Category: Web/Tech

Rankings of economics blogs

All these measures are a bit mind-boggling, but Craig Newmark considers the relevant data in detail.  I don’t mind how BlogPulse measures popularity, but I’ve long believed that blog writers should not spend much (if any) time checking their stats.  Of course I didn’t go looking for these rankings, I just happened to see them on Craig’s blog…although I did read the post in full…

Markets in everything: Virtual sweatshops

We’ve known for some time that online games have spawned markets where virtual assets go for real dollars. What’s the implication? Profit opportunities for anyone willing to put together high-tech capital and low-cost labor from places such as China, Indonesia and Romania:

Rich Thurman earned $100,000 by farming 9 billion gold in Ultima
Online… Thurman says he had "up to
30 PCs running at once, automatically collecting gold for me."

That is the first step. It isn’t too difficult from there to make the
leap into creating your own sweatshop. All you need is the ability to
write game macros or the money to purchase them. That’s right, if you
know where to look, they are on the open market. A macro that uses a
teleportation exploit in WOW is currently going for $3,000. Then just
hire cheap labor to monitor the bots.

The full story is at the gaming site 1UP, and worth browsing. The tip from Edward Castronova at Terra Nova. Castronova studies the economics and sociology of virtual worlds – read his most famous paper.

 

Guest Blogger: Tim Harford

As I search for enlightenment in Peru, Tim Harford will be enlightening readers of Marginal Revolution.  Tim writes the Dear Economist column for the Financial Times.  He is also an economist with the International Finance Corporation, co-author of the excellent primer on foreign aid, The Market for Aid, and author of the forthcoming The Undercover Economist.  I am looking forward to reading the Undercover Economist of which Steve Levitt says:

The Undercover Economist is a rare specimen: a book on economics that
will enthrall its readers. Beautifully written and argued, it brings
the power of economics to life. This book should be required reading
for every elected official, business leader, and university student.

MR readers are in for a treat this week!

The Revolution reaches Outer Space

At MR we are often told, "We love Marginal Revolution but when traveling the outer rings of Saturn downloading it takes such a long time."  We agree and in order to make our product more easily available to other life forms we now do OSS, Outer Space Syndication, courtesy of Blogs in Space.  This will require certain changes on our part as the producers of Blogs in Space are careful to make clear:

Bloggers who use this site are urged to keep their blogs devoid of any
overt language, comments or content designed to offend, taunt or
provoke alien life forms in any way. Aliens may find your lifestyle,
grammar or the picture of your girlfriend offensive, we just don’t
know. Blog In Space does not warrant that any content transmitted into
space will not be objectionable to alien life forms and will not be
responsible for alien abductions, close encounters or intergalactic
war.

Will OSS increase the audience for MR?  I’m not sure but I do believe that one day entire alien civilizations will devote themselves to the study, appreciation and worship of the bildungsroman.  You think I jest?  Stranger things have happened.

Thanks to Jacqueline for the pointer.

The economics of podcasts

We can expect

…a massive dilution in the audience size of the early entry podcasters. EVERYONE’s audience will fall as the marginal listeners find something they like better. Yes, there will be some podcasts that get more listenership than others, but most of them will be repurposed content that already has demand.

…when those formally known as podcasters do an accounting of the net dollars they earned and compare it to the time they invested, they will realize they made about 17 cents per hour all in.

All that will be left of profit motivated individual podcasters will be the few and far between and probably less than half of a percent of all podcasters (and please don’t anyone post a comment saying…if there are a million podcasters, 1 pct is 10k, half of that is 5k. That’s a ton. I’m making up these numbers to prove a point, not to be literal…Ok?).

And like personal blogs, tens of thousands if not more will stay on as labors of love that we enjoy because of their creativity.

So in about 3 years, the Podcast phenomena will have run its course and will just be a normal part of the digital media landscape.

Just like streaming.

That is Mark Cuban, read the whole post.  Here is his earlier take on podcasting.

My take: The key question is what kind of aggregators will take off.  Some people find blogs through Google, but most find them (I suspect) through other blogs.  Podcasting may not work this way.  The relative returns to "portal podcasts" will be lower than for portal blogs.  Glenn Reynolds can read and process material faster than most people, but no one can hear a two-minute comedy routine in much less than two minutes (no need to write me about speeding up the tape, cutting out the dead space, etc., you get the point).  So you won’t find good podcasts through other podcasts to the same degree, since it is harder to serve as an effective portal.  The sorting will work less well, and the categories will be harder to describe and communicate.  Advertising will matter more, and institutions such as iTunes will have more influence over selection and content.  Podcasting will be more in hock to MSM than are blogs.

How do cellphones change your life?

Yes you are always connected and people yak in restaurants.  Michael at 2blowhards.com makes another good point:

I don’t use the land line often, but when I do it’s often for very enjoyable 30 minute stream-of-consciousness yakfests. It’s hard to imagine enjoying such a conversation on the cellphone, and I finally decided that I don’t want to give up the possibilty of having analog conversations.

Is it down to the quality of the sound? There seems to be an ever-so-slight delay in the conversational back-and-forth on a cellphone. This takes a little getting used to, and it certainly interrupts the free flow of intuition and thought.

My main dislike: When you have a cellphone, it is easier for others to be late.  It is also harder to get people to precommit to exact plans in advance.  Too much discretion, not enough rules.

Monitor your social fabric

The Social Fabric features a display of avatars on a mobile device’s screen, representing individuals in a group of friends or acquaintances. The avatars use body language to show how recently you’ve contacted each person: Regularly contacted friends appear alert and look directly at you. Less frequent contacts might slouch and turn to the side, and infrequent contacts could have their backs turned.

Read more here, and then go call your mother.  We can imagine this technology extended in various ways, as the non-salient is made more salient and memorable.  Should wives not favor cell phones that tell the husbands when to call them?  Or does this simply make one party feel more guilty and the other more aggrieved?  There is surely an optimal degree of forgetting.

Guest Blogging from Liberia

We are excited to have Lee Coppock, an economist at the University of Virginia and friend of mine from graduate school, guest blogging for us over the next week.  Lee is visiting Liberia on a private aid mission and will be giving us an on-the-ground perspective on economic growth, culture, institutions and aid.  Lee visited Liberia last year but tells me that at that time he was afraid to visit the downtown internet cafe.  This time he promises to risk it on behalf of the revolution, the Marginal Revolution!  Thanks Lee!

Liberty Belles

Liberty Belles is a new blog from five young libertarian women ready to take on the world.  I like their Statement of Principles:

What We Want

For too
long, the word on the street has been that the movement for freedom and
limited government lacks its Lady Liberty. Women’s voices are largely
absent from the conversation, despite the calls and catcalls of our
fellow men.

In March 2004, Comedian Drew Carey wrote a letter to Reason Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie suggesting some strategies for improving circulation:

“To start with, how about some near-naked starlets? ‘The Girls of Reason
or something like that. To justify them editorially, you could have
them holding pencils between their pouty lips while reading books on
privatization. You could also note how much perkier their breasts are
without government interference.”

While we may not be naked
and pouting, our ideas are on display for all to see. We stand for free
minds, free markets, free… Well, let’s say we don’t mind you holding
the door for us, we just don’t want the government doing it.

With Liberty Belles, we blast ourselves into the canon of ideas.

And
because we simply can’t disappoint, here’s a sneak peek at how ladies
of liberty lead the people. Drew Carey: eat your heart out.

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People

Go get em grrls!  And don’t forget to check out one of the uber-texts of libertarian feminism, Liberty For Women (I am a contributor).

Is RSS Google’s main competitor?

If RSS is getting face-time at the expense of search, Google has something to worry about. And it makes sense. From personal experience, I know my daily routine to keep up with the information overload doesn’t really involve searching anymore, but subscribing. Thanks to services like del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com, people are spending a lot less time actively searching and more time passively reading what’s being updated in their readers.

I think what they’re [Google] afraid of is the rise of applications that seem to be tracking importance and trends better than search. In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like bloglines, newsgator, feedster and kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow. And it’s all being accomplished with RSS technology.

Here is the longer and very interesting discussion.  I have long resisted RSS feeds.  I like the visual feel of a well-designed blog, I like to see how one post follows another, and I also track new blogs by seeing when people add to their blogrolls.  By doing things "by hand," I feel I am in closer touch with the blogosphere, and obtain what Michael Polanyi called greater tacit knowledge.  I will let you know when I switch to RSS, but I predict it won’t be soon.

Thanks to the ever-useful Chris F. Masse for the pointer.