A number of recent posts have discussed examples of technological compatibility in terms of network effects. beata385 and njr25 each discuss HD DVD and Blu-Ray, while brucelee26 considers the transition from Windows XP to Vista — an interesting example, since instead of two competing firms, we have a single company trying to shift its users […]

Most bloggers of this week also continued writing about information cascade, and it is quite amazing that so many examples can be found in our ordinary lives if we observe them carefully. I would like to mention some postings which described easy to understand real world phenomenon.
Blogger kiisska gave an excellent insight about Stephen J. […]

This week’s posters found many examples of network externalities and their effects on the spread of technology.  Blogger w8143 brings up the examples of iPods.  Their large market share makes it more likely that a consumer looking for an mp3 player will know of and trust the brand.  The considerable user base also makes third-party iPod-compatible products more appealing to producers, another network effect which […]

Excellent examples of the information cascade phenomenon seem to be popping up frequently in recent blog posts. The more one learns about this powerful concept, the more one begins to see its effect on a diversity of societal trends. As we’ll see, the results of these effects are not always positive.
Blogger timewalker points […]

In a recent post enciphered discussed political Google bombing. As introduced in class, Google bombing refers to the practice of linking multiple sites and blogs to a certain page in order to boost its ranking in the Google search results. Some of the most famous Google bombs are expressions of political opinion.
One instance of Google […]

In a recent post terraroisin discussed Google’s AdWords Learning Center, which is a lessons catalog for anyone with questions about the AdWords program. The learning center provides detailed information on many of the concepts we saw in class (e.g., Cost-per-click (CPC) and Clickthrough Rate (CTR)), and seems to be a great reference to supplement the […]

Several posts during the past week touched on the issue of search and search-based advertising. Search-based advertising is one of the most lucrative markets in the IT industry and the primary source of Google’s revenue. There are two main reasons why Google maintains such a large lead in the market: quality of search […]

A recent post by babaganoush discussed the issue of privacy in keyword-based advertising. As touched on in class, maintaining privacy is one of the chief concerns moving forward as we develop more sophisticated methods of targeted advertising. A recent paper by Chopra and White discusses various implications for privacy as we begin […]

In a recent post tekhn3 mentioned an interesting auction type that we have not discussed in class. It seems to be a form of an all-pay auction. In an all-pay auction every bidder pays their bid, but only the highest bidder wins the good being sold. Lobbying can be viewed as an all-pay auction as […]

The frequency of posts on our class weblog has grown to about eight per day. We are still reading and enjoying them, and we are grading them. But given the rate at which posts are arriving we will begin commenting on the digest post only on those where we want to add something.
Fifo writes about […]