Curiouser and Curiouser!

To LinkIn insert trust in slot

Clay meets Ringo. YASNS: Ringo.com. Yet another social networking service, Ringo, yet another bizarre misreading of social networks:

Asking your friends to join is as simple as sending an email. As your circle of friends grows to include your friend's friends, and their friends too, you will quickly find that your new, expanded circle of friends includes hundreds of people. Many circles never stop growing.

Now you are ready to find a match within your list. Are you looking for an activity partner? Somebody to go to the movies with? A friend, a lover, a soul-mate? Or perhaps simply a mechanic or a lawyer?

With Ringo you can instantly find that someone, always safe in the knowledge that they were referred to you by a friend!

In biological systems, things that don't stop growing are called tumors.

The persistent mistake in the design of these systems is to assume that human relationships have frictionless transitivity -- A trusts B, who trusts C, who trusts D, so introducing A and D is a sure bet!

A is my sister. B is me. C is my meth dealer. D is his "debt collector." My relationship wiht my sister includes her trusting me not to introduce her to known criminals. Any service that proposes to remove me from deciding which introductions to broker doesn't get my business.

The general rule in systems like this seems to be "We're going to assume that human behavior is simple and can be easily represented as transitive operations, because thats what we know how to make computers do."

[Marc's Voice]

Marc raises a good point about transitivity of trust.

I observed a little while ago that I thought the LinkedIn model might be superior to other networking services I've looked at.  This is because it has an brokering model where to get in touch with someone I don't know I have to go through someone I do (and further to someone who knows them).  These contacts are not automatic, a human being makes a judgement.

In my case it appears the judgement was negative since I never got a response but I suppose that just proves the system works.

What ever did you expect?

A diplomat's undiplomatic truth: They lied. The U.S. may have found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, it's in Dick Cheney's office. [Salon.com]

Was it ever in doubt?

Of course the next step is obvious.

America you're feeling sleepy... very sleepy...

Do oligopolies have benefits?

Do oligopolies have benefits?

In an article called "The Benefit of Oligopolies,. author Sam Vaknin argues that oligopolies get bad rap, that they are more likely to foster R & D and even lower overall prices than a system where there are many competitors just hanging on and killing each other with price competition.

He makes some good points. The naive reaction to oligopolies is that they invariably stifle competition and artificially inflate prices. This is not always the case, as we have shown, though he wrongly implies that it is never the case.

Vaknin ignores the effect of price signaling, easier to effect when there's only a Coke and a Pepsi, a Boeing and an Airbus in the market. He also ignores the problem of excessive political power, as large corporations can threaten retailers, suppliers, and regulators far more effectively than little ones. Like many economists, he presents an ideal market that exists independent of politics and power.

As far as seeing that oligopolies increase innovation, I don't buy it He cites William Baumol of Princeton University who wrote:

.Because firms in an oligopoly characteristically charge above-equilibrium (i.e., high) prices - the only way to compete is through product differentiation. This is achieved by constant innovation - and by incessant advertising.'

But that juxtaposition of advertising and innovation is the point. Innovation for many oligopolies is basically an extension of advertising. In part, it's just pseudo-variety, such as the addition of Multigrain Cheerios or calcium-enhanced orange juice.

The author cites the major investment by the pharmacy oligopolies in developing each new drug. Even that's a mixed bag - many of the real breakthrough come through the high-risk small pharmacy and biotech labs, innovations that oligopolies exploit through distribution deals. Yes, the big companies do have some serious breakthroughs in their labs, but they also spend a lot of money developing copycat drugs to compete with already successful drugs like Viagra or Lipitor. Other resources are spent in tweaking older drugs to extend patents with "new, improved" versions.

Vaknin also indicates his belief in Schumpeterian disruption to keep the naughtier oligopolists in line:

Still, Schumpeter believed in the faculty of 'disruptive technologies' and 'destructive creation' to check the power of oligopolies to set extortionate prices, lower customer care standards, or inhibit competition.

Linux threatens Windows. Opera nibbles at Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Amazon drubbed traditional booksellers. eBay thrashes Amazon. Bell was forced by Covad Communications to implement its own technology, the DSL broadband phone line.

Barring criminal behavior, there is little that oligopolies can do to defend themselves against these forces. They can acquire innovative firms, intellectual property, and talent. They can form strategic partnerships. But the supply of innovators and new technologies is infinite - and the resources of oligopolies, however mighty, are finite. The market is stronger than any of its participants, regardless of the hubris of some, or the paranoia of others.

To a limited extent I agree. The forces of real innovation, usually extrinsic to the big players, are a real threat. But the new oligopolies have found ways to avert or postpone the reckoning day. As we've noted, they can buy out the innovators, copy their products, tie up the intellectual property, and enlist the government to pass laws or grant contracts curbing the innovators.

One very chilling new maneuver is the ability of patenting methods and ideas, rather than products or specific inventions. So that you can't run an online store in certain ways without Amazon's permission, or run an Internet video rental service that looks even remotely like Netflix.

The goal of the new oligopoly is to avert disruption. Oligopolies, for the most part, don't have ambitions to become monopolies. The point isn't that they are near-monopolistic price fixers. The point is that they can, in tacit agreement, raise the barriers and free themselves from some of the worst pressures of free markets.

[Oligopoly Watch]

A great piece worth reading whole.

You've got ping

Third-party TrackBack in Radio. markpasc.org
Matt Mower's Python TrackBack server for Radio (and ACLs in PyCS!!). [Trackback pings for matt_blogs_it]

Heh.  Nice to see it worked.  This is my first 3rd party, unsolicited, trackback ping to appear in the RSS feed :-)

Clueful MP found. World ends.

MP sets up spam busting site. Use it, don't abuse it [The Register]

Wow!

An actual British Member of Parliament doing something clueful!

Draw your own conclusions

But nearly 100% watch television.

Frank Davies in the Philadelphia Inquirer: War poll uncovers fact gap. Excerpts:

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi...

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents.

He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts. Kull noted that the mistaken belief that weapons had been found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war."

Pollsters and political analysts offer several reasons for the gaps between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or skepticism, and Bush administration efforts to sell a war by oversimplifying the threat...

Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

Draw your own conclusions.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Gimme

:-).

LOL! This windows senior programmer, 20 years of experience, tells me he does know the mac as well. Doesn't seem to know OSX though, so I tell him about the BSD nature of it and show him some quicktimes of the interface (I don't own a mac). After some seconds of unreal silence, he says: "How the hell can they do that using a Motorola 68000?!?" [Cristian Vidmar: CRISTIAN VIDMAR: M y P u b l i c W e b l o g]

[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Gimme Gimme Gimme

TypePad takes off

TypePad is a go.

My TypePad weblog is live and thanks to design help from Mena, it "feels" like this blog, but is light and clean. Let me know what you think. I'm considering making TypePad my main blog.

I'll cross post for awhile, but lets keep the comments on this blog so I can keep them in one place until I do the final export.

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

Looks good.

Purple as in the number

Oxen bloxsom purple communities. EE Kim speaks!.

Eugene Kim has started blogging: EEK Speaks.

Eugene and his partner, Chris Dent (who blogs at Glacial Erratics), of Blue Oxen Associates, both have PurpleNumbers on their blogs, where each paragraph has its own fragment permalink.

Eugene wrote a plugin for his bloxsom blog, and Chris is generating his in Moveable Type. Chis also sends these paragraph level links out in one of his RSS 2.0 feeds.

PurpleNumbers are something totally good for the iCite net, which likes links to content at as fine a granularity as interesting, like a paragraph.

[the iCite net development blog]

I had the pleasure to meet Gene during Planetwork conference.  Somehow they convinced Pierre Omidyar to fund them! 

[Marc's Voice]

I have a question about PurpleNumbers which is:

• What happens when the paragraph gets edited?

Does it get a new purple number?  If so, where does the old purple number go?  If not, how do you find out that the paragraph you are linking to is no longer the paragraph you thought you were linking to?

Target Post

This is a dummy post that will act as a target for trackback pings.

I'm now testing the trackback send-ping functionality from the Radio client.

Ping Post

This post should trigger an automatic trackback ping to the target post below.

Update @ 23:34

The ping worked.

All that remains is to have the client automatically obtain the trackback ping ID, either from the RSS item (if posting from a story in the aggregator and the item supports the module) or by auto-discovery.