virtualeconomics

Oh what a lovely bubble!

LinkedIn doubled in the first day of its IPO, Facebook is heading to $100 billion before it even floats, higher education might be a bubble, silver had a stab at being a bubble, commodity prices have become uncoupled from demand and China is hoarding rare earth metals. But if you're looking for the perfect bubble, Bitcoin looks like a great bet.

If you don't already know what Bitcoin is, it will take several minutes of reading largely inpenetrable articles to find out. Here's Wikipedia. Here's an explanation from Tim Lee. Here's Tyler Cowen. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer virtual currency that's better, in various arguable ways, than other virtual currencies like Beenz or e-gold or Azeroth gold coins. A handful of technophiles accept it as payment. There's lots of ways to trade it. It's an internet currency that fulfils the standard criteria for being considered money and you can buy some right now, if you want.

A new role at Holidayextras

I'm very pleased to say that in a couple of months I'll be taking up a new position as Editor-in-Chief at Holidayextras.co.uk.

As well as looking after existing PR and SEO teams - something Holidayextras already does brilliantly, so it's a good place for me to learn more about that side of the content business - I'll be recruiting, training and managing new teams of freelance writers to cover the UK's major airports. (If you're interested in talking to me about that opportunity or know someone who would be, therefore, do get in touch - contact details are at the top of the page. I'm particularly keen to hear from writers I've worked with before, since you've already been through a lot of the relevant training. Writers who know their airports also eagerly sought.)

I left localpeople last November planning to take a year or so off to play with my twins. The Holidayextras opportunity was sufficiently interesting to drag me away from that break early. They're already doing a great job of exploiting a lucrative niche in one of the UK's largest online markets. The company consistently wins prizes for being not just a good place to work but one of the top 100 companies in the country. Most of all it's an opportunity to work with some excellent people do something I enjoy - building up new teams of writers and making content a measurably valuable part of the business rather than a cost centre.

I start on Monday July 18th, just six short days after the (very) long awaited latest volume of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire comes out, so I already know how I'll be spending the last few days of my year off - reading very quickly. I've got lots to look forward to in July.

In search of lost nostalgia

If I'm reading a book, I can remember what page I'm on. It's hardly a superpower or a talent, barely even worthy of being called a trick, but I find it a slightly useful propensity - reading just before I go to sleep I wake up, pick up the book and think "ah, I stopped at page one hundred and forty seven. About halfway down". It saves a little skimming, a little re-reading, the odd accidental spoiler. And while I know that technology as basic as a bookmark - for which read absolutely any scrap of paper that happens to be lying about - would do the same job, it amuses me to be able to do it.

When I first got a Kindle at the end of last October (a kind parting gift from my lovely colleagues at Northcliffe) there was a lot about it I liked. The thing I disliked about it - and I disliked it viscerally, almost as a personal affront - was that my my utterly trivial mental trick of remembering page numbers had been rendered even less useful than it was before. The Kindle knew what page I was on. I need never remember a page number again.

Startup100 riggers just Wronga

By now you'll have seen Mike Butcher's piece on TechCrunch about the results of last month's Startup100 awards. Wonga was voted the winner, but at the last minute Spotify was jobbed in to win the prize. So far so nefarious, but the worst bit is that the vote was only rigged because some of the people running the award are apparently too stupid to understand the benefits of short-term lending so don't want to be associated with it.

The folly of rigging your own awards ceremony has been sufficiently addressed by Mike (and it is telling that the Telegraph's reponse to this is basically to wash their hands of the whole affair, little more than "a big boy did it and ran away"). It is the apparent misapprehension of the organisers that Wonga is doing something disreputable that I wish to address, by looking at the basic economics of short-term lending and the small amount of research that has been done on this market.

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

Adapt by Tim Harford

Tim Harford's third book, Adapt, is much braver than his first two.

The Undercover Economist, his first book, leapt on the post-Freakonomics enthusiasm for popular economics and - alongside Steven Lansberg, Tyler Cowen and others - explained how we can all use economic principles to make sense of our everyday lives. It was clever, fun and accessible: a better introduction than most to demystifying economic theory and making it actually useful to the man complaining about ticket prices on the Clapham omnibus. The Logic of Life, his second, told us simply that logic underlies even our most seemingly absurd decisions. Tim's narrative, that people act rationally even when they seem not to, drew examples and theory from the field of behavioural economics to tell the reader what was again an ultimately comforting and familiar story that helped them make more sense of their own life.

Where The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life were reassuring, Adapt is confrontational.

Maybe Demand Media's CEO doesn't use Google

Google's latest update, Panda, was targeted specifically at content farms.

This isn't ambiguous or in any way contentious. Panda, named after a Google employee but also known as the farmer update, was explictly "designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful", and while the Panda announcement itself was reluctant to use the term "content farm" an earlier blog post by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer and co-signatory of the Panda announcement, stated that Google was targeting "“content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content". 

So when Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt recently told Kara Swisher that "I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either"...that was a very strange claim.

And we thought only Bill wanted to run a charity

Microsoft is buying Skype for c$8bn. Lucky eBay, which finally makes its money back. Lucky Zennström and Friis (again!). Lucky VCs and Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (yes, apparently). 

And poor Microsoft. $8bn to buy a platform that exists only because the traditional market is overpriced. Buying Skype is like buying Craigslist or buying PirateBay (or maybe buying YouTube) - gazing out over them thar interwebs and saying "wow, that thing's popular. Let's get us some of that and later we'll surely figure out how we can make it make money".

The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

Keeping the lizards out (reprise)

As the opportunity to vote for something rolls around once again, I only ask that you consider the following questions.

If you're going to vote for the LibDems, is it because you actually want them to govern, or merely want them to govern more than you want the Tories or the other alternatives? If you you're going to vote for AV, is it because you'd really like to be ruled by people who will be elected under that system, or because you hate that idea slightly less than being ruled by the people likely to be elected under FPTP? Are you, in any sense, being presented with an option that you positively want and endorse?

Every time you turn up and tick one of their boxes, you are legitimating the government. You are preserving the illusion that the goverment governs by the consent of the governed because it has a popular mandate expressed through the ballot box.

It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that legitimacy, if it is not something you wish to confer. It is not a waste of your vote to withhold that consent, if all you can think to do with it is submit to the lesser of several evils. The BNP will not really end up running the country, whatever you do or do not do. And if everyone did it; if no-one turned up to the polls; if the mandate and the legitimacy were withdrawn; then there would the opportunity for actual, meaningful political change.

I leave you, as always, with the definitive words on the subject by Douglas Adams from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.