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Not addiction; dependency

Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - May. 15 (Opinion) - The world of the screen hasn't replaced everything, but, for most of us, whether we're of Ternovskiy's generation or not, it has replaced a lot. According to recent media surveys, the average American spends some 8.5 hours a day peering at a screen - TV, computer, or cell phone - and that number continues to rise as smartphone use explodes. We've reached a point, in other words, where it's more likely than not that we're looking into a screen at any given moment when we're awake.

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The iPad Luddites

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Rough Type - By Nicholas Carr - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - Is it possible for a Geek God to also be a Luddite? That was the question that popped into my head as I read Cory Doctorow's impassioned anti-iPad diatribe at Boing Boing. The device that Apple calls "magical" and "revolutionary" is, to Doctorow, a counterrevolutionary contraption conjured up through the black magic of the wizards at One Infinite Loop. The locked-down, self-contained design of the iPad - nary a USB port in sight, and don't even think about loading an app that hasn't been blessed by Apple - manifests "a palpable contempt for the owner," writes Doctorow.

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The Omnigoogle

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - Google's protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers' needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks -- entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions -- Google's range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.

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Cloud may squeeze margins, says Microsoft exec

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - May. 20 (Opinion) - The shift from software licenses to software subscriptions is likely to squeeze Microsoft's profit margins in its business division, says Capossela, though he expects it will also bring higher and more consistent sales:

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Gilligan's web

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - May. 14 (Opinion) - I think we'd all agree that the Web is changing the structure of media, and that's going to have many important ramifications. Some will be good, and some will be bad, and the way they will all shake out remains unknown. But what about Shirky's idea that in the BW years we were unable to do anything "interesting" with our "cognitive surplus" - that the "only option" was watching TV? That, frankly, is bullshit. It may well be that Clay Shirky spent all his time pre-1990 watching sitcoms in his cellar (though I very much doubt it) but I was also alive in those benighted years, and I seem to remember a whole lot more going on.

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Reality mining and your cell phone

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Dec. 20 (Opinion) - If you'd like to know why companies like Google are so intent on gaining access to your mobile phone, take a look at the research on "reality mining" that's being undertaken by an MIT team led by Sandy Pentland. In an interview with Technology Review, Pentland explains how modern cell phones provide a uniquely rich record not only of people's locations but of their actions, social behavior, and even social roles:

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Skype and the hedge fund problem

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:17:28 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - Hedge funds work on a simple wisdom-of-the-crowd principle: Because they involve an extremely large number of transactions, which smooths out the vagaries of individual transactions, the movements of financial markets follow predictable patterns, which can be discerned from a study of their past behavior. Deviations from the patterns tend to be shortlived, and by making huge bets that the deviations will quickly return to the norm, you can make a whole lot of money. As we've seen recently, though, things aren't quite as simple as the hedge fund operators assume. Sometimes, very weird things happen and the deviations become either larger or longer-lived that expected, at which point the big bets can unravel in very unpleasant ways.

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Amazon re-prices S3

Wed, 02 May 2007 10:53:49 -0700

Rough Type - By Nicholas Carr - May. 02 (Opinion) - For any utility, profitability hinges on using your capital assets - your installed capacity - as efficiently as possible, and the way you do that is through sophisticated pricing schedules. In essence, you want to reward those customers whose usage patterns allow you to use your installed capacity efficiently (by cutting their prices) while penalizing those customers whose usage patterns undermine your ability to use your installed capacity efficiently (by raising their prices). If you do this effectively, you get the best possible return on every dollar of capital you invest in infrastructure and, as you grow, you get more profitable. If you do it poorly, you become less profitable as you grow and, ultimately, you croak.

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Googleopoly

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:50:47 -0700

Rough Type - By Nicholas Carr - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - Google is not only the dominant player in the ad-serving market (and would see its dominance expand greatly by adding DoubleClick's dominant banner-ad business), but is also the dominant player in the web searching market, controlling somewhere between 48% and 64% of that business (depending on whose data you believe). It has also, through its recent YouTube acquisition, seized a dominant share of the burgeoning market for the delivery of video online. Combined with Google Video, YouTube controls 55% of that market, according to Compete, while its nearest competitor, MySpace, holds just 15%. Google's dominance in all these areas, moreover, seems to be increasing, suggesting that all these markets may have winner-takes-all characteristics.

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Citi whacks IT

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:13:13 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - In yet another sign of the vast amount of waste inherent in big-company IT operations, Citigroup announced this morning that the continued rationalization of its IT assets and workforce will be a cornerstone of its effort to cut $4.6 billion from its spending over the next three years.

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Are CIOs "dead weight"?

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:40:19 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - n my commentary on the latest Financial Times Digital Business podcast, I look at Chris Anderson's charge that chief information officers are turning into "dead weight." In case you missed it, Anderson had a provocative post on his blog late last month titled "Who Needs a CIO?" He'd given a speech at a CIO Magazine conference and came away from the event disillusioned:

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Is a "neutral" net anticompetitive?

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 09:12:38 -0700

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - The "net neutrality" debate is a complicated one (witness Google's recent twists and turns). Take the very important issue of competition. On the surface, it would seem that those in favor of making net neutrality the law of the land are fighting the good pro-competition fight. By preventing telcos, cable operators, and other pipe owners from giving favorable treatment to certain forms of data - allowing, say, video from TV studios to flow faster than video from amateurs - a net-neutrality law would keep the playing field level for the little guys.

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IT, YouTube and the wealth gap

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:36:54 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Feb. 09 (Opinion) - Hurley and Chen came by their windfall fair and square. They built a better mousetrap. But there's a bigger picture here, too. It's worth keeping the YouTube phenomenon in mind when reading a speech that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave earlier this week in Omaha. The speech, called The Level and Distribution of Economic Well-Being, examined the ever widening gulf between America's rich and everyone else, a worrying trend that Bernanke's predecessor, Alan Greenspan, also frequently addressed.

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Google's machine

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:30:58 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - After years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward googlebombing, Google has now taken action to stop the practice. It has incorporated into its search engine a googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow identifies and neutralizes any concerted effort to skew search results for a given phrase (such as, most famously, tying "miserable failure" to the White House site). That's fine with me. It's like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.

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Pay-per-view journalism

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:30:12 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Jan. 16 (Opinion) - Pay-per-view journalism is inevitable. It simply brings the compensation model in line with the content model. Online publishing breaks the old bundled-content model of print publishing. Once content moves online, writers are no longer contributing to the overall value of a package - a newspaper or a magazine, say. Each of their stories becomes a discrete product. As I've written before, "The web unbundles the bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It's naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click." If you can isolate a product's economics and measure them accurately, then it's only rational to compensate its creator based on its actual performance.

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Search advertising and the little guys

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:07:49 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Jan. 12 (Opinion) - ... smaller businesses appear to be cutting back on search advertising. "Many small and midsize marketers are buying far fewer 'keywords,' and phrases," reports the magazine. Why? Because the big guys are at last moving in in force, and the small fry are getting priced out of the market. The playing field is tilting again.

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Sharecropping the long tail

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:52:41 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - Despite the explosion of web content, spurred in large part by the reduction in the cost of producing and consuming that content, web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less. Using data from Compete, MacManus shows that the top ten sites accounted for 40% of total internet page views in November 2006, up from 31% in November 2001, a 29% increase.

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The five Google products

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:49:19 -0800

Rough Type - By Nicholas Carr - Dec. 04 (Opinion) - In a series of recent high-profile statements, Google's cofounder Sergey Brin and its CEO Eric Schmidt have made it crystal clear that they've been disappointed by the results of the company's new-product strategy and are revamping it.

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Knockoffs roil Second Life

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:33:00 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents' creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land.

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More blogs, less weight

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:12:02 -0800

Rough Type - By Nick Carr - Nov. 10 (Opinion) - Just two years ago, in October 2004, blogs accounted for 16 of Technorati's 35 most influential and authoritative media sites. They represented, in other words, 45% of the short head, with mainstream media (MSM) sites holding the remaining 55%. By March 2005, the number of blogs in the top 35 had dropped to 13, or 37%. By August 2005, it was down to 11, or 31%. By February of 2006, blogs held only 4 of the top 35 slots - or 11%. Finally, in Sifry's new October 2006 report, just 2 blogs - Engadget and Boing Boing - were in the top 35. Blogs' share of the short head has fallen to a piddling 6%.

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Welcome back to frugal computing

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 13:17:24 -0800

Rough Type - By Nicholas Carr - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Led by web-computing giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Ask.com, companies are dumping billions of dollars of capital into constructing utility-class computing centers. And keeping those centers running requires, as Gilder himself notes, the "awesome consumption" of electricity

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