There’s an apocryphal Chinese proverb and curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” It means: May you experience much upheaval and trouble in your life. The clear implication being that ‘uninteresting times’, of peace and tranquility, are more life-enhancing. Well, these are certainly interesting times, whether we look to the turmoil of the [...]

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A few months ago, I blogged about a lecture that behavioral economist Dan Ariely gave as part of his book tour for Predictably Irrational. Today, I see that Chris Yeh has published an outline of the book, and that the SEOmoz blog has applied it to derive lessons for web marketing. Fun and informative reading, at least [...]

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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at Ben Kunz’s “Modest Blogging Proposal” column in BusinessWeek. He leads with: If “pay per post” lets online writers shill for cash, why not go all the way and sell real-life opinions, too? He proceeds to take it all the way himself, ultimately concluding: So let’s sell, [...]

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Curt Monash recently shared his views of the text analytics market through his blog and a slide presentation that he’s made available online. The presentation is refreshingly hype-free, and I recommend you take a look. His observations about the web search market are spot-on: the current attention is on transactional queries (see Andrei Broder‘s classic [...]

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I must have been asleep at the RSS reader a couple of weeks ago, because I missed this gem in  ”Lost in the Crowd“, David Brooks’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers in the New York Times: Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli [...]

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One of the mistakes we often make in our quest for economic reductionism is to assume that all value can be monentized. But this model often breaks down in the context of online communities. As Manila Austin, a psychologist who heads up research at Communispace, put it, ”People want the validation that they are being heard.” In [...]

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A few days ago, Jon Pareles wrote a New York Times article entitled “Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan“, describing the increased licensing of new music for commercials, video games and soundtracks. He comments: Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now [...]

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Loic Le Meur wrote a post today arguing that we need search by authority for Twitter. His argument: Comments about your brand or yourself coming from @techcrunch with 36000 followers are not equal than someone with 100 followers. Most people use Twitter with a few friends, but when someone who has thousands, if not tens [...]

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  Dan Farber recently shared this observation about the future of journalism: While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn’t catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of [...]

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Merry Christmas / and Happy Newton Day to all! I hope all of you are spending some time offline for the holidays. I couldn’t kick my daily blogging habit, especially after I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about the dreadful controversy of unfriending people on social networks: Now, people who have accumulated [...]

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