Experiments in Cyberspace

Have you ever spent the last day of the year on-line? Instead of partying, hitting the streets or freezing your privates out in the snow (this obviously rules out the people of the southern hemisphere), have you tried celebrating the New Year in front of your computer in peace and tranquility? Well, before you call the men in white coats let me explain. It happened to me once, about 5 years ago if my memory serves me right. Surprisingly, I was not alone. There were quite a number of souls who were in need of psychiatric help apparently. I will go on and say - at the risk of being called anti-social, cynical, narcissist or a similarly appropriate term for the occasion - I enjoyed it very much. For reasons I will not go into, I had to stay home and rather than watching TV and testing the alcohol barrier, I punched the keys until the early hours of the day while the fan was humming gently in the background, trying to cool the system. This is for those who will spend the evening of Dec...

I sometimes come across in blogs an add-on which shows the mood of the owner, the song she listens and the book she reads at that particular moment. Now that Christmas is due and the New Year is imminent (apparently the economic crisis affected my vocabulary), if I had a similar plug-in, mine could as well read: Mood: Gloomy Listening: Sound of Silence Reading: For Whom the Bells Toll Still, in spite of ominous signs, tightened budgets, shrinking profits and accelerating unemployment, this is the time of year to hope, and to reflect . Capitalism, just like it does not distribute wealth equally, does not distribute peace, happiness and joy with a conscience. Well, let me stop before this turns out to be anything but a Christmas post. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happier New Year.

It is customary to compile a list of events when the New Year is near. As most of you know, Google makes a similar list of popular searches every year on a country by country basis. I have taken the liberty of picking the most interesting queries among them. Here they are: "my" from Australia - This is definitely my number one. When you don't have a mirror, what do you do? Yes, you ask Google. "qq" from China - It probably means something in Chinese; then again, it might not. "you" from Chile - Another intelligent search item. Were they talking to Google bot? It was also the number eight of the Colombians and number nine of the Spanish. I am beginning to suspect you is a nick for a new drug. "danmark" from Denmark - Apparently the Danish like to see how many times their country is indexed by the search engines. "google" from Germany - I have nothing to say. "hong kong" from Hong Kong - The Danish were not alone. ...

You surely know Aesop's fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." The tragic ending of the shepherd boy and the flock is used to teach us not to lie. However, this short story has always irritated me: there is something wrong with the moral of it. I do not know your experience, but here, in this lovely corner of the world, shepherds hardly own flocks. They are usually hired hands and the protagonist in the fable is also depicted as one. OK, the boy lied and got eaten, but so did the flock. Now, whose flock was it? By not believing him, whose property perished? Whenever I hear cries of help from industries in trouble after the recent economic downturn, I can not help but remember Aesop's tale. Some scream and shout, some refuse to believe because they have been lied and ripped off so many times. Before rejecting help to those who are presumably in need, it is worth thinking about what happens to the flock.

With no intention of upsetting numerous bloggers - some of which I closely follow and benefit - who advise on how to make money on line, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics that was recently published in Edge can be an eye-opener. In his analysis of the latest crisis of the banking system, Taleb says, When I was a quant-trader in complex derivatives, people mistaking my profession used to ask me for "stock tips" which put me in a state of rage: a charlatan is someone likely (statistically) to give you positive advice, of the "how to" variety. Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a book on "how I failed in business and in life"—though the second type of advice is vastly more informational, and typically less charlatanic. Indeed, the only popular such ...

As the number of social networks increase, so does their importance for bloggers in particular and businesses in general to promote their content through them. It is critical to understand the metrics used to use social media effectively . One particular industry that has high stakes in this is the search engines as social media sources provide an effective alternative to traditional web search by directly connecting users with the information needs to users willing to share the information. For example, users can post questions or new items, and rely on other users to comment or rank the content (e.g., sites such as Slashdot or Digg) or rank the popularity of users (like Twitter). While the responses could be excellent, the quality could vary greatly. Hence, user feedback, such as voting, or rating the content, has become a crucial aspect of the effectiveness of the community as demonstrated by the paper, A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media [pdf] by Jiang...

Less and less things in life surprise me any more. But this new craze of "let's all follow each other on [insert your favorite network here]" has amazed me. Apparently there is still room for surprises and I have gladly taken it as "I am not that old after all." Fine! Let us dissect and analyze this 'following phenomenon'. What makes the number of followers valuable as a metric? For instance, Matt Bacak of Twitter fame claims he has so many followers that he is the third tweeted??? man in the Tweetland. He thinks it is valuable so he markets it: First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site's members. [...] Turn your income-generating ideas into handfuls of cold hard cash. [...] By Matt Bacak, the Powerful Promoter and author of Powerful Promoting Tips newsletter. "If I could show you a proven, b...