There I was, reading this paper called “Online Advertising, Identity and Privacy” by Randal Picker of the University of Chicago Law School, and learning quite a bit from it. He’s obviously thought hard about the conflicts (privacy) and opportunities (advertising) that arise when people provide their identity to online services, and about what kind of regulation may be needed to ensure those services behave responsibly with the data they collect. After all, as he says:

In the past, we have regulated intermediaries at these transactional bottlenecks – banks, cable companies, phone companies and the like – and limited the ways in which they can use the information that they see. Presumably the same forces that animated those rules – fundamental concerns about customer privacy – need to be assessed for our new information intermediaries.

In introducing the topic of advertising, Picker makes the standard point that “Ads in these [traditional] media are targeted to rough demographics. The Internet, in contrast, promises advertising matched to me”. And this, he claims, is a good thing: “Think about TV advertising and how many ads that you see for products that you never consume. Those ads are almost all wasted. Behavioral advertising … Continue reading

I don’t usually read Wired so I didn’t see Kevin Kelly’s article called “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online“. I didn’t miss much. It was a precis of Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody (my views on that are here), about how the Internet is dramatically enhancing our abilities to cooperate, collaborate, share, join and do all kinds of groupy things, prefaced by a few paragraphs in which he tried to claim that this groupiness is “socialism”. In that it’s social, or something. KK doesn’t really care if it’s socialism or not of course, but using the word in the pages of a Condé Nast-owned publication sounds daring and provocative, so why not? And what else would you expect from someone who calls himself “Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine” [link]? (In the comments section of the first link of the following paragraph, Seth Finkelstein says all this more energetically.) Law professor Lawrence Lessig took umbrage at the dread word, because “at the core of socialism is coercion” so “I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on … Continue reading

My writer’s block has writer’s block. Still, I don’t want this place to be abandoned completely so I’m going to revisit an oldie but goodie: what do you see when you google barbie?

Yochai Benkler made a big deal of the Google search results for Barbie in his book The Wealth of Networks (2006), where he claimed that, whereas other search engines gave you only sales-related Barbie sites in the top ten, Google’s “radically decentralized” algorithm revealed an entirely different picture of Barbie. “The little girl who searches for Barbie on Google will encounter a culturally contested figure. The same girl, searching on Overture, will encounter a commodity toy”.

But that was in 2006. Since then things have changed in the google-sphere. I posted about this 18 months ago in Barbie slinks back to the confines of feminist-criticism symposia. Here were the Google first page results from 2006 as reported by Benkler:

barbie.com
Barbie Collecter
AdiosBarbie.com
Barbie Bazaar
If You Were a Barbie, Which Messed Up Version would you be?
Visible Barbie project (macabre images…)
Barbie: The Image of us all (1995 undergraduate paper)
Andigraph.free.fre (Barbie and Ken sex animation)
Suicide bomber Barbie
Barbies (dressed and painted as countercultural … Continue reading

The Netflix Prize has a winning entry. There are i's to dot and t's to
cross, but there is now an entry that has achieved the 10% improvement
over Netflix's existing system that the prize demanded.

Judging
from the team name, the winning entry is a joint effort between three
leading teams: BellKor, Pragmatic Theory, and BigChaos. 

Congratulations to
the winners! Continue reading

Hey Google, let me introduce you to Wal-Mart.

You’re both looking a little out of place at this swanky party, and you don’t look like natural friends, but actually you have a lot in common and you’ll get along fine. Oh I know you are a lot more attractive than Wal-Mart – younger, cooler, and with much better taste in office furniture. But underneath all the surface appearances you share the same hobbies and even the same values, so you’ll overcome any awkwardness pretty soon. Trust me, you’re birds of a feather.

What hobbies? Well, you love to collect vast amounts of crap and then make it easy and cheap for people to get at it. And guess what? So does Wal-Mart. Don’t get me wrong, Wal-Mart isn’t in your league. He only gets crap from a small number of people compared to you. But he does have some great stories about making bargains. Just ask him to tell about the time he told Coca Cola to go back and redesign their Diet Coke recipe just for him – it’s hilarious.

And you know that crowdsourcing thing you do, where you get other people to work for free because it’s … Continue reading

I've learned two lessons in the last couple of days.

First, if you want to get some attention for a blog post, call it something eschatological like "Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche". If I had called it "Simulation of a 48-product market under simplistic assumptions" somehow I don't think I would be writing a follow up. I don't like this lesson much. But I don't feel too guilty: if I was really trolling for traffic I could have called it "Learning from the Big Penis Book" [see Music Machinery for why].

Second, no matter how hard you try to be clear, many people don't get what you are trying to say. So maybe it's not their fault. For examples, see some of the comments here and here and even a bit here and on the original. The main complaint is that picking two example runs from a simplistic simulation of a small system with a small and fixed number of customers and products doesn't simulate the entire Internet. Where is the statistical sampling, the exploration of the sensitivity to parameters, the validating of the recommendation model? And on and on.

… Continue reading