Monthly Archives: September 2002

Self Interest

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Groups with a common interest have an extremely difficult
time coordinating their behavior. Even if coordinated
behavior would reap a significant common benefit.

For example there are numerous tragic stories of neighboring towns
standing by while fires distroyed a village or city because previously
their fire departments failed to coordinate the size of their hose fittings.

Coordinating behavior for common gain is particularly difficult in
competitive environments, like the marketplace. One thing that will
drive the players in a market to pay the coordinating cost is a common
threat to their survival. A common foe.

Here’s a facinating example. The hyper-competitive Whitehouse reporters
banded together against

their common foe, the president’s press secretary.

That kind of event sometimes is the precursor of standard setting.

The Oligarchy of Bloggers

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Blogs are another system where we see power-law distributions. If we treat each blog as a node in a directed graph then the inter-blog linking can be used to rank each blog. A nieve observer might assume the best blogs have the most incomming links; confusing links with quality. A leading blog is more likely to garner additional links as the set of blogs increases. This is a beautiful example of “The rich get richer”. A world where the assumption that quality=links=wealth drives a positive feedback loop.

Consider a simple model. At any given instant in time a blog can collect a new link for one of two reasons – Quality or Findablity. A) Quality: It’s a really marvalous blog that people want to read. B) Findablity: It is a blog with lots of links so vast crowds of people find and randomly some link to it. If a million people find your lousy blog you’ll garner a lot of links. If a handful of people find your marvalous blog only a handful can link to it.

The challenge for the blogging community is to architect things to that people have an easier time finding the blogs that they personally find to be great. For example the authors of news aggregators should be aware that when they bundle in highly ranked blogs they are accelerating this rich get richer effect.

This is really the heart of the RSS design problem!

What other stuff could we do?

Could we build more rankings, for example rankings that are more topical. For example it it really useless that when browsing one of those blog ecology graphs I keep ending up at the same handful of blogs. Power-law distributed graphs have that kind of “black-hole effect”. All the tools need to compensate for that! What would it mean to create some kind of graduated income tax for blog linking?

The folks playing with graphs of the blog community ecology need to get some attributed quality rating scheme going. If I link to 10 other blogs I should be empowered to broadcast what I know. For example I know this link goes to a guy that’s funny, and that one to a site that’s reputable, and this one to a leading proffesional of kind foo.

Maybe news aggregatoring tool vendors provide schemes that measure the “use value” of a the blog on the other end of a link. How often did the link get followed? It could then publish that – for what it’s worth as one ranking attribute of the link.

Then there are freshness issues. I use NetNewsWire for an aggregator. I have about 40 RSS feeds in there. Some are pretty solid, but alot come and go as I try out various blogs, see if they can hold my interest. I wish my aggregator helped me do that.

Google – will it work?

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Google’s solution to the librarian’s problem – findablity – stands on the presumption that links create a valid proxy for quality. It works delightfully when the population manufacturing links validates that hope.

Google is great in all kinds of esoteric domains where thousands of enthusists and domain experts are laboring way stitching together the web.

It seems to fall down when the domains become less esoteric. For example it’s useless when commerce is has created a fog of links that effecively jam the algorithum – e.g. try “I feel lucky” for cheap long distance service. Conversly it breaks down when the topic gets sufficently esoteric that there too few people working on it to create enough links that google can see ’em – e.g. try “I feel lucky” for economic displacement. Most of history is in this “under linked” catagory; for example I’m a fan of the story telling school of economics from the 50s and 60s but almost none of that is on the web.

Which brings us to the question at hand; google is moving into news! (See Google News). Will the optomistic approximation links=quality work there? I think it’s going to be hard. The stuff is all fresh – so it won’t have gotten a lot of linking by proffesionals and enthusasts. There is a vast industry in place (i.e. PR and the news conglomerates) that labors furiously to jam the signal.

Of course optomisticly we can hope this raises the role that tools like blogs can play on the one hand and it might reanimate the job of the expert – the job the newspaper editor used to fufill.

I wonder if their ranking of articles is informed by their ranking of the newspaper that ran the article.

The model where quality=links is interestingly similar to so many other nieve models: quality=wealth, or quality=age, or quality=income, or quality=ancestors, quality=test_scores, quality=power, quality=certification. They are all a proxy. In a world of 10 billion attributes picking one or two certain to blind those that take them too seriously and lead to that great fear of conservatives and liberals alike unintended consequences.

A metric ton of logic

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“A metric ton of logic doesn’t offset that feeling of loss.”

Boy does that sum up what the economists call displacement; a kinder gentler word for refugee.

Of course there is also: “”The teeth of the sheep shall lay the useless plough up on the shelf.”

The 13th century prophesy that correctly foretold how landowners would displace the tenant farmers of Scotland with sheep.

Sometimes though you can find a few pounds of very insightful logic.

Stablity vs. Innovation

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Brad deLong draws our attention to an article in Business Week about MSN and AOL trying to capture a chunk of the highspeed home ISP market. The article misses the point; this competition is about who will control the bandwidth market. Sure! It’s also about who will control the top of the power-law heap in the customer eye-ball market – but are these two really different. This is about big time innovation & disruption.
Continue reading →

Firms & Networks

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I’m reading “The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies” by Neil Fligstein.
I’m a fan of what might be called the “network theory of firms” – e.g. that a firm can be usefully modeled as a node in a network of linkages to other entities in the economy. The theory gets interesting when you begin to classify the kinds of links and their attributes.

Fligstein provides a nice enumeration of some of the attributes of these linkages.

“Networks usually are a stand-in for other sociological variables such as resource dependence, power, often ownership, information, trust, or status.”

This is a wonderful book. If books were meals then Barabasi’s book Links would be a salad and this book would be beef stew.

The sentence actually reads: “Networks usually are a stand-in for other sociological variables such as resource dependend (Burt 1983), power, often ownership (Mizruchi, Stearns, and Brewster 1988, Lincoln, Gerlach, and Takahashi, 1992; Palmer et al. 1995), information (Davis and Stout 1992), trust (Uzzi 1996), or status (Podolony 1993).” but…

Browser History Scraping

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Fraud: Having trouble getting a handle on corp. scandals? I doubt this will help.
thanks kimbo

Pop?: v.s. Soda (requires java).

Things to worry about: asteroids! “… early warning satellites detected an explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere June 6, at the height of the tension [India/Pakistan] with an energy release estimated to be 12 kilotons. Fortunately the detonation, equivalent to the blast that destroyed Hiroshima, occurred over the Mediterranean Sea. … In 1996, our satellite sensors detected a burst over Greenland equal to a 100-kiloton yield.”

9/11: Blueman group, the tragedy. Be sure to look at the scraps after the flash animation.

Keychain: lock your keychain or screen from the menubar on OS X 10.2

Gimp-Print!: Oh happy day, this suite of print drivers from the open source community allows my Mac, running OS X 10.2, to print on the nice Epson printer that I just happen to have lying around already. Meanwhile the vendor has been working on drivers for this thing for a few years. Once again developers with a personal need for a solution outrun developers being paid by disinterested product marketing people.

Kits!: Beautiful hobby kits for kites, boats, planes.

Catalogs: The catalog search tool at Google is amazing. Try something really obscure!

Market Making: Emerging marketplaces and how the rules that govern them come to pass is one of my interests. This is an essay by an early seller in the marketplace established by Google for buying awnsers to your questions.

Fax Away has a very civilized pricing model. They will send your fax for you, anyplace in the world, for reasonable costs/minute. They charge only for what you send. They use a prepaid model; you put ten dollars in to your account and then to send a fax in the US is 11 cents a minute. You email them the document you want faxed. Works perfectly for me. Meanwhile eFax.com will give you a free incomming fax number. Update: they now have a dollar a month account maintainance charge – so they aren’t useful for my very rare fax needs. It looks like InterFax now does what Fax Away used to do; but I haven’t tried them – I walked down to the copy shop and spent a dollar a page instead.

Schadenfreude

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The question of the day is if I can experiance schadenfreude by denying another the dose of schadenfreude he was looking forward to?

– ps … every blog should have a posting entitled Schadenfreude.

Dial-up, Credit Cars, Safe Cars

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Some more random links from my browser history…

Dialup Internet: Wasted a little time looking for an dialup internet service to use when on the road. The Freedom List appears to be the place to do that shopping. You can get unlimited dialup nationwide for 6-16$ a month from dozens of vendors (so called ISP – or Internet Service Providers). The costs of an ISP break down into four parts: customer service, his computers (and thinks like storing mail and setting up the mailin handing), and then his access to the internet backbone packet routing, and his access to one or more of the or more of the local dial-in phone networks. Most of this costs are in these last two, I suspect. Those long lists of local telephone numbers your call are maintained by the dialup network providers. There are a handfull of these UUNet, QWest, Telia, etc. This ISP is one of the few that expose that the cost of the different dialup providers. Generally the ISPs also provide few really minor (i.e. cheap and easy to do) services. Mail handling is one example. Customer support is not cheap – so when you read reviews you can see that mostly that’s quite spotty.

Credit Card: I got a new credit card recently. I got it from these guys Farm Bureau Bank; they have been very pleasent to deal with on the phone – unlike the large card company I have been using who was always sending me thru vast phone mazes and trying to sell me junk while generally being clueless. The real reason I picked them was I get 2% [not any more, it’s now 1%] back on all my purchases, in cash, if I play their points game right. I found them using the Credit Card Goodies site which is mostly a place where people who like to shop for credit card deals hang out. It includes nice java applet that plots the advantages of various reward programs for you. Credit cards are a money substitute. Stores trust currency because it’s backed by the goverment. Stores trust credit cards because the credit cards twist their arms – “you will always take this, otherwise you will lose sales” – the store gets the benefit that people can buy stuff more casually. For that benefit they lose some money. So when you pay a $100 on card the store only gets 95$. How much they get depends on their deal/relationship with their bank/credit-card processor. The credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, AMex, Discover, etc) are bridges between buyers and sellers. Another kind of standard that creates efficencies in the supply chain; but in this case it’s an owned standard and taxes are collected by the owners. My 2% cashback on the new card is the card issuing company bribing me to bring my credit card cash flow of this bridge thru their company. Some portions of the traffic flow across this credit card bridge are so concentrated that the Goverment thinks there are anti-trust issues (you can read court documents about that).

Safe Car?: There are various ways that members of an industry “conspire” to set standards to improve overall efficency. The auto insurance industry collects statistics about car safety, theft, etc. that they use to set insurance rates. It used to be this info was hard to get your hands on, but now much of it is on their web site. The frightening/facinating stuff there are the videos of crash testing. The real meat – what they use for setting insurance rates is the detailed data found here.

Selections from my browser history

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Amazing realtime data showing the flow of water in rivers and streams all over the country.

Malcom Gladwell’s web site has his very delightful articles for the New Yorker. In his latest article you can learn how some people can read people’s emotions from their faces. The article just prior to that is a light but unsurprising look at “The myth of talent.”

John Siracusa has done a heroic job in his series of articles on Mac OS X;
you can reach the entire set by starting from his latest
review of the Jaguar release. These are arstechnica a very high quality zine of about high technology, all their articles are worth reading. [You can subscribe using to their announcements bboard via this URL: http://arstechnica.com/etc/rdf/ars.rdf].

I’m surprised I’d not previously come across Bennett Carter’s political cartoons. He won this year’s Pulitzer prize. I particularly like his cartoons that illuminate the reframing at the heart of much PR.

I think this business, creating a diamond from the carbon in a corpse, is morbid.

I bought long distance service for my parents using this site, which shows the real price per minute and includes a number of services with no monthly ‘membership charge’. My house hold pays about 7$/month for long distance.

Mapquest maps are better than Yahoo’s.