Web site traffic is power-law distributed. The top ten accounts for a huge slice of the attention pie. Here is the top ten from Alexia’s Top Global 500.

• yahoo.com
• msn.com
• google.com
• passport.net
• yahoo.co.jp
• sina.com.cn
• baidu.com
• ebay.com
• microsoft.com
• sohu.com

Lots of food for thought in that very small list. AOL? The Asian portals! Notice how many of those sites are in the same business, i.e. portal.

These lists are the shopping channel for investment bankers. No surprise that Google owns a piece of Baidu. I predict further condensation.

When thinking about the identity problem it’s important to note that Microsoft has market shaping power not just on the client side, but also on the server side.

Bloodybacks are stinkin up the town. Running home after a foolish attempt to destroy the insurgency in Lexington and Concord.

Now saltpeter perfumes the air and blood stains the ground.

Shortly after these shots were taken the lobsterbacks attacked the homestead of Mr. Russell. Mr Russell, crippled with a bad leg, was murdered with their bayonets upon his door step as his loving wife hid within. Ten other members of our community were similarly murdered.

This log-log chart shows the revenue and expenditures for my town; both are aprox. power-law distributed. The revenue sources, shown in blue, are more condensed than the expenditures. The numbers are taken from the proposed budget for the coming year (See this pdf) page C-1).

This next chart and the following table are the ten top revenue sources shown in three formats: a linear chart, a log-log chart, and a pie chart.

And now the same thing on the expense side.

I liked this. Hidden at the tail end a posting on web graph stats is this nostoglic tail from a decade ago.

If you go read the paper you’ll probably enjoy a snicker at the laughably-small size of the 1995 Web, and also at my heroic attempt to build a Snow Crash-inspired immersive simulation of the whole thing, using the then-hot VRML technology. It actually ran and you could zoom around in it and it was drop-dead cool, but not many people ever saw it; here’s the sad story.

I’d got some interests from the titans of VRML culture, including Mark Pesce and YON, who were at the conference, and we’d scheduled a demo. Getting the thing to run was kind of a pain in the ass, you needed all sorts of Netscape extensions and the textures were mammoth, so it took a while to download.

So on the day of the demo, I got it all set up and went to get the guys, and in the 30 seconds I was away from the browser, this elderly conference attendee got in, closed all my windows, opened a shell window, and started going through his back 300 emails over a connection with an effective rate of 300 baud or so. We stood there for a few minutes and hinted politely, but he needed his email and just wasn’t moving and was old enough not to be intimidated. A pity, but we made a date to come back first thing the next morning.

Except for, during the night, the guys from Microsoft went around, erased Netscape from all the computers, and installed Internet Explorer. I have some perspective now, but at the time I literally had to go outside the conference and sit down away from everybody, because I was afraid I’d do physical violence to the first Microsoftie I saw.

But I shouldn’t cry too much; Neal Stephenson, as a cyberspace designer, is a great novelist, and the project never had legs.

The Akamai service interruption of Tuesday 15 June, that affected Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft shows risks of doing business over the Internet cannot be ignored or eliminated, claims John S. Quarterman, CEO of InternetPerils, Inc. InternetPerils is the industry’s leading provider of Internet risk management products for insurers, financial institutions, banks, telecommunications providers, government, and enterprises that need to effectively manage their Internet business risks.

Businesses currently use technical solutions for Internet risks including worms, viruses, cable cuts, and routing flaps. Firewalls, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, and, in this case, content distribution, are good and useful. Yet none of them alone and not even all of them together can handle every circumstance.

“You can put all your cargo in a convoy on the stormy seas of the Internet, but what do you do if the convoy sinks?” asks Quarterman. When businesses face risks of fire or hurricane or flood, they install sprinkler systems, put up storm windows, and establish evacuation paths, explains Quarterman. “They also buy insurance. Businesses that use the Internet need to deal with risks beyond their control through new risk management strategies, starting with Internet business continuity insurance.”

“Such policies may be hard to find today,” said Peter F. Cassidy, Director, InternetPerils. “But so was sea voyage insurance in the 17th century at the beginning of the great age of seafaring. It is time for businesses to demand insurance for faring on the global sea of the Internet.”

We’ve got the coffee shops, but where is Loyds of the Bay?

This new feature at Amazon is very cool!

Here, for example, are the phrases from the ever popular Jane Jacob’s classic:

need for mixed primary uses, need for aged buildings, perpetual slum, public sidewalk life, zoning for diversity, cataclysmic money, cataclysmic use, slum shifting, border vacuums, secondary diversity, high ground coverages, myths about diversity, fashionable pocket, unslumming slums, low ground coverages, credit blacklisting, disorganized complexity, orthodox planning, assimilating children, dwelling densities, primary diversity, incidental play, city diversity, primary mixtures, diversified city

Kieran Heally give a fun example of how it let’s you quickly find the phrases you’ll be needing to pose as a mavin in the field of your choice. Sociology in his case. Without any effort at all you too can be saying things like: “The reality maintenance of cosmopolitan influentials creates dogmatical beliefs that undermine the ascetic conduct vital to avoiding a primitive world view.”

But there’s more! You can click on any given phrase and see all the books that use it. For example:

• Intergenerational Wealth Transfer
• Pool Memory
• Long Emergency
• Culture of Life
• Regulatory Capture
• Communities of Limited Liablity

It’s your handy dandy meme legitimization score card!

And then it’s another example of the network effects around open content. Only the books that revealed their content to Amazon’s “Look Inside” benefit from the fun.

I’m just love examples of the power of middlemen to enable things. The best are the ones where a event would be impossible without the intermediary. Like the way that real estate agents close deals that an owner could not close himself. So here’s one I noticed today.

This grows out of one of the advertising mysteries. I.e. why is that if I shop for tires at one point during the day I don’t see tire ads at other sites latter in the day.

The social engineering problem is part of the reason that doesn’t happen. If I visit great-barge-in-tires.com and then pop over to the weather site, my favorite blog, and then the news paper it would totally spook me out to be followed around by tire ads.

That social barrier creates discounts the value of assembling a model me.

But, if I arrive later in the day at a car chat site and ads appear for tires it wouldn’t spook me out. It would seem perfectly natural that ads for tires appear on a car chat site.

The distinction there is that the car site’s has a natural audience. The persona of the imaginary member of that audience includes the possibility of an interest in tire purchases. My visiting the site creates a makes me a member of their audience and so it becomes reasonably to target a tire add in my direction.

The middleman here is the car site, which labors to create a particular audience demographic. My visiting the site acts, to a degree, as a kind of permission based marketing. In a sense I’m giving them permission to stereotype me as a car fan by virtue of my visit.

The notable thing is that in the context of the car site the knowledge of my morning tire buying can be leveraged without spooking me into thinking – “Man there something inapproprate going on here.”

That suggests that there maybe more dynamic add placement than I’m aware of, that the folks who run places like Double Click have just managed to sell the model they collect about me to sites where it will be more valuable and less likely to back fire.

The middleman, the car site, provides a way to solve the social engineering problem. Of course this leads to the exaggerated humorous insight that creating an audience is a form of identity theft.

I recall my father’s bemused comment on dirty money: “We can clean it!”

I have a friend who won’t use a very useful piece of open source software because he feels it’s author is a pompous jerk with a short fuse.  You can clean money, it is much harder to clean your reputation.  Relationships relationships, complex transactions, can not be reduced to simple market commerce.

Today’s debacle around WordPress (they were running a link farm on the reputation credit created by all the WordPress blogs “thank you links”), bleck. I use WordPress here and in a few other venues. I’ve made some very minor contributions. So yea!  I’m in that core of the community, if you define that as the top 5 thousand people in the community :-).  Today’s mess ripples thru the entire complex relationship network that holds a community like this together, and it is more likely to shake off people at the periphery than those closer to the core.

For example one of the things that the WordPress community does is Pingomatic.com. One of the hubs in the ping market. Trust?

Ugo does a good job of covering many of the bases of my opinion about this. He ends with this…

Since Matt is almost exactly half my age, I don’t want to be too harsh. Who’s not done something terribly stupid in his youth? I’m sure he’ll regret this and reform his ways. Unfortunately for him, the web, and Google in particular, have very good memory, so this episode won’t be forgotten so easily.

Open source projects are very long games with many many rounds and very ambiguous end states. If a player doesn’t play nice it taints his reputation for a long time. In the end sooner or later every participant in these games makes a fool of him self. In all robust collaborative games forgiveness is an extremely necessary and critical move.

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