Today, this popped up on my Twitter feed. Bill Amend, the author of Foxtrot, was trying to use the Kindle Comic Creator tool to publish his successful collections on the Kindle. He took a close look at the terms and conditions and found that (a) because his collection was over 10MB the minimum price permitted …
Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Hunting and the Boston Marathon Bomb Brothers.
How did the Boston Marathon Bombing brothers get caught? The release of videos played a key role. This decision to release this video has been called many things – a risky decision, a calculated bet, a crucial turning point, and a fortunate use of crowd-sourcing. Let’s not get sloppy with the use of modern lingo. …
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Paul Milgrom's 65th Birthday
My PhD advisor turns 65 today and here, at Stanford, we are having a conference in his honor. I made some remarks that I thought I'd post here. I am here to talk about Paul's contributions to applied theory. While Susan and Yeon-Koo have talked about theoretical contributions that so many in this room associate with Paul, …
Blogging Citation Norms
[Note: This post is 'wonkish,' a word which here means you may have to think harder than normal while reading it.] One thing I learned at the Kauffman Economic Bloggers Forum last week is that there is angst among the professional (i.e., non-academic) bloggers about citation and re-stating the arguments of other bloggers. It was …
Future of Blogging
Last week I attended the annual Kauffman Foundation Economics and Financial Weblogging Forum in Kansas City. It was the first time I had met so many of those bloggers that I read daily. I learned that the non-academic bloggers are young, very young. One of them is just out of high school! They are also …
I Get My Wish!
Last summer I expressed an interest in meeting musician David Lowery to discuss the evolution of the music industry. Long story short: we’re getting together at the University of Minnesota next Friday, April 19 for an event entitled “Resolved: Napster is the Best/Worst Thing That's Ever Happened to Music.” The event title is a bit …
Who owns Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has as one of its defining characteristics, its openness. Anyone can edit it. Anyone can reverse someone else's edits. And that process has led to the encyclopaedic resource we have today. How Wikipedia works is still a bit of a mystery. But what appears to be the case is that a core group of volunteers …
The On Line Honesty Box
Many vendors give away free services, but usually there is a catch. For example, while Google has given away search services for more than a decade, no user has any illusions as to why. Advertising buys space and tries to reach readers. As another example, for many years US cellular carriers came close to giving …
Why are there no good toilet finding apps?
Five years ago, when watching Steve Jobs introduce the concept of apps on the iPhone, I had an idea. It was to build an app that would allow you to find the nearest public toilet with the push of a button. I actually investigated doing this in Australia. The full story is here but the …
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Am I the Only One Ambivalent about Amazon’s Acquisition of Goodreads?
The New York Times reported recently that Amazon’s buying Goodreads, the largest book review site online. It’s easy to see the appeal of Goodreads to Amazon. Goodreads apparently has 10 million ratings and reviews of over 700,000 titles. This trove will bolster the already-copious product information that supports book discovery at Amazon.com. Moreover, Goodreads is a …
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Digitopoly 