admin

May 27 2003
0

How to measure Google’s performance pre IPO

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

How could you have made more than 10 times your money in less than a year, subsequent to the .com crash? – by buying stock in a .com Last July Ask Jeeves teamed up with Google to have Google supply advertising alongside search. The deal replaced Overture and involves a revenue split between Google and Ask Jeeves, with the majority going to Ask Jeeves. Since most of Ask Jeeves’ revenue comes from this, and since most of Google’s revenue comes from similar, this is a vicarious way of tracking Google’s performance while they are still a private company. The results are outstanding, Ask Jeeves is now worth 13 times what it was before the deal with Google. Contra Costa Times | 07/19/2002 | Ask Jeeves, Google team up for profits

Read More
May 23 2003
0

Where is the semantic web? – In weblog publishing tools.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Dave Winer: “Anyway, I don’t see any killer apps in the RDF crowd. I see lots of people with strong opinions and not much software.” Lets face it, this is true. But the fact that it is true hides something absolutely extraordinary. From the way all of our brains are configured, to the way every language on earth has subjects, predicates and objects, to the way any box of any form you fill in on the web has a URL a label for the box and a value you type in – all these things are what the model of RDF is about. There is something profound about a non-hierarchical messy network and triples – I suspect it is the way our brain is wired and the way that any language or information based upon this wiring has to be expressed. So why aren’t people using RDF, where are the…

Read More
May 22 2003
0

The Third Industrial Revolution

Posted by | globalization | No Comments

Before 911, the most serious impact on day-to-day life in the West might arguably have been a result of globalization. But globalization and its effects are still an issue: “The recent gyration in the prices of oil and other primary products was related to concerns about the Iraq war and terrorism and masks the trend of falling prices.” The former vice minister for international affairs in Japan’s Finance Ministry thinks that there is a general trend towards global deflation caused by the information and life sciences revolution and globalization. Cheap goods from China and India may once again account for nearly half the world’s production after almost 200 years. He argues, however, that if deflation hits the US it will be nothing like as destructive as during the 1930’s. “The world is shifting from an era of structural inflation to one of deflation, in which prices for most manufactured goods…

Read More
May 21 2003
0

Bureaucrats decide world’s tallest building

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

Nick Aster points out that the ‘World Council on Tall Buildings’ (straight out of the X-men) decided that the Petronas Towers in KL are the tallest building in the world despite the fact that the Sears tower in Chicago is blatantly taller. “Measured to the top of the radio masts, Sears’ height is 1,518ft, which easily eclipses Petronas’ 1,483ft. Trouble is, the masts on top of the Sears Tower don’t count, but the mast on top of Petronas’ does. Hmm, confused? The masts on the Sears tower are not considered to be a part of the actual building, so the official measurement stops at 1,450ft. So Petronas gets the crown.”

Read More
May 21 2003
0

Conspiracies are not what they are cracked up to be

Posted by | politics | No Comments

Jeff Jarvis is sensibly skeptical of conspiracy theories: “I never buy a conspiracy theory, for I argue that the world — and especially government and especially big business and very especially big media — are simply not well-organized enough to conspire. That’s why synergy doesn’t sell. No, I don’t believe in conspiracies.” Given that: a. conspiracies, as a subset of mysteries, are seductive and intriguing; b. people who think alike will independently behave alike, without having to go to the significant bother of conspiring. One can assume that the universe of claimed conspiracies is much, much larger than the number which are real. But I still think that Michael Jackson’s behaviour plausibly points to him having been abducted by aliens.

Read More
May 21 2003
0

The memetics of weblogs

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

Interesting empirical study of rules of meme spreading from looking at weblog postings, from the excellent Microdoc News. via Doc Searls “Rarely can an individual blogger get a story going.” “The best blog stories are those that are branded with a word or phrase that is highly identifiable with that story.” “The stories that get going are not usually subject specific blogs but stories that cut across all interests of the blogging community.” “When bloggers action is not requested, most often stories get up and running for longer.” “Perhaps the last conclusion we came to in this study is that blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared. “ Microdoc News: Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story

Read More
May 20 2003
0

The tragedy of the disappearance of ‘the tragedy of the commons’

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Western economies are largely becoming service based economies, and irreversibly so, the US cannot compete globally in manufacturing and production, as witnessed by the huge subsidies to farming or steel manufacture. What if many of the services that rely on information technology are not economically viable in the long run? What if never ending cheapness created by the applicability of Moores Law and lack of scarcity in digital media conspire to create hyper-deflation? Kevin Werbach recently delivered “the notion that many media organizations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of

Read More
May 20 2003
0

We are not decended from chimps.

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

“Richard Dawkins perhaps provided the best visual for our link to chimps,” Fouts told Discovery News. “Imagine taking the hand of your grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the women would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee.” This is not what Dawkins said and is complete BS. rather like saying “Imagine a chimpanzee taking the hand of her grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the chimps would be holding the hand of a human”. Chimps and humans share a common ancestor, we are not decended from chimps any more than chimps are from us, but we share an ape ancestor. Discovery Channel :: Study: Chimps Belong In Human Genus

Read More
May 20 2003
0

Horrible propect of deflation looms

Posted by | business | No Comments

Although deflation strikes fear in the minds of governments (the principal economic stabilizing mechanism, interest rate adjustment, is no longer viable) and bankers (“because a zero rate would roil money market funds, which rely on a positive interest rate to cover their own operating costs”) it is ordinary people who would lose out most. Low interest rates on mortgages may have created a false euphoria where people believe they can afford house prices that would normally be out of their reach. Deflation could spell bad news for anyone with debt, such as a mortgage, as the value of the debt would increase over time. For the poor, who often rely on extortionate loans just to survive, let alone buy property, the effects could be crippling. In the early 19th century in Britain, social unrest brought on from the effects of deflation almost caused a revolution. Deflation Hints Feed Talk of…

Read More
May 20 2003
0

The Kevin Werbach Experience

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Europemedia on a virtuoso Kevin Werbach performance: “The notion that many media organisations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of ‘scarcity’ is as radical as it is true. As weblogs provide a rival to newspaper columnists, P2Ps topple record companies, open spectrum enables everyone to become a broadcaster and TiVo makes advertisers shudder.” Europemedia.net: News – TVMW Seminar: The Kevin Werbach experience

Read More