Forrester missing the point

So I get in my inbox an email from George Colony, the CEO of Forrester Research.

I'd forgotten I was on his email list to alert people whenever he writes a new article. But I haven't received an alert for several years now (either he hasn't been writing, or the emails were being captured in my spam folder).

In either case, the topic sounded interesting and I'd read good stuff from Mr. Colony previously....

...until I read this:

Please note: You must be logged into Forester's site as a registered guest to access George F. Colony's "My View." To log in, please click on the following link and enter your user name and password. User names and passwords are case sensitive.

Um, George....this is 2005. If you'd like to engage readers on the Internet, you don't require them to register and log in beforehand.

Needless to say, George's email went straight to the trash. And obviously I didn't read his column.

George, if you want to become part of the conversation of the blogosphere, you should put Your View in an open, public blog where people can read it freely, feedreaders can pull it easily, and search engines can index it with speed to send your words straight to the readers that matter.

Posted

IT harware failure….

The "perfect storm" of harware failures has ground my work to a complete halt. While I let various memory tests and other diagnostics run on my desktop, I'm going to try to catch up on some blogging...

Posted

And so it begins…

It's now official: Japan's population has begun to fall. Demographics has now been catapaulted into a major political issue, but seemingly from the point of view of managing public sector costs and pension structures. Other related aspects, like social conditions that encourage greater fertility (if this is even desirable- it's an open question), and whether to "top-up" population decreases with immigrants seems to be off the agenda for the moment. It starts in Japan, but we'll be seeing this come up shortly in parts of Europe, and in China.

Posted

A Flat Tax

Steve Forbes presents his framework for a flat tax in the US. Did you know that a flat tax has been implemented in the past 10 years in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania, Georgia, and Serbia? And it's become a mainstream political issue in Greece and Poland? In Estonia it worked so well that they've paid off their national debt and going to lower the flat tax in 2007. I love this part of Forbes' plan: "To avoid puerile and divisive debate about who would gain and who would lose, my flat tax is designed to be a tax cut for all. Because some people will only focus on what they lose in the way of deductions under the flat tax--ignoring the fact that their income tax payments would go down--my plan gives you a choice: When the flat tax is implemented, you can file your postcard return under this new, simple system, or continue to file your tax returns, with all of their mind-numbing complexity, under the old system. See for yourself which is better. I think most would conclude that the flat tax is best." What a choice! I think the old system would disappear instantly if it were presented in this democratic way. Or how about this as an add-on to the plan: people would pay a surcharge equal to their share of the cost of processing their taxes. Those choosing the old system would pay for the cost of processing via the existing IRS, those choosing the Flat Tax would pay a considerably lower surcharge. The biggest problem with this plan is the messenger: it just won't work to have Steve Forbes, capitalist mascot and billionaire, pitching this kind of plan.

Posted

The future of the Internet (and PC!)

Looks like Jason Kottke has taken a deep breath and dived into describing a *very* compelling vision of how the Internet & PC might develop. Read the whole thing: GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? (kottke.org) The only part I think he hasn't fully thought through, maybe because it's too unpredictable, is the role of a startup in catalyzing this vision. Jason only really seems to believe that big players like MS, Google, Yahoo, and Apple will make it happen.

Posted

Long Live Pastafarianism

Boing Boing offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can prove that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Good luck! Link: Boing Boing: Boing Boing's $250,000 Intelligent Design challenge (UPDATED: $1 million). Also here: Boing Boing: Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows.

Posted

Mapping the Blogosphere

Being a new, fast growing medium, the Blogosphere still hasn't been properly mapped out.

And by this, I mean in all it's dimensions: the economics, the socio-behavioural characteristics, the key companies, the key individuals, any geographic clusters, and so on.

Recently there appears to be a race on to create the best Top 100 list of Blogs (whatever that means), spurred on by Jason Calacanis. But many people believe this is a very "old media" way of measuring influence because the readership of blogs is so distributed and spread over so many topics.

The reason I bring this up is that I've noticed some interesting "experiments" done by Fernando Plaza here and here (posts in Spanish).

Basically, he's been playing around with two measurements:

1- the amount of overlap between blogs. I think this is very important because in the Old Media world, few people would subscribe to both Time and Newsweek, because you're paying twice the money for essentially the same news. But in the blogosphere, where it's trivial to add subscriptions via RSS, the same gadget freak might be reading both Engadget and Gizmodo. What are the implications for advertising? Does this dilute or amplify a single blog's influence?

2- Fernando also explores the "Slashdot" effect and theorizes that a blog's real power is not how many readers it has but rather how many of those readers it can redirect to content it links to.

This last point raises the question of whether it might be more relevant to measure referrer traffic as a way to guage the strength of the referrer, particularly as a share of the referrer's total traffic, rather than simple inbound links.

Posted

Breaking News: Emily & Raf are getting married!

So Raf proposed, and Emily said yes!

Congrats, little sister, and welcome to the family Raf.
 

Posted

Crime & Punishment

From the BBC. An excerpt:

Police in Japan have arrested a Chinese student over the use of a network of software "bots" to steal items in an online role playing game (RPG). Players were attacked in the game, Lineage II, and their items were then sold for cash on auction sites. The attacks were carried out using automated bots, which are difficult for human game players to defeat. The student, who was abroad on an exchange program, was arrested in the Kagawa prefecture of southern Japan. In Japan, as in England, there are no specific laws to govern trade in virtual possessions.

I wonder if sentences will have real and virtual components, just like the crimes.

Posted

Bankers & Consultants driving the UK economy

No, really! Latest figures show that "Financial Services" are now responsible for 30.2% of the wealth in the in UK GDP. In this category are bankers, insurers, fund managers, market researchers, and management consultants. A nation of powerpoint slide-writers! Some other interesting stats: - Computer services worth 2.24 billion pounds, up 354% since 1992. - In same period, Insurance and pension funds up 220% - Market research and management consulting output has grown from 4.7 billion to 11.3 billion pounds since 1992. - Britain's "creative sector" is now 9.2% of the economy. - 9 out of 10 slowest growing (or, shrinking) industries are in manufaturing The same figures show that manufacturing is now contributing just 14.2%, and agriculture just 1%. It would seem amazing, then, that modern economies, and just about the entire G7 are guilty here, spend so much money subsidizing agriculture when it has such a negligible effect on national wealth. It would also seem amazing that the mainstream media in these countries dedicate so much space to talking about manufacturing when it's clearly shrinking so much every year to now become a relatively minor part of GDP. One would think that government subsidies and media attention should rather focus on the fast-growing sectors- how do we create better bankers, consultants, and so on, rather than keeping old and dying industries on life-support at enormous cost. Link: Telegraph | Money | Engine room that powers British economy.

Posted