I love Amazon.com.
Why?
I buy a lot of things from Amazon, but mostly music cd’s. There are three reasons for this:
1. Subscription shipping. With Amazon Prime “all you can eat” express shipping for $79/year, I never have to worry about shipping costs. I don’t hesitate when purchasing something, even if it is a small order, because I know shipping costs are already covered.
2. Long tail product offering. The music that I listen to and purchase isn’t always in the mainstream, so it’s difficult to find. I usually can’t find it in Best Buy or other physical retailer, nor even on iTunes. But it is nearly always on Amazon, which is great. It’s only rarely that I am looking for something that I can’t find.
3. Personalized recommendations. I have purchased so much music from Amazon that my preference profile is very rich. So when they recommend via e-mail or on their site that I purchase an artist’s album that I haven’t heard of, I’ll check it out. I often buy it – and like it. The service’s recommendations now are so spot on, that I truly trust it. That’s a powerful thing to say: that I, as a consumer, trust that when a company says I should buy something from them, I do.
I bring up the case of Amazon example as just one example of where the consumption of media is headed. It will become personalized: it’s delivered just for me and no other consumer. And it will be predictive. It’s not just about giving me what I want and only when I want it, but also telling me what I want before I know that I even want it. Media should know where to find me; I shouldn’t have to know where to find it.
So it’s more than just personalized content. I think the power of personalization resides in telling me what I should be looking for. Amazon is already headed in that direction and is doing a great job. There are other examples, too, in the RSS world that I’ll touch upon in subsequent posts.

Traditional radio is really feeling the heat these days. Increased digital downloads (legal and illegal), satellite radio usage, and IP radio alternatives (including podcasting) are consuming a larger share of people’s music listening time. Radio is slowly losing the power that it once had, as evidenced by the following ad that I found while flipping through a magazine:

“Tons of artists. Zillions of songs. And oh yeah, it’s free. Radio. Brought to you by America’s 13,000 local radio stations that play artists like these every day.”

Are ads like these going to have the same rejuvenating effect on the industry as the “Got Milk?” ads did for its own? I hardly think so. It appears to me more like a desperate attempt to grasp whatever still remains before these digital technologies facilitate change in a significant way.

With yesterday’s news that Friendster is laying off people and that the company’s CEO will be leaving in a few weeks, it’s apparent that some of the first generation social networking sites are hitting a few bumps in the road. Bill Burnham wrote about this problem in a great post a few weeks ago,

“You see, despite all the hype about social networking, it has now become readily apparent that social networking is not an application in and of itself, but rather a by-product of other activities.”

In other words, there needs to be a reason why people are getting connected. Jeff Clavier continues along that mode of thinking,

“The first generation of social networking sites (Friendster, Tribe, ZeroDegrees, Orkut, …) have all gone through ups and downs (more downs) as they were pioneering in this new space – and not really figuring out a business model for themselves, besides advertising. Social networking is now an integral part of the fabric of Internet applications, but offers limited value in its own right – with a very quick decay of one’s interest.”

I would argue that in addition to possessing a reason d’etre, successful social networking companies will more closely integrate the revenue model into the functionality of the service. It’s not just about throwing up some advertising. Take, for example, H3, which embeds the purpose of the network (locating job candidates) directly into the revenue stream (a bounty for a located candidate). I think that we’ll continue to see closer alignment of the connections’ goals with the revenue derived from them.

We all know about search engine spam. Wikipedia defines it using the coined term “spamdexing” as,

“the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve.”

To combat the numerous techniques used to spam search sties (like keyword stuffing, invisible text, cloaking, etc.), the engines have deployed a variety of algorithms to determine ranking relevancy. (In a post earlier this month I talked about the fine line between search engine spam and content, arguing that different parties would disagree as to what is spam and what is actual content). Thus far, the major search engines have done a fairly (but not perfectly) good job at combating this problem, but it’s obviously a continuous battle.

Now enters the world of RSS and the Incremental Web. No longer is the position of a search result a function of its relevancy, but it is also a function of its timeliness. Consequently, search engine spammers have a new trick to play with.
For example, I’ve noticed as soon as I ping Technorati with a new blog post, a search for many of the keywords in that entry places my blog in the first result. As the day progresses, the blog entry moves down the list of results. I believe that spammers will begin to realize this “opportunity” to instantly have their pages placed at the top of the list results and exploit it.
Eventually the Feedsters and Technoratis of the world will determine algorithmic techniques to combat this problem, but I predict that there could be a bumpy transition period as spammers realize the power that’s here.
UPDATE: Since writing this entry, I’ve come across two great posts (here and here) from the hyku blog about spam moving to RSS and another with PubSub’s thoughts on the issue.

After the extended media blitz in the past few weeks, along with the recommendations from fellow bloggers like Seth Levine, I decided to pick up a copy of Levitt & Dubner’s “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.”
While I am almost certain that this book is going to become the over-hyped over-fashionable cocktail-conversation book-du-jour (think: Gladwell’s Tipping Point), it is well worth the read. Seth summarizes,

“The basic idea of Freakonomics is to use statistical analysis to explore relationships and answer some pretty interesting questions about our world (are swimming pools more dangerous than guns; why do drug dealers live with their mothers; how can we tell if sumo wrestlers cheat; etc).”

I was happy to read that Levitt & Dubner directly address (more articulately than I) the relationship between correlation and causation that I passionate wrote about in my post, “My Pet Peeve.”
Page 163 reads,

“A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause. After all, there are several ways in which two variables can be correlated. X can cause Y; Y can cause X; or it may be that some other factor is causing both X and Y. A regression alone can’t tell you whether it snows because it’s cold, whether it’s cold because it snows, or if the two just happen to go together.”

Of course, I would take issue with many of their arguments and conclusions. For example, they try to dispel the conventional wisdom that flying is safer that driving, “The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying is about equal. The two contraptions are equally likely to lead to death.” I ask: isn’t the more relevant metric the per-mile death rate? Afterall, there’s a reason that people fly – to get there faster.
But more importantly, one of their basic arguments is that so-called “experts” in a field (like real estate agents) are often incented to not necessarily present the full truth. And these “expert” authors here run into the same quandary. With strong financial motivations to sell more copies of the book, Levitt & Dubner are compelled to make wild claims, which they do: the decline in the national crime rate in the nineties was a consequence of Roe vs. Wade; parents’ actions have little effect on the outcome of a child. There potentially may be some evidence to support these extremely controversial claims, but we must remember that the motivation of these authors comes down to the same principals which they themselves argue – economics.