I admit that I’m a psychological-literature junkie. I’m always interested in the latest research and theories on what makes people tick. (yes, everyone at Scout Labs knows his/her Myers-Briggs type). I’ve noticed an increasing number of research paper headlines on the topic of Internet Addiction Disorder over the last few years. So, instead of just ridiculing the concept out-of-hand, I decided to actually read through the research to see if there is any validity to the notion.

Jennifer R. Ferris from Virginia Tech defines it as “a psychophysiological disorder involving tolerance; withdrawal symptoms; affective disturbances; and interruption of social relationships”. Hmmm. Better look at the symptoms to see how I fare.

To be diagnosed as having Internet Addiction Disorder, a person must meet certain criteria as prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association. Three or more of these criteria must be present at any time during a twelve month period:

1. Tolerance: This refers to the need for increasing amounts of time on the Internet to achieve satisfaction and/or significantly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of time on the Internet.

In college I used to only email some things here and there, and now (as CEO of an Internet company) I am connected all day long! So, strike one against me.

2. Two or more withdrawal symptoms developing within days to one month after reduction of Internet use or cessation of Internet use (i.e., quitting cold turkey) , and these must cause distress or impair social, personal or occupational functioning. These include:

• psychomotor agitation, i.e. trembling, tremors; anxiety;
• obsessive thinking about what is happening on the Internet;
• fantasies or dreams about the Internet;
• voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers.

This is getting eerie. For our family vacation this summer, we will be staying in a house in Bali that has ONLY DIAL-UP CONNECTION. I am already waking up in cold sweats about it. And I was wondering what that uncontrollable finger-twitching-in-the-air thing was about…

3. The Internet is often accessed more often, or for longer periods of time than was intended.

I cannot tell a lie. Once I get to CuteOverload, time seems to stand still and I can be there for hours. Gulp.

4. A significant amount of time is spent in activities related to Internet use ( e.g., Internet books, trying out new World Wide Web browsers, researching Internet vendors, etc.).

Great…our whole company hath been stricken!

5. The individual risks the loss of a significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of excessive use of the Internet.

I thought everyone’s spouse yelled at them for playing Facebook games while watching the Daily Show together! Well, signing off now - looks like my case is pretty serious. Please do not let your symptoms go unchecked! Here are some additional resources for your self-assessment:

Belluck, Pam. “Net Addiction: True Disorder or Just a Cyber-Psycho-Fad?” , New York Times 1 Dec. 1996.

Egger, O., Rauterberg, M., (1996) “Internet Behavior and Addiction.”, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

And a great Internet Addiction Recovery site.

March Madness has arrived, and my workplace productivity is already suffering a little (sorry Jenny - I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…

Crowdsourcing your picks

Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven - in a way and in part - by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.

Turning to the Experts

I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Ttaken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there - separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch - so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:

• CBS Sportsline
• ESPN
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sporting News
• College Hoops Net

Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions - especially whole brackets.

DIY Analysis

This is an especially rich area this year, and I found a number of nifty online tools. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save your work, and you get a bunch of other features, but the free version gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.

You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.

Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.

Finally, March Madness is fertile territory for stat-obsessed geeks. One category of basketball statistics - efficiency - has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.

A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). A Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn has produced a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is, which is nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”

OK, back to work now.

In our Scout Labs application, I am Scouting dozens of things at any given time, but one of my favorites is my PR Nightmares Scout. I like watching for when corporations (and politicians!) slip-up, I must admit. Thought I’d share with you some of the juicy debacles I’ve discovered recently. Enjoy.

Hillary’s latest investment in herself
Compare and contrast these presidential fundraising headlines from The Politico today: Obama on pace to raise $30 mil in February and Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million . Wow.

Apple Russia caught up in PR nightmare
In a turn of events that almost seems too bizarre to be true, Russian journalist and 14-year Mac user Alex Patsay has written an open letter to Apple PR following what sounds to be a disastrous …

The World Bank chops down the Amazon rainforest
Here we go again. The World Bank is busy funding the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, alleges this article in The Independent . The World Bank has emerged as one of the key backers behind …

Is Your Web 2.0 Strategy On Target?
Recently, Susan Gunelius on BrandCurve wrote a post about Target stores dismissing a query from a blogger who objected to their latest ad campaign. It seems that the blogger thought the ad, …

We always enjoy a good data visualization, especially when it’s elucidating what we are doing here at Scout Labs! On Wired Magazine this weekend was a infographic of what happens after you hit “Publish” on your blog page. It’s called “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits - to You”. If you can figure out how to click and hold your mouse down to zoom it and scan around, you’ll see a category called “Data Miners” and I guess that’s partly us — the ones who analyze the blogosphere (and social networks and image-sharing sites and video sharing sites and user reviews) to make sense of it for clients overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all. But we are also the “Corporations” (yes, “the Suits”), because real people at real companies are using our service to Scout what people love, hate, want, think and feel about their products, brands and services. What we are NOT: an ad network or aggregator trying to sell ads. We figure there are plenty of those out there desperately trying to get ads in front of eyeballs. Inspiring people to build better products and to build stronger relationships with customers sounds much more fun to us.