Discrimintory pricing as the driver of reduced privacy – By way of Dave Weinberger. I think this is 40% exactly right, but it under estimates the way that technology makes the explicit data into a superfluid and the tendency of firms to chase operational efficencies. Examples: out sourcing, risk management, and lowering barriers for buyers all along the sales pipeline.
I’ve written about the fun of pricing games a couple of times before.
20 Questions – Very sweet bit of AI; maybe this time it really is “the groundhog day of the AI winter.”
BooksFree: When I lived in New York one of the many services of the local corner store was a lending library of assorted books. 25 cents a day. BooksFree is a web biz, you pay them a few bucks a month, you give then a list of books your interested in, they then send a few to you. When your finished with those you send them back and they send you next ones on your list. Paperbacks only, but free shipping. Stuff your local library doesn’t carry. Similar, of course, to NetFlix. While I’ve yet to tried them,
this is a nice article about them.
Brian passes along a wonderful site for all the public radio streaming from all over the world. lectures, science, quiz shows. Do your bit, listen to essoteric shows before they wiped out.
“‘And that’s how I learned to use iMovie,’ he said. And I’m all ‘Ohmygod. His poor iMac.'”
–A girl on the bus
From In Passing an amusing blog of stuff people overheard other people saying.
About once a year for the last decade, or more, I rediscover Alexa.com. The folks at Alexa collect browsing habits from folks who install their clever little tool bar widget. They then aggregate that data into the one of the better, if not the best, data on where people travel in the web.
Alexa was bought out by Amazon but it continues to provide a lot of facinating data. These days they display site rankings, rather than site traffic numbers. Bear in mind that site traffic is power-law distributed so the top ten get the vast majority of the taffic.
The stricking change since the last time I played with Alexa is the rise of a number of Korean web sites with amazing traffic volumes. That’s an under reported story!
One of the fun things to do at Alexa is look at the chart that shows site ranking over time, and then contrast sites with each other.
SARS Blog — Chatty opinionated resident of Hong Kong posting about the SARS situation there.
For example:
“For the first time since SARS came onto the scene, I have actually stood in a long queue of people. It was an experience I thought I might not have for some time.
I had to go to the transport department and renew the license for the car. The office was absolutely packed with people getting this done before the Easter holiday began.
The funny bit was about half way through the queue, with 50 odd people in front and behind me, in a snake line, so I was right in the middle. I coughed (been smoking too much) and suddenly I had a lot of space all around me.
People really are a little paranoid.”
Med Rants — A doctor’s blog who appears to be writing usefully about the SARS situation.
Useful – Spin Sanity’s Myths and misconceptions about Iraq.
A wise man with a strong voice, read his blog.
“The odds of audit for high income taxpayers was less in 2001 than those of low income taxpayers — those with incomes less than $25,000 filing a simple return.”