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. …
Continue reading "Crowd-Sourcing and Crowd-Hunting and the Boston Marathon Bomb Brothers."
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, …
[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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
Continue reading "Am I the Only One Ambivalent about Amazon’s Acquisition of Goodreads?"
Today is April Fools Day although it is hard to miss it on the Internet. As this is a blog devoted to the more dispassionate investigation of the digital economy, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little today about several pieces of research that have been conducted by economists in recent years …
Digitopoly 