Like I said before, a big problem with micropayments is transaction costs. It costs too much to transfer money securely, and it’s too much trouble for users. So this got me thinking, what if you could make a micropayment simply by clicking an attractive button like this:
Suppose you could give [...]
I’ve started adding TipJoy buttons to my site. Currently they’re on the econ blog directory page and the ChatterMeter. If you want to show your appreciation for these things, please leave a tip. It’s really simple, just click the button. The default tip is 10 US cents. You get to [...]
Damn, I thought I’d thought of another brilliant web service that’ll make me a billionaire, but someone’s beat me to it yet again. My idea was that I sometimes come across sites or stories online that I want to bookmark and follow up later. I put them in a bookmarks [...]
I have another blog-beg to ask. Later this year I’m planning to teach a university course about Internet economics. I’ve taught it in the past, but I think it’s time to review and refresh the content, since things change quickly in Internet land.
The class is a second-year undergraduate course, [...]
According to a recent study commissioned by Chitika, the top 50,000 blogs earned US$500m in advertising revenue in 2006. Chitika sells online advertising, so I guess they have an interest in knowing how big their market is. You can read the report of their study but it’s a little disappointing. [...]
I’ve been reading the Google public policy blog. It’s not a very active blog, but it’s interesting to read about the topics that Google cares about in terms of government policy. There’s the controversial issue of ‘net neutrality’, of course, plus recent FCC spectrum auctions, and even IT law in [...]
It really helps to have influential friends. Apparently, Steve Fossett’s buddy Richard Branson got in touch with his buddies at Google and asked them if their satellite images could be used to help in the hunt for Steve who has been missing for almost two weeks after his light plane [...]
For an alternative ranking of economics sites based on traffic data, see Brian Gongol’s site.
Rankings are calculated daily based on the relative ranking [...]
My new website and blog is up at partiallyunexpected.com. I won’t be blogging on 26econ any more, and will gradually re-organise this site to focus on the blog ranking and other useful things.
I will be extremely flattered if any of my few loyal remaining readers migrate to the new [...]
If anyone is still reading this blog, apologies for the lack of updates recently. My life was undergoing some big changes — my wife and I separated.
Anyway, now that things are getting settled down, my energy for blogging is coming back. I’m going to be making some changes around [...]
Not that I’ve been blogging much recently anyway, but I’m going to take a break from updating this blog for the next couple of weeks.
No, it’s not because I’m bad at macroeconomics, just I don’t quite have energy for it now.
Be back soon.
The main outcome of the credit crisis seems to be that banks are unwilling to lend to each other, or to anyone for that matter.
In response, central banks are slashing interest rates.
But wouldn’t higher interest rates encourage more lending?
Someone please explain …
Don’t you think it’s totally cool that a Nobel Prize winner has a blog, i.e. a simple and direct way of communicating with anyone who cares to read? In the recent past, access to the thoughts of such great people was much more limited. Maybe they should make writing [...]
If you have a Google account, go check out Google Web History, and see how many searches you’ve done in the past few years. Since June 2006 I’ve searched Google 9,873 times.
They also show some interesting stats about your search activity. Here’s mine by time of day:
[...]
You may be interested in this presentation that Sequoia Capital (a VC firm) gave to the startups it funds on the causes of the current economic crisis, the outlook for the future, and what startups can do to survive:
Sequoia Capital on [...]One new econoblog in my directory:
And, VoxEU asked to be removed.
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Posted in Blog ranking, Economics [...]
From John Whitehead at env-econ.net:
I’m presenting a “paper” at the 2008 Kentucky Economic Association meetings today in Lexington, Ky. The title is “Some Economics of Economics Blogs” and it is co-authored with Aaron Schiff of 26econ.com. In the “paper” we consider overall economics blog market trends and consider blog demand [...]
Via Visible Hand
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Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | Econ [...]
From GirlOnGauche via Fimoculous.
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Posted in Humour
Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | Econ blogs search engine | Resources | [...]
I finally had a chance to clear the backlog of new blogs to add to my econ blogs directory. The latest additions are:
DataPoints: The Dismal Scientist Blog
Global Economics and Structures
Well I knew that New Zealanders love to send text messages by mobile phone, but this article about Prime Minister Helen Clark’s use of texting made me smile:
She has three mobile phone devices and has described herself as the “mistress of text” because of her frequent use of the [...]
Every random person I meet wants to know my opinion on the credit crisis and bailout.
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Posted in Miscellaneous
Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | [...]
Cosmic Top Secret. It’s the highest NATO security classification.
(HT: Cockpit Conversation)
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Posted in Miscellaneous
Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | Econ blogs search engine | [...]
Several times recently I’ve had an email arrive in my inbox with an old timestamp. Since gmail shows emails in date order, I have to scroll through dozens of screens of emails to find the ‘new’ one and clear it. There is no obvious way to filter only unread emails.
After [...]
On the eve of the launch of the first Android mobile phones, Google has some interesting thoughts on the future of mobile phones:
It has a range of sensors that would do a martian lander proud: a clock, power sensor (how low is that battery?), thermometer (because batteries charge poorly [...]
The Palgrave Econolog blog has produced a new ranking of econ blogs. Their ranking is based on incoming links from other econoblogs in the past 90 days, “plus some secret Econolog sauce”. I really don’t like the secret sauce bit — although all blog rankings are not very scientific, [...]
The latest additions to my economics blogs directory & ranking:
Recursos Escasos - Blog de Economia
JZ Hub (Hypotheses, unknowns, betas)
There are now 279 econ blogs in the directory. As always, please [...]
The latest trend in spam subject lines seems to be to make up seemingly exciting news headlines. Some are actually kind of funny. Recently I’ve received:
Britney Spears Is Actually A Piece Of Broccoli
Britney Spears to Study Theoretical Quantum Mechanics at MIT
Angelina’s Newborn Twins Marry Each Other
Paris Hilton To Invade Rwanda
Some new additions to my econ blogs directory:
Informe Economico (in Brazilian)
Economy of Kuwait (in Arabic)
RGE - Global Macro EconoMonitor
Over at my internet economics class blog, student posts have started appearing. For one of their coursework assignments, I asked each student to write a blog post describing and discussing the business model of an Internet-related business. They’re basically supposed to examine the revenue sources from an economic perspective, [...]
MR reports that Google’s StreetView is causing some controversy in Japan. The basic problem is, due to lack of space in Japan, there is not the clear distinction between public and private space that you get elsewhere.
For example, here’s the apartment where we lived in Tokyo until recently:
[...]
I use Google talk for instant messaging. It’s pretty good, but the desktop client lacks the ability to chat to groups of people simultaneously. Recently Google released a new ‘experimental’ version of the client, which does support group chat. Great … BUT … it doesn’t support file transfers [...]
Reading an abstract of a talk at Google about cryptography, there are a bunch of interesting parallels with game theory:
We combine several advances in cryptography theory to construct a model of computation in which a third party securely performs computations for a set of parties who do not trust one [...]
Google now indexes 1 trillion unique URLs.
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Posted in Google
Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | Econ blogs search engine | Resources | Consulting services
[...]From ReadWriteWeb:
$650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
28% of a worker’s time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc)
There’s gold in things that minimise them thar interruptions arr [...]
From ReadWriteWeb:
$650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
28% of a worker’s time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc)
There’s gold in things that minimise them thar interruptions [...]
Via the ever-excellent Jan Chipchase, lucky phone numbers for sale:
Unless what is deemed to be a lucky number changes over time, the supply of lucky numbers is fixed, so the price should be determined by demand. I wonder how the willingness to pay for luck [...]
Via the ever-excellent Jan Chipchase, lucky phone numbers for sale:
Unless what is deemed to be a lucky number changes over time, the supply of lucky numbers is fixed, so the price should be determined by demand. I wonder how the willingness to pay for luck changes with [...]
I bid on a dining table in an online auction and won. Then I realised that it won’t fit through the door of our slightly small apartment. D’oh!
So I explained my mistake to the seller and asked them to re-auction it again, with a promise to pay them the [...]
In the vicinity of our new apartment is a church that likes to celebrate its Sunday service by ringing the church bell continuously for about 5 minutes at 9.30am and 10am every Sunday. Furthermore it is not a nice melodious bell but just a continuous loud bonging of a single [...]
Next week I start teaching my Economics of the Internet course at the University of Auckland. I wanted to have a class blog, but those few of my remaining faithful readers will know that these days I can barely keep up this blog, let alone another one. So I decided [...]
A funny thing about blogging — often you write about something and then soon after you come across something related.
To wit, soon after my post about lack of macro data, via Flowing Data I came across the G-Econ project, by William Nordhaus and others at Yale. It [...]
From Mike On Ads: Use your web browser history to estimate whether you’re male or female. It looks at the sites you’ve visited, uses the typical demographics for those sites, plus a little maths, to give probabilities of you being male or female.
This simple but clever example gives [...]
At a conference I went to last week, Ian Foster talked about advancements in computation and how today’s computing power combined with massive datasets are changing the way science is done in some disciplines. He gave a very interesting comparison — a global climate change simulation model versus a [...]
Two major reasons why I haven’t blogged much in the past couple of months:
1. Living without broadband.
2. Moving from academia to the fast-paced world of consulting.
(1) has now been solved — we finally moved into our own apartment with good broadband. (2) is something that I need to adjust to [...]
I’ve recently become a convert to Stata for data analysis tasks, and it seems to be an excellent piece of software. One thing that interests me about statistical software in general is the proliferation of different programs. Aside from Stata, there’s SAS, SPSS, R and Eviews, to name a few. [...]
I’ve recently become a convert to Stata for data analysis tasks, and it seems to be an excellent piece of software. One thing that interests me about statistical software in general is the proliferation of different programs. Aside from Stata, there’s SAS, SPSS, R and Eviews, to name a [...]
Technorati rankings are back in business and I’ve recently added these blogs to my directory:
Geary Behaviour Centre: the blog of the Centre for Behaviour and Health at the UCD Geary Institute.
Rigotnomics: a blog by ‘wannabe economists’ (their words, not mine) of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies [...]
Technorati rankings are back in business and I’ve recently added these blogs to my directory:
Geary Behaviour Centre: the blog of the Centre for Behaviour and Health at the UCD Geary Institute.
Rigotnomics: a blog by ‘wannabe economists’ (their words, not mine) of the Graduate Institute of International and [...]
Alex Kirtland and I have an article published in the online web design magazine Boxes and Arrows about how to design online reputation and rating systems.
[...]Alex Kirtland and I have an article published in the online web design magazine Boxes and Arrows about how to design online reputation and rating systems. Check it out here.
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Posted in [...]
I got a new computer, and with it comes the hours of installing programs and configuration. Would you believe I had to download and install 92 Windows updates for a brand new computer (Dell).
Anyway, it’s interesting to compare the process of installing Windows Live Messenger to Google Talk.
Google Talk: [...]
I got a new computer, and with it comes the hours of installing programs and configuration. Would you believe I had to download and install 92 Windows updates for a brand new computer (Dell).
Anyway, it’s interesting to compare the process of installing Windows Live Messenger to Google Talk.
Google Talk: [...]
Technorati is down (again) which is preventing me from updating econ blog rankings or adding new blogs.
I’ve heard rumours that Technorati are abandoning their blog rankings and this may be an early indication of that. They do not publish rankings on their own website at the moment, but (until [...]
Technorati is down (again) which is preventing me from updating econ blog rankings or adding new blogs.
I’ve heard rumours that Technorati are abandoning their blog rankings and this may be an early indication of that. They do not publish rankings on their own website at the moment, but (until [...]
In my RSS reader, I put blogs in two categories — “must read” and “other”. The former contains a dozen or so great blogs that I try to read or all or almost all posts. The latter contains dozens more blogs that I don’t attempt to keep up with, but [...]
Google Finance is now offering free realtime stock quotes for the NASDAQ, with promises of more realtime data to come.
It must be rather tough to be a competitor of Google.
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Posted in [...]
I seriously think people should have to get a license to create charts. Original here.
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Posted in Statistics & data
Also on 26econ: [...]
Where I live at least, the rush-hour traffic seems to be significantly less bad on Fridays. Is it because enough people simply take Fridays off? Or is it because people are just a bit more flexible on Fridays? The boss probably isn’t going to get really mad if you’re a [...]
Technorati has fixed its problems — rankings are being updated daily again.
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Posted in Blog ranking, Economics blogs
Also on 26econ: [...]
I am trying to justify buying one of these gadgets. Suppose it costs about US$500, suppose your time is worth $50/hour, then it pays off if it generates you an extra 10 hours of productive time. Where could that time come from? Commuting on the bus, in my case. [...]
Technorati is currently experiencing technical difficulties which is preventing me from updating the ranking of econ blogs in my directory. The rankings are currently frozen, but I’ll start updating them as soon as Technorati fixes whatever problems it’s having.
… that mobile phones worked a bit like IM where you can set your status (available, busy, away, etc), and other people could see your status before they called or texted you …
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Posted in [...]
… You’re on your way to work on a beautiful morning under a clear blue sky with not a cloud in sight and you think, oh damn, I forgot to bring an umbrella.
I’ve noticed two innovations in retail since I left New Zealand a year and a half ago. First is bank branches in shopping malls that are open 7 days a week. These are full-service branches, where you can get a mortgage or investments even on a Sunday.
Second is self-service [...]
The latest additions to my econ blog directory:
GMU Econ Society: Official blog of the George Mason University economics society.
InvestorCentric: The news and information that matters to real estate, small business and alternative investors, by NuWire investor services.
Macedonomics: A Macedonian view on economics by Tomislav Najdovski, a [...]
I realised why I wrote so many blog posts when we were in Japan — I couldn’t watch TV. We did have a TV at home, but we didn’t subscribe to cable, so we could only get the free-to-air Japanese broadcasts, which I couldn’t really understand. So I spent most [...]
Recent Twitter outages have caused much consternation. These seem to be symptoms of recent rapid growth. With a platform business like Twitter that does not charge its users, it gets no marginal revenue but incurs marginal costs as its user base grows, which leads to cashflow problems.
Obviously the strategy [...]
Following my earlier post about small differences in Japan, here’s a few observations about New Zealand from the point of view of someone who’s lived in Japan for a while:
People are soooo talkative.
Everyone appears to move in slow motion. They sure drive fast though.
Lots of middle-aged women are working, [...]
I’m experimenting with ways of coping with dial-up internet. Google Reader has an offline mode via Google Gears, where I can download all the unread items in my rss feeds in one go, while I’m doing something else. Then I can go offline and read them more quickly. Just [...]
We made it back to Auckland with surprisingly few disasters. Currently we’re staying with my parents just outside the city. ADSL doesn’t stretch this far, so we’re on a diet of dial-up internet. It’s quite a shock compared to the 100 megabit connection we had in Japan. On the other [...]
In the midst of all the tedious tasks involved with moving countries, I had the following idea: Wouldn’t it be useful if you could use a web address for your postal address instead of a physical address? Then you just give the URL to people and when someone sends you [...]
Tyler Cowen lists some small observations on a recent trip to Tokyo. Here’s some of my own, having lived in Tokyo for the past 18 months:
All public schools use a chiming clock to tell the time, the chimes are identical for every school, and they play a gentle version [...]
Interesting things are going on in social networking right now, with all the major players trying to extend their services beyond their own sites to third-party sites (see here and here). One interesting thing about Google’s Friend Connect offering is that it allowed you to access your [...]
I was a little puzzled when I read this article saying that Japan is giving 10 billion US dollars in aid to African nations to tackle climate change. The article gives very little details, but I wonder if this is the best use of funds. If the objective is [...]
In a week we’re moving from Tokyo back to Auckland, New Zealand, so blog posts may not be very regular for the next couple of weeks.
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Posted in Miscellaneous
Also on 26econ: [...]
More recent additions to the econ blogosphere:
Cheap Talk: By an anonymous econ grad student who likes industrial organisation, travelling and reading nonfiction.
sustainable options: By Martin de Wit, from South Africa, a blog about natural resources, the environment and sustainable development in Africa.
economic woman: Where economics and [...]
More evidence that poverty doesn’t stop innovation: The extremely cool blog AfriGadget, about how people with limited resources solve everyday problems with large amounts of ingenuity. Constrained optimisation at its finest!
For example, check out this home-made helicopter:
(HT: Signal vs Noise)
Check out this article in BusinessWeek about Twitter. The article itself is pretty ordinary, but look at the spectacular number of hyperlinks it contains. In fact, there are so many links that the article is hard to read and I gave up.
I was wondering why having too many links [...]
Google spreadsheets has added forms, which allow web users to input data into a spreadsheet that you’ve created. This makes it perfect for running simple surveys. Here’s a quick run-down on how to do it:
First go to Google Docs and create an account if you haven’t already got one. [...]
Another example of technically sophisticated consumers undermining product differentiation strategies: The CHDK project, which is a piece of software that enables all sorts of advanced features on standard Canon point-and-shoot digital cameras.
Firms commonly re-use components between high-end and low-end products to save money and disable some of [...]
From Bits:
Pilfered credit card numbers and bank account PIN numbers have become commodities on shadowy Web sites where stolen digital information is bought and sold.
Company e-mail, business documents and personal health information are the new targets of choice for illegal hackers …
A couple of years ago, credit card numbers [...]
RFE have created a Google custom economics search engine for the 20,000+ economics websites in their directory. Very useful. Somewhat less ambitious in scope is my econ blogs search engine.
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Posted in [...]
So now Google is jumping on the Social Operating System (SOS) bandwagon with Google Friend Connect.
One way this will work is sites like mine, for example, will be able to add a widget so that site visitors can “friend” the site itself (like a fanclub), and can [...]
From Felix Salmon, upon getting a dull email from Google’s customer support:
I guess it’s inevitable that when a company grows to be as big as Google now is, it will revert to this kind of overlawyered corporate-speak. Is that evil? Maybe not, but it’s a step in the wrong [...]
Just as The Economist predicted, social networks are starting to open up their services to outsiders, to provide something like a “social operating system” for the wider web. Competition between social networks is driving this. The leader this time was MySpace, which announced a data availability initiative (couldn’t [...]
Some more econ blogs newly added to my directory:
EconomistMom.com: A place where analytical rigor meets a mother’s intuition.
Exuberant Rationality: Political and economic commentary by Jesse Zinn, a grad student at UC Santa Barbara.
Digital Audio Insider: A blog by David Harrell about the economics of digital [...]
Because it makes you think.
When you write a blog, you need material for posts. You get that by reading other blogs, the news, or whatever, thinking about it, adding a bit of value, and writing about it. Writing a blog gives you a reason and motivation to think about things.
Writing [...]
Having just deleted a ton of spam emails, I wondered why are they always about body part enlargements, other sexual performance enhancers and financial scams? Why don’t people try to sell normal less dubious products or services this way?
I think this says something about the economics of spam and [...]
From Paul Kedrosky: Monthly vehicle-miles on U.S. highways from 1983 to today …
(HT: John Battelle)
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Posted in Markets
Also on 26econ: Econ blog ranking | Econ [...]
Very loyal reader Chewxy informs me about some analysis by Jakob Nielsen of a study done by some others about web users’ habits.
The headline results for bloggers are: People spend 4.4 seconds per additional 100 words on a page. This means that readers will read [...]
Check out Honesty Online — they sell digital certificates that help you to prove that you are who you say you are, online. How it works is you enter some personal details and a credit card number. They do a background check on you, and fish up some information [...]
From the ever-excellent Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a study shows that at some point there are decreasing returns to the number of friends you have on social networks:
A central feature of the online social networking system, Facebook, is the connection to and links among friends. The sum of [...]
On 101ratings.com (my other blog): Rating systems versus reputation systems.
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Posted in Reputation systems
