time to reflect on his England career and assess the Three Lions' current generation.

Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country.

Now 43, Heskey finds himself back at Leicester City, beginning his coaching career where he started out as a player. His expertise is being utilised with the club's women, who this season earned promotion to the increasingly star-studded WSL 1, topping the second tier with two games to spare.

Heskey is relishing the coaching experience, too, and explained why in this exclusive interview.

FULL INTERVIEW

DONOVAN

"I measure success in living to our values"

Landon Donovan will be forever synonymous with his playing career on the USA national team, having been a ubiquitous protagonist in many of the country's modern successes on the international stage.

But he's started writing a new chapter in his life: Coach Landon Donovan. Or, to be precise: Executive Vice President of Soccer Operations and Manager of San Diego Loyal Landon Donovan. Taking charge of a new club - the Loyal compete in the United Soccer League (USL) Championship, a division below Major League Soccer (MLS) - in his hometown was an opportunity he could not turn down.

Donovan has been rightly praised for assembling a coaching staff consisting of both men and women. One of his most trusted confidantes is Carrie Taylor, who describes the USMNT legend as being "like a brother to me." Taylor was the first female coach in professional men's soccer in the USA.

FIFA.com caught up with the 39-year-old in the middle of preparations for his second season in charge to hear about his coaching journey so far, his guiding philosophies, and to gain insight on how Donovan the coach is different to Donovan the player.

Landon Donovan will be forever synonymous with his playing career on the USA national team, having been a ubiquitous protagonist in many of the country's modern successes on the international stage.

But he's started writing a new chapter in his life: Coach Landon Donovan. Or, to be precise: Executive Vice President of Soccer Operations and Manager of San Diego Loyal Landon Donovan. Taking charge of a new club in his hometown was an opportunity he could not turn down.

FIFA.com caught up with the 39-year-old in the middle of preparations for his second season in charge to hear about his coaching journey so far, his guiding philosophies, and to gain insight on how Donovan the coach is different to Donovan the player.

FULL INTERVIEW

LARSSON

"I'm proud of the career I've had"

In recent weeks, the headlines in the Swedish press have been all about the return of Zlatan Ibrahimovic for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ qualifying, five years after he announced his international retirement in the wake of the UEFA EURO.

Sebastian Larsson was one Zlatan's team-mates at France 2016, where the Blagult failed to make the knockout phase after finishing bottom of Group E. Thirty-one at the time and already an international for eight years, it would not have been a surprise had Larsson also called time with Sweden.

But five years later Larsson is, at 35, still indispensable to the team. Moreover, he wore the captain's armband during the opening qualifiers for Qatar 2022, as Sweden kicked off their Group B campaign with two wins.

In conversation with FIFA.com, the midfielder talks freely about his country's ambitions. He also reminisces about the 17 years he spent in England, and shares his memories of training with Thierry Henry and his pride at pulling on Sweden's famous yellow jersey more than 120 times.

In recent weeks, the headlines in the Swedish press have been all about the return of Zlatan Ibrahimovic for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ qualifying, five years after he announced his international retirement in the wake of the UEFA EURO.

Sebastian Larsson was one Zlatan's team-mates at France 2016. Thirty-one at the time and already an international for eight years, it would not have been a surprise had Larsson also called time with Sweden.

But five years later Larsson is, at 35, still indispensable to the team. Moreover, he wore the captain's armband during the opening qualifiers for Qatar 2022, as Sweden kicked off their Group B campaign with two wins.

In conversation with FIFA.com, the midfielder reminisces about the 17 years he spent in England and shares his pride at pulling on Sweden's famous yellow jersey more than 120 times.

FULL INTERVIEW

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HESKEY Emile Heskey is one of Leicester's favourite football sons. A local lad made good, he lifted two League Cups for his hometown team before becoming a treble-winner at Liverpool and earning 62 caps for his country. In a 'golden generation' of dazzling individual English talent, he was the unflashy personification of humility and hard work.

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The home of Nigella online | Nigella Lawson

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Nigella's official site packed with recipes, updates, tips, advice, books and products, as well as a host of ways for you to join in.

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Læs anmeldelser, sammenlign kundevurderinger, se skærmbilleder, og læs mere om Sproghjælp. Download Sproghjælp, og brug den på dit Apple TV.

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We are surrounded by incredible digital experiences. Masterful design, branding and marketing.

Yet, it would be fair to say we are also drowning in awful digital experiences - or, at the very minimum, experiences that seem to be stuck in 1991.

As a Digital Marketing Evangelist you can imagine how much that pains me.

When I work with companies, I do my very best to bring my deep and undying passion for creativity and digital awesomeness to them. One manifestation of that is the stories I tell by comparing and contrasting the client's digital existence with others I consider best of breed.

In this blog post I want to try and do something similar by sharing some of my favorite digital experiences with you. There are 7 in total.

Each example is truly amazing and for each I'll share my perspective on why. In each case there are also tips that highlight things that overtly or covertly make the company delightful.

What can you expect?

Inspiring landing pages, cool calls to action, delightful cart and checkout experiences, website copy delicious enough to eat, copy that convinces people to buy by respecting their intelligence, ecommerce reimagined, higher conversions via greater transparency, and examples of how to truly live your brand's values online through an experience that leaves your customers happy and willing to pay more for your products!

Here are the companies and stories covered in this post:

My goal with this post is that by the time you are finished reading, you'll have identified 7 specific things to work on in your digital experience (though there are 18 lessons listed here). And if at least some of you cringe when you contrast your website with the examples below, that's a plus.

Ready to see some pretty sexy-functional-cool stuff? Let's go ...
Songza: Smart Homepages That Anticipate and Deliver Delight
I. Love. Songza.

I really do. It is such a cool service. The music collection is wonderful. I love the social nature of sharing playlists. The suggestions engine they have. And, I cannot stress how much I love this, the nag-free experience they deliver.

There is a lot any business - B2C, B2B, A2Z - can learn from Songza.

I want to highlight their home page ... it is simple, beautiful and incredibly smart!

I'm visiting it on Saturday evening local time. The page knows that! Then it auto-magically creates five options for me of the music I could possibly want. Party options, relaxing options, entertaining cool friends or eating dinner. I press a button and - boom! - Music! Tied to one of 5 things almost all of us are likely to want to do at the moment we visit Songza.

It is not that hard to do this. They use geo/ip to work out where I am. They check if the service is available (they are not in all countries). They work out my local time. Then they match it back to their rules engine that serves me the best options. Try Songza at different times of the day. You'll be amazed at how clever they are with the music options they serve when you visit them at 0600 hrs (music for singing in the shower!) or 1345 hrs or 2200 hrs.

Songza demonstrates great use of technology, but not in an in your face look at how smart we are way. They deliver delight. I smile every time I see the home page they create for me.

Of course there is still the search box on top of the page. For the small % of times they might get day/time wrong, that text is a drop box so you can change it to what you want. At the bottom of the page they explain in three short sentences what they do. (Their wonderful slogan: Playlists by Music Experts. 100% Free. No Audio Ads.) Can you explain your value proposition in nine words? Then, they show external endorsements.

So why is it that YouTube's home page is still such a cluttered mess?

Why is it that when I visit www.3m.com or www.gillette.com they ask me to pick my country? (OMG! In 2013!)

Why is it that when I just visited news.yahoo.com, the ad says "New Rule in Texas!", and the page is exactly the same for me in California or someone in London? Why is it that www.orbitz.com uses none of my location signals to customize content on their home page to appeal to me? Why not, at least, show me "Current Deals from San Jose" (my closest airport)?

Sad, right?

There is one other thing that immensely delights me about Songza.

I was listening to my "Write Great Blog Posts" music. I noticed that I was not logged in. So no social features/recommendations available.

I prepare for the inevitable pause in music and click on Log in ...

Astonishingly, there is no pause in music!

The page reloads with the log in screen and I'm able to type my username / password to now access more content / features. With, did I say this already, no interruption in my music!

I know it is such a small thing. But it matters so much from a consumer experience because it delivers a tiny jolt of delight and it makes your customers smile.

Starting with Amazon.com and right down to the smallest site in the world, when I click to log in I know everything I'm looking at, work I've already done, is going to go away. I'm taken to a new screen. After I type my info I know that they'll redirect me to the home page, regardless of where I was.

Why? Why not Songza your experience?

John Lewis: Thoughtful Cart and Checkout Experiences for Nonline Outcomes

If you've ever asked me the fastest way to improve your bottom-line of your digital experiences, it is likely that my answer was: "Reduce the cart and checkout abandonment rates."

It takes a lot to get someone to your website. It takes even more to get them to come back the 5 times it takes your average customer to hit the Add To Cart button. But if they do, take their money!

Sadly cart abandonment rates routinely run north of 65%. Abandonment rates during checkout are often even higher.

That is so sad. If someone has taken out their wallet to give you money, why not take it?

Part of the problem is that most cart experiences stink. They are full of nonsenseware - cross-sells and up-sells, all kinds of seals and logos, irrelevant other products, promotions, mobile app pimping and so much more.

Here's an awesome cart/checkout experience, from John Lewis, a UK brand I love ...

The first thing you'll notice is that the cart page is uncluttered. The products you are purchasing dominate the page, right under the main site header. All other recommendations, logos, etc. are below the fold.

The cart itself has 7 different, subtle but clever, things (red numbers above).

1. Big font delivery text. No doubt about what I need to do to hit the goal. 2. The button, in a different color, is easy to find (no hunting expedition!), and does not say Start or Checkout or other boring stuff. It says Continue securely . How soothing. :) 3. Shows me again if the product is in stock. 4. In case I was thinking of abandoning, there is a nice heart logo and Add to Wish List , what a cool way to still keep the customer. 5, 6, 7. Another confidence builder: Communicates that they ship everywhere, and whether the particular product is available for each option. I was also impressed at their clever way to drive you to the store by having "Click & Collect" right there. A really nice way to do a multi-channel strategy.

Neither Macy's, Best Buy, nor PetSmart does anything close to this clever. Not just the online + offline part (though they all want multi-channel desperately), but the whole cart experience.

I also like the checkout experience....

8. The phone number is there (again in case you were thinking of abandoning). 9. This may be me but I love the truck, and subsequent art on the site. 10. They have a Help in the top nav (and tell you it will pop up :). 11. Lastly, they build confidence by showing a date and time (and in a subtle way, they push you to the store where you will surely buy other stuff!).

A really wonderful experience. Oh, and through the checkout process they refrain from nonsenseware. Just a simple, uncluttered nag-free, ads-free focused-on-checkout experience.

I can't resist, I have one more example for you. One of my favorite checkout experiences around, and it is from Ringadoc ...

I like that they reiterate their value proposition again. They also make it clear they only serve California, rather than telling you after you click the Submit button!. (They say this all over their site but do so here again in case you missed it.) I really like the big boxes, big text. The entire "checkout" page is what you see above (I've reduced the size). There is nothing else on that page. Talk about nonsenseware-free!

Bonus: Ringadoc also has a great home page, in case you are looking for inspiration. They sell a very complicated product, and they do it very smartly.

Innocent: Passionate Copy and Heart-warming Visual Design

Television has its fair share of horrible commercials. But a vast majority of TV commercials, or magazine ads or even billboards, are clever/beautiful/joy-evoking. They go to great pains to create a connection with a product's brand by living their brand values in the ad (with imagery, with words, with music, with celebrities). The product/brand managers at 7 for all mankind clothes, Bertolli pasta sauce, Pepsi, Dodge Dart, etc. work very hard on every single frame or picture or second of music.

But when it comes to the web, they all seem to leave their creativity, passion, and brilliant minds at home. Try any of the sites mentioned above. They have boring images (or garish ones that say "LOOK AT ME!!!!!"). They have copy that a dead cat might have written.

Why?

Why leave your passion behind when it comes to the web?

Another example is Innocent (another UK brand!). Here's an example of what I mean by not leaving your passion, love, smarts behind when you crate your digital experience. How awesome is their page for roasted aubergine moussaka veg pot?

Then the Veg Pot itself (big image!), and underneath it the ingredients and nutritional info. Then the product description, more on this in a second. And finally (did you see the bee?) the reviews.

One nice clean and tight package that delivers everything you want as a customer, and nothing else - and all delivered with a unique brand experience.

My favorite part is the product description; take 30 seconds and read it:

Isn't it amazing? (If you are the aubergine type.) That is mouth-watering yummy text. It is copy by someone who loves their product and can't wait to share it with you. That is selling with passion!

I love the 3 bullet points. They could have ten, but they went with the 3 that communicate the product's value proposition with the biggest impact.

Read their invitation to get you to write a review. How nice.

Then some reviews (they float by). This one with only four circles, but somehow makes the whole thing more credible.

And this is not a one-off deal. Each product description is written with the same unique blend of love, passion, smarts and good copy.

Here's the one for bombay curry:

Bombay butternut squash curry with basmati rice, yoghurt & cumin

Ah. Autumn in Bombay. Right now, the home of Bollywood, 22 million people and 102,224 rickshaws is pretty balmy. Temperatures hover around 28C, blue skies reign and spices waft along on the cool breeze. But seeing as it's more hatscarfcrispyleaf weather round here, we're hoping this aromatic curry will warm up your lunch break. We've combined tasty butternut squash, fennel spiced red peppers and fresh spinach with a delicious mix of Bombay spices and a dollop of cooling yoghurt for a healthy curry to heat you up when it's nippy out. So whack on another jumper, kick back and enjoy your Mumbai moment*.

*Bombay is more commonly known as Mumbai. It is also known as Mambai, Kakamuchee and Galajunkja for future reference/taxi directions

Mmm, hmm, good! :)

The potential impact of the copy we use on our websites is often deeply under-appreciated. Innocent has a great digital brand experience overall. But what stands out for me is the copy. It demonstrates love for their product, it sells with passion, it communicates the brand's core values.

There are a million sites you could contrast with Innocent. Let me use Ragu, the famous maker or pasta and pasta sauces.

This is their page for Old World Style Marinara sauce....

A small part of me died.

The complete copy on this page, completely bereft of any passion or love or soul, is the list of ingredients. IN ALL CAPS!

Nothing about what makes this product unique. Nothing about the brand's value or promise. Nothing about ... anything. Not even nutrition facts or pictures of yummy food made with the sauce. Just the ingredients.

And this approach pervades the Ragu website. For example, check out their Meet Our Farmers page. Maybe you expect this page to showcase how cool Ragu is because it buys from small family farms or does organic farming or does not use chemicals. Or maybe you expect to see videos of farmers picking their produce or interviews to underline that Ragu is not a nameless, soulless corporate giant. Or maybe information about how Ragu farmers support local communities. Or ... well, there are a million things I would do if I had a "Meet Our Farmers" page.

But if you were expecting any of those things, you'll be just as heart broken as I was. That page features 3 rolling images (which scroll by before you can finish reading or seeing the photos). Underneath are two, mostly likely stock, photos of Farmers "Chuck" and "Frank" bearing copy that is almost certainly lawyer-approved - it is bereft of any passion. Plus: No videos. No sweeping photos. No environment commitment. Nothing.

And I'm sure that like every big company, Ragu and its parent company spent millions of dollars on this website. I have zero doubt that the brand manager for Ragu and SVP of the foods division are amazingly smart people full of passion. Yet.

The web can sell product. The web can infect your potential customers with the passion you feel for your job. The web can, in a very real way, create experiences that live your brand's values. The web can really do ... so much. But you have to try.

If you were looking for inspiration, look no further than Innocent. Oh, and if you want a taste of how much more awesome than above they are ... just click on links titled bored?, beat january, and blog in the site header.
AAA Life Insurance : Truly Customer Centric "Convince Me To Buy" Experience
At a former employer we used to obsess about CMTB. Where's the CMTB? Wait that's not CMTB, that's just treating customers dumb? What subtle CMTB clues can we put on the page?

CMTB stood for convince me to buy. It was our short hand for persuasive content that always took the customer perspective, treated the customer with respect, and created a simple experience requiring the fewest back button presses / having to go back to Google.

This is a great story about CMTB.

I want to buy term life insurance. I only have the vaguest idea of what it is, but I know I want it. So I Google term life insurance online quote and spent most of my time with two companies. MetLife and AAA . Each website has a form you can fill.

The yellow box below is the MetLife form. It asks some basic information that is easy to type in, Female, Excellent Health, DoB, Coverage. I got tripped up on Term Length. I was not sure what the implication of my choice might be. I go back and complete the Life Insurance Calculator , but it does not cover this. Anyway. I choose 30 and hit Go.

The AAA form asks for a bit more info (height and weight) and, smartly, captures my email address. But there is nothing that trips me up. That makes me happy. I click Next.

MetLife presents me with this rather ok'ish page. The nice doggie says $377/month and asks me to Continue. There are three reiterating bullet points.

But there is very little CMTB.

And $377 seems like an insane amount of money to pay each month.

My only choice though seems to be to Modify Quote link (it looks a bit weird, but you can see it above if you try for a couple of seconds).

So I abandon.

AAA on the other hand takes me to a page that .... well ... seems to be designed for humans. There is a happy family (awww). There is a bold claim: Term Life for Less. (Not: "Affordable coverage." Subtle difference in persuasiveness.)

Scroll back up. Look at the MetLife page (and that is the whole page up there). Then scroll back down and look at the AAA page. What do you think?

The AAA page also includes a handy dandy "Estimate Your Needs" calculator in case that is of value. Calculate Now! :)

But to me the pièce de résistance is the box you see in the middle. Rather than one number ($377!) I get an extremely simple-to-understand graph that is immediately soothing because it illustrates that I have a choice.

First thing to notice is that the graph tops out at $275 (I'm already saving $102 over MetLife, hurray!).

Let's look at the other delightful things about this awesome example of a CMTB page, first let's zoom into it ...

1. I really like the clean title. Your Term Life Quote. MetLife has something inside the blue box, much less clearly stated. 2. There is a crystal clear path back to where I came from in case I made a mistake. 3. To ensure I made no mistakes my choices are clearly stated again. How nice is this? 4. AAA gives me lots of choice. Remember they never asked me to pick my term. They realized very cleverly that a lay person would not know what it is, and, more importantly, a lay person would not realize the implications of that choice (on rates). Now I can see what the implication of choosing 30-year term is: biggest bill. But ... 5. This is a stroke of genius. Next to the text "Adjust Coverage Amount" they have a red bar I can move to figure out the if I can come up with a "happy number" for myself! Sweet!!

So what happens?

I don't abandon.

I move the bar! I try various positions, for example I adjust the coverage to $300,000 and realize that it would be extremely easy for me pay $48 per month....

Assuaged, I try other positions and end up with a 20 year term for $90/month that gives me pretty good coverage.

Then I click Next and start my application.

There are 2 major differences, IMHO, between the approaches of the companies. Actually, 3 differences:

AAA's visual experience is substantially better than MetLife. It is modern, easy on the eyes, and full of persuasive elements. The team at AAA likely is not just a "web team," they understand what trips people up and they work to eliminate those trip wires. For example, they choose to present term options when they will make sense to prospective customers. They assume intelligence at the other end (in their prospective customers). Rather than thinking "we can funnel the most if we just spit out one number," their approach is "let's create an extremely simple visual summary of choices, and put our customer in charge of figuring out what works for them."

Every large successful old school company has a tendency to try to do business online just as it has always been done offline. "Let's just get people on the phone and our sales reps will convert!" "When people walk into the office, they are very simple-minded and don't know what they want, let's do that on the web."

AAA shows that a old school company can learn new tricks, that it can assume a little bit of intelligence on the other side and deliver an experience that can convert at a higher rate, even with some data (ooohhhhh scary data!), by trusting their customers to have a big say in how much they want to pay and what tradeoffs they want to make.

I love AAA. And I do have a 30-year Term Life Insurance policy from them.

CMTB rocks!
Shopbop: (Luxury) Ecommerce and Branding Done Right!
I don't often get an opportunity to do this, but when I do I love shopping at Nordstrom. The stores are almost always beautifully done, the displays are lovingly put together, and - my favorite - the staff are informed and kind. It is on those rare occasions that I truly understand what "retail therapy" means.

Neiman Marcus is another example of a store where shopping is often fun. It is often clear that a lot of thought was put into every little thing, including the underside of tables, to encourage you to stay, explore and buy.

It is the look, the feel, the little touches that make you happily part with your cash.

Recently, I wanted to buy a dress for myself. I went through the shopping experience for a few different sites, picking the same brand BCBGMAXAZRIA.

So what do the NM and Nordstorm experiences look like?

One word: Generic.

See what I mean? This blog runs WordPress. I can buy a theme for $20 that would give me exactly the same layout, look and feel as the above two "luxury" "top-tier" retailers. How lame is that? $20!!

When I visit Macy's, I do have lower expectations. I don't mind that the BCBG page there looks generic, has utterly clinical product descriptions, and contains irrelevant stuff and text ads on the page. It is ok that when I'm shopping for a $368 dress they show "Ads by Google" to Lean Cuisine (PS: I'm not fat), NextTag, UGG, and Nordstrom. (Though the tradeoff between making two cents from me via the ad click rather than $368 from the dress might be questionable.)

But with Neiman Marcus, with Nordstrom, I don't expect that. I expect that they'll have a beautiful brand experience, use fast-loading technology to do clever things, allow me to explore products, make smart recommendations. And so much more. I expect all that because they expect me to pay their prices!

After spending millions upon millions of dollars in their offline retail experience, it is incredible that their choice of online experience is to barely beat one that can be had with a 20-dollar WordPress theme.

At least the Neiman Marcus page is not 30% empty white nothingness like Nordstrom's is.

So, is it possible to replicate the incredible in-store experience on the web? In fact, can you one-up the store and do things online that you can't even do offline?

Yes!

Meet the incredible luxurious, beautifully dressed-to-impress experience of Shopbop ... The first thing you might notice (please do visit the site) is how focused (and beautiful, did I already say beautiful?) the experience is. Everything seems to be placed in exactly the right place with a great attention to detail. Unlike almost every other site on planet Earth, the product takes center stage on Shopbop. You see the dress, and that is all you see, until you are ready to see the other stuff.

The price is easy to see, colors easy to find and change, micro conversions cleverly tucked under the Add To Cart button.

The bottom part of the page is taken up by well thought out recommendations to accessorize the dress. [Many, many retailers get greedy here and throw up completely random stuff, or nothing at all. Both are such big mistakes. Remember, you are trying to create a unique brand experience.]

Let me drill down into some of the more subtle features that make Shopbop's experience so much better than its peer set:

1. I love clean headers. Hovering over them brings up focused small sub menus (unlike sub menus with 900 items each for NM, NO). 2. I love this. When you pick your size the Size & Fit box on the right automatically opens! It shows the normal distribution of XS, S, L etc, but it also shows, how cool is this, the Model's size (S in this case), her height, bust, waist and hip size! You can't try the dress on, but this data helps you understand if it will look on you just like it does on the model. (Not in my case.) 3. The description is not clinical, it paints a picture.

4. In case you are not ready to buy (don't abandon!) you can add it to a wish list, add it to your designers, email it to your mom (and beg her to buy it for you), etc. Micro-conversions FTW! 5. I lied earlier. This is my favorite bit. If you click to play the video it does not open a new pop-up, it does not open a new frame, it does not do things you expect on all other sites. The model you see above just starts moving! She shashays right where her image is, in the white space. Nothing else changes on the screen. It's like magic. Try it on the site.

6. When you click on the model, the zoom is delightful. It takes over the entire right side and shows a detailed view just as long as the model ...

Both Nordstorm and Neiman Marcus have zooms, try them on their sites and you'll see why Shopbop's is so much better.

7. Hyper-relevant accessories to make the dress, and you, pop. The experience with the accessories is the same, big, bold, beautiful with just the information you need (right on the dress page) and nothing that you don't need...

On and did you see a subtle example of CMTB? When I picked my shoe size, I see "Only 1 left." Nice. I instantly head to the checkout. :)

Shopbop is not as big as Nordstorm or Neiman Marcus or Debenhams or other top-tier stores. It does not have the complexity or the number of products that they do. It does not have nearly as many layers of management as they all do.

But I humbly believe that none of those are reasons to have generic web experiences intended to sell non-generic products. If we don't put in the effort to create beautiful, smart, friendly, brand-enhancing, thoughtful experiences, how can we ever expect the web to deliver the kind of feeling someone gets when they walk into our stores? How can we expect to make lots of happy customers and lots of money as customers and their shopping preferences move online?

You want a premium price? How about a genuinely premium shopping experience.

Bonus: If you want another example of a great top-tier store that does digital really well, check out Barneys New York.
Security Choice: The Power of Conversion Through Transparency
This deep into the post I'm confident that you are on to my bias for white space (I love good white space, Shopbop, and don't love the wasted white space, Nordstorm) and uncluttered experiences (a common theme thus far). I have to admit, I do like sexy and nothing says sexy like uncluttered experiences where the content has lots of room to breathe.

That said, one of my most-tweeted quotes is: "Never sacrifice functionality at the alter of sexiness."

I firmly believe that.

This example will prove that I'm very comfortable with the cluttered and a little garish, as long as the experience is deeply functional.

The story is that like every other human being on the planet I worry about the safety of mi casa. At least in our neck of the woods the brand that many people know is ADT. So like every other human on the planet I go to my favorite search engine and type in "ADT Security Plans."

I was looking for two things. 1. What is the cost of, and options for, an ADT security system? 2. What will be the monthly fees?

I get a bunch of paid and organic search results.

Here's the first one...

Protectyourhome.com gives me some hints when it comes to the answer to the first question. I can see some equipment, though it is unclickable and the page does not say anything about the equipment you get for $49 (and note the weasel word: "Starting at").

I like the bonus. But there is no indication as to what the monthly cost will be, and there is no online quote option. Being wary of the phone hard sell, I just click the back button. It is easier.

I click on the next link, it takes me to Homesecurityteam.com. I scroll down the page and see the package, offer for free consultation and the happy family:

But there is no direct indication of what the monthly price will be. I'm still quite skeptical about these affiliates because I feel that they are just trying to pawn me off to ADT and collect their bounty. So I click on the back button.

(In writing this post I now see that the top nav has a link called Pricing . I'm not sure if that is for the security system or the monthly plans. I should have clicked on that to check.)

The third link is to the ADT website. Now they can acquire me (I'm pre-convinced!) by creating a great experience, reassuring me with clear pricing, and they won't even have to pay a bounty to their aggregators!

Here's the landing page...

It looks pretty. But a quick glance will show that they are offering me the worst possible deal. Not only are they not giving me the $100 Visa card like others, ADT is not telling me what the monthly price will be or what my options are for monthly security monitoring!

There is a "Low Monthly Fees" bullet, but there is little detail (weasel word alert: "about $1 a day").

And it is as if html has not been invented. My only option is to have ADT "Call Me."

I realize that ADT has always done phone sales and is comfortable with that. But in the age of digital (and at 0200 hrs when I'm searching for security), why not deliver a digital experience that expresses your value proposition in such a clear and compelling way that it can convert better than your call center?

But that is not the worst part. (Though it is all pretty awful.)

The worst part is the asterisk. Do you see it next to the $49? And five more times on the page?

I was really curious what the terms were to get $49 installation. What was included?

If you scroll and look carefully you'll find an * and a link to Terms and Conditions . If you click on it (get ready to weep) you'll see the page you see on the right.

K. M. N.

The finest American lawyers hugged the finest Direct Marketing experts and produced this horrendous baby.

It is impossible to understand. It is more complex than the International Space Program. And, worst of all, in the end all you can sadly think is: "ADT is one big scam."

Not the impression you want to have about a security company.

I can customize and buy a car online. Why can't ADT figure out how to create a digital experience that is transparent? One where I can go pick my components, choose between five plans, and send them an installation order?

IMHO there are 2, amongst others we can't guess, contributing factors. 1. ADT assumes there is zero intelligence on the other side (in its prospective customers). 2. ADT believes that its operators are best equipped to oversell me.

In the long run, both create unhappy customers.

But my experience was not entirely futile.

The last link I clicked on took me to this fantastic page from Security Choice ... Take your time ... Can you figure out how much the security service costs? :)

Nine dollars! The page answers the one question you want answered to get ADT into the consideration funnel. How hard was that?

It's got all the other stuff, too. But by naming the price, your mind does not go instantly on guard, like it did with all the other folks. You think, "Nine bucks, I can do that, thank you. Can you tell me more?" And you ... click on the $9, and you get to a sweet comparison table of all the plans. It also happens to include textual explanations for those amongst us who want to know more (and of course delightfully will help the company's SEO strategy).

But there is more to the Security Choice landing page than just passing the all-important transparency test. There are 11 other things you should consider for your landing page optimization strategy:

1. Without a doubt my favorite element was the transparency / answering the first question I had quickly. 2. Nice CMTB "Act now and rest easy tonight!" 3. They want you to call them. Is that clear on this page? :) And when you call them the first thing they (or DirecTV or Crutchfield or any DR company) will ask for is the Promo Code. Clearly marked here. 4. Did you see, did you see? They can tell where I'm visiting them from! (3M, Gillette - boo!) Another nice CMTB.

5. This was close to my favorite: today's date and exactly how long they are open today! They know my location, my time zone, they tie it to their working hours and then create a sense for urgency for me. Nice. 6. Free system valued at $850. Need they say more? Another wonderful example of CMTB. 7. You had me at hello, but sure, I'll take a $100 card, too. 8. Telling me information I don't know ("save 20% on your homeowners insurance"), information that will push me to buy. 9. Everyone on the Internet loves speed. Does your page communicate what aspect of speed you deliver on?

10. If you are ready, a clear call to action stands out. Notice it does not say Call Us, it says Call Me. Make the conversion as easy and as painless as possible. 11. If all of the above did not already make the sale, there is additional information.

Of the tabs in 11 they should probably highlight the last one, "How Safe is Your Neighborhood." I type in 94043 and I get: 233 burglaries, 1,820 property crimes, 6 murders and more! Scary stuff, but ties clearly to what they are selling. The data is for 2008, but works like a charm in driving conversions.

ADT's business is undeniably complex, and it is difficult for someone from the outside, me, to understand it all. But if I might be so bold I would recommend that they fill out that form on Security Choice's website. The call is free and someone at Security Choice could share digital best practices with ADT. :)

Ok, question for you: Are your landing pages this good? Do they understand the singular thing the Visitor is looking for and deliver that answer in size 68 font this clearly? And do you have enough wood behind that arrow? All 11 of these incredibly persuasive elements?

No? Why not? Don't you love happy customers and big revenues?
Method: Amazing, Immersive, Love-Evoking Brand Experiences.
I've saved one of my absolute favorite sites for my last example. It is one that pulls together lots of little things that I've mentioned in this post, and does a few things above and beyond.

Rather than one page or one thing, I want to highlight the entire Method website (even though sometimes in Chrome it acts weird).

It is an amazing, immersive brand experience. Without trying very hard, you get a really great sense of the brand (and all its quirkiness). The site's visual design is beautifully consistent with that of the product, and consistent with the look and feel of the products when you bump into them at Target or other retail stores in the real world.

Amazing right?

Not just sexy, functional too.

The top nav is super clean, just three things: Shop, Clean Happy, Methodology. The color palette ensures that you see them easily.

Then if you want, a subtle second nav with product segments.

One big promo at the bottom of the page. And one giant rotating "hero" in the middle of the page that grabs your attention - as much with the beautifully photographed products as the delightful copy!

If you want to contrast how absolutely amazing Method's home page is, try comparing it with another company - (one that also spends millions upon millions on TV and other offline advertising - Lysol. Go ahead, click on that link. You'll see what I mean. Amazing, right?

With Method, beauty is not skin deep. It is very hard to make a dish washing liquid page one that people will remember visiting.

Checkout the product page for the clementine dish washing soap. Giant image (oh, I love this so much!). Beautiful copy, excerpt: " wash more dishes than you can shake a spatula at. when the plates pile up, there's no greater relief (short of having someone else tackle them for you) than knowing you have an ample reserve of natural, ultra grease-fighting dish soap."

Clear call to action. Product reviews (integrated with Facebook). Sharing options. Two tabs with more details "what's in it" and "scents". Just reading the what's in it will improve your confidence in the brand 100x.

Another contrasting moment, with another much bigger, much richer company. Palmolive. (Small warning: The page automatically plays music!). If you choose the Original dishwashing liquid you are taken to this page. Compare it to Method's. Again, amazing difference.

If you click on any Buy Now link on any Palmolive product on the site you are unceremoniously dumped on this page.

It is a website called "econsumeraffairs.com", not what you might expect: Colgate or Palmolive. The site has no Palmolive branding on it. It doesn't remember the product you want to buy (OMG!). You are supposed to be so desperate to buy Palmolive that you'll survive the shock of ending up on this page and then answer seven (7!) questions

Yes. I was speechless.

(Oh, and I died on the first Want to buy a Colgate-Palmolive product? question. It says Select Product Type. Your options: Household surface care, Fabric care, Oral care, Personal care. What category does dish washing liquid fall into?)

What another example? Check out Finish, and any product (say, Finish Gel). Incredible.

Let's get back to the happy stuff.

As in the case of Innocent earlier, I'm really delighted with the love and attention the team at Method pays to the words they use. For example, click out the site footer...

Does that not make you smile? You can say "Like us on Facebook", sounds a bit desperate. Why not say "like to be our friend?" Much better, right? Or say "lights, camera, videos" for YouTube. Why not say "greenskeeping + sustainability" instead of "Environmental responsibility" like every other site?

Some sites just try to be cute, or come across as trying too hard. But as you see the footer above, or when you experience the Method site, you don't get that sense of neediness.

I'm sure the thing you clicked on first in the footer was the humanifesto. Here is that awesome beast of a thing:

Every Brand Marketer says that their brand stands for something. Every Brand Marketer has written down the brand persona. Every Brand Marketer knows the brand attributes.

Yet you would not know that were you to visit their site. Say Bounty or Iams or Downy or Gain or Vicks.

Why don't they have a Humanifesto? Does the internet stink at branding?

Today, you as a Brand Marketer are slowly losing control of your God-given right to deliver the first impression of your brand in a controlled 30-second TV ad or via a glossy print buy in Martha Stewart Living . If people discover you digitally, what is your plan to make them fall in love with your brand?

And if they do visit your digital existence, and they are impressed enough to sign up for a longer term relationship with you (OMG, true gift from god! Not just a unmemorable one-night stand via tv, but the start of an actual direct customer connection - and many future dates!), what does that experience look like.

Does it look like this?

First, I bow to the coolness of that graphic. These people really want my email address! They made me smile.

Next, notice the overall branding - consistent, lovely color palette, totally on brand.

Then, checkout the CMTB. Just two boxes and Submit (clear call to action). In bold people against dirty, me! The notice the cute "psst ... read our privacy policy." How often do you draw attention to your privacy policy as a way of converting your website visitors?

Oh, and above is the whole page.

To get some perspective, let's try to do it for a different company. Let's pick Febreze (again, a brand with millions upon millions in actual spend on Marketing and Branding).

If you click on their Get Newsletter link, I get shuttled to a website called Home Made Simple and this profoundly generic page (compare to above) that is asking me to Complete Your Sign Up :

Where's Febreze?

I doubt the fact that they are asking me to fill out 14 fields will escape your attention. 14. And they are asking for my date of birth! And asking me to make up a security question and remember the security answer.

For. A. Newsletter!!

How is it possible that P&G, a company with unlimited money and unlimited creativity - and, I know for a fact, some of the smartest Brand Marketers on the planet - can create something so gosh darn .... cheap, onerous and uncreative?

Digital provides every Brand Marketer an almost infinite capability to express creativity. I love that the ones at Method do such an incredible job of expressing that creativity. End result? I pay more money for soap that I suspect is no better than any other, but boy do I feel better using it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is marketing that works! You exchange creativity, passion and love for your products for my money.
Closing Thoughts / 7 Experiences, 18 Lessons.
Above and beyond all else, it is my hope that this post provides specific guidance on what incredible web design, branding and digital marketing experiences are.

I hope that the actual examples provide concrete evidence of the awesomeness that is all around us.

I hope they inspire you to take a long hard look at your own digital existence and want to move from good to magnificent. And do remember that you have to take none of this at face value. You have free tools like Google Analytics Content Experiments (now with the power of multi-armed bandits!), and eminently affordable ones like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run experiments that will prove I'm right. Sorry, I meant so say tools that will prove to you what works best for your business. The missing ingredient is inspiration (in spades above) and your courage (I know you have tons of it).

To accelerate your experimentation I've summarized a cluster of short lessons from experiences covered in this post. They are collected in this pdf file, please click the link to download: 18 Lessons from 7 Incredible Digital Experiences.

I hope you find these lessons to be of value.

Now go, carpe diem!

As always, it is your turn now.

Which of the 7 was your favorite example? Which one was a surprise? Do you have a digital experience that you absolutely positively love like crazy? Is there a digital experience you find utterly frustrating? What was your key learning from this blog post (from our 18 lessons)? Is there something specific you are going to change about your own digital experience?

Please share your lessons, frustrations, examples, stories, inspiration via comments below.

Thank you.

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7 Incredible Web Design, Branding, Digital Marketing Experiences

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We are surrounded by incredible digital experiences. Masterful design, branding and marketing. Yet, it would be fair to say we are also drowning in awful digital experiences - or, at the very minimum, experiences that seem to be stuck in 1991. As a Digital Marketing Evangelist you can imagine how much that pains me.

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Du kender måske det kinesiske ordsprog, der siger, at 'selv en rejse på 1.000 mil begynder med et enkelt skridt'.

Og inden du sukker - træt af genhøret - så er det måske nok en kliche, men det er altså en klog kliche. For hvor skal man begynde, når man kun kan se slutresultatet for sig?

Det svarer til at bygge den store Lego Ninjago-skæbnebåd ved kun at kigge på billedet på kassen - uden manualen, der tager dig igennem processen klods for klods. Derfor har vi omdøbt ordsproget til Ninjago-rådet.

Ordsproget - altså Ninjago-rådet - siger nemlig noget helt konkret om at arbejde effektivt: Det fortæller dig, at du skal bryde dine arbejdsopgaver ned i mindre stykker. Der er ingen opgave eller noget projekt, der er så komplekst, at det ikke kan brydes ned i overskuelige små og relativt nemme opgaver. Det er sådan, man eksekverer.

Som en anden dommedagsprofet formaner jeg her tre klokkeklare konsekvenser ved ikke at følge Ninjago-rådet, så du må hellere spidse øjnene og læse grundigt med, hvis dit projekt ikke skal lide en grufuld død.

1. Vi har svært ved at komme i gang med opgaver, fordi vi ikke har brudt dem ned. Hvis du bryder opgaver ned, vil du altså ikke blot blive mere effektiv, du vil også sænke din frekvens af overspringshandlinger. Det er videnskabeligt bevist.

2. Vi bliver forsinkede med vores opgaver, fordi vi ikke har brudt dem ned. Hvis du bryder opgaver ned, får du fokus på alle delopgaverne, og det sætter dig i stand til at vurdere, hvor lang tid en opgave tager. Og gør derfor din planlægning bedre.

3. Vi går i stå midt i projekter, fordi vi ikke har brudt dem ned. Hvis du bryder opgaver ned - inden du går i gang med dem -vil du støde på problemstillinger som manglende kompetencer eller resurser. Det gør processen smidigere og mere vellykket.

Nok dommedagsprofetier. Nu er du klar til at få brudt Ninjago-rådet ned i mindre dele (lagde du mærke til, hvad jeg lige gjorde der?).

Nøglen til ninjahurtig eksekvering på dit projekt er at knytte 'next actions' til alle projektets bevægelige dele. En bevægelig del er en mindre opgave, som skal løses, hvis hele projektet skal lykkes.

Du kan tænke på de bevægelige dele som tandhjul, der skal placeres rigtigt i forhold til hinanden, hvis den store maskine skal virke, når du trykker på knappen.

Du kan også lade mig give dig et eksempel.

En kunde ringer til os og beder os om at lave en skriveguide, de kan bruge i deres kommunikation fremadrettet.

Det projekt kan vi fx inddele i disse fire overordnede opgaver:

1. Vi gennemgår det eksisterende materiale for tendenser og udfordringer.

2. Vi fastlægger mål for den fremtidige kommunikation.

3. Vi formulerer anbefalinger til skriveguiden, der skal hjælpe med at indfri målene.

4. Vi skriver guiden.

Hver af disse fire opgaver består af en række tandhjul, som vi skal placere i den rigtige rækkefølge.

Dykker jeg ned i punkt 1, kunne tandhjulene fx være disse:

Skaffe eksempler på brochurer, jobopslag og andet materiale

Finde ud af, hvad målgruppen synes om materialerne

Identificere fællesnævnere og modsætninger på tværs af materialerne.

Virker opgaverne stadig lidt komplekse? Jamen, så laver vi øvelsen én gang mere. Her er min to do-liste med 'next actions' til tandhjulet 'Skaffe eksempler på brochurer, jobopslag og andet materiale':

1. Find og print tilgængeligt materiale på kundens website.

2. Lav liste over det materiale, du mangler eksempler på.

3. Bed kunden finde og sende eksempler på det, du mangler.

Tadaa. Små tandhjul, der passer perfekt ved siden af hinanden i en logisk rækkefølge.

Egentlig er tandhjulsmetaforen ikke særlig velvalgt. Pointen med tandhjul er, at de drejer rundt samtidig, mens pointen med Ninjago-rådet netop er, at du ikke skal udføre alle opgaver på én gang.

Heldigvis er det ikke vigtigt, om vi kalder dem tandhjul eller klodser i den store Lego Ninjago-skæbnebåd. Du skal bare tage dem én ad gangen - og du skal vide, hvad der venter.

Ellers får du hurtigt samme forhold til dit projekts deadline som et dådyr til et sæt forlygter: Du stirrer paralyseret, mens den kommer hastigt nærmere.

Fra nu af bruger du Ninjago-rådet og bryder alle dine opgaver ned. Hvis opgaverne stadig virker frustrerende eller uoverskuelige, så skal de brydes endnu mere ned.

Bruger du allerede Ninjago-rådet? Eller har du andre metoder, der fungerer endnu bedre for dig? Så lad mig høre fra dig i kommentarfeltet.

Dette blogindlæg er baseret på en af lektionerne i vores e-kursus Effektiv på arbejde. Det er helt gratis, og du kan tilmelde dig lige her.

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Ninjago-rådet: Medicinen mod forsinkelser og missede deadlines | Bro Blog

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Du kender måske det kinesiske ordsprog, der siger, at 'selv en rejse på 1.000 mil begynder med et enkelt skridt'. Og inden du sukker - træt af genhøret - så er det måske nok en kliche, men det er altså en klog kliche. For hvor skal man begynde, når man kun kan se slutresultatet for sig?