Feb 15 - Remuneration

My favorite form of remuneration is definitely functionality. I use google because it not only does a great job delivering information, it does that by doing a great job parsing it. I can paste a package tracking number into that search bar and the only return will be a link to track my package, provide by some algorithm that google ran. I can type in the name of a drug and a short writeup on the substance will appear at the top of my page.

For the commercial side of things, freemium is definitely top dog. There are times where it suffers, especially in very social contexts (If you play this game for free, you get this equipment. If you pay, you get whatever you want!). However, the times it shines are fantastic.

The first example is from Pandora, the online radio service. They deliver a fantastic product, and generally are my first choice when it comes to music on the computer. But there are ads and limitations, which are understandable. However, you can pay about $30, and get the premium version of the site for a year - no ads, no listening limits, and more ability to skip songs. When I saw this, I jumped at the chance. Now I can put on pandora from my phone, and listen to it on an 8 hour drive with little to no interruption.

Now there is only a very small segment of the userbase that pays for their pandora subscription, but there are a lot of people who use it in general. If only 1% of a big number pays, you still end up with a big number. And here, the cost for the premium service can be far less than the benefit.

Feb 8 - Print vs Digital

The different costs that arise between print media and digital media are astounding and varied. the first one, obviously, is the literal cost - imagine you had to subscribe to a magazine for every blog you read, or buy a newspaper to read an article. The amount of media you consume would instantly collapse. If each thing cost more than they do now, the benefit would be reduced considerably.

The cause of this is the cost of production, just like with the costs of books before Gutenberg's invention. Every copy of a magazine has to be written, arranged, printed, and shipped all over the country. There are hundreds of people involved with this, not counting the actual shipping. No wonder those things cost three bucks at newstands! Newspapers are the same way - only it's every night that it happens.

So when you work in a medium that has incredibly small costs of production, like this blog, you end up with a huge amount of content. Since the only thing I'm spending is my time, there's no huge financial reason that I shouldn't produce every minute of the day. So how do you sift through this?

Thankfully, a major feature of the internet is its social aspects. If it weren't for the retweet feature on twitter, we'd only ever follow people we know. If it weren't for aggregator sites linking to informative blogs, we'd never read those. And if we never read those first posts, how are we supposed to visit a site enough for it to make any money? Where would we be then?

Social tools and Bargains - Feb 1

In his chapter on the use of social tools, Shirky addresses several problems I had envisioned in regards to starting any sort of relatively social thing. Everything from a restaurant to a manufacturer must at some point address the issues of adaption, and go through the process of moving from no users to many. The paradox was one notable thing I had seen - how do you go from no users to many users, when users show up because others are already there?

The way he lays out the solution to this, with the Bargain, was one that I had considered, but doubted. Giving people the tools they want to get something done is great, but the issue is when part of that tool is a social environment. Sites like facebook had an easy time of this - by serving a small group in a physically tight-knit location, and giving them a tool that they had longed for but never received, Mark Zuckerberg became the king of campus. The rapid adoption of his site, combined with close physical and social proximity to other campuses meant that there was demand for his extant tool long before it was offered them. It wasn't long before every college had a facebook, and then it was opened to the world.

Something like twitter, though, had a more lopsided adoption path. So far as I can see, it started out with nothing, and then gained some users, and the main tool it offered was being able to update and be updated by numerous people, via text message. After a while, the accessibility and relative anonymity led to organizations, especially television networks, using it to both update and get opinions from users. Suddenly, the amount of coverage that twitter was getting skyrocketed - the word went from some thing people had heard about once, to something people were hearing mentioned a bunch. This meant that more people were joining it, and then connecting with each other, and community was born.