This post stems from today’s lecture on the Market for Lemons and my initial research for my paper. I’m interested in the effectiveness of modern recommendation engines, especially in the digital music market. Our discussion today came to the conclusion in that a simple market where buyers and sellers have imperfect or asymmetric information the […]

            Earlier today a friend of mine told me about a small argument he had with someone in a linguistics class about political correctness, its motivation and its effect on everyone.  From what I gather, the whole episode started with someone expressing displeasure with the ever-present influence of censorship that he/she feels limits the things […]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2007-03-26-alpha-mom_N.htm
 
Where there are networks there are trends and where there are “alpha mom’s” there are networks. “Alpha mom’s” are modern mom’s who work, have money to spend, and also want to be the best moms they can be without sacrificing their own identities, and they have become a major target for marketing. This article from […]

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html
http://www.amazon.com/Snipers-Shills-Sharks-Human-Behavior/dp/0691127131>
Princeton University Press has released a new book by Ken Stieglitz, a professor of computer science at Princeton. His book, “Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior” is being marketed as an introduction to auction theory in the form of a mass market book about eBay. The book’s introduction, available on Amazon.com, outlines the […]

 
I’d like to address an interesting topic of online expert networks. For the purpose of this post, the term ‘expert’ is very loosely interpreted to be anyone with significant knowledge of a topic. Such online networks may be blog communities (such as Expert Voices), online forums, IRC groups, mailing lists, and tracing back […]

 http://www.sbindependent.org/node/1791
As many of us found out, tragedy strikes amongst the Hokies today in Blacksburg, VA. The shooting claimed the lives of 33 people and many are affected by it. Personally, I went to high school in Richmond, VA, and many people I know, friends, schoolmates, mere acquaintances, etc. all are affected.  Many more college and […]

In the past few classes we’ve been discussing how ideas and preferences travel virally through a population until they hit a cluster. A principle assumption throughout these exercises has been the intelligence and logical behavior of the individual. It’s important that once an individual with better information has spoken out against the trend that the […]

As was previously discussed in class, diffusion in networks is a phenomenon that can be modeled mathematically- by taking a diagram of linked nodes and adding the concept of threshold to it. What happens in some cases (like in the infinite linear chain) is that the cascading effect leads to everyone adopting the idea/trend that […]

http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/27/magazines/fortune/fastforward_photobucket.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007032808

The above article explores the success story behind Photobucket, one of the largest photo-sharing websites currently available. Experts attribute Photobucket’s success to the flexibility it offers when it comes to […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1176868800&en=a84a2d9cef4524e5&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
    Several weeks ago, we talked about the way Google used an algorithm to sell search and contextual based ads to advertisers with a maximum profit. However, there is obviously more to online advertising than just ads that appear based on user inputs, and, as stated in the article, Google has been looking to increase […]