In a nutshell, today’s FCC ruling means that you will be able to use a Google version of Skype on your cellphone.

F.C.C. Hands Google a Partial Victory - New York Times

Web businesses will succeed based upon their competitive advantage in acquisition of the finite resource of attention.

The quantitative measure of this will be the cost per bit, where the cost is the acquisition cost per user divided by the amount of time and therefore the number of potential transmittable ‘bits’ the users’ attention is captured for.

Traditional economics is based upon the notion of scarcity. But this scarcity tends to be relevant only in the production, not the consumption of things.

This is because the cost per unit of consumable energy, or more generally, information - the bits consumed per bit delivered is usually very high.

As an example, the number of bits of information in the atoms that make up a book is much higher than the atoms that store the book in digital form on a computer.

Because of this, the cost of duplicating a computer file is much less than a scribe written bible or even a printed book - so much so that scarcity seems to disappear and the cost of distributing things like a song goes to zero.

Because the supply side was so choked, the symmetry in the scarcity of both production and consumption was invisible. But it exists , there are a finite number of people on earth and a finite number of hours that people can spend listening to songs.

As the scarcity of production drops the scarcity of consumption - the attention scarcity becomes the limiting factor.

The competitive advantage for the manufacturing industries of the Industrial Revolution was in economies of scale in production. For internet companies, competitive advantage is in capturing people’s attention.

The Attention Economy: An Overview

My wife is now nearly 4 months PREGNANT! So we’re launching a kids and baby site for Wists, called Yokiddo.

Hopefully by saturating ourselves with fun kids stuff to look at, such as a $3M model of Moscow or Craftsman’s ‘my first chainsaw’, we will exorcise the need to actually buy any.

Is Rim the new Microsoft?

The graph says it all. Far from denting the Blackberry maker’s stock, RIM has actually outpaced Apple’s massive surge since the iPhone announcement at the beginning of the year.

Windows 3.1 was shabby compared to the original Mac OS, but businesses liked Microsoft because its very absence of polish made it seem less like an indulgence.

Bottom line: Rim is the Microsoft of the business cellphone market, and there is a lot of money to be made there. The iPhone is years ahead of the Blackberry, but its presence creates context making Rimm’s the business device and Apple’s the consumer one.

I am the real fake real fake Steve Jobs.

I’m Spartacus.

The other real Fake Steve Jobs

Today a globeandmail.com: Suicide bomber killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. this is a very important story following on from the Red Mosque siege, but it has had very little coverage in the US.

Financial news in newspapers and television in the US is far superior to Europe, but international news is either nonexistent or terrible.

I would suggest that keeping the public informed of what is happening in Pakistan at the moment, would be an investment better spend than a significant portion of the defense budget.

Seems that two overgrown fratboys got gored at this years Pamplona bull run. Good!

Running Bulls Gore 7 In Pamplona - Photos - KNBC | Los Angeles

Silicon Valley, with its safe little world of unisex ponytails, mid-range Cabernet, fresh faces, expensive bicycles, big white teeth and university style suburban planning (and I’m talking about Sand Hill Road, where the VCs’ fraternities are, here), is an awful lot like a University.

Every social network has its particular neighborhood feel and Facebook, which started in the elite Universities, has the same feel as Silicon Valley.

I heard someone who had built a very successful web company describe Facebook as ‘the Internet’.

So I ask you. Is that statement based upon business acumen or the experience of using a social network that feels familiar but mirrors a relatively small community’s world?

Mythbusting: Why Facebook isn’t the reincarnation of Google - Valleywag

Trivia - Pandoras ‘box’ was a mistranslation.

Pandora - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The mistranslation of pithos as “box” is usually attributed to the sixteenth century humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam when he translated Hesiod’s tale of Pandora. Hesiod uses the word “pithos” which refers to a jar used to store grain. It is possible that Erasmus confused “pithos” with “pyxis” which means box. The scholar M.L. West has written that Erasmus may have mixed up the story of Pandora with the story found elsewhere of a box which was opened by Psyche

The distinction between blogs and newspapers blurs.

A few years ago I used to get laughed at when I suggested that the model for amateur online diarists would be that for global media corporations. De facto, this is now true.

There is something so fundamental and powerful about the reverse chronological list that it couldn’t be any other way, however recently something interesting has happened.

Blogs are becoming more like news sites like CNN, a cover page with multi column snippet digests being slapped on the front to draw people in.

The Huffington post was the first blog to do this and now Talking Points Memo has followed suit.

Chatting with Nick Denton the other day we came to the agreement that traditional blog layouts don’t pull repeat readers (not SEO traffic) into the site, off the front page, very well. News sites like CNN get 10 page views per visit, whereas Gawker sites get less than 2.

Although page views don’t strictly mean much in the days of Ajax driven sites (Nielsen announced today they are no longer going to count them), the design of newspapers and the design of blogs are merging, setting the standard for online publishing.