Profile
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Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
1 year ago | Comment
Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive.
Nothing particularly new, but still a refreshing and inspiring collection of visualizations.
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The Future of the Internet, Perspectives emerging from R&D in Europe
1 year ago | Comment
Excellent "state of the internet address" by Joao Schwarz da Silva, Head of Converged Networks and Services Directorate, European Commission. Full of interesting facts, statistics, and future trends, which are poised to change the internet as we know it today.Highly recommended for anyone working on web applications and services of any kind.
Abstract: The Internet world as we know it today has undergone far-reaching changes since its early days while becoming a critical communications infrastructure underpinning our economic performance and social welfare.With more than 1 billion fixed users world-wide today the Internet is poised to become a fully pervasive infrastructure providing anywhere, anytime connectivity.With the further deployment of wireless technologies, the number of users of the Internet is expected to jump to some 4 billion in a matter of few years. As the Internet extends its reach and serves an ever growing population of users, sensors and actuators and intelligent devices, new innovative services will be introduced, that contribute in turn to further developing an environment supporting innovation, creativity and economic growth. Such development has been positively acknowledged by the European Union in several documents that are emphasizing the European effort and strategy regarding the development of the "Future Internet". The lecture will address the EU approach and the R&D agenda in the technological and associated policy domains that have a bearing on the network and service infrastructure elements of the Internet of tomorrow.
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CNN discovers downside of 'citizen journalism'
1 year ago | Comment
The pitfalls of user-generated content...
An iReport story posted by a "Johntw" at around 9 a.m. EDT with the headline "Steve Jobs rushed to ER following severe heart attack" entered the Internet rumor mill, landing on news site Digg.com and spawning dozens of nervous postings on micro-blogging site Twitter.com.
[...]
Apple stock dropped with incredible speed on the strength of the rumor. The company's shares fell to $95.41 from $105.27 between 9:40 and 9:52 a.m. - 9 percent - before Apple denied the report. After describing the content as fraudulent, CNN confirmed Friday that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation is under way in regard to the "citizen blogger" post, which caused a $9 billion loss in Apple shares before the post was debunked.
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Experience
1 year ago | Comment (2)
I rediscovered two great quotes on experience today...
"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."
Franklin P. Jones
"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
Barry LePatner -
We need a bigger game room!
1 year ago | Comment (2)
...via Bosko.
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Controversial lecture: Nature, not human activity, rules the climate
1 year ago | Comment (2)
3.9.2008 at 13.00, Jozef Stefan Institute, main lecture hall, Jamova 39, Ljubljana, Slovenia
We have a global warming nay-sayer visiting IJS next week:
Professor S. Fred Singer
University of Virginia Science
Nature, not human activity, rules the climate
The science is settled: Evidence clearly demonstrates that Carbon dioxide contributes insignificantly to Global Warming and is therefore not a 'pollutant.' This fact has not yet been widely recognized, and irrational GW fears continue to distort energy policies and economic policy. All efforts to curtail CO2 emissions, whether global or at the state level, are pointless -- and in any case, ineffective and very costly. On the whole, a warmer climate is beneficial. -
The Rich can Play
1 year ago | Comment
An analysis of the per-country breakdown of medals won at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Unsurprisingly, the bottom line is that big, rich countries are major players, but being rich is far more important than being large.
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I Believe I can Fly...
1 year ago | Comment
Red Bull X-Fighters 2006 Highlights - HUGE air!
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It's official... I'm not shaving until I turn in my PhD. How's that for a motivation booster?
1 year ago | Comment (4)
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Why is increasing complexity of recommender algorithms so often correlated with complete absence of common sense in their application?
1 year ago | Comment
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Monetizing Noovo: Thinking Out-of-the-box
1 year ago | Comment (1)
Here's an alternative (or complementary, if you wish) proposal for monetization of Noovo, something different to the one-size-fits-all advertising approach. I think that Noovo should leverage it's role as a publisher* to profit from the service. As a typical publisher, Noovo could charge users for access to premium content, and pay royalty fees to authors who produce such content in the process.
Here is why I think such a (traditional) business model is viable:
- Authors are better motivated to contribute quality content when they are compensated for their efforts. Well, this should be obvious. Major services such as Google Knol are also betting their money on it.
- There are currently few ways in which blog authors can charge users for access to content they create. Giving content away for free and making money indirectly, as a by-product of high volumes of traffic, is the rule-of-the-day. Mostly this boils down to advertising in some form or another, with referral fees probably coming in second(?). Few bloggers think in a traditional sense: magazine subscriptions and book royalties.
- There's a love-hate relationship between most professional bloggers and advertising. I think that most professional, quality bloggers, resent the fact that their blogs are polluted with ads, but have to put up with it because selling adds to their readers appears to be the only way to make a living from blogging. I have no hard evidence to back this claim, just intuition.
- Users are willing to pay for premium content, and authors will love them for it. Sure, we're spoiled on freebies on the web, like snotty kids on candy. But the fact of the matter is that the time we spend (and waste) on the web is ultimately very expensive compared to a small subscription fee. Although subscription-based business models never really took off in internet news, one need not look far to see that users are willing to pay for content (after all, porn is still one of the biggest businesses on the web). It goes down well with the authors, too. Finding that users are willing to pay, even just a little, for content they produce, should make them feel pretty good about themselves. For comparison, where's the personal reward in selling adds to your readers?
- Subscription-based media give an illusion of credibility. This comes from the observation that such media deliver content for which people are presumably willing to pay. On the other hand, media that is supported by advertising is often thought to be tailored towards maximizing advertising returns, at the expense of quality, honesty, and usability.
- Some users will pay for that aura of elitism. There's no limit to what some people are willing to pay to become members of an "elite" society. Such societies often revolve around (valuable) information, which is shared only among the privileged few. Consider, for example, elite conferences such as TED. Although the role of "author" may be dispersed among many members within the society, most of the "responsibility" can be attributed to the founders (and gatekeepers) of the society, which, to some extent, also assume the role of editors.
Noovo has most of the building blocks for such a business model in place. Our publishing features are relatively advanced. More importantly, we already support fine-grained control over who has access to what. Invitation-only and "stealth" groups give authors the power to easily limit access to their content, and to create "elite" groups of users. They just can't charge users membership fees (yet). I would expect authors to make certain posts visible to all, and only limit access to those "golden nuggets" of information. This would, after all, help them promote themselves and convince users that they'll get their money's worth by subscribing.
All that really needs to be done to pursue this idea is a bit of payment processing (and a pricing model). We'd probably need support for saving drafts, shared authorship, per-member within-group posting permissions, separate control over access to excerpts and actual content, etc. All of these are just tiny improvements and don't interfere with the existing architecture or design.
Finally, there are quite a few indirect (non-financial) benefits to be expected from implementing such a business model:
- It may attract more (active) users. Few things motivate people as much as the prospect of making some easy money. Think pyramid schemes and lottery tickets. Who knows if people would be willing to pay in order to read your cranks or download your smiley collection? Just imagine the money you'd make.
- It may attract more professional bloggers (or motivate new ones). Provided that their resentment towards advertising is strong enough, and that they can be convinced that there is enough money to be made here. It may not hurt a medium-profile professional blogger much if they switch from WordPress to Noovo - these are just publishing tools, it is the content that is valuable.
- It may attract more "important people". They like to flock in elitist, closed, invitation-only groups.
- It could be a selling-point for potential investors. It certainly distinguishes us from services that we currently consider our main competitors, and could be a genuine value proposition for investors.
- It saves bandwidth and computational resources. Whenever an author decides to charge a fee for their most valuable (= popular) content, they will be helping us cope with the traffic that such content would otherwise generate (if public).
* Noovo is, of course, a publisher, in many ways similar to companies that print and distribute books or CDs:
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information – the activity of making information available for public view. (source: wikipedia).
- Authors are better motivated to contribute quality content when they are compensated for their efforts. Well, this should be obvious. Major services such as Google Knol are also betting their money on it.
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Lovro's B-Day
1 year ago
Number of photos: 3
