http://www.econometa.com The economy of stuff about stuff Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:21:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Matt Mullenweg questions claims that OpenID is a workable spam blocking tool. Expanding on my comments there, I see at least three ways people are looking at using OpenID: (1) As a way to prove you own the URL associated with your blog comment. This is the original problem that OpenID ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/58 Eric Janszen's recent article notes the serial bubbles that have occurred since the 90's, and predicts that the only viable candidate for the next bubble is alternative energy. The argument that there will be another bubble seems pretty strong; but to me, the reasoning around how and why "the bubble ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/57 Again via Steve Hsu, a thought-provoking article on how to make easy money running a hedge fund. The basic idea is that a fund manager has a good shot at generating outsized returns over a limited time period by selling insurance against a low-probability event. The reason for the high return ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/56 Supplemented by Steve Hsu, a rant on how few people get the training to really understand distributions, which are increasingly important in everyday life. This reminds me of my foray into tagging, where I had to dust off my own understanding of distributions. On the one hand, the fact is that ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/55 We just launched a new PrefPass product that I'm pretty excited about. You can think of it as a universal login widget. It's some code that you paste onto your registration and login pages, letting users join your app without having to choose a password. Instead, they can use any ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/54 This is old news, but somehow I'd never come across this particular chart before. In a white paper on solar power, I came across the following graphic: This sheds new light on the stats regularly circulated about the growth of Internet advertising as a whole. Apparently, a fixed pot of money ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/53 I managed to stop by day two of the Internet Identity Workshop for a couple hours, and had some good conversations while seeing important specs come to life right there on the spot. Impressive stuff! I had really wanted to attend the day three session on "The Business of Identity" initiated ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/52 Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity have received a lot of attention, and for good reason; these laws encode properties that are very important to users and identity providers, and previous attempts at identity systems violating these laws have been rejected by these two groups. However, there's another important group whose ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/51 I noticed that I keep having the same conversation with people on fundraising. Understanding how ownership changes when a company raises money by issuing stock really is simple and straightforward. I think I've pinned down at least one issue that might make this stuff seem more complicated than it is. ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/50 Kevin Burton points out that given current ad monetization capabilities, CraigsList is leaving millions on the table every year. And Kevin says that it's "evil" to do so, since that money could be given to charity. I can see his reasoning: a way to do good is to make tons of ... http://www.econometa.com/archives/49