Blogs

Moms obviously serve a very important role in the home, including influencing or being responsible for most of the important purchasing decisions in the home. I have yet to see any good social networks dedicated to supporting mothers at home. There are numerous vibrant forums all over the Internet but there don't seem to be any good actual social networks out there.

Has anyone come across any social networks for moms? Or alternatively what kind of features would a mom want in a social networking site just for moms?

While researching and fact finding for my upcoming book (titled Quantifying Openness) I came across a startling number of phenomena that were Pareto or Power law distributed (or Zipfian in discrete cases) throughout the Internet and social media circles. We often see averages or peaks cited as usage statistics or membership statistics for social networks. Rarely do organizations quantify their publicly available statistics in meaningful ways.

We can certainly point to many Pareto or power law distributed phenomenon in the "natural" world as well as those created by man. The business world is certainly no exception. In addition, many industries or markets see disruptive events that don't necessarily mediate a redistribution of wealth but trigger a redistribution. Inevitably, the distribution seems to often reflect a pareto style distribution. Is the banking industry any different? Was the recession the disruptive event that set the events in motion for a redistribution of wealth among the banking industry?

My recent knol examines relevant heuristics and cognitive biases in open systems on the Internet
How accurate or objective are product reviews and ratings? How well do public (online) conversations reflect the actual views of the participants? Do cognitive biases, selection biases and heuristics influence public interactions, reviews, ratings, conversations, etc. in open systems? To what degree? What can be done to reduce bias? This working paper represents a thought project style (i.e. non-experimental) exploration of these issues.

To read more, view the knol here: http://knol.google.com/k/dan-pothier/cognitive-bias-in-online-open-syste...

I recently came across Doc Searles' article over at Linux Journal entitled "EOF - The Google Exposure" in which he discusses; "Advertising is a bubble. If that’s a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that’s true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk. Let’s run down some evidence."

If you're interested in reading the article (I suggest you do) you can find it here:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/eof-google-exposure?page=0,0

This is a little off my normal topics, but I'd like to talk a bit about real estate prices today.

I've hypothesized before that the Internet generally creates a destructive paradigm for the business models it seeks to replace (e.g. instead of adding value it just cannibalizes existing models through price point competition). In the newspaper industry for example, you can replace a relatively large economic supply chain of loggers, transport trucks, pulp mills, paper mills, printing presses, delivery trucks, professional journalists, paper boys to deliver newspapers to hundreds of thousands of homes, etc with a couple of servers that can accomplish the same thing.

Social Media Marketers all over the Internet are drooling over themselves at Dell's claims that they made $3 million dollars in sales via Twitter all for $0 cost. They're using these stories as testimonials to convince big brands that social media marketing is right for them. Statements like "Twitter Earns Brands Millions - For Free" are typical of their claims.

Dan Ariely wrote in his book "Predictably Irrational" that people don't have an internal value meter and that we rarely choose things in absolute terms. His specific quote (regarding the subscription options available at the time for the Economist) was: