Recently in Blogging and Computers Category

Unix weenies everywhere will be partying like it's 1234567890 this Friday.

That's because, at precisely 3:31:30 p.m. Pacific time on February 13, 2009, the 10-digit "epoch time" clock used by most Unix computers will display all ten decimal digits in sequence. (That's 6:31:30 Eastern, or 23:31:30 UTC.)

King Banaian gets it. Responding to Rodrik's discussion starter, he writes,

Because I read more now, I think research is improved too.

I'll second that. And...

I worry about the lemons problem only insofar as one thinks econoblogging is about spreading the word of what's on the cutting edge of economics research or the policy debates. I have never concerned myself with the former, and as to the latter, I'm not terribly convinced that the best policy analysis comes from the economists with the longest c.v.'s. Again, that might be about where I'm from and what I do, a personal bias.

Since I, like Banaian, am on the faculty of a "Non-Flagship State U" we share a similar perspective. I agree that excellent policy analysis can come from economists without a long c.v. So if you can't judge a blog's quality relative to the market solely on the basis of the academic prestige of the author or his/her institution, does that lead to a breakdown of the market? No. Links are the currency of the realm here, and they are the way that information gets passed along. Suppose a brand new blog reader drops in on the economic corner of the blogosphere tonight. After how many minutes of clicking around will he or she figure out who the heavy hitters are? It probably wouldn't take long to get the lay of the land. A lot of those readers will never pick up a copy of the American Economic Review, much less Econometrica. And yet, they will figure out whose blogs are worth reading (and probably figure out who's got the best academic pedigrees as well). Whether their list of favorites would put their c.v.'s in rank order or not, well... de gustibus non est disputandum.

The blogosphere, even just the economics corner, is a big place with room for many styles and approaches. Rodrik seems to have come around on the question that kicked off this whole discussion as well. We'll gladly give him a mulligan on this one. In the world of blogging, that happens, and that's one of the things that makes all this interesting...and valuable.

Dani Rodrik notes Greg Mankiw's recent post announcing the end of comments on his blog and wonders, "Is the econ-blogosphere sustainable?"

At this rate, in any case?

Two things happened in the last twenty-four hours which made me wonder if some of the best economics blogs may be on their way out. First, an economist with a very high-quality blog told me that he was not sure if he had made the right decision by starting it. He said he worried about coming up with new content on a daily basis, and that he may run out of energy at some point. Then, Greg Mankiw declares that he is too busy to be reading and filtering all the comments he gets on his site and turns off the comments section. In a long post, he says the whole blog thing is taking too much of his time, and intimates that he may not be doing this for ever.

So if economists with high opportunity costs of time start to get out, shall we have a lemons problem on our hands? Will eventually the only prolific bloggers remain the ones that are not worth reading?

It is ironic that this post comes in a rather slow period in my own blogging. My excuse? Working on getting a conference paper out. Not to mention the fact that conferences aside, as late October rolls around a lot of us in the academic community find ourselves in a pretty busy time. It's what I call the rhythm of the semester. In my case, a lot more is hitting right now than would be usual even for late October. Opportunity cost, baby!

But to call this a "lemons" problem is to imply that there is some information asymmetry in the market. In other words, when there are a lot of blogs out there, it is harder for people to tell which ones are the "good" ones and which ones are the lemons. Unable to command a price to cover their opportunity cost, the "good" bloggers exit and you're left with lemons.

Nah.

Finding a good blog is a lot easier than finding a good used car, and the commitment factor is a lot less of an issue. If you buy a lemon used car you're stuck. If you find you're reading a sub-par blog, you can move on. Information is passed in the form of links that tie us all together. Yes, there can be a bit of an echo chamber in some corners, but particularly in the economics wing of the blogosphere there is also a lot of cross-traffic between writers of different ideological persuasions. I mean, I comment at Angry Bear once in a while. They haven't kicked me out yet. My comments and their responses there and here build a stock of information about our blogs that makes it way around the network of readers. That helps people make decisions about who to read. So while I wouldn't say that the econ-blogosphere is a picture of a perfect market of ideas, it's got a lot of things going for it. I don't think the lemons issue is much of a problem.

I have a feeling that the stable long run equilibrium will have some of the better blogs that feature mostly economics and less of the daily political bloodsport will post better items less frequently. Also, blogs by academics will be subject to bursts of activity and periods of relative quiet. Readers who become familiar with that rhythm will accept it the same way that TV viewers are accustomed to sweeps week and summer reruns.

In other words, the death of the econ-blogosphere has been greatly exaggerated. It seems much more likely to me that the medium is simply entering another stage in its development.

James Hamilton (Econbrowser) did it for his blog. So here goes. (TouchGraph Google Browser)

Click the image to make it larger.

Seems pretty accurate to me.

Happy 4th of July!

Bruce Bartlett on why blogging is like a seminar...only better.

Yep, in the grand accounting scheme of the intellectual debate, I'd say that blogging is on the plus side of the ledger.

Via Mark Thoma.

Cumulate Draw is a web based drawing application that looks very promising. One drawback appears to be that you can't insert text just anywhere in your drawing. You have to create a box for it and set the borders and transparency. No big deal once you get used to it. Anyway, I think it could come in quite handy for those "quickie" graphs to put on exams and such.

Hat tip to Newmark's Door

Kash Mansori has a new blog... The Street Light.

I've added it to my feed reader already.

BlogNetBiz is an interesting addition to the blogosphere. In addition to the usual aggregator function, the site keeps track of the most active blogs and most active comments sections. Sort of a real time ranking system. Check it out.

Hat tip: EclectEcon

Gabriel Mihalache has a blog called Economic Investigations that you might want to check out. He is a self-confessed "neoclassical cowboy" who spent the summer reading David Romer's Advanced Macroeconomics and everything he could find by Robert Lucas. I think students might particularly like his blog because he comes at it from the point of view of someone who, well..., spent the summer reading Romer and Lucas. In other words, he's brimming with enthusiasm and ideas. Some of his posts would be good fodder for grad student discussions. Take a look!

The Economist asks the question, but doesn't hit on any very satisfactory answers. New Economist links to the article and points us back to Brad DeLong's idea of the Invisible College--which I think does a much better job of explaining the value of academic blogging, of which economic blogs are a healthy subset.

I did find one bit from the article worth mentioning, however.

With professors spending so much time blogging for no payment, universities might wonder whether this detracts from their value. Although there is no evidence of a direct link between blogging and publishing productivity, a new study* by E. Han Kim and Adair Morse, of the University of Michigan, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, shows that the internet's ability to spread knowledge beyond university classrooms has diminished the competitive edge that elite schools once held.

...

* “Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge?” by E. Han Kim, Adair Morse and Luigi Zingales. NBER working paper 12245, May 2006.

I think that is true. A person can have access to the insight of a Brad DeLong or a Greg Mankiw anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. That means that my students at Western Illinois University can discuss what DeLong and Mankiw happen to be talking about that day. That didn't happen when I was in college. For a professor, the internet is a professional lifeline. Being a blogger connects you to the larger world in a way that is hard to define. My site statistics show hits coming in from all over the world. I may not have as many active commenters as the major sites, but comments are of generally high quality. There is a demand for what we do, and we get something in return, even if it is not measured in dollars and cents (or pounds or euros). As a professor, blogging about economics allows you to participate in conversations about policy and theory that used to happen only occasionally at conferences or in the faculty lounges of the "elite" schools. That is not to diminish the "elites". Any place where you can have a couple of Nobel laureates and someone like DeLong or Mankiw congregate in a hallway is still going to retain a prominent standing. But it is not in their interest to keep that hallway conversation to themselves. They want to influence the public debate. They want the immediacy that blogging provides. The ideas flow more freely. The invisible college grows.

Furthermore, blogging forces one to sit down and write. It disciplines a person to think about voice, audience, clarity, style, etc. It keeps you sharp intellecutally by reading everything that comes your way in your fields of interest. My publication record has not suffered as a result of blogging. If anything, I write more and think more clearly. It is also a good source of ideas for teaching and research. As the medium matures and as I mature as a practitioner, I expect that things will get even better. The economist as blogger is a phenomenon that is here to stay.

Happy 30th birthday, Apple! (April 1, actually.) In celebration of the milestone, Wired has a special report.

This will bring back memories. How many of those interfaces did you use? (I've used all of them except Lisa.)

I'm looking forward to seeing "Every Apple Ever Made," a collection of 240 images that Wired will post on Thursday.

If you haven't checked out his blog, do so. Vote for him by clicking over to this site.

John Palmer is on the economics faculty at the University of Western Ontario.

My ISP just upgraded my connection. I mean, they just upgraded it. The change took place while I was connected, just minutes ago. All of a sudden I was redirected to their homepage and told to update my configuration. The difference in speed was noticeable, not that it was slow before. And as is typical (at least in my experience) with service upgrades in the broadband world, the price remains the same.

I guess you'd call that a productivity shock! And it was a bit of a shock to have my browsing interrupted with a message that I'm about to get a boost in speed. Has that ever happened to you... while you're on-line?

That way, they could commiserate with the folks down there about how much resentment a successful company faces.

Ok, I jest, but before you laugh it off, read this (NY Times).

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23 - For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.

...

"I've definitely been picking up on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."

Like make a lot of cool stuff and give it away.

For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft's operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.

I don't want to repeat the whole article, and there is much more than I have excerpted here, so do read it all. For my part, Google seems to be doing a lot of things right. Fears of them taking over the computer world are probably blown out of proportion. Other good ideas will spring from the fertile ground of Silicon Valley. After all, it wasn't long ago when folks might have laughed at Google for thinking they could be a threat to Microsoft. Which brings me to one more good quote from the article.

"When I meet with venture capitalists, or if I'm engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with someone, inevitably the question is, 'Why couldn't Google do what you're doing?' " said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly.

"The answer is, 'They could, and they're probably thinking about it, but they can't do everything and do it well,' " Mr. Donato said. "Or at least I'm hoping they can't."

Go get 'em, Mr. Donato.

Capitalism. Ain't it grand?

Another link from Newmark's Door. (ABC News)

The reason for asking that question is the announcement this week by blog tracker Technorati (a great site, by the way, for continuously following the state of the Zeitgeist), in its annual State of the Blogosphere report that the number of blogs in the world has jumped from 7.5 million in March to 14.2 million today.

In other words, in appears the blogosphere is doubling in size every five months. Or even more staggering -- a new blog is being created out there somewhere every second.

In the time it took just to read that excerpt 10 blogs were created. Now go read the whole thing while a couple hundred get started.

That is amazing, of course. But the fact is that many blogs fizzle out after a few months, weeks, or days. Only a relative handful of that 14 million are updated daily or even semi-daily (as in the title of Brad DeLong's blog). Also a relative few are worth reading. The interesection of those two sets is nonempty, but certainly less than their union.

Among economics blogs, the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown of the best. Our friend Mark Thoma even gets quoted:

"On a professional level, I've been making contacts that I would have never made before," says Mark Thoma, associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Mr. Thoma is also a self-described left-of-center Democrat and author of economistsview.typepad.com.

Indeed. I can say the same.

I did, and that allows me to proudly say...

The results page was down due to heavy traffic. I'll have to check it later.

One study thinks so.

Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.

Pew also found that 22 percent of e-mail users say they are spending less time on e-mail because of spam, down from 29 percent last year. In 2003, it was 25 percent.

No confidence intervals, so I don't know just how much of a difference this really indicates. Obviously they think it's significant.

"This shows some level of tolerance that people are manifesting," said Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew and the study's author. "Maybe it's they're getting used to it. Maybe it's like other annoying things in life - air pollution, traffic - they are just learning to live with it."

And then there's this,

Pornographic spam is on the decline, replaced by fraudulent "phishing" scams aimed at stealing bank passwords and other sensitive information, the study finds.

Maybe people just started ignoring the pornographic spam. Since the providers only get revenue if the spam actually gets results (cliking on the links, visiting their site, etc.), the best way to discourage them is to just ignore them. The cost of spamming is not zero, but it is low. So I'm a little surprised that they are giving up. (Surprised, but certainly happy.)

The "phishing" is a different thing altogether. These are attempts to defraud people and should be dealt with as such.

You've heard it a million times, but it bears repeating. Don't ever give out your passwords or account numbers in response to an e-mail. No reputable company will ever ask for them that way.

Unfortunately, the potential profit (or plunder) for phishing spammers might be better than it is for the pornography spammers. They might prove harder to get rid of. But if we all just ignore them... maybe. Just hit "delete".

Looking for a newspaper feed? Check this out. There's more on the site than just the feed links, very interesting stuff.

Links to individual posts were cutting off the titles. I have fixed the problem. Link to individual posts to your heart's content!

Picture sharing, apparently.

Reporting from Philadelphia this weekend, the site of the annual meeting of economists this year. Not as nice weatherwise as San Diego last year, but a nice city nonetheless.

Flying out today, I had only about 40 minutes to make my connection in Minneapolis. The flight from Peoria was delayed almost an hour. The flight from MSP to PHL was delayed about 30 minutes. You do the math. And MSP is, well, sort of spread out all over the place. Seriously, the journey from gate B10 to D6 might be measured in miles. But after running through the airport and dodging obstacles in a manner reminiscent of O.J. Simpson in his better days, I did make it.

To all those on my flight who never thought I'd make the connection, the guy in 9-D made it. I'm here.

Oh, and in case you've never tried it, checking in and getting your boarding passes on-line just might be the best thing since sliced bread.

Time to catch up on the news I missed while I was at 33,000 feet.

So Jon Stewart goes on CNN and rips the hosts. OK. But that's not the big story. The New York Times tells how the incident became instant fodder for the blogosphere. The point is that CNN missed an opportunity to promote themselves by giving away free downloads of the video from the program.

"What's fascinating about the Jon Stewart takedown of 'Crossfire' is not just what he said, but how his message got distributed," Jarvis wrote. "The really stupid thing is that CNN didn't do this themselves: 'Hey, we had a red-hot segment...you should watch; here, please, look at this free download because it will promote our (hosts) and our brand and our show and give us a little of that Stewart hip heat.' That's what CNN should have done. Instead, they'll charge you to deliver a videotape (what's that?) the next day."

CNN media representatives said they were not surprised by the massive response, based on "Crossfire's" ratings and Stewart's own visibility. They had no comment on the company's policy of distributing its programming via mail, as opposed to online. The CNN.com site does offer short clips of some of its programs.

The new media community filled the void. The article continues...

In addition, Jarvis pointed out that the Internet serves as a sort of unofficial index of other media outlets, giving people the ability to access almost any report transmitted on television, radio or in print news.

"Welcome to the future of TV!," Jarvis wrote. "In old TV, a moment like this came, and if you missed it, you missed it. Tough luck. In new TV, you don't need to worry about watching it live--live is so yesterday--because thousands of peers will be keeping an eye out for you to let you know what you should watch, and they'll record it and distribute it."

That's the power of a network, and I'm not talking about CNN.

Alan Bjerga references your humble scribbler today. Thanks Alan!

He also references this article from CNET news that I found interesting as a new blogger. Apparently blogs are taking up a lot of bandwidth on the 'net. As a blogging neophyte, I was momentarily confused. Surely, all these blogs can't be generating that much traffic, can they?

Reading on, I got the point. It's all these RSS feeds are the problem. All day long, these feeds are supplying "news aggregators" with blog entries and news articles from all over cyberspace. You log on to one of these aggregators and you can get all of the news to which you subscribe all in one place. It's as if you could subscribe to a bunch of newspapers, have the headlines all combined onto one sheet of paper in your mailbox every day, and you can scan all the headlines reading just the ones that you want. Cool, huh? Yes, very. But when a lot of people do it, it generates a lot of 'net traffic.

So the article is interesting, but I'm not panicking. The blog phenomenon is still pretty new. The technology for managing the RSS feeds is pretty rudimentary. Reading the article and knowing little else about RSS, I gather that the RSS protocol was designed without any regard to bandwidth constraints. (RSS actually stands for "really simple syndication".) Who would have thought that blogging would take off in such a big way? I think it is safe to predict that they'll develop a new protocol that uses the scarce resource more efficiently.

But if this blog phenomenon gets any bigger, they might want to hurry it up!