June 2008
15 posts
Nobody Watches TV →
Web 2.0 Fails To Make Money →
“The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers….”
Debunking the Theory of the Long Tail →
“…The number of titles that sold only a few copies almost doubled for any given week from 2000 to 2005. In the same period, however, the number of titles with no sales at all in a given week quadrupled. Thus the tail represents a rapidly increasing number of titles that sell very rarely or never. Rather than bulking up, the tail is becoming much longer and flatter. Moreover, we...
Clay Shirky on Power Law Distribution and the Web →
“…What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome....
Tim Berners-Lee on The Fractal Nature of the Web →
Universe possibly fractal on large scale →
“We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably...”
– Peter Schjeldahl on Jeff Koons, The New Yorker, June 9
“For anyone who sees things in such immediacy every true change must seem...”
– Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”
“How did we get to this strange pass, where up is down and down is up? How did it...”
– Jonathan Rowe, “Our Phony Economy.” Available here.
Operation to Restore Virginity →
“Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the...”
– Virilio