Ludwig Siegele On Data

Ludwig Siegele's latest Special report for The Economist is entitled A deluge of data is giving rise to a new economy. He provides an excellent overview of the impact the availability of vast amounts of data is having on business. But follow me below the fold for my two quibbles.

The Scholarly Record At The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has been working on a Mellon-funded grant aimed at collecting, preserving and providing persistent access to as much of the open-access academic literature as possible. The motivation is that much of the "long tail" of academic literature comes from smaller publishers whose business model is fragile, and who are at risk of financial failure or takeover by the legacy oligopoly publishers. This is particularly true if their content is open access, since they don't have subscription income. This "long tail" content is thus at risk of loss or vanishing behind a paywall.

The project takes two opposite but synergistic approaches:

• Top-Down: Using the bibliographic metadata from sources like CrossRef to ask whether that article is in the Wayback Machine and, if it isn't trying to get it from the live Web. Then, if a copy exists, adding the metadata to an index.
• Bottom-up: Asking whether each of the PDFs in the Wayback Machine is an academic article, and if so extracting the bibliographic metadata and adding it to an index.

Below the fold, a discussion of the progress that has been made so far.

Economic Limits Of Proof-of-Stake Blockchains

In 2018's Cryptocurrencies Have Limits I discussed Eric Budish's The Economic Limits Of Bitcoin And The Blockchain, an important analysis of the economics of two kinds of "51% attack" on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies based on "Proof-of-Work" (PoW) blockchains. Among other things, Budish shows that, for safety, the value of transactions in a block must be low relative to the fees in the block plus the reward for mining the block. In last year's The Economics Of Bitcoin Transactions I discussed Raphael Auer's Beyond the doomsday economics of “proof-of-work” in cryptocurrencies, in which Auer shows that:

proof-of-work can only achieve payment security if mining income is high, but the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of income. ... the economic design of the transaction market fails to generate high enough fees.

Follow me below the fold for a discussion of a fascinating recent paper that extends Budish's analysis.

More On The Ad Bubble

Google UI Timeline

Two weeks ago a firestorm erupted over a seemingly insignificant change to the UI of Google's search engine. It was enough to get Google to backtrack. A week later Daisuke Wakabayashi and Tiffany Hsu had the details in Why Google Backtracked on Its New Search Results Look, including this informative timeline graphic of the history of such changes since 2007. Their explanation for why Google made the change was:

Users complained that Google was trying to trick people into clicking on more paid results, while marketing executives said it was yet another step in blurring the line between ads and unpaid search results, forcing them to spend more money with the internet company.

Well, yes, but follow me below the fold for the bigger picture.

Meta: Slow Blogging

Blogging is slow right now because my physical therapist wants me standing up and moving around at least every 15 minutes. Long-form blogging in 15-minute increments is hard.

Regulating Social Media: Part 1

It has become obvious that self-regulated social media are a threat to pretty much every country's national security. This is intended to be the start of a series looking at the range of suggestions as to how, at least in the United States, it might be done, including (I hope) at least these:

• How to Regulate (and Not Regulate) Social Media by Jack Balkin
• Bipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with small competitors by Cory Doctorow
• The Good And The Bad Of The ACCESS Act To Force Open APIs On Big Social Media by Mike Masnick
• Testimony by Maciej Cegłowski to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for their hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
• A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet by Ben Thompson.
• A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us by Annalee Newitz

Below the fold, I start with the first of them.

Advertising Is A Bubble

The surveillance economy, and thus the stratospheric valuations of:

Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent), which rely on advertising for, respectively, 97% and 88% of their sales.

depend on the idea that targeted advertising, exploiting as much personal information about users as possible, results in enough increased sales to justify its cost.This is despite the fact the both experimental research and the experience of major publishers and advertisers show the opposite. Now, The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn provides an explanation for this disconnect. Follow me below the fold to find out about it and enjoy some wonderful quotes from them.