Suppose you finally admit to yourself that you like reading the New Yorker and decide to get yourself a subscription. You could get a year for $46 at newyorker.com or amazon.com; just $1 an issue equalling 72% off cover price. Not bad. Or you could do a Google search for "new yorker discount subscription" and choose among vendors like SpeedyMags.com, which sells a year for $19.05, a savings of 89%.

These cheaper vendors will probably send you more junk mail, but the savings seem worth it. Why is it that the price differential here is so high? Are many New Yorker readers so lazy or fearful that they can be expected to pay $27 instead of doing a google search?

link

OK, I'm not really going to publish a favorite footnote every week. But if I did, this one on David Weinberger's blog would be it:

*For the moment we're pretending that telecommunication services are offered in a free market. Haha.

link

Rather than renting DVDs to you, the Peerflix company facilitates trades among members. Brilliant.

link

John Battelle follows up on the Bloglines acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The companies made their official announcements today.

link

Mary Hodder has the scoop. This is an interesting story for two reasons: it could have strong effects on the blog dot-coms, and it's a great example of a company that was built to be sold.

Effects on the blog dot-coms: Bloglines has a large user base, rivalled in size and service lock-in only by LiveJournal. Although the interface emphasizes the aggregator, Bloglines is also designed to support a fast and excellent blog search engine. Coupled with the extensive data Bloglines has about who reads what, Ask Jeeves has just acquired a wealth of information that can help them produce better search results.

Built to be sold: Mark Fletcher, who previously built and sold ONEList (now Yahoo! groups), knows something about acquisitions. He built Bloglines to be scalable from the start; I've never heard of it being slow or inaccessible. I'd guess it's not going to be hard to tweak its interfaces to the new brand. I am curious about the Bloglines (or parent company, Trustic) employees—are they mostly contractors, with no promise of long-term employment? Have they been compensated with equity in anticipation of a liquidity event? Did they just move to Ask Jeeves? Or did they just get laid off while Fletcher pocketed $N million dollars?

Oh yeah, it would be interesting to know how much Mr. Jeeves paid. I'm pretty sure Bloglines wasn't in any hurry to get sold, and I think it's worth a lot to a search engine company. Yahoo bought ONEList for $432M in stock, but that was in 2000; that stock would now be worth about $277M. Adjusting for hype and a hazy notion of comparative value, I'd guess Bloglines garnered $30-50M. But I'm hoping we'll get more information.

Speculative, up-for-discussion definition of "commodity": A commodity service or product is something for which you can (1) clearly communicate the requirements to (2) a third party who can be cheaply yet reasonably trusted to understand and implement those requirements and (3) produce the commodity itself, which can be easily tested against the requirements.

Therefore, whether a good or service can be a commodity depends not only on the proto-commodity itself but also on the culture between the producer and consumer. This is because the major aspects of culture are framing communications (language, common experiences captured by literature and art, etc.) and enabling trust (rule of law, institutions, media).

link

A short story about the creation of SourceFire, a company that sells a proprietary GUI admin tool for an open source network intrusion monitor system whose development it leads.

link

John Dvorak: "The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium."

link

In the space of five months, John Roberts started a software company and delivered its first product to thousands of potential customers—a process that could easily have taken years. His secret? Open-source development.

link

There are some great observations in this overly long essay.

One interesting trend is the shift of value away from software and toward the network effects surrounding software-based services. What this means is that while the software of ebay or amazon or orkut is fairly easy to clone, each of these businesses has its competitive advantage in the scale and involvement of its user base. The advantage is not in writing software, but in developing self-sustaining communities that invite and reward effective participation. This is dependent on software in roughly the same way that good cities are dependent on the layout of public spaces, roads, parks, transit networks, and buildings. Given enough money, you could clone all of these aspects of a city, but your clone wouldn't have any life until it was full of people constantly occupying the physical space and gradually reshaping it to fit their own lives.

In other words, skills now crucial in making software aren't taught in The Art of Computer Programming. If you want to make software, read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, or better yet, A Pattern Language.

There is also some grist for the prediction mill in this essay. Here are mine:

• Microsoft will ship open-source software within 10 years. Leading up to this point, they will transition to a business focused primarily on helping people find and use content (including software) created by third parties. Their software margins will crumble during this time period, but they may be able to sustain a profitable software business by driving quality up and cost down due to explosive growth in the number of devices that use software.
• Some interesting stuff is going to happen when people start figuring out how to commoditize network effects. This problem will require figuring out how to make software more responsive to user intentions, and less brittle at the mercy of incompatible formal interfaces. The driving forces in the next generation of programming systems will be social, not technical.