This image is lifted from an article at First Monday (A Practical Model for Analyzing Long Tails). I’d seen this trick of using a sports field to help inform your intuition about power-law curves previously. In that case the distribution of wealth is the topic. These guys talk about the L-curve; shown here (video): Both [...]
Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport. $157 per adult. I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean. A place people go for the weekend; well they used to. The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have [...]
Friday, February 23, 2007
There is some deeply disturbing data about the decay of human social networks (pdf). Meanwhile bees, a social insect appear to be in big touble too; something really bad is happening to the bee populations, Colony Collapse Disorder (Wikipedia). “It is very frightening. We don’t know the cause. … The bees are quite strong. … [...]
Sunday, February 18, 2007
I suspect we all know, but I just what to be sure it’s on the record, that Long Tail ideas suffer from the Base Rate Fallacy. Which is to say that stocking more products in your store, more books on the library shelf, more details in your server logs, or keeping more of your options [...]
Yahoo turns the heat up on the ping hub market. This should be a standard rather than a market.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Chris Anderson’s new book on the Long Tail is finally out. I got a review copy and sooner or later I’ll get around to picking apart my thoughts in some organized manner. The idea in the book is simple; that there are bottlenecks in traditional supply chains, e.g. shelf space in the record store or [...]
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
In this day and age you really can’t hope to achieve scale with deep relationships, you need broad light relationships that create vast probablistic oportunities for sucess. I’m glad to see that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett know this: Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was [...]
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
This is yet another of those damn powerlaw scatter plots. This one illustrates the usage (market share?) of various namespaces used in RDF documents. This data is take from here with an overview here.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
This pretty well sums it up: In days past, these professional courtesies were almost necessary in building a strong agent/client relationship. Those days are long gone. At one time, it was a loving and trusting relationship built on mutual respect. But as with most modern relationships, the agent/client, once sacred bond, has been destroyed by [...]
AOL recently released a huge sample of search engine queries. In a highly questionable move they tied these queries to reasonably anonomous user identifiers; for example we know that user known as #724 searched for “how to install a glue down floor”, as well as “carbol tunnel” etc. He did 366 searchs between March 1st [...]
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