Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve doing several interviews this week. In a couple of hours I’m interviewing Patri Friedman about Seasteading. Then, tomorrow I’ll be talking to Jim Bessen of Patent Failure fame, and the president of the Encyclopedia Britannica. What should I ask them?
This week I’m guest-blogging for Megan McArdle at the Atlantic. Here I take John McCain to task for his nonsensical position on warrantless wiretapping, and here I talk about the economics of free. Check it out at Megan’s blog, which you should really be reading whether I’m there or not.
From an interesting collection of economists, including L. Vernon Smith and Cass Sunstein, a paper calling for changes to facilitate the growth of prediction markets.
Another paper on happiness research and cost-benefit analysis. “Opportunity cost, Opportunity Cost!” shrieks Ludwig von Lachman from beyong the grave.
Here is a more questionable contribution from the more mainstream Herbert Hovenkamp. ., “Innovation and the Domain of Competition Policy” “U Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-07 . The paper advocates the more expansive use of antitrust law in intellectual property disputes, on the grounds that IP law has been tainted by rent-seeking, and that antitrust law has not. Granted, that the antitrust statutes have not been much revised. So the lobbying action is at the DOJ, the FTC, and pretty much everywhere else rather than in the halls of Congress. And yet more action in the offices of the countless economic consultancies that have sprung up, spouting reams of game theoretic nonsense in the pursuit of fat expert witness fees. And the antitrust bar. Dr. Hovenkamp has been fortunate to remain oblivious to it all. See George Bittlingmayer at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=344040.
Another curiousity is this paper by Dr. Richard Gilbert, proposing that “innovation” as such also be subject to antitrust scrutiny when the distribution of market power is interesting. Talk about subjecting ordinary business conduct to a chilling and error-prone regulatory regime. I read it through wondering if it was a clever reductio ad absurdum of the whole enterprise, but in the end when there was no punch line delivered I concluded sadly that the author was serious. Gilbert, Richard, “Holding Innovation to an Antitrust Standard,” 3 Competition Policy 47 (2007). http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=987322
I was just cleaning out some old e-mails and found this old Radio Shack ad that a friend had sent me a couple of years ago. Sadly, I remember lusting after this machine back in 1989. A 20 MHz processor, 2 megs of RAM, and “mouse support included” made this Tandy 5000 professional “the most powerful computer ever.” But with a price tag of $8499, it was practically as out of reach as a new Ferrari. (And note the fact that the ad makes clear that “monitor and mouse not included.” Can’t even imagine what that brought the final total to). And I love the fact that it’s running the old Aldus PageMaker program, which I used to think was the greatest thing since sliced bread. God, I can’t even imagine using that clunky program now. It’s just amazing to think how far we have come in the last 20 years.
Randall Stross, a Silicon Valley-based technology author, has penned an excellent essay for the New York Times making an argument that many of us here have made in the past: “The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits.” That is, tech giants can rise very quickly and attain something approaching market dominance thanks to the power of bandwagon effects and the “winner-takes-all” economics that characterize digital markets in the short-term. But that dominance, Stross rightly argues, is difficult to maintain over the long haul because technology and markets evolve rapidly and new players displace old ones. Mr. Stross notes that IBM is a classic example, but Microsoft is experiencing a similar fate:
two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that he won’t succeed. Not because of personal failings, but because Mother Nature simply won’t permit it.
We have some very savvy contributors and readers here at the TLF, so I am hoping that some of you can help me out regarding a data search I’m struggling with. I am seeking a definitive database of blog stats. I am hoping that somebody out there has been tracking blog growth regularly and has aggregated yearly data going back a few years. I want to chart this growth as part of my ongoing “Media Metrics” series, but I want to make sure that the numbers I am using are accurate.
Since 2003, I have been relying on the occasional reports about the “State of the Blogosphere” that Dave Sifry of Technorati has been putting together. Lots of good info in those reports, but (a) it is not standardized (the totals are from random months); and (b) he stopped producing it last year (the last report is from April 2007). There are also other questions I have not been able to figure out: Should the totals include individual profiles at social networking sites? If so, how would they be counted? How are “splogs” (spam blogs) defined and factored (or not) into these totals? Should Twitter and other forms of “micro-media” factor in?
Regardless, I have put together the following chart using the numbers from Dave Sifry’s old reports as well as the latest numbers that Technorati lists on the “About Us” tab. The latest number is an astounding 112 million blogs, and according to Technorati data, “there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” That’s impressive, but I would love to see if anyone else has competing numbers.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? I would really appreciate any input here. One would think that something as important as the growth of the blogosphere would be better tracked by someone out there. Or perhaps someone is tracking it very closely and I just haven’t seen it because the data is proprietary? (like Gartner? or eMarketer?)
Well, this is gunna be a sure-fire sign of my uber-geekiness, but I gotta say I just love Scribd’s “iPaper” service, which allows anyone to upload and share just about any type of document with the rest of the world. Think or it as YouTube or Flickr for nerds who want to share their papers and PowerPoints even more than their pictures or videos.
Like Flickr and YouTube, Scribd offers users the ability to embed things directly into blogs like this. Below, for example, I have embedded my recent slide show presentation at Penn State University’s conference on the future of video games. If you play around with the buttons on the top of the iPaper player, you will see how easy it is to resize the embedded document, search within it for specific items, download or email it, print it out, and so on. Super cool. I hope my TLF colleagues will join me in using this great tool more here on our site. I plan on posting a lot more things here this way in the future. (And I swear I didn’t get paid by Scribd to say any of this!)
Over at “The Social,” a CNet blog about social networking and social life, Caroline McCarthy discusses a new study that she says “reveals [a] shocking truth: Most Facebook apps are silly, pointless.”
A new study from number-crunching firm Flowing Data did some eye-opening work recently, dividing 23,160 Facebook applications into 22 categories. A whopping 9,601 of them fall into Facebook’s “just for fun” category, followed by “gaming” and “sports” with over 2,000 each. In other words, the majority of Facebook applications are goofy time-wasters.
She calls this “an unsettling piece of news that I don’t think any of us saw coming” and says “The world of social networking may never be the same.”
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
