Does Long Tail distribution fuel terrorism?

There is a popular theory that the internet, and information technology in general will substantially lower the transaction costs of selling hard to find products and services and increase the collective share of niche markets, information and viewpoints. Chris Anderson in his wildly popular book, “The Long Tail” calls these niche products and services the long tail of markets.

He claims that internet driven distribution will be able to cater to minority tastes, and individuals will be offered greater choice, and will be able select items that they may never even have known existed. He argues that by destroying the current model where popularity is currently determined by the lowest common denominator, a long tail model may lead to improvement in a society's level of culture.

This seems to be true for business. Some of the most successful Internet businesses like eBay (auctions), Amazon (retail) and Netflix (video rental) have delivered stunningly successful businesses by leveraging the Long Tail as part of their business models.

However, the same may not be true for culture. The counter view in fact is more frightening, and may well be more correct.

Cass Sunstein, a Law professor at the University of Chicago in his book, Republic.com has argued that the internet causes us to become more extremist and close-minded by exposing us to very selected and biased array of viewpoints. He describes a world where “you need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less.”

Christine Rosen, author of “Preaching Eugenics” says that we have moved into a world of “egocasting”—a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy.

Our technologies—especially the Internet—are encouraging group polarization: “As the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving.”

When you combine these philosophies with Huntington’s theory in The Clash of Civilizations, it paints a frightening picture. Huntington says that the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural and that the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future.

By encouraging the polarization of groups, the internet may well be fueling the growth of terrorism. The fact of the matter is that this is something we are seeing today all around us. Along with the growth of the internet, we have seen a growing cultural assertiveness, which is seeing the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism. And this is largely a middle class phenomenon. - the group which has been exposed to the internet the most. From 9/11 to the UK bombers, the terrorists were all middle class educated people.

To counter this, Sunstien says that “People should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance,” he notes. “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.”

BookTour.com - Just Another RoR Site

Chris Anderson the author of The Long Tail, released BookTour.com a web 2.0 startup that helps authors connect to audiences. Booktour.com used Ruby on Rails to build the site, and Anderson was all praise. “The powerful web tools available today, from Ruby on Rails to MySQL, are just astounding--what we built in three months and at the cost of a few thousand dollars would have taken years and millions of dollars in the mid-90s. I'm still not quite sure what Web 2.0 means, but if this is what it enables, I like it!”

Zoho as an Office Appliance

Red Herring wrote an article in August 2006 which mentioned 17 Microsoft Office Killers. The line up is:

• Microsoft Word: Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Writeboard, Writely , Rallypoint , JotSpot Live
• Microsoft Excel: JotSpot Tracker, Numsum , iRows, Zoho Street
• PowerPoint: S5, Zoho Show
• Office ‘Suite’: ThinkFree, gOffice, Zoho Virtual Office
• Microsoft Project: Basecamp, JotSpot Project Manager

Zoho figures in all the categories except MS-Project.
Over the last year Zoho has added some very interesting products. They now have a CRM application and all the office productivity tools - email with calendaring, a word processor, a spreadsheet, powerpoint, chat, a planner, a wiki and a host of other interesting tools including an online questionnaire called 'Zoho Challenge', an online survey tool named 'Zoho Polls' and a site monitoring service. Very Impressive.
It would be even more impressive and useful of Zoho could be offered by a local partner as an Office Appliance that includes a dual ISP connection, proxy and network security. The appliance could be installed on the customer's office premises (local appliance), and connected via the internet to the partner's data center where a mirror appliance (remote appliance) is maintained. To reduce issues to do with bandwidth, Customers could choose to configure Zoho to use applications on the local appliance (via a LAN) or the remote appliance (via the internet). LAN access would be suitable for users who work out of a fixed geographical office location.

Under-served Young Indian TV Viewers

UTV is launching a youth channel named Bindass. It will go on air by August 2007. The brand proposition for Bindass, a Hindi channel targeted at youth in the age group of 15-34 years, is the celebration of being young, fun, fearless, frank and valuing freedom in all its forms. According to UTV, the 15-34 age group constitutes 72 per cent of India’s population and forms 42 per cent of the TV viewership.
The television company got Synnovate to do syndicated research, and the findings indicated that this segment of viewers is highly dissatisfied with the content available on television. They are not interested in watching soaps or gadget shows or music or even VJ shows. Instead, they were found spending time on something unexpected – cartoons and kids’ shows.

42

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought is the second most powerful computer in the universe of space and time. Millions of years ago there lived a race of "hyperintelligent" beings. Their favorite pastime (or 'timepass' to all you Mumbaikars) was a game called Brockian Ultra Cricket. The game involved suddenly hitting people for no apparent reason and then running away. Besides this they spent their time bickering over the meaning of life. They got so fed up with this bickering, that they decided to build themselves a super computer and ask it to figure out the meaning of life. They build a computer called Deep Thought. And it does just that. It thinks. And it thinks. Time goes by and seven and a half million years later Deep Thought pops out the answer to the question and delivers it to the descendants of the people who built Deep Thought. The answer is …42
The problem was that the people didn't know quite what to do with the answer. In fact they did not even know what the question was.
Deep says "So once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means." Of course the problem with this is that it will take a new super computer and 10 million more years to do the reverse calculation to obtain the question from the answer of 42.

Talent Communities

The internet is changing the world in very fundamental ways. Many of the changes lie before us as opportunities. Besides products and services the internet is increasingly demanding that we create fundamentally new organization structures and management techniques that let us outsource greater and greater parts of the production process.
It is creating a world of David Ricardo and Ronald Coase. Ricardo, a political economist, popularized the idea of comparative advantage. It is his theories that form much of the academic underpinning in favor of outsourcing. Ronald Coase, who was awarded the Nobel prize for Economics in 1991, popularized the theory of Transaction Cost Economics. Bringing down transaction costs, makes it easier to outsource. Internet technologies are making it possible to bring down transaction costs to a level where it becomes possible to outsource components of work that were hitherto considered an internal function.
There are organizations (like The Gerson Lehrman Group Councils ) that are being setup that specialize in creating professional networks for consulting and even provide temporary CxOs.
The concept is being extended to what are called talent networks and talent communities.
Jon Hagel (of Netgain fame), in his talk on Web 2.0 at NASSCOM suggested that Indian IT service companies need to innovate and create fundamentally different organizational ways to build and deliver IT products and services that Indian IT companies need to build scalable talent networks encompassing a broad range of smaller, more specialized companies.

Foolishness on Demand

Foolishness follows the universal law of demand. The greater the price you have to pay for being foolish, the less you do. - Ronald Coase
http://www.reason.com/news/show/30115.html

Facebook

Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students, but it wasn't that easy to get an account because you needed to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly framed as the "cool" thing that college students did. So, if you want to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear: college was about Facebook.
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Understanding Ricardo

There is a theory in economics which shows that it can be beneficial for two parties to trade in a goods or services, even if one of the parties has a lower relative cost of producing all goods and services. In other words if India can produce both rice and oil at a lower cost than Bangladesh, it still makes sense for India to buy rice from Bangladesh and sell oil to Bangladesh.
Apparently what matters is not the absolute cost of production but the opportunity cost, which measures how much production of one good is reduced to produce one more unit of the other good.
Counterintuitive. But it is one of the cornerstones of international trade theory.

Legal Process Outsourcing: $640 million by 2010

Niche legal process outsourcing (LPO) services are expected to become a US$ 640 million market by end 2010. Employment in the sector is expected to grow from 7500 in 2007 to 32,000 in 2010. According to ValueNotes, there are about 100 LPO service providers in India, who cater to 8 broad segments:

1. Legal Transcription
2. Document Review
3. Litigation Support
4. Legal Research
5. Intellectual Property
6. Contract Related Services
7. Secretarial Services
8. Legal Publishing Services

Most LPO companies are small. There are only about 12 players who have more than 100 employees. Leaders are eValueserve, Integreon, OfficeTiger, CPA Global, Mindcrest, Pangea3, Quislex. Emerging players include: Lawscribe, New Galaxy, SDD Global Solutions, Tusker Group, Aptara, Lason and Quattro BPO.

Hyman Financing

According to Hyman Minsky, an American economist, in prosperous times corporate cash flow rises beyond what is needed to pay off debt. This results in speculative lending that goes beyond what borrowers can pay off from their incoming revenues. This results in a crisis, which results in a drop in lending, even to companies that can afford the loans, and the economy contracts.
Ponzi Finance (Mint)
Minsky said balance sheets and cash flows go through three stages, which he termed hedged finance, speculative finance and ponzi finance.
In the first stage, hedge finance, the cash flows generated from operations are enough to meet all financial obligations of a company. But as an economy grows, companies tend to take more risks. They move to the second stage—speculative finance. Here, their cash flow is enough to cover only debt payments; the actual debt is rolled over rather than repaid. Then there is the final stage of ponzi finance, when the cash generated from operations is not even enough to cover interest payments. The company either has to borrow more or sell off its assets to service its debt.
Ponzi finance is the last stage before a financial crisis and, after the crisis, companies go back to the first stage of hedge finance. And then the process starts all over again. Minsky has in recent years developed a following in the investment community, especially among the “world is a bubble” crowd.

The Seven Wonders of the World

A list of the Seven Wonders was compiled some time during the Middle Ages. The list comprised the seven most impressive monuments of the Ancient World. These wonders inspired the compilation of many other lists of seven attractions, or “wonders,” by later generations.
Included on the best known list were:

The Great Pyramid of Khufu. This is the oldest of the wonders and the only one substantially in existence today. It was built by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty around the year 2560 BC.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. These were a series of landscaped rooftop terraces situated on the east bank of the River Euphrates, about 50 km south of Baghdad, Iraq. The Babylonian kingdom flourished under the rule of the famous King, Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC). It was not until the reign of Naboplashar (625-605 BC) of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty that the Mesopotamian civilization reached its ultimate glory. His son, Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) is credited for building the legendary Hanging Gardens. It is said that the Gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife or concubine who had been "brought up in Media and had a passion for mountain surroundings".

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (a large gold-and-ivory figure of the god on his throne by Phidias),

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (a temple, built in 356 BC, famous for its imposing size and the works of art that adorned it),

The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus,

The Colossus of Rhodes, and

The Pharos of Alexandria (a lighthouse built c. 280 BC on the island of Pharos off Alexandria, said to have been more than 350 ft, or 110 m, high).

UNESCO World Heritage List Criteria

To be included on the UNESCO World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of ten selection criteria:

1. to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius;
2. to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design;
3. to bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared;
4. to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history;
5. to be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land-use, or sea-use which is representative of a culture (or cultures), or human interaction with the environment especially when it has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change;
6. to be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance. (The Committee considers that this criterion should preferably be used in conjunction with other criteria);
7. to contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance;
8. to be outstanding examples representing major stages of earth's history, including the record of life, significant on-going geological processes in the development of landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic features;
9. to be outstanding examples representing significant on-going ecological and biological processes in the evolution and development of terrestrial, fresh water, coastal and marine ecosystems and communities of plants and animals;
10. to contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.

Slow down in Britian?

In Britain:

• Inflation is back. Retail prices rose by 4.8% in the 12 months to March, the most for almost 16 years.
• The Bank of England has raised to 5.5%. It is anticipated that the rate will go to 6.0% by the end of the year.
• Debt-servicing costs are at their highest as a share of disposable income since the recession of the early 1990s

According to the Economist (June 28) "The willingness of households to pile up debt buttressed the growth in consumption and overall demand during the past few years. In effect, however, it brought spending forward. Now the danger is that consumers will have to retrench, leading to a nasty economic slowdown."

Why do we have a market for fake designer goods

Hindol Sengupta, wrote a piece on the IBN blog called "Poor Me And Expensive Clothes" on why he thinks most designer stuff is overhyped and overpriced, and that only like about 0.0001 percent of people can afford it, maybe even less... Poor Me And Expensive Clothes

But IMHO thats the whole point. If you are wearing it, you are sending out the message that you are in the 0.0001 percent. And thats whats important.
A lot of people (especially the smarter ones) understand that you are paying more for the brand than the clothes; that you are essentially paying for the advertising that entices you to buy the brand in the first place (Just like coca cola and pepsi), that in most cases, were you to know a good tailor and got some decent material, you could get it made, to better fit, for a tenth of the price.
To know this you just have to look at the fake designer market.
A 2006 report by Davenport Lyons, a UK law firm, says that 12% of the UK, bought fake luxury brands, and 48% of the UK bought a look- alike: items that closely resemble or mimic the styles of luxury and designer brands.
The situation in Europe is not much better...
As much as 20 per cent of the clothes bought in Italy are fakes, according to a report issued by the Italian consumers association Intesa dei Consumatori in April 2004.
And in case you thought that its the sleaze bags who buy the fake stuff, the Davenport report goes on to say that "Contrary to popular preconceptions, those who have bought fakes are actually more likely to be genuine luxury goods buyers, as well
as higher spenders in some key categories"

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Turtles live 'twixt plated decks
Serving to conceal their sex
Thus their sex appeal is lost
Fashion's seldom worth the cost
* Based on the writings of Ogden Nash © Steve Smith & Edward de Bono Creative Team 1998

The world according to Einstein

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
The World As I See It, Albert Einstein