I think the real appeal of the website is the sheer uncertainty. As an item nears the end of bidding, a big countdown clock appears. At any moment, someone else can come up in and bid on the item, which then resets the clock to twenty seconds. The process repeats and repeats, until the price gets to a point that discourages other bidders. (It’s probably less discouraging to you, since you’ve already sunk $50 in bidding fees.) But here’s the dirty secret of the site: after placing a bid, you’re forced to wait and watch. You have no way of knowing if your bid will win, or if someone else will swoop in and bid on the laptop at the last possible second. In other words, it’s just like a slot machine: you put in a quarter and wait for the wheels to whirr. With swoopo, the random number generator is other people.
No doubt the folks at swoopo are using their understanding of how bad we are at resisting a perceived “deal” to their advantage.
Long, but interesting and different enough to warrant a read. Here’s a quote that caught my fancy:
“You can read all the books you want that say freedom is a better system, but if people in their daily lives are surrounded by cops with guns, where government supplies emergency services, where every product has been regulated and tested by government, it’s hard to wrap your head around the crazy idea that all these things can be provided by a free market,” Friedman tells me. “So let’s do it. Let’s live it. It could be a disaster. People might die. But living it makes it so much more powerful than talking about it.” Through Burning Man, he adds, he’s “seen the power of experience to shape people’s perceptions about what’s possible.”
Like Mrs. Nichols, many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?
….
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
Using popularity rankings to make decisions, however, has downsides. These online rankings are public, creating a positive-feedback loop. The more popular something becomes, even if just from a random burst of interest, the more likely it is to grow ever more popular. And that has troubling implications about the effects of all sorts of popularity rankings, from bestseller charts to election polls.
Frequently, popularity rankings speak less to the merits of what’s being observed and more to the fact that crowds are observing it. In other words, peer pressure. “If you see a crowd around a building, you pop over and see what everyone is looking at,” says Jimmy Leach, editorial director for digital at the Independent newspaper in the U.K.
— WSJ.com, ironically I found this on Techmeme, which is described as “Techmeme spotlights the hottest tech stories from all around the web on a single page.”
If you haven’t checked out Wolfram|Alpha yet, it’s worth 15 minutes. The website describes it as such:
Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer
As anyone would do when checking out a new search engine, I conducted a vanity search only to realize it can’t “compute” my name, but it can compute my first name, which is what is pictured above. Apparently my name was more popular pre-1960 and supposedly there are ~99k people alive with the name Tom.
I’m not sure how that helps me, but it’s interesting to know. And that’s my take on Wolfram|Alpha: it’s interesting, but I’m not sure how it helps me as of yet. It’s like the Rain Man search engine.
Stone said on Monday that Twitter would remain free for consumers and businesses, and that the company’s main focus at the moment is developing new features for commercial users, such as “lightweight analytics” and a directory of commercial accounts that would verify that businesses on Twitter are legitimate.
Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ”malfunctioning” business model.
Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.
