Category: Internet

Great story today about a guy exploiting (in a positive way) the power of Craigslist, and conducting a series of barter exchanges that so far has started with a red paperclip and ended with a year’s free stay in a house in Phoenix.

Of course, any reader of This Old House Magazine knows that there are many old houses that are available for essentially free, provided you can move them or otherwise improve them. So theoretically Kyle MacDonald should have had his house a long time ago. But this is the rub about Craigslist: it’s not a perfect market, because not every buyer or seller is plugged into it.

The larger economic point that is missed by the article, and by the premise of MacDonald’s experiment, is that there is no way to overcome economic friction. Part of what MacDonald is doing in his “trades up” is exploiting private valuations of goods that are lower than his own private valuation, and thus apparently creating value in the trade. But this overlooks the value of MacDonald’s time and the opportunity cost that he incurs by spending time on this project. The other factor is the value contributed to the project by people like Annie Robbins who acts economically irrationally because she admires the anticonsumerist principle of the exchange, and by the snowmobile company that donates goods and travel in exchange for marketing publicity. In fact, that particular trade may well have destroyed traditional value somewhere along the way.

So here’s the larger economic question: are market exchanges in particular, and the market in general, subject to the laws of thermodynamics? Is it possible to have a trade that “creates value”? Or is what happens merely a shifting of value from one party to a different party with some inevitable loss of friction?

A lot of modern negotiation theory is based on the principle of the “win-win” where both parties at a table derive benefit from a trade. The question is: who loses? Does every win-win have an external party somewhere who is not represented at the table who is disadvantaged by the trade in some way?

These aren’t theoretical questions. A lot of the politics that surrounds business is based on the conflict between people who believe in win-win (or at least tout its value) and people who argue on behalf of the damaged external party. Think industry vs. environmentalists.

Serial (or parallel?) entrepreneur and Linspire founder Michael Robertson announced a new shot over Microsoft’s bow today: a general purpose Ajax application platform called ajaxLaunch.com, with its first application, ajaxWrite, a web based word processing application that can read and write Word files and do WYSIWIG formatting.

This is a pretty damned impressive application on first glance. I showed Lisa at breakfast and she said, “Hmm,” obviously not too excited. Then I told her that it was web based and she said “You’re kidding.”

It’s not perfect, particularly in reading Word docs. Complex Word docs, including documents built on Word’s default letters templates, or even straightforward multi-page documentation with tables and different formats, are readable but the formatting is messed up. Several docs I imported came in all centered.

But, of course, this is a web based application, and the thing about web applications is that you can ship upgrades any day, as opposed to every three years.

It’s still early days for this, but seeing ajaxWrite makes me think that maybe this Web 2.0 business is really real. The only question is: what’s the revenue model? Om Malik has the same question.

Having been tagged by Fury, I thought I might share four things about a bunch of more or less useless personal information categories with you:

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. Microsoft Blog Product Manager
2. Electronic text transcriber
3. Particle accelerator signal wiring guy
4. Junior comic book guy

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again

1. Raising Arizona
2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
3. White
4. Garden State

Four Places I’ve Lived

1. The Lawn
2. The News
3. The Hill
4. The Other Hill

Four TV Shows I Love

1. The West Wing
2. Law and Order: CI
3. This Old House
4. Supernatural

Four Highly Regarded and Recommended TV Shows I Haven’t Seen

1. The Sopranos
2. Sex in the City
3. Lost
4. American Idol

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. Brussels
2. Florence
3. Westport
4. Positano

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Risotto
2. Unagi nigiri
3. Sammiches
4. Dal

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. Bloglines
2. Questionable Content
3. New York Times
4. Lists of Bests

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

See list of vacation spots

Four New Bloggers I’m Tagging

1. Zalm
2. Blogorelli
3. Tin Man
4. JP

As the Tindersticks once sang, “So this dying slowly… I’m just tired, darling/I just need to lay down.” Oddly enough, when Stuart Staples sang those words he sounded like I feel: so congested I can hardly move my head.

So while I wait for the decongestant-induced colored light trails to vanish, a quick pointer to a pair of goodies courtesy of Doc Searls: egosurf.com and isolatr. The former is apparently designed to show you how much you write about yourself vs. how much others write about you (I’m solidly in the middle of the gauge), while the latter… well, see for yourself.

Via the Comics Curmudgeon, I bring you Balloonist, a cross-platform application designed to do comics lettering and layout. But wait! It also features “gouache mode,” in which you can lay in word balloons over existing comics. Like, ones that someone else drew.

And for an example of how cool that can be, I give you (via Sue Trowbridge, via the Comics Curmudgeon again) Mary Worth sings My Humps. Which remix got some ink in the Associated Press (including the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette).

Which inspired me:

Unfortunately, as you can see by the acne that the Garfield strip sprouted, Balloonist isn’t free, and its $88 registration fee is a little steep if all you want to do is to poke fun at moldy 80s icons. But hey, it’s interesting at the very least.

That was quick. The new Lists of Bests is up and (aside from some Ruby on Rails related error messages earlier this evening), seems to be cooler than ever. User created lists, clean design…

Um. Waitaminit. My login from the old Lists of Bests site is gone. Hope that’s a temporary thing, guys, but it would be cool if you had a FAQ for us old users to tell us what’s up.

Fortunately the Robot Coop team is looking for comments, so go check it out and post your feedback.

My favorite shopping list Internet web application shopping list site, Lists of Bests, has been acquired by the Robot Co-Op. Lists of Bests allows you to mark off CDs, books, and videos that you have consumed that appear on various “best of” lists. I always thought it was a cool concept but the content didn’t update often (I would have loved to see the Village Voice’s Pazz’n’Jop list or the KEXP Top 90.3 lists, for instance) and the community features were weak. Since the Robot Co-Op have done 43 Things, 43 Places, and AllConsuming, I would expect that the revamped Lists of Bests would be much stronger in the community aspect.

Anyway, congrats to Bill Turner and here’s hoping Lists of Bests doesn’t stay offline too long while it is being overhauled.

ABC and Apple have posted two volumes of Schoolhouse Rock videos on the iTunes Music Store for download. There’s interesting backlash in the reviews section about the pricing: no attempt was made to provide a volume discount, so each eleven-song video set is priced at $1.99 * 11 = $21.89, or $43.78 for the whole set. Since all 46 songs can be heard on the 30th anniversary DVD for $12.99 at Amazon, I can only assume that the assumption is that people will only be buying individual songs. Which is probably right—born a year before the series started in 1973, I only remember less than half of the ones on iTunes and would only pay money for “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here,” “Conjunction Junction,” and “I’m Just a Bill.” But those three alone would be half the price of the DVD.

Complaints about the business model aside, this is great stuff and would almost be reason by itself to buy a video iPod.

Doc Searls: Lesson for the day: Use your ass. He’s talking about snowboarding, as the summary by Dave Winer makes clear: “Doc Searls and son nail snowboarding. It has a lot to do with falling on your ass and annoying skiers.”

Heh.

I took the day off in compensation for having to work last Monday, and Lisa and I were originally talking about skiing. But it’s maybe going to get to 20° here today, and the mountains will only be colder. Instead, I think we’ll go check out a museum.

A recent post on Elise.com shows some interesting market share information about different blogging tools. The post shows that SixApart, between TypePad and LiveJournal, owns the market right now, though, each of those tools has a smaller market share individually than Blogger. Of interest to me as a longtime Manila user is the market map of Google Share vs. 6 mo growth rate, which shows that the number of pages on Manila appears to be shrinking (probably due to the shutdown of EditThisPage.com), while the number of pages on Radio blogs is growing at about a third the rate of speed of the overall growth of the blogosphere.

An interesting contender that emerges from that market map is b2evolution, which had the fastest growth rate but the smallest Google share.

Of course the usual quibbles about methodology apply, including the fact that many sites run by standalone software installations or using custom templates don’t point to their blog tool on their template. Like this one, for example, though I’m about to fix that.

Tony Pierce wasn’t the first blogger to go from blog to book, and now it looks like he won’t be the last, thanks to the new BookSmart software from Blurb. Announced at the DEMO conference, Blurb BookSmart is a general purpose tool that does for text what iPhoto does for pictures: makes it easy to self publish quality hardbound books.

Given my experience with iPhoto books, I’m curious to see how it turns out. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way to get into the beta without an invitation, so if anyone can hook me up, I’m your friend. Oh yeah: also no word about Mac compatibility for the software either. (Update: I missed the software compatibility info on the bottom of the Create Your Book page, which indicates that Blurb BookSmart is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.)(via)

That’s the way I heard the legal voice over that just aired during the Superbowl, anyway, the one that announces that “this broadcast is only for the NFL’s watchers. Any other use of the broadcast, including images or accounts, is forbidden.” I guess that means the play-by-play blog is out. What’s the legal meaning of account here, anyway? Does it include pointing out that the Seahawks are really sucking wind so far and need to stop missing 50-yard field goals?

This is not the sort of headline you want to see: Subscriber credit card data distributed by mistake, writes the Boston Globe. It’s particularly galling when you find out how the information was distributed: stacks of account reports containing credit card numbers and bank account numbers with routing codes were inadvertently recycled as “toppers” on bundles of subscriber papers. Thanks to the Slashdot thread, I can also point to an online application that reports if your information was leaked or not.

Contrast this with the latest in a series of “make the bastards pay” stories about pre-Internet dinosaur businesses who want to tax providers of useful Internet services out of existence: Newspapers want search engines to pay:

Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, collect headlines and photos for their users without compensating the publishers a cent,according to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which announced Tuesday that it intends to “challenge the exploitation of content” by the Googles and MSNs of the Web.

Since the World Association of Newspapers seems to have a lot of time on its hands, I have a list of suggestions for more profitable activities:

1. Create a code of conduct about how you will treat sensitive subscriber data.
2. Enforce it.
3. Stop trying to block search engines from accessing your content.
4. Stop arbitrarily limiting your online ad inventory and hurting your authority by scrolling your old headlines behind a paywall.
5. Start getting a clue about information security and the Web. Please. For the love of God.

As long rumored, Pixar was acquired by Disney yesterday, and headline writers showed no restraint (witness Slashdot’s Pixar Eaten by Mickey Mouse, and Techworld’s Disney buys Pixar and Steve Jobs for $7.4 bn).

I got an email from an old friend in the animation business who was at Disney before the merger. He says that the word is that the two animation units will remain intact and separate organizational units for the time being, with the only possible overlap area Toy Story 3 (which Disney had wanted for themselves but which will likely now be done in the Pixar unit).

All I ask is, if you are planning to use the combined form of the name, please use the one in the headline rather than the alternative, for obvious reasons.