SAST Wingees

The real truth behind The Truth Laid Bear (TTLB) ecosystem

Ever since Jason Calacanis announced “The Blog 500” Challenge prize, an extensive debate is raging in the blogosphere about the blog popularity police.  Interestingly, N.Z. Bear, who runs TTLB, boasts about the TTLB system in the comments section of  Jason’s post making it seem like TTLB has the perfect solution to the problem. Somewhat coincidentally, about a month back, myself and Sibu started discussing the flaws in the TTLB ecosystem – we have been part of it for a few months now. Our pet peeve has been that TTLB shows zero incoming links for our blog but we actually have counted more than 15 incoming links (Technorati fares slightly better showing 3 incoming links, but that is another matter).  BTW, both TTLB and Technorati did not even respond to our problem reports on the above problem and its more than a few weeks since it was logged. So we decided to review the entire TTLB ecosystem of over 34,000 blogs to see how the other blogs got higher ranks. We evaluated several methods including writing a program to crawl the ecosystem lists and find patterns. Considering the time that would take, we decided to use a quick and dirty manual sampling method. Each of us, Sibu and myself, spent about 1 hour and were able to spot 115 entries (details in the attached MS Excel spreadsheet) which are corrupt for various reasons: 1. Suspended accounts.
2. Link rot (the linked to page does not exist anymore).
3. Parked domains leading to pages showing information on the domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions etc.).
4. Several entries linking to cleverly disguised marketing to peddle everything from Viagra to real estate to adult singles directories.
5. Some real companies like the Kissimmee Valley Authority (Wiggly Worms     #27174 ) and Sloan Petroleum (Slimy Molluscs    #19874) listed as blogs.
6. Sites like google.co.uk, hello.com (google’s web-based photo site) and even W3C.org are listed as blogs !!
7. Bush Cheney campaign blogs which are dead quite obviously. We split our sides when we spotted the entry Slimy Molluscs  #17480 . Its actually a discontinued blog which says “Goodbye Cruel Blogosphere”. Read  Om Malik complaining about Technorati.  He is actually complaining about tagging but his mention of spam blogs and more importantly his mention of lack of traffic coming to him from Technorati caught my attention. Om is one of the top bloggers and if he does not get traffic from Technorati who does? Overall it seems like something is wrong with the blog popularity police. I think Sam Cohen is correct, this whole ranking idea runs counter to the spirit of the blogosphere. Instead of figuring out Jason’s Blog 500  problem, we should instead figure out a way to bubble up the fantastic thoughts published by unknown bloggers. Otherwise, the A-list bloggers will become an extension of the MSM controlling what blog readers read by virtue of their power to bestow incoming links. References:
1. Clay Shirky uses Power Law distributions to explain why inquality of bloggers and consequently an A-list of bloggers is a given. Although it is an old article, it is a must read. 2. At the end of  the above article, Clay links to a Technorati page called “interesting newcomers list“. Its actually a rotten link ! Hopefully David Sifry is working on it! 3. David Sifry has some explanations on spam blogs and fake blogs in his state of the blogosphere series.  4. Michael Williams has written a post on this subject a few months ago. Note:
1. Given that the TTLB ecosystem rankings change everyday the data we collected may not still be accurate, but a similar sampling will yield similar results on any given day.
2. TTLB claims that it only counts incoming links over the past week. Even if that were true, the incoming links data in TTLB for our blog is still incorrect.  PSFK linked to us just a couple of days back.

A workable $100 PC may finally be arriving soon

I have become an official contributor to my favorite trendspotting site (thanks Piers). My first post for PSFK went online today. Check it out.

Salt on a magpie’s tail

A Swedish folk tale from Eldrbarry, worth reading to your kids (Via Priya Raju).

Putting Out to Open Source

Thanks to Sukumar for introducing  me to the concept of “putting-out system” of manufacturing. When I first started to research and read about putting-out systems, I never expected it to be an enormous topic with such wide ranging implications.

As mentioned in numerous articles and papers, the world of manufacturing started way back and originally it worked on a system where workers took the work home. Due to the technological advances and industrial revolution, factories began to emerge and became the primary work place for workers. Apart from the obvious changes to economy and society, I discovered a few not-so-popular impacts because of factories:

–         Commute: People started commuting to work.

–         Behavioural changes: Workers were now taught to be moral, obey orders, be disciplined and respect the next workers personal space.

–         Welfare changes : Workers who had a choice of leisure vs income now had almost no choice.

–         A plethora of regulations and laws have been introduced and continue to be introduced to govern manufacturing

Factories evolved as the primary place of work compared to the putting-out system primarily because of four reasons:

1. Physical restrictions: It is (almost) impossible to put an iron furnace or a large loom in your office room.
2. Cost of moving people Vs. cost of moving information.
3. The increased volume of production made the putting-out system infeasible
4. The need to monitor the manufacturing process more closely to ensure quality.

Let us look at these reasons in the modern context. The first reason is the primary one because of which factories  were born  and continue to get created and continue to exist. (i.e until we figure out to put robots and nano-robots there. Desktop Manufacturing may affect this. More on that later.)

As manufacturing in the first world countries moves to the higher end of the value chain, it is becoming more information-intensive, technology is having a major impact.  With the internet and wireless, the cost of information exchange has significantly reduced relative to the cost of commuting. It is obvious that jobs that require little direct human interaction can be done remotely and is happening in the form of telecommuting, offshoring and the open source movement.

The Open Source movement in particular is making the pendulum swing back to the putting out system of manufacturing away from the factory model atleast in the software world. In the putting-out model, the entrepreneur took the raw materials to the weavers, from door to door, and collected the finished cloth. Open Source development is another putting-out system where the raw material is the intellectual capital.

At the same time, it is still not possible to do all of the jobs completely remotely. Due to the fourth reason,  a human element is still in play in most of the jobs

Tanenbaum says in his Computer Networks book, ‘It is sometimes said that transportation and communication are having a race, and whichever wins will make the other obsolete’

Well, communication is winning for sure, but transportation is not loosing either. Related reading:

Joel Mokyr’s excellent paper on Rise & Fall of the Factory System

Comparing the old Dadni Loan Systems in India to putting-out

Sony’s PSP could finally be the Web Tablet that succeeds

For many years several companies have tried to introduce web tablets without much success. Meanwhile Sony has added web browser functionality to its popular PSP gaming device. Russell Beattie predicts that this may be the device that finally succeeds in the web tablet space.  He maybe onto something here. For one, it costs an affordable $250.00 and more importantly  it has a eminently more justifiable purpose of playing eye-popping games.  The web browser by many reviews seems to be pretty good (this IGN.com article seems to be the best review). For it to fulfill the promise of a web tablet, it must do a few more things like chat, IM, Skype..   Digging around a bit, the cottage industry that has sprung up around the PSP (much like the iPod) has many of these and more in the works: 1. IRC Chat here. The site also points to upcoming AIM features. 2. Discussion around the need for Skype for PSP here. I am sure Skype is listening. 3. Russell Beattie alludes to an iTunes linkup. His dream maybe coming true soon. A company called Mindola software has introduced PatioTunes  that can control iTunes from a WiFi-enabled PDA. Although it does not talk about the PSP yet, it could be coming pretty soon. Apple had better get its iPod Video act together quickly, for Sony is about to crack this market. References:
1. Om Malik comments on the Tapwave Zodiac’s demise and explains why such failures can happen. His 4th reason for failure is –  cramming too much functionality into the device! Sony seems to be doing that exact same thing with the PSP and looks set to succeed.