Freakonomics and Radiohead

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Interesting comment by Simon Goodley:

From this week, those wanting to listen to the boys’ next LP, In Rainbows, can pay as much or as little as they like for the album, which will be available to download on the band’s website.

It is a classic honour system, most famously described by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their bestseller Freakonomics (which inspired this stunt, some eggheads insist).

Because the Radiohead sale is being conducted online (where customers register) the whole thing could end up telling us quite a lot about Radiohead fans.

Similarly, in Levitt and Dubner’s work, an entrepreneur who delivers bagels to companies decides that, rather than hanging around and waiting for each customer to pay him in turn, he will simply leave behind a cash box and a note asking them to leave what they owe.

Amazingly, the sharks in America’s offices didn’t bankrupt him after a week and payment rates consistently hovered around 90pc. Meanwhile, his accounts unearthed some fascinating trends…

Comment dross

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I see that the Telegraph has made the same mistake as the Guardian in allowing people to post comments under assumed names. Here, for example, is ‘Lickyalips’ responding to an opinion piece about Gordon Brown and a petition on the Downing Street website:

Cameron should have responded by telling the deep-fried McMars Bar that people are not interested in the phony Downing Street petitions website after the government ignored 1.8 million signatures against the road-pricing scheme, which is going ahead regardless.

That would have put the sporran-faced gobshite in his place.

As the man said, if you set up a cockpit, people will fight.

Wiki wars

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From the Telegraph…

Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle where in previous years it was flood, and the discussion pages are increasingly filled with arguments and cryptic references to policy documents. The rise of the deletionists is threatening the hitherto peaceful growth of the world’s most popular information source.

Even though anyone can edit all but the most controversial pages, the English-language Wikipedia is governed by a group of a little over 1,000 administrators drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic editors. Only they have the power to finally delete an article or bring it back from the dead.

The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists…

Google now accounts for half of all web searches

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From the Telegraph…

Google was used for over half of the world’s 61 billion internet searches in the month of August, according to a report.

The US search engine powered 31 billion queries during the month, say the web analysts comScore.

Google sites recorded 37 bn searches in August

In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites.

Google-owned video-sharing phenomenon YouTube scored 5 billion searches in August.

Second on the list was Yahoo!, another US-based search engine, which was a long way behind Google with 8.5 billion searches recorded across the month.

Third was the Chinese search engine Baidu with 3.2 million searches, followed by all Microsoft sites, such as MSN, with 2.1 billion. Fifth was Korea’s NHN, with 2 billion.

ComScore’s Bob Ivins said: “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon.”

The report is billed as “the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity”.

It also revealed that the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.

Second was Europe with 210 million searchers making 18 billion searches, followed by North America, with 206 million making 16 billion searches.

The most underdeveloped area in terms of web searches was the Middle East-Africa region, with 30 million recording 2 billion searches…

Decline of the record industry, contd.

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From TechCrunch…

Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record industry.

According to reports, Madonna has signed a $120million deal with L.A. based concert promotion firm Live Nation to distribute three studio albums, promote concert tours, sell merchandise and license Madonna’s name.

Whilst the deal differs from Nine Inch Nails in that Madonna is not offering direct-to-public albums, Live Nation isn’t a record company. The deal shows that even for a world famous act, a record company is no longer required in the days of digital downloads and P2P music sharing.

The only real question now is how fast will the music industry model come tumbling down. When Radiohead led the way in offering their music directly to fans many predicted that the move was the beginning of the end; Madonna may well be the tipping point from where we will now see a flood of recording artists dumping record labels and where todays model will shortly become a footnote in Wikipedia.

Alcoholic nonsense

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From the dessert wine section of a restaurant menu last week…

Alasia Brachetto d’Acqui 6%

Delicious semi sparkling semi sweet pink quaffer, a must for all light desserts, light in alcohol but not in flavour, fantastic nonsense.

Just think: someone sits down with a blank sheet of paper, sucks his/her pencil and writes this stuff.