Toluu : echovar

echovar

economies, internet, language, and culture

Saying that “Track” is expensive is another way of saying that it’s risky. It’s saying you haven’t solved enough of the technology problem to proceed. Given the circumstances, the current price is too high for the projected revenue.

However, the absence of track isn’t a static problem. A moment will arrive when a player will take the plunge and dominate the market. They will have put enough of the pieces together to see how the story ends. The first one in will have access to the most information about what track means, how to implement it and how people use it. That means they’ll be able to optimize the service faster than followers in the space. As time passes, the price of the technical solution will go down, the revenue opportunities will go up and cash flow will move from investment to revenue.

The question is, at what point do you enter the game? Can you wait for a set of economics that are cash flow positive? Of course, by then, usually the game is over. Unless of course, there’s only one player in the game. Then the cost of waiting is

The Power of Track: Top Down, Bottom UpNovember 8

Pyramid with eye on the dollar bill

Any discussion of ‘Track’ seems to require a brief definition. By now we’re familiar with ‘Search,’ it’s the process of examining everything in an index to find keyword matches– and then ranking the results in the most useful order. ‘Track’ is a filter on the firehose of information generated by the microblogging space. It’s stuff that’s not in the search engine index yet, it’s what people are saying and thinking right now. The ideal time parameters around track are the rhythms of the conversation. Tracked results should reach one quickly enough to be able to respond to a question or statement without the thread of the conversation being lost. Track expands the public instant message dialogue beyond a personal directed social graph. When I track a topic, I’ll see messages from anyone who uses the words I’m tracking.

Our recent Presidential campaign featured diametrically opposed approaches to organization. One campaign employed a bottom-up strategy; the other preferred the top-down approach. This got me thinking about track and the difference between top-down and bottom-up strategies. A top-down strategy is easier to support in that the tracked keywords are very limited and they don’t change unless consciously changed. The creation of an intentional scarcity of tracked keywords also lays the foundation for an economic model.

Here are two approaches to a limited track keyword set:

A bottom-up strategy is harder to support, every user in the system could have a separate list of keyword filters for the full stream. That’s a lot of computing that needs to be done very quickly. As events unfold around us in the world, each user’s set of keywords would change to aid in the discovery around the new topics emerging. The full set of track filters would be constantly shifting and morphing.

Search uses a top-down strategy to prioritize keyword results. You probably want to see the results that most people want to see or think are important. The brilliance of the modern search engine is that it makes that calculation for everything it indexes. It arrives at top-down through bottom-up voting on importance. Services like Mahalo attempt to only provide extended results for popular searches– converging to the top of the pyramid.

Here are some examples of services trying to create lists of what’s popular:

If you track what’s popular, depending on the community providing the attention data, you quickly converge on the least interesting topics. You’re only seeing what everybody knows.

Ana Marie Cox’s Pie Charts and The Other ShoeNovember 8

Ana Marie Cox Coverage Pie Chart

I’ve enjoyed reading Ana Marie Cox’s tweets and posts from the campaign trail these past few months. Ana does a great job of showing us what it’s like to be on the bus, or on the plane with the candidate. While her work for Time Magazine is interesting, I found her pie chart on how a journalist spends time on the campaign trail to be one of her most revealing missives. Is being there really being there? Is it proximity or access that really matters in doing journalism? How much time does a journalist really get to spend with a candidate– per 24 hour period, how much journalism really goes on?

Perhaps politicans need a Regulation FD, something like the disclosure requirements for public companies. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the regulation:

The

Office Coffee: A Leading Economic IndicatorOctober 22

Office coffee machine

My office supplies coffee, tea and hot chocolate to its employees. There’s filtered cold water and hot water for the tea and chocolate. Coffee requires at bit more work. Someone has to make a pot of coffee which includes putting a filter into the machine and then loading 1 1/2 portions of ground coffee from pre-measured packages. Through experimentation and oral history, I have learned that 1 package of coffee is too weak, and 2 packages of coffee are too strong.

Office coffee is perpetually bad. There many reasons for this. Often the coffee will sit in the pot cooking away for hour after hour– the flavor boiled out of it. Even when cut with milk it’s barely drinkable, an acidic brown liquid. Good office coffee requires social cooperation of a fairly high level. Reasonably good raw materials must be provided. And then the key, there must be a willing group of people dedicated to making and then maintaining the freshness of the brew.

If you think about it, the social contract around the quality of good office coffee requires an effort equal to that of a business like Peets or Starbucks. A single person is unlikely to make that effort; social cooperation is necessary.

The quality of office coffee produced in this manner is a leading economic indi

Music of Politics: The Birth of CoolOctober 19