Stock Pigeons

Posted on 19 August 2011 by Erik Hare | 10 Comments

Stock markets around the world react to every news report like pigeons in a park. Huddled together in one strutting mass they move slowly around, clockwise, until the smallest cue strikes them. Suddenly, there is a small panic and the flock races counter-clockwise in a feathered flurry. They stop, and then the heads all bob clockwise again for a moment. After a few scratching moments a blind panic sets in and boom! Counter-clockwise with a few desperate flaps of wings.

You may think that pigeons are not rational enough to run a financial system. But if you want to find something in the news to explain the market’s behavior, you might as well consult the mooching birds at the nearest park. Everything that stock markets are reacting to has been in the news for a very long time – they suddenly decided, for their own reasons, to start taking it seriously.

As today starts, the movement is staying very counter-clockwise. The pigeons seem to have a purpose.

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People’s Voice

Posted on 17 August 2011 by Erik Hare | 17 Comments

What makes a successful blog? As a place where reader and writer come together and a connection sparks, interaction between people generally defines success for a blog. When a stable community forms there’s definitely blogging gold.

Conventional wisdom insists there are only certain ways to achieve this. Short snippets of text, lots of photos, links, techno talk, and highly personal content are supposed to be How It’s Done™. But a quick glance at Minnesota based blogs shows that these “rules” are consistently broken among those with the highest interaction. Somewhere in here is a definition of quality – or at least relevance to reader’s lives – that is not exactly what many blogging mavens would have you believe.

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Fear the Dragon?

Posted on 15 August 2011 by Erik Hare | 26 Comments

The casual joke turns on China knocking on our door in the middle of the night on a repo call. Like a lot of jokes it’s a way of laughing off a genuine fear – that they US is slowly being owned by a nation that isn’t exactly friendly and we have no reason to trust. Paranoia sometimes sets in when people wonder why China would loan us all this money in the first place – has this been a plot all along?

A hard look at the Chinese Dragon shows that not only is there little to fear from them, they have far more reason to be afraid of us. And they’re pretty open about it, too.

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Awfully Artificial

Posted on 12 August 2011 by Erik Hare | 8 Comments

Words mean things, or so the saying goes. Unfortunately, the world changes so words have to change. That’s where it gets interesting.

English is an adaptable language that mutates easily. The problem is that language is useful for both communication and identity, so people sometimes deliberately use a word in a different way to show what group they belong to. There are also things that defy description.

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Value of Information

Posted on 10 August 2011 by Erik Hare | 10 Comments

When the NY Times announced it was installing a complex paywall plan in April 2011, most internet mavens predicted failure. Conventional wisdom has long told us that information is supposed to be free on the internet – despite the fact that this argument leads to the logical conclusion that the internet is literally worthless. Brushing that aside, the NY Times hoped to gain 300k subscribers in its first year and show that there is indeed a value to quality information, possibly making it distinct from information as a commodity.

It worked. In the first three months the NY Times achieved 224k subscribers directly, plus decent income in other areas that were not part of the standard they were to be judged by. People will indeed pay for news on the internet.

The implications of this are potentially vast if we can learn from this experiment.

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