Virtual Economics

Suicide is virtually painless

Suicidemachine.org offers an automated way to delete your profile from the major social networks in a bit less than an hour. The pitch: "Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego." The idea is...oddly beguiling, like the strange attractiveness of civilisation collapsing or the egde of the cliff. Regain hours of your week that you could spend talking to the people you really like IRL? If you're tempted, you probably should. 

Killing in the name

I've bought my copy - go on, you know it would be funny, and it's only 29p!

Attention spans are getting

Once upon a time an economist and a journalist got together and wrote a book, Freakonomics. A lot of people read and liked their book because it was very good, so they set up a blog (also Freaknomics) which ultimately ended up being rolled into the New York Times website. The blog was also very good, and a lot of people read and liked it too. Four years later they published another book - Superfreakonomics - and it turned out that after four years of blogging they had, collectively, forgotten how to write anything long-form at all because the whole damned thing reads like a series of blog posts. Sure, every now and again there's a nod to bringing the snippets and anecdotes in a chapter together as part of a wider theme but almost no single tale in there spans more than a couple of pages.

We read a lot about the web shortening the attention spans of readers (indeed I was discussing this with a magazine editor at the weekend and he simply said they didn't publish anything longer than a thousand words online because no-one would read it) but the shortening attention spans of authors is a new one for me. Does the discipline of blogging habituate its practitioners to thoughts and expressions only a few hundred words long? Probably. And while this makes - in this one instance at least - for an extremely disjointed book, is such brevity really such a bad thing?

Post-rapture pet care, part 2

Earlier this year I posted about post-rapture pet-care, a lovely idea/business/joke which offers the services of cheerfully-damned atheists to care for the pets left behind by the devout after the Rapture. A couple of days ago loyal VE reader Susan4110 posted the following comment on the service which I thought I'd share with you:

"I emailed Bart Centre, the owner of this pet rapture service and told him that I was Christian and it was my understanding that it is illegal to sell a service which you believe that you will never have to deliver. He became very angry and emailed me a note with a link for me to connect to. He said the link was his “lawyer” He lied...It was not a link to lawyer at all it was a link to a picture of a sex toy moulded in the shape of Jesus the Christ."

So here's a shout-out to Bart - well played mate, I'll be dining out on that one for a month. 

WLTM salvation

Just noticed this on the OKCupid dating site - under "favourites" it tells me "You haven't saved anyone". This struck me as oddly poignant. (Read the disclaimer, just under the name of my blog at the top - I write about whatever I like.)

As famous as the Queen

I just spent an instructive few minutes trying to find people whose own websites are higher up Google's results than their Wikipedia entry. Jim Carrey has a very new website, but no; IMDB, fan pages and Wikipedia are all higher up the Google results. Sergei and Larry you'd have thought might have made exceptions for themselves, but again no. Barack Obama, Jerry Yang, Vladimir Putin, Mike Arrington, Bruce Lee, Silvio Berlusconi, Rupert Murdoch...no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

In fact, the only person I could find whose website comes ahead of their own Wikipedia entry was the Queen. (The website of her son and heir Prince Charles is beaten into fourth place not just by his own Wikipedia entry but by multiple listings for the West End cinema which shares his name.) Oh, and porn actress Jenna Jameson (link is safe, sorry). It works for me too, but that's only because I'm not famous enough to have a Wikipedia entry (I've never been able to tell whether the one I did have was deleted on reasonable enough grounds of non-notability or because it was composed entirely of lies by my friends claiming I was a spy for the Bratislavan government. Though possibly that's what all Bratislavan spies say). So...me, the Queen, Jenna Jameson. For everyone else in the world though there's the mighty Wik.

Spider on Mencken

I've spent most of my copious spare time (joke here) this past week or so re-reading the glorious Transmetropolitan. Ten collected volumes of utter barking genius, and I thought I'd share with you one of my favourite bits, a quote from H L Mencken that appears about halfway through book six:

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic he personally he is very apt to spread discontent amongst those who are."

Advertising Archaeology #3

Part of an occasional series, here is the latest advertising archaeology kindly provided by the good people of the London Underground as they clean away years of accumulated posters, leaving - in this case -  a film poster from 1996 and therefore a little over 13 years old.

Actually, I will pay for online content...

A few days ago I argued that News Corp was ill-advised to put its newspaper websites behind a paywall and beyond the reach of Google. I as reminded today - as the Times announces a date for its paywall to go up - that personally I must concede one exception to this argument. As I have mentioned here before I buy the Times on Saturday to read Giles Coren's "restaurant review" (in which he does now seem to visit and comment on a restaurant every single week, a submission to restaurant reviewing orthodoxy which I regard mostly with scepticism) and for that reason alone. If the Times is willing to sell me those two pages and just those two pages, online or off, for anything less than the pound it currently charges me for the whole Saturday paper I will cheerfully pay up. (Of course, its advertisers may become more wary of paying to reach 600,000 daily readers if everyone is finally forced to admit that some of those readers are only reading two pages of the magazine supplement and not likely, therefore, to pay much attention to the car ads on page seven of the bit they threw away unexamined. Still, that's digital fragmentation for you.)

So when Techdirt points out that the various surveys saying people will (or alternatively won't) pay for content online are a lot less reliable than seeing what happens when someone actually starts charging*, I have to agree. Would I pay for content online? Yes, under one extremely hypothetical commercial model. Do I think that model will ever be made available to me? Almost certainly not. So what's the right answer to the very general question "will I pay for content online?" I guess it's a maybe or a probably not.  

*We already know this bit from long experimentation, of course - all the readers go away. Still, the last experiments in this field were carried out several years ago before everyone spent their time online playing on social networks, listening to music and watching streaming video, so it would be easy to argue that the circumstances have changed significantly. Got worse, specifically, from the point of view of charging for content. But getting worse is still a change.

King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks

King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks
Originally uploaded by vigornian

From my friend Vigornian - signage indicates that King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks. "I couldn't help admiring the station's fine cross-species tolerance. Ood, Judoon etc must hold it in until they get home, obviously".