Reading in the Open-ended Information Zone Called Cyberspace:My Reply to Kevin Kelly (2)
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Sven Birkerts (0)
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Britannica Blog (5)
3 weeks, 5 days
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My old sparring partner Kevin Kelly has asked if, all these years and all this internet later I still look at my wife in the same way. I’ll try to answer that question soon, but I want to warm up to it by reflecting on one of Kelly’s assertions, which, like all things in this discussion we are all having here, is not unrelated. Kelly looks back at the 1995 Harper’s Forum we participated in ...
Wagging the Long Tail of Love (32)
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The Technium (54)
1 month
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Seth Godin has been exploring Chris Anderson's idea of the The Long Tail. As usual Seth brings clarity and illumination to this often misunderstood notion. He recently posted a dissection of the three "profit pockets" within the Long Tail, which he illustrated like this: There's a blatant switcheroo that Seth (and almost everyone else) makes when explaining the Long Tail. In pocket #1 of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator of a ...
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Tiffehr said:
Always interesting to follow long-tail theory. Even those who get confused about the strength of the 'head' factor.
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Hashim said:
"The creator is dropped when we get to the long tail "pocket of profit" because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It's profitable only for the audience and aggregators."My exact critique of Seth's post.And The Long Tail book itself says that filters (i.e. aggregation, search, discovery, recommendation engines) will be the big winners in the tail, not content creators.
Spend More Today (10)
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Alex Tabarrok (38)
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Marginal Revolution (150)
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In Nudge Thaler and Sunstein motivate their Save More Tomorrow plan with the following unfortunate illustration:Consider, for example, the case of Tony Snow, the former White House press secretary, who resigned at age fifty-two in 2007 to return to the private sector. He said his motivation for leaving was financial. "I ran out of money," he told reporters...Before serving as press secretary, Snow worked a much more lucrative gig as a Fox News Channel anchor. ...
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Jen Dodd said:
Are we saving too much or too little for our retirement? Includes a great quote: "My wife once asked me whether we were saving enough for "our" retirement. "Sure," I said, "don't forget one of us will probably die before the other and I'm not saving for your future husband." "Why," she replied with a sigh, "can't economists be more human?" "
Meet the X-man (1)
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British artist Nick Veasey creates x-ray images "from the miniscule to the massive, the unusual to the everyday". I wouldn't argue with the word massive! Check out this image of a Boeing 777, which Veasey says was made by combining 500 separate x-rays of individual elements.Professional Photographer finds out how it all began..."My girlfriend's father used to be a lorry driver," explains Nick with a mischievous smile. "At one time he drove a lorry for ...
Solove, Daniel J. The future of reputation: Gossip, rumor, and privacy on the internet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 246pp. (1)
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John Dupuis (0)
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Confessions of a Science Librarian (0)
1 month, 1 week
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Another cautionary book about the effect of the Internet on our lives, this one concentrating on the effect that it can have on our privacy.Overall, I liked the book for its detailed exploration of the effects, mostly potentially negative, of blogs and other social tools can have on our lives, how we can regret things we expose about ourselves and the things other people can expose and reveal about us. How little incidents can burst ...
It's All Too Much (50)
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Cool Tools (53)
1 month, 2 weeks
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I moved to California hauling a lot of boxes still unopened from at least two previous purges of epic proportions. Sound at all familiar? It's All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to "organize" all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place. ...
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Shawna said:
Now I feel guilty about half the clothes I boxed up for Goodwill this weekend. I should probably throw most of them away and save Goodwill the trouble of sorting through them. And oh, do I need to downsize more 'stuff' in my life!
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Dan N. said:
Merlin writes a review of Peter Walsh's book for Cool Tools. Yes.
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Allison said:
for my next Amazon order
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Matt said:
The space limitations I have in my apartment mean that I pay a serious price for things that I don't regularly use. The snowboards take up tons of space, even though they get used every year. So I think tonight I'm going to put my skim board on craigslist.
John Quiggin: The political economy of networks (3)
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John Quiggin (0)
1 month, 2 weeks
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I’ve had this post in mind for quite a while, and never got in finished to my satisfaction, but it’s been stimulated to a significant extent by reading Clay Shirky, so I thought I’d pop it up now, somewhat half-baked, since Clay is currently visiting Crooked Timber, where I’ve crossposted this. The biggest single question in political economy is whether and to what extent we can achieve social equality without sacrificing other goods like liberty ...
