Disqus - Latest Comments for jny2cornell

Re: Satisficing

Josh Young — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:22:59 -0000

I find Wikipedia's other definition of satisficing more helpful: "it is optimization where all costs, including the cost of the optimization calculations themselves and the cost of getting information for use in those calculations, are considered." http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: The True Meaning of MSFT-NEWS

Josh Young — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:00:30 -0000

Your interview with Josh Cohen was killer, btw. Thank you for that.

If Google's operating margins are really 35% (not 63%!), why isn't there room for MSFT to pay up for content to index? If, as Ryan Chittum argues, search traffic just isn't that valuable for a newspaper's website--on top of the fact that Bing should be interested in grabbing at market share--why is it so clear that GOOG's counteroffer to News Corp with be nothing more than "token"?

I want to be clear here. I'm not saying that the possibility of lacking News Corp's content in its index should outright terrify Google. I am suggesting, modestly, that the situation has more than zero plausibility. It's a legitimately interesting business question, in other words.

Re: The True Meaning of MSFT-NEWS

Josh Young — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:07:17 -0000

Don't miss Ryan Chittum's post at the Columbia Journalism Review. He reacts to some odd assumptions in Danny Sullivan's post and runs the numbers himself.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audi...

Re: What’s the relationship between cost and price?

Josh Young — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:18:40 -0000

The supply of content produced by newspapers will crater sooner than later, sure, but I doubt that the supply of sufficiently close substitutes will diminish enough that newspapers regain significant pricing power. Those days are simply gone, no?

Re: Is Twitter A Cyber Ghetto?

Josh Young — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:37:41 -0000

Hey Sam,

Thanks for the link! I agree that the comments in my post are the best part of it. I wrote mine driving back from an exhausting but fun weekend out of town. Which is to try to excuse myself for being a little snotty. I hope that doesn't discourage Cody Brown from following up.

Fwiw, the notion of myspace as "cyber ghetto" isn't fully Brown's coinage. I'm not at all saying he's misappropriated it, but it's worth mentioning that the social network scholar danah boyd brought the term "ghetto" into broad public view with respect to myspace at the pretty recent Personal Democracy Forum. She first heard it from fourteen-year-old named Kat from Massachusetts: http://www.danah.org/papers...

Re: Real-time Web Growth Will Be M2M: Smart Meters

Josh Young — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:57:52 -0000

That makes sense, and thanks for replying, Albert. I think the P2M and M2P use cases are especially interesting in the medium term. Building a human's general (or specific, as within some vertical) command line for the Internet would be mighty fun! I also think there are probably use cases where a machine intermediates (by filtering, e.g.) what's really person-to-person communication, as in this little project we're slowly working on at http://www.newsmango.com/.

Re: Real-time Web Growth Will Be M2M: Smart Meters

Josh Young — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:23:13 -0000

Sorry for the tardy comment. I meant to ask a couple weeks ago why Twitter seems uninterested in being the conduit for M2M (or M2P or P2M) communication. If I'm wrong, please correct me. That wouldn't be at all surprising since I'm going off of, and interpolating from, one of TechCrunch's notorious reports, the section called "RSS Is The Enemy."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2...

I also recognize, given the context of my source, that you may not be terribly interesting in commenting at all. If so, no worries.

Re: Comments on the NY Times piece (Scripting News)

Josh Young — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:38:24 -0000

Funny you should call for a PageRank for twitter! Because there actually is one already. It has an API, and it's at http://tunkrank.com/.

Check out the explanation of the algorithm by @dtunkelang here: http://thenoisychannel.com/....

Re: Making Name-Your-Price Work for Digital Goods

Josh Young — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:07:18 -0000

The link above, though abridged, works for me on the actual tumblog, but maybe it doesn't for you after disqus emails it. In any case, here's a shortened version that disqus may not abridge: http://bit.ly/AbLgX

The worry about crowding out seems to me to apply more to writers than musicians and comes from the suspicion that a only a small portion of any writer's following will ever be willing to pay in any form at all. Writers may have some analogues to concerts and t-shirts, but they don't seem as strong. News is really an experience good--way more so than music. So a writer's ability to convey a promise that an article is worth reading is even more important--those goods, the article and the promise, are actually quite complementary, not distinct. It's all in my post. Thanks for having a read!

Re: Making Name-Your-Price Work for Digital Goods

Josh Young — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:54:45 -0000

"Voluntary 'splitting of surplus' is an instinct that people would have much more if the counterparty is an individual and not a corporation."

That statement seems both true and really, really important. Our moral intuitions as reciprocal altruists kick in. Sometimes I wonder about the extent to which we'll look back at the twentieth century--and the rise of the firm, as traditionally explained by Coase's theory of transaction costs--and marvel at how we sometimes lost track of pretty basic but important human instincts.

Re: Making Name-Your-Price Work for Digital Goods

Josh Young — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:41:14 -0000

"Name your price" is attractive. There are important considerations to bear in mind, however.

First, I suspect that Radiohead's success is partially the result of its novelty. The first couple data points seem like particularly weak ones for making predictions about sustainability. I realize they may be the only data points around, but they strike me as questionable enough that we should still put a lot of weight on our theoretical economic and social considerations.

Second, "name your price" is similar to tipping, and tipping is largely a social act. I think "badges" and other context-appropriate ways of recognizing donors are really important. Of course, this is exactly what Whuffie represents writ large.

Third, I worry that "name your price" models may crowd out musicians and authors' ability to sell value-added scarce goods and services alongside content they would give away. For instance, there's a deep value proposition in the trust between journalists and their readers. As I discuss in depth at <http: networkednews.wordpress.com="" 2009="" 02="" 11="" no-micropayments-maybe-charity-yes-freemium-news=""/>, some flavor of value-added access or interaction could build trust and therefore increase the value of the journalism to the reader.

PS. http://www.kachingle.com/ seems to be an attempt to track consumption. It's not automated, since users have to click once as they visit each site or post.

Re: What about Sy Hersh? (Scripting News)

Josh Young — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:49:46 -0000

I think Hersh should find 1000 people willing to pay $1000 year--not for his writing, which he should publish freely, but for membership in a club. It would be the Hersh Club, whose members could ask him questions and discuss his reporting with him.

This idea isn't new. Benefactors of a museum sometimes get special access to the art in after-hours tours given by the curator. They get to have a glass of wine and ask special questions as their whims dictate. Members of the Hersh Club might enjoy the same. Maybe there could be something like a private listserv or a friendfeed room. Maybe there would be occasional meetups around the country.

Now, he couldn't share all of his reporting, since it's often secret and a group of 1000 people is too big to trust fully. But he could share a lot of it and answer follow-up questions. He could also release some essay just to the members. Some of them would pass it on to friends, but that might be okay much of the time. They would just be paying to hear the word sooner.

Hersh could also turn around and ask for help. His members would be there to support him, after all. I'd bet that more than a few would be honored. After a while, members of the club would develop their own community. They'd talk back and forth. They'd tease out problems and conceive of solutions. They'd have great questions, tips, and leads.

Of course, 1000 x 1000 is a lot of money. Maybe Hersh wouldn't be that popular, or maybe 1000 people is too many for a community of this kind. But he might be able to find 250 people willing to pay even more. The market would work it out--but only if there were sufficient transparency. Members of his club would have to disclose their identities, so he could avoid those who might cause the rest of us to question the integrity of his work.

Re: How will we get our news? (Scripting News)

Josh Young — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:52:40 -0000

I think there's lots of room for some people to make money from their writing, not just because of their writing. I think users of news will pay creators of news. But not for their writing. For the words themselves, there's no price but free, for most writers most of the time.

A select few readers might pay for special access to and interaction with their favorite journalists. That interaction builds trust, and my sense is that trust between journalist and reader is a potentially great place to monetize real-live human benefits above and those contained in just the words. In a post recommended by @jayrosen_nyu, I explain it all here, from the ground up:

http://networkednews.wordpr...

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

Josh Young — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:38:32 -0000

I agree that new pathways will develop. All I'm saying is that google only has certain tools and can therefore build only certain kinds of pathways. Those pathways might or might not be the best pathways, however, and we should think about why we care about the news in order to imagine more useful possible pathways. Once we have more useful pathways in mind, we should think about new kinds of tools for building them.

Re: Avoiding The Big Yellow Taxi Moment

Josh Young — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:30:22 -0000

But the fact that bloggers will become experts at knowing where the credible experts are is far from enough. In Rick and Fred's words, that doesn't scale for the reader.

How am I supposed to know that Doc's blog is the place to go for the scoop on santa barbara fires? A search for "santa barbara fires" might naturally enough turn up Doc's blog (in fact, it's number 4). But it might not--much of Doc's google juice comes from his leadership on VRM, after all. It's an architecture problem, and search and hyperlinks and pagerank probably aren't robust enough for the news.

For one, search is a pretty limited method for content discovery in which we can only find what we already know we're looking for.

For two, we care about the news for so many other reasons. We're more likely to trust something if our friend wrote it or read and likes it or if some stranger who likes what we like likes it. We're more likely to read something if we know for sure that it mentions people we care about. We're more likely to care about something if it happened one mile away than if it happened one hundred miles away. We're more likely to be interested if it fits some general topic traditional indexing might miss because that topic latent within the text, not explicitly mentioned. We're more likely to read something if the thing we read before it doesn't require us to travel to an entirely new web page or service (which is to say that aggregators and rss are convenient). I could go on and on, but the point is that the news is its own thing that requires new tools.

We need startups that can envision the architecture that fits the way we want to read the news--and build services that can create, collect, and scale the data to populate that architecture.

Re: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/10/hacker-news-tec.html

Josh Young — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:55:09 -0000

How does Gabe's voice shine through Techmeme? How might it be different if someone else built it?

Re: Monetizing Internet Radio With Music

Josh Young — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:52:42 -0000

I think this is brilliant. We forget all too quickly that good advertising fits its context. Magazines ads aren't alluring photo spreads for nothing. Movie previews aren't five minutes long for nothing. Search ads aren't text-based for nothing. And so on. So set aside for a moment the the question of who would sponsor a 'paid song.' Instead, consider that listener is far more likely to listen to that paid song than they are to the yelling and screaming of some car dealership owner.

Re: Where To Go For Inspiration?

Josh Young — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:14:58 -0000

That's not really fair. An RSS reader crowds out the unknown (delicious unknown unknowns, actually, a la Rummy) only insofar as one's unwilling to click out of it. Meantime, an RSS reader is a fantastically efficient tool for absorbing the known (known unknowns, hopefully).

Re: louisgray.com: RSSMeme is the Authority on Google Reader Sharing Notes

Josh Young — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:58:25 -0000

Just a quick note: An average of 1.44 notes per story doesn't imply that, if a story gets one note, it has a 44 percent chance of getting a second. In fact, that chance is probably lower--since the average is probably dragged up by stories with more than two posts.

Re: Making My Personal Health Record Public

Josh Young — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:51:58 -0000

http://www.washingtonmonthl...

"If the 45 million uninsured Americans could be transitioned into a VA-style system, they would literally be getting the best care anywhere."

Re: Three Reasons To Use Disqus

Josh Young — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:09:56 -0000

From google reader:

Let me underline a sentiment expressed by others: Disqus promotes conversations, and conversations promote community.

Disqus promotes conversations...
(1) by making it easier to comment at all (via email and, as admirably suggested above, IM),
(2) by making it easier to target your reply (via threading, which shifts a blog's comments from a linear structure to a tree and gets a step closer to the graph-structure of the blogosphere's and real life's conversations), and
(3) by making it easier to trust the judgment of a commenter (via shared profiles that expose identity and past behavior).

My suggestion echoes Jason Goldberg's. What about social networks? How can we use your platform for our conversations while not having to trust you to play nice (you are great, I'm sure, but what about your acquirer?).