In addition to the gift economy, Chris Anderson of The Long Tail describes the three other business models in today’s ‘free’ economy.
Paid products subsidizing free products
Paying later subsidizing free now
Paying people subsidizing free people
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The Four Kinds of Free
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Fight Club’s 8 Rules to Live By
Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by.
At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment, so maybe what Tyler says can help the rest of us as well.
- “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- Again: “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”
- “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
- “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”
- “People do it everyday, they talk to themselves… they see themselves as they’d like to be, they don’t have the courage you have, to just run with it.”
- “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”
- “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
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10 Links for a Better Understanding of Today’s Financial Crisis
One of the few people I listen to on financial matters, Ramit Sethi, has produced a great list of 10 links to walk you through today’s financial crisis — and make you smarter than 99% of other people.
I would provide you with the 10 here, but it’s best to go to Ramit’s article for his comments on each.
The crux of the issue is something I allude to on occasion and is very simple: save more, spend as consciously as possible, and concentrate on asset allocation – not on timing the market.
For more learned advice from Ramit, I suggest watching his 3-minute video answering readers’ finance questions.
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The Negawatt Unit of Power
Seed Magazine highlights the word Negawatt:
\né-gə-wät\ n: A measure of the avoided use or the conservation of a unit of energy.
Wikipedia goes into more detail:
By investing to reduce electricity demand instead of investing to increase electricity generation capacity, this “virtual generation” method can supply growth of supply by improving the efficiency of existing electrical equipment rather than by building new power stations.
Energy consumers may also reduce energy consumption during peak, hours to “generate” negawatts – hypothetical tradeable units of saved energy.
A similar concept applies to energy, with potential consumers being rewarded for lowering consumption at any time, rather than just at peak times: this could then be labeled negajoules or negawatt-hours.
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Data Visualisation: Very Small Array
My latest RSS subscription: Very Small Array
Experts in data visualisation (I still can’t force myself to write that word with a ‘z’), each post is full of information and is beautifully presented. Even better, it’s all CC licensed.
Some of my recent favourites (some simple, all beautiful): Length of Weekly #1 Songs by Year, The World as Reported by The New York Times, My Love is a…, Missed Connections by Age, and the Breyers-Miggs Personality Types (CT, if you’re wondering).
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World Wide Words
Michael Quinion, the British etymologist, documents the meaning and derivation of words and phrases in the English language.
Covering etymology, grammar and neologisms (among others), my favourite aspect of World Wide Words (where he “writes on international English from a British viewpoint”) is the front page Sic! section highlighting common—yet amusing—errors:
Charlotte Metcalf’s food column in the Spectator for 13 September: “If anything, luxury food sales are rocketing and appear to be recession-proof. Mary Adams, buyer at Fortnum & Mason, says: ‘Grouse are literally flying off the counter.’”
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2001: A Google Search
In celebration of their 10th birthday, Google have temporarily opened up their 2001 index for searching.
Some interesting searches: 9/11, YouTube, iPod, Ubuntu, flickr.
via Link Banana
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Flickr Community Building
Like David, I had seen many people linking to this article profiling Flickr’s Director of Community, Heather Champ, and was unsure why. Once I read it, however, I found it an engaging look at the intricacies of policing an online community.
At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image of our own. But in truth it’s more like a Photoshopped image — the nice parts accentuated, the inappropriate bits cropped away. So it goes with any online community, of course. Behavior must be moderated and a communal ethos must be preserved; Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony. So directors of community exist. And while the job of nurturing and policing any online realm would make for a fascinating study, I was particularly curious about how it worked at Flickr.
via Kottke
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Google Chrome? I’m Sticking with Firefox
A month has passed since the release of Google’s Chrome browser. Disregarding the fact that an official Linux port is still not available, there are two further reason why I’m sticking with Firefox:
- You can enable Chrome’s best features in Firefox.
- On testing beta releases (of IE, Firefox and Chrome), there was no stand-out candidate. The test criteria: startup and page-loading times; JavaScript and CSS performance; memory use.
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Obama, Science, and 61 Nobel Laureates
In an open letter to the American people, 61 Nobel Laureates are endorsing Barack Obama for President (pdf).
As the largest number of Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, surely this will have some influence over the undecided voters (then again, Kerry had 48 and we know what happened there).