The offline story of how former Nasdaq chairman  Bernard Madoff evidently took $50B from investors in a massive Ponzi scheme has been been a staple in the press since the story broke last week. But what caught my eye today was an article in the Wall Street Journal. The title, “Madoff Exploited the Jews“, strikes me as [...]

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In my previous posts, I discussed applying Mankiw’s Brief Principles of Macroeconomics to the attention economy postulated by Herb Simon and went through the first seven of ten economic principles, which concern how people make decisions and how the economy works as a whole. In this final post of the series, I’ll consider the last [...]

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My recent posts about the macroeconomics of information and attention triggered an unexpected controversy about who deserves the credit for the concept of attention economics. The Wikipedia entry for attention economy credits Herbert Simon, and I had always thought he came up with the idea. Perhaps I’m biased because of the five years I spent at [...]

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As some of you may have noticed, I’ve recently started blogging more about search engine optimization (SEO). I’m not an SEO expert, and I confess some misgivings about the whole endeavor. But I’m enough of a realist to play by the rules of the attention economy rather than just rant about them. One of my [...]

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An article in Search Engine Land today describes how “Ask.com Plays The Google AdWords Arbitrage Game“: Rather than promoting its own product (as with the Cashback example), or drumming up some incremental searches for its site (as with the apples example, or by saying something like “New Hampshire Hotels? Try Ask.com For Better Results”), Ask is [...]

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In my previous posts, I discussed applying Mankiw’s Brief Principles of Macroeconomics to the attention economy postulated by Herb Simon and went through his first set of ten economic principles, which concern how people make decisions. In this post, I’ll consider the second set of principles, which concern how the economy works as a whole. [...]

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An article in today’s New York Times entitled “Your Privacy Is Protected Only if You Are Really Sick” describes the guidelines that the Network Advertising Initiative, a trade group that represents two dozen companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, has adopted for how ad networks use data about Internet users. The upshot: Networks only [...]

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In my previous post, I discussed applying Mankiw’s Brief Principles of Macroeconomics to the attention economy postulated by Herb Simon. Let’s start with the first set of basic economic principles, which concern how people make decisions. 1. People Face Tradeoffs. Information Markets In the 1990s, the web quickly exploded from an obscure protocol into an [...]

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I received a nice email from a reader today. As per my mantra of “when in doubt, make it public“, I thought I’d post an answer here. Subject: Daniel, You Blog So Much… …how do you do it? I am a regular reader of your blog, and I am amazed at the frequency of your [...]

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I’m proud to announce that I’ll be organizing the Industry Track at SIGIR ’09. For those unfamiliar with the annual ACM SIGIR conferences, SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval. I’m working with general chairs [...]

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