Read and Pass

Breaking the effect

America is filled with noise. Not just car alarms and sirens, cars and trains, but books and movies and television shows that fill the American dialogue with a deafening noise.

Fundamentalist beliefs, irrational exuberance, and unfounded opinions have taken over.

The end of constructive debate was years ago.

What's happening is the Options-Validity effect. There’s an inverse relationship between the options--the number of media outlets and sources of information--and the validity--how rational, fact based, and constructive--of those options. More now than ever, America is faced with an unprecedented number of options and an unprecedented lack of media validity and integrity.

I believe that this relationship can be broken.

Keep reading this blog, and pass it on to others, to see how.

Show some respect

Remember when you heard that when you were a kid?

That's our goal at ChangeThis. To respect your intelligence. To make it easy to spread ideas that respect individuals and their communities. To respect the ability everyone has to make a difference.

Idealism is fine, but it won't buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks (neither will $2, it seems). What we're going for here is a practical, fast and free way to spread the very best ideas to people who can actually do something with them.

Business, health, politics... if it spreads, if it's respectful, we're for it.

Your mileage may vary

One of the conundrums of creating a clearinghouse for great ideas is this: what should you do with the ideas you don't necessarily agree with?

Here's what we decided: If the argument is thoughtful and rational, we're likely to share it.

That means that not every author will agree with everything we distribute. In fact, NO author will agree with everything we say. In fact, we don't even agree with everything you'll find on the ChangeThis site.

That's because we're not here to articulate a particular partisan agenda. Our guiding principles are logic, respect and a bias for anti-superstitious and anti-fundamentalist thought. If it meets those criteria, we're a lot more likely to post it.

So please... don't blame our authors (or us) for the ideas you don't particularly like. Just consider them and then let them sit. The best ideas will spread. The others will whither.

We go live in August. See you then.

Stay open, be bold

Media no longer encourages the spread of important information. Instead, it limits, filters, and dilutes those ideas that need to be heard most. TV shows require a sound bite, a clip that has no meaning and no direction. Movies are aimed solely at producing big box office numbers, regardless of the message they’re trying to convey. Books are published only when a publisher feels that it’s safe enough and general enough to appeal to the mass market.

At ChangeThis, we’re creating a new medium whose goal is not quick entertainment or easy profits, but rather the spread of the ideas and arguments that will change the way people think.

To do this, we need your help.

Above all else, we need you to have an open mind. Ideas can’t spread when people are so fixated in their ideologies and so conditioned to ignore arguments that might threaten the status quo of their beliefs. You don’t need to believe everything we put out, but you do need to at least consider it.

We also need you not to be afraid. Don’t be afraid to pass a piece on if you believe in it. For this to work, the ideas need to flow from person to person, leaving a wake of changed minds in their wake. Keep the current flowing.

Putting the representation back into our democracy

Congressional election turn out is at an all time low. Even when voting for the president, less than half of America comes out to have their voice heard. Voter apathy has never been more prevalent and voter knowledge has never been so absent.

The state of America’s democracy is poor and quickly crumbling. With more media outlets than ever before, Americans are tuning in to reality TV and tuning out to politics. Never before has our country been capable of so much, yet its people care so little.

There are some possible explanations. Maybe Americans feel their vote doesn’t matter when the popularly elected candidate loses the presidency, or when 49% of a state’s votes go unheard because of our first past the post electoral system. Maybe Americans can’t relate to their elected officials: women make up 51% of the population but only 14% of congress; Hispanics and African Americans make up 13% of the population each but both have less than 7% of congress; the senate is 84% white male. Maybe Americans just don’t care whose elected because no matter which party runs the country, the status quo remains in stasis.

Part of our goal at ChangeThis is to open people’s eyes to the world around them and their minds to the possibilities that abound. In this election year, we need to have an informed and politically active citizenry. Every vote counts that much more when our country is in a perpetual war against Afghanistan, Iraq, and whoever harbors terror worldwide.

In the coming months, we want to create an information rich, fact based national dialogue on the major election issues. If enough people listen to, contribute to, and help to spread the ideas, America will once again have informed and active voters.

Please heed the call

Kurt Vonnegut is the Bob Dylan of contemporary American literature. Bursting with raw talent and unwavering ideological fervor, for decades he has defined social and political commentary. His wit and imagination left his readers forever fans and forever changed.

At the root of his devoted following lies the respect people have for how strong he held to his convictions and how passionately he articulated and spread them. It didn’t matter that he broke grammatical rules like an MLA rebel without a cause, or that his books had more and deeper plot holes than the pot hole lined streets approaching the Holland tunnel. (Nor did it matter that Dylan couldn’t sing more than one raspy monotone note.) What mattered is that Kurt never gave up and never gave in.

Find an idea that you can’t stop thinking about, an idea that you’d be proud to defend and advocate. Now write about it.

Send me an e-mail if you come up with something great.

Saving the world, one priority at a time

Woe is the world plagued with disease, malnutrition, pollution, tyrannies, and corruption. Everyone loves to commiserate about these seemingly insolvable and ever-worsening problems, but no one ever attempts to solve them. A group of academics has finally stepped in, and using rather complex cost-benefit analyses, they’ve made a list of the most effectives causes to attack given fifty billion dollars or less.

No surprise, AIDS topped the list. The numbers are devastating: as of 2003, there are 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS, and in 2003 alone there were 5 million new AIDS infections and 3 million AIDS deaths. Although the virus is spread rapidly and death tolls are constantly growing, there is hope.

Prevention—save sex and condom use—is not expensive. But it will be difficult to change the cultural barriers in many African and Asian societies to having protected, monogamous sex. It will also be difficult to convince the American government to promote any program besides absolute abstinence, which has been almost entirely ineffective.

Treatment—drug cocktails made by big western companies—is extraordinarily expensive. So expensive that in the developing countries where AIDS/HIV infection rates are highest, treatment is almost a non-option. Patents prevent generic AIDS medicine from being produced by ready and willing factories in India and elsewhere.

A dollar spent now will save ten dollars five years from now.

Preventing and treating the AIDS/HIV epidemic is an idea advocates have tried to get addressed for over 20 years. But it still hasn’t caught on.

There are more causes than just the local PTA book drive. Help become an agent of change for something that can save hundreds of millions of lives.

Grab hold and stay afloat

Jerry Maguire said it best, “Help me, help you.”

Publishers need to understand that ChangeThis is here to help them, just like Cuba Gooding Jr. understood that Jerry was there to show him the money. ChangeThis could show the publishers the money too. The vast majority of books get published and go unnoticed; ChangeThis offers an opportunity for books with great, viral ideas to get an instant shot of PR. Having millions of people read a chapter of a great book usually means many thousands of people will wind up buying that book.

At ChangeThis, our goal is to change people’s minds through the spread of important ideas. In no way are we out here to make money. But that doesn’t mean we’re against publishers selling more books because of the manifestos we distribute. If people are so moved by an excerpt, by all means they should go out and purchase the whole book.

There’s so many incredible ideas out there, floundering in the sea of published yet undiscovered books. Some of these books are too powerful to let drown into obscurity.

That’s why we’re throwing out lifejackets.

Scraping off the Ivy

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the "Tipping Point," has signed on to use his piece the "talent myth." His argument is that hiring the brightest employees from the best schools and giving them the star treatment will not guarantee success.

Using Enron as a case study, he shows how a business culture so fixated on talent can easily implode.

More author announcements as we get them.

Who's Who

All I did was think up the first draft of the business plan. The rest was done by the people you see below... summer interns all.

Changethis is the work of five incredibly cool people.

Catherine Hickey isn't in the picture, but that's a long story. More about that later.

Amit Gupta founded The Daily Jolt (www.dailyjolt.com), a network of student-run websites operating at over a hundred college campuses. With wonderful clients such as The Peace Corps, Universal Music, Verizon, Samsung, and Virgin, and a devoted group of over two hundred student reps, the company has slowly but surely clawed its way to profitability. Despite being profitable, they still manage to provide a genuinely useful service to college students. Amit also provides design, development, and consulting services through a scrappy little outfit he started called Creative Code (www.creativecode.com). When not working, he enjoys taking mediocre pictures and eating Hemp Plus granola.

Michelle Sriwongtong is a senior-to-be at Brown University. Unlike Amit, she founded nothing and really never finds anything. She's from sunny southern California where she spent her youth on the lush soccer fields that led her to the team at Brown. She's trying to double major in international relations and economics but she wishes she was a neuroscience major headed for the journalism world. On her days off, she's made it to Asia, Africa, and Europe, and looks to conquer South America next.

Noah and Phoebe are a little late with their bios, but I'm withholding lunch until I get them, so expect them soon.

Noah comes through

What he doesn't tell you is that he's brilliant--and mature beyond his years...

Noah Weiss is a native Brooklynite who is flying west to attend Stanford next year. Ever since watching and dancing along with Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" at age five, Noah has been an avid dancer taking classes in modern, ballet, jazz, African, and hip hop.

He has performed with Andrew Jannetti and Martha Bower's Dance, Theatre, Etc, and is currently working with DanceWave. Entering high school as a self-proclaimed techno nerd, Noah eventually emerged as a political science and literary buff. Check out his Senior Portfolio for a compilation of all his work and photography.

More than just a workhorse, Noah is also a life-long vegetarian--except from age four to six when the McDonald's happy meals toys beckoned strongly--who has a penchant for stuffed artichokes.

Take a swing

To write a manifesto, you need a powerful idea that is fact based, can incite the user into action, and will so profoundly affect the reader that they have to pass the manifesto on to family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

Want to write one? Read over our Manifesto on Manifestos.

Then, send us a word file with your sources and general formatting and if the manifesto works, our wunderdesigner Phoebe will turn into a PDF with beautiful typesetting and eye-catching pull quotes.

You got to fight, for the right, to marry

Yesterday, the federal marriage ammendment fell 19 votes short of the 67 it needed to write discrimination into the constitution.

We recently signed on Evan Wolfson, who is a champion in the fight for marriage equality. In 2004 he was named one of the "Time 100," Time magazine's list of "the 100 most influential people in the world." Evan is the head of Freedom to Marry, and has been a long-time advocate for gay/lesbian civil rights.

Stay tuned for more author announcements.

Doin' the PDF shuffle

Reading a PDF is often like dancing with an awkward partner: you need to constantly shuffle left and right, up and down, trying to readjust to something that just doesn’t fit.

The problem with most PDF documents is that they’re just scanned in pieces of paper, meant to be read from top to bottom on a 8.5 x 11 sheet. But computer screens are wider than they are long, so either you need to zoom out so far that the text causes an early onset of glaucoma, or you need to rock the scrollbars back and forth at the end of every sentence.

Our concerned with eye strain, hater of scrolling, lover of usability designer Phoebe created a PDF format for Manifestos that’s actually meant to be read on screen. It’s horizontally oriented and each page is designed to perfectly fill the screen from end to end.

Did we mention you can print manifestos, too? Just set your printer to landscape mode and you’ll have a beautifully designed manifesto ready for it’s spot on the coffee table.

Passing over Partisanship

Let’s steer through the political quagmire, straight to a medium where the content, persuasiveness, and urgency of ideas are what matters. There are plenty of ideas out there, but most of them are being yelled too loudly and substantiated too softly to make an impact.

TV, print, movies, and newspapers have largely succumbed to a battle of ideologues. Instead of distilling and catering our ideas to the traditional media, let’s circumvent its confines.

The media middleman is now irrelevant.

The manifesto call is now open. Have one already? Send it over to [manifestos @ changethis . com]

Sliding through the Slush

Notable authors, people whom you already trust and whose work you seek out, wrote the first manifestos. But in no way are we keeping the manifesto submission process exclusive to published and distinguished authors. We know there are thousands of incredible ideas that have not reached a big enough audience to make a difference or haven’t been refined and edited enough to have an impact.

That’s why there is the Slush Pile.

A few days each year in NYC, the snow falls heavy with rain quickly chasing after in just above freezing skies. The streets and sidewalks are slopping full of wet snow, squishy to the ear and slippery to the foot. Each step forward, carefully and forcefully making left foot pass over right and then right over left, is drudgery.

Is climbing through and to the top of the Slush Pile as arduous as the trek from the Lexington line to East End on a slush filled day? Not quite, but it still can be a long and hard journey.

The Slush Pile is where manifestos are submitted, and after approval—mainly checking for formatting, grammar, and proper citing—the piece is put up on the ChangeThis server for everyone to read. The more people read the manifesto, the further up the Slush Pile the manifesto climbs.

The top read manifestos from the Slush Pile are then sent out.

In effect, the Slush Pile acts as a micro representation of the Internet. If it’s successful on the Slush Pile, there’s more than a good chance the piece will be distributed far and wide across the net.

Get your manifestos ready.

Why terrorism?

We signed on Jessica Stern, who is a lecturer in public policy at Kennedy and served on Clinton's NSC.

Instead of studying the roots of terrorism from an office in America, Jessica went to the source--Pakistan, India, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Indonesia. For five years she interviewed terrorist groups, from extremist seminaries in India and Pakistan to refugee camps in Lebanon to Christian cults in Texas.

She found that terrorism has become a way of life, a profession, that no amount of bombing can change. The War on Terror needs to be a battle for terrorist' minds, not for their camps and ammunition depots.

The manifesto advisors

Instead of having a board of advisers, we have our First Readers Group. They're thinkers, bloggers, writers, techies, business people, and more. Each First Reader gets an early look at the manifestos, and we use their comments on the landing pages--where the manifesto is downloaded and detailed information can be found--and their feedback for fine tuning.

Halley Suitt said about the "The Coke Myth":

You have no idea how much pressure there is for parents to cave in and let their kids drink soda all the time... I appreciate Tyler's obvious call to action and encouragement to resist parental peer pressure and JUST SAY NO to drinking sugar.

Joi Ito said about "Customer Evangelism":

I think marketing people often feel like they have or want to "control." [They want to] "Build the Buzz" and "Create the Community"... [but] it's about letting the buzz and the community happen and then feeding it.

Advisors continued

Red Maxwell said about "The Art of Start":

Once I started reading Guy Kawasaki's manifesto, I couldn't stop. Taking the time to hear out his ideas on entrepreneurship has give me valuable insight, affirmation, and perspective.

About the PDFs:

The interface and format of the PDF are elegant and easy to use. Brilliant!

Following the tracks

Manifestos won't just be PDFs floating unconnected through the internet. They'll each have a landing page, which has the usual author bios, reviews, and links, and also trackbacks.

We developed a system for tracking blogs that link to the manifesto's landing page. A list of recent blog posts about the manifesto will show up in the sidebar. Blogs who actually host the PDF will have links to their site, too.

Ready, set, launch!

ChangeThis is now officially launched and live. Go check it out.

Friday we had our internal launch. Over the weekend we worked out kinks in the design--cross-platform cross-browser CSS dropdowns can drive even the best people crazy--and in the backend.

Sunday night we sent out the preview links to the bloggers who have signed on. Want to join the list of bloggers who get early previews to manifestos before they're released? Sign up here.

The first manifestos

We've just published our first batch of manifestos. Check them out below:

1.01

GUY KAWASAKI, former Apple Fellow and
entrepreneur extraordinaire, on up-starting a
start-up. A sneak preview from his upcoming
book, "The Art of the Start."

http:// changethis.com / 1.ArtOfTheStart

................

1.02

Get customers who worship the ground you
advertise on. "The Customer Evangelist
Manifesto," with the evangelists themselves,
BEN McCONNELL and JACKIE HUBA.

http://changethis.com/1.CustomerEvangelist

.................

1.03

'Marriage is a basic human right.' EVAN
WOLFSON, director of Freedom to Marry,
gives a fresh legal perspective on same-sex
marriages and civil rights.

http://changethis.com/1.ForRicher

.................

1.04

Death for a 17-year-old? AMNESTY
INTERNATIONAL on their campaign to stop
executions of child offenders in America and
seven other nations.

http://changethis.com/1.StopExecutions

.................

1.05

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go
down, but what do years of sugar-rich beverages
do to our children? TYLER LACKEY tells us
how sugary drinks may 'Kill Your Children.'

http://changethis.com/1.KillYourChildren
...................

Plus one!

1.06

Have you ever received AN EMAIL IN ALL CAPS?
End the madness here, with ELLY MARKSON's
brief but powerful guide to email etiquette.

http://changethis.com/1.HowToBeABoor

Manifesto Batch #2

2.01

To commemorate his 60th birthday, the guru
of post-modern business, TOM PETERS shares
his personal sixty snapshots of excellence in
'This I Believe.'

http://changethis.com/2.ThisIBelieve

................

2.02

Interested in starting a weblog for your company?
Before you begin – or even if you've already begun –
read 'The Corporate Weblog Manifesto' by Microsoft
evangelist ROBERT SCOBLE.

http://changethis.com/2.CorporateWeblog

................

2.03

'Terrorism can be defeated.' Professor
BENJAMIN KUIPERS presents a stunning proposal for
how to fight back in 'How to Defeat Terrorism.'

http://changethis.com/2.DefeatTerrorism

................

2.04

CHESTER E. FINN of the Hoover Institution,
on rescuing public schools: 'We should evaluate
teachers based on the only measure that really
matters: whether their pupils are learning.'

http://changethis.com/2.BetterTeachers

................

2.05

DR. JONATHAN SACKNER-BERNSTEIN,
cardiologist and heart failure expert, may just save
your life. From his book 'Before It Happens To You,'
an excerpt on heart disease prevention that you'll
want to send to everyone you love.

http://changethis.com/2.BeforeItHappens

................

Bonus!

2.06

Want to make more out of life? Do Less.
SETH GODIN, entrepreneur and author of several
best-selling business books, including Purple Cow,
on how to maximize quality and time.

http://changethis.com/2.DoLess

................

Finally,

(1) Check out the great ideas people have
submitted in the manifesto proposal area
and vote for your favorites!

http://www.changethis.com/proposals

(2) We're looking for great classic science
manifestos. Stuff by Feynman, Sagan, or similar.
Help us out, tell us what to consider:

http://www.changethis.com/content/feedback

This is only a test

Trying out file download tracking...

Download test file