virtualeconomics

Life begins at fifty billion

The most recent trading in the secondary market valued (unlisted) Facebook at $50 billion - more than venerable sites such as eBay or Yahoo, and within sight of Amazon's c$80 billion. Since this latest valuation is little short of fifty times Facebook's estimated 2010 revenues of $1.1 billion, it raises the question of what has to be believed about Facebook's prospects for that valuation to make sense.

 A quick comparison of Facebook with its approximate peers - major consumer technology retailers, websites and especially social networks - shows a chasm between the value placed on the revenues of other companies versus pure social networks. (Revenues rather than profits are used throughout because profits at Facebook are unknown.) But the things we have to believe for a valuation of $50 billion make sense just aren't all that wild.

If you're going to criticise bloggers, probably best to check whether you are one

Another day, another extraordinary anti-Internet rant by The Australian. Last week the Editor in Chief threatened to sue a journalism commentator for reporting on the proceedings of a public conference (accurately, as it turns out from tapes that have since emerged of the conference). Then the editor of the media section apparently asked the police to investigate an #iamspartacus tweet threatening to blow up the paper, which anyone with even a passing interest in recent media news would have recognised as a parody of the Twitter Joke Trial. Today the paper's war on C21st media takes the form of a blog post complaining that blogging isn't proper journalism, neatly summarised by Jay Rosen as "journalism is ours, you can't have it".

Follow us on...

There's a couple of new pages regular readers might like to take a look at - a dedicated posts-only Twitterfeed (ideal if you want to just see blog posts on Twitter not every damned thing that pops into my head) and a Facebook page. The FB page is where I'm currently running the poll to see whether The Times is still considered the UK's paper of record now its website sits inaccessibly behind a paywall - if you haven't already, you can read the post here (or Roy Greenslade's take in the Guardian here) and vote here.

What's in a name? Free holidays, tickets, beer...

An American girl in Massachussets who happens to have the account name @theashes has had a fun few days. About a week ago her account was mistaken by a handful of cricket fans for the official news account for the England / Australia match.

Unimpressed, she wrote "This is not the account of the cricket match. Check profiles before you send mentions, it's incredibly annoying and rude," and then as the problem continued "I AM NOT A FREAKING CRICKET MATCH!!!".

The trouble with the end of privacy, geopolitics edition

Just as Facebook and ubiquitous CCTV spell the end of privacy for the individual, the latest Wikileaks revelations look like the end of privacy for governments. Unfortunately, social proof means that enforced openness is unlikely to be any healthier for governments than it has been for individuals.

While some individual privacy has been given up voluntarily (we publish our thoughts, our locations, our moods), some has been given up without much in the way of consent (in the UK we are watched by 4.2 million CCTV cameras, one for every 14 people). And while some government privacy has been given up ostensibly voluntarily, if grudgingly, (freedom of information legislation) some has simply been taken away (Wikileaks keeps publishing the United States' secret documents). Technology makes privacy hard to maintain and if three people can only keep a secret so long as two of them are dead, what chance had three million? One of the strangest aspects of this leak - which governments terrified of embarrassment continue to claim with almost charmingly blatant ulteriority puts lives and national security at risk - is that these "secrets" were already known to three million US government officials, "a diplomatic outreach", says Simon Jenkins, "that makes the British Empire look miniscule".

Entire population of the world killed inside a fortnight

Call of Duty: Black Ops launched three weeks ago on November 9th and immediately became the highest grossing media launch of all time, taking $650m in its first week. According to the stats that flash up in between games the current kill count is equal to 150% of the total global population, so it seems that it took the game's approximately three and a half million players just a fortnight to kill their way through the equivalent of the entire population of the world. They've also fired about 200 billion bullets. Jeffery MacCormack wonders what it says about us as a species, that the most successful media launch of all time has thus far wiped out the human race in its entirity.

(Photo: popculturegeek on Flickr)

Freedom of tweets - hopefully a solved problem

The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, says he will sue journalism commentator Julie Possetti for defamation after she tweeted the allegedly false claim that for political reasons he stifled debate on man-made climate change at the paper. The details of the story are at Crikey.

Jay Rosen asks "what newspaper has ever revealed itself to be such a threat to freedom of the press as The Australian?", and j-blogger Jonathon Oakes calls it "a ridiculous vanity suit", pointing to a recent pattern of The Australian squabbling with the internet. 

Happily, freedom of tweets is pretty much a solved problem, as we saw with the #iamspartacus response to the Twitter Joke Trial. And while I can't quite claim to be going first, since blogger Syd Walker has already reproduced the allegedly defamatory tweet on her blog, I'll happily take the honour of going second.

Is the Times still the UK's newspaper of record?

 Since the Times swept its website behind a paywall, its content is almost unique amongst UK newspapers in being inaccessible to the general public - only a relative handful of print and online subscribers can now read what appears therein. Clay Shirky says it is now a newsletter. Emily Bell says that it "conceivably has outlived its editorial purpose as a lever of influence." And yet we continue to list it as the UK's primary newspaper of record. I do not believe it should be any longer so regarded, and have knocked up a poll to assess the matter - click here if you'd like to vote.

Ignoring the white bear in the room - they already know we only vote against them

Two days after the Whitehall kettle and the police are already sounding the warnings for "a new era of unrest". Quite apart from the obviousness of the police agenda (new unrest, new license to beat up protestors) the surprise for me is the rarity with which people take to the streets.

"Don't vote, the government might get in" goes the old saw. There is, as ever, much truth behind the doggerrel. The thing is, all the parties know that we only vote to get them out. They know that we don't want them governing us. And we can tell this from the simple evidence of what they spend their money at election time convincing us to do.

Probably looks, then

 
From today's Mailonline - "would you rather be known for your brains or your looks?"...with the options "yes" or "no". Better still, at time of writing 69% of people had opted for "yes", 31% for "no". (Via NadiaKnows)