Ben Franklin changes his mind:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

The mind is not a particularly consistent thing. I like that: “a reasonable creature” because it is a more modern framing of this puzzle than the classic, i.e. Greek, where in the the rational man does battle with his animal self, typically thru the medium of will power. Franklin is more modern, he reasons cheerfully amoungst his multiple interests.

I gather we can now be quite exacting about what’s going on when we change our minds. Below we have two ways that we might weight the value of future rewards. The upper curve is that prescribed by the rational man beloved econ 101 text books. The lower curve is the result of experiments on pigeons, children, and undergraduates.

A casual model of identity presumes that it is about self, but it’s not. Identity is about multiple actors. For example, typical usage of identity cards requires three actors, i.e. the card’s holder, issuer, and the reader. All the internet embeded identity protocols follow a similar pattern. PGP keys have the same three players. Those who sign your key fill the role of card issuer.

All of that reminds me of the seventies television detective who would carry an assortment of business cards from which he could pick the identity he wanted to adopt prior to questioning a witness. I can’t help thinking of him each time some spammer offers me yet another 50 free business cards. When I have worked for older companies they always had a business card policy, while these days you can pretty much design your own, which can lead to trouble.

At the optometrist the other day another customer was selecting glasses that would make her younger in the evenings and older when she was in front of her students. The optometrist related the story of how he has people come in seeking short term rentals of glasses, say for an interview. So there is a huge subtext of style, fashion, and the like off to one side here. Riding the subway it’s facinating to observe how carefully crafted some people’s presentation of self is.

All of which has gotten me thinking about ways that people present themselves in the internet. I can’t recall when email software first came to support automatically appending a signature file; it certainly goes back a long way. The finger/.plan file scheme, according to wikipedia, goes back at least to 1971. I seem to recall something similar on the Dartmouth basic system in the late sixties.

What triggered writing this post was noticing some interesting examples where the identity issuer role is about enabling the shaping of who you are more than authenticating who you are. That’s interesting from the point of view of the business modeling of identity systems since the issuer role is, presumably, the only really profitable role in this industry. Credit card and check printing companies do a bit of this when they let you select which cat picture to put on your card or check.

Web forums do this by allowing users to select the avatar. I’m shocked, at this point, that there doesn’t appear to a number of firms trying to capture forum avatar market. Why, for example, can’t I stick something into my account settings at the model train forum which so that my avatar there is based on my flickr photos of my train set? Or my delicious tag cloud around my train tag?

In point of fact there is a huge amount of this going on. Here are two examples.

It looks to me like Ticker Factory’s first users were hanging out in child birth forums. What ticker factory lets you do is put a simple chart into your signature showing progress toward a goal. These are very simple, here is one from a weight loss forum.

I find it notable that most of the data, the parameters, reveal not the data but information about the person’s style.

For a while if you typed “doll” on google it would suggest that you’d might have actually meant to type “dollz“, and even today the top hit for “dolls” is not about dolls. When I first stumbled on the dollz movement I thought it was a kind of online paperdoll, which it is. but it’s actually about creating avatars and signatures. It’s discussed at wikipedia, where this provocative sentence appears.
“
The first instances of cartoon dolls showed up in 1995 as avatars made for use on a visual chat client called The Palace by a Palace user named artgrrl (later known as shattered innocents)
.” Should of listened to her mother I guess. The dollz/avatar business appears to be huge. I wonder how much market concentration has already happened?

Notice that both of these examples have a tiny bit of advertising in the resulting image. Sites like flickr and delicious accumulate quite extensive models of their users and that ought to enable them to offer services like these that are more informed about who the person is. You can inject these feedburner widgets into forums and email signatures.

I guess I don’t know where this posting is going. Maybe I should ramble on about christmas cards next.

Over at the Alexa blog at the tail end of a rambling post about the competition for the #2 spot in their ranking we find the following provocative statement:

…over the last six months the Reach and Pageview numbers for both of these giants has been declining, along with Yahoo, in the Alexa stats. That isn’t to say that their overall users or page views are declining, rather that their percentage of the overall traffic on the Web is shrinking.

Markets condense for lots of reasons. Fast growing markets condense because the rapidly entering new customers lack information to guide thier choices leading them to mimic exisiting market players, i.e. you get strong preferential attachment. That concentration of market share can be quite durable since the winners will then work to lock those customers in. As the market matures knowledge about the vendor/customer relationship increases. Vendors get better at managing lock-in while customers become more knowledgable about how to shop.

The relationships that define an industry’s structure. Market share is a metric of the vendor/buy relationships for a particular class of vendors. Individual relationships can come and go, but they tend toward durable. A particular class of relationships is quite durable; which makes market share something dependable. That stablity allows firms to plan their capital expenditures confidently; i.e. it lowers their risk. From a planning point of view how your industry is consilidating or not is as important as if your industry’s market is growing or shrinking.

So I’m particularly bewildered that Alexa doesn’t track and chart an actual measure of how condensed the traffic is.

Back for a moment on the left/right (aka little/big-economic entity) distinction. Consider a treaty who’s name is something along the lines of ‘Treaty to protect the rights of X.” Now, imagine the X that that is furthest to the right. ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Bill Gates?” ‘Treaty to protect the rights of the G7?’ How about: ‘Treaty to protect the rights of Broadcast Organizations‘?!?

Which brings us to a related question; how does the Plutocracy feel about the demotion of Pluto? Heavens, if they can organize to eliminate the death tax you’d think they could get it together to for this!

Statement from Billy Campbell, President, Discovery Networks, U.S. Discovery Communications, Inc

Our entire company is deeply saddened by the tragic and sudden loss of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. Steve was beloved by millions of fans and animal lovers around the world and was one of our planet’s most passionate conservationists. He has graced our air since October 1996 and was essential in building Animal Planet into a global brand.

What a legacy! “Building a global brand!”

I largely agree with this essay.

While worry that the disaffected masses are going to blow up the economic hubs is all the rage I worry that Artists will blow up the planet. It’s only a matter of time.