PIMCO Managing Director Paul McCulley recently wrote a guest post on The Big Picture, where he mentioned how an increasing number of network connections and IT advances are altering the face of financial services:

Google announced the launch of Lively, a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox which allows you to add virtual worlds to typical websites. Eventually they may charge for some of the advanced features, or they could monetize through the combination of search boxes and product placement advertising.

Google already has some patents for targeting ads in video games. This one was referenced here here:

For instance, users that spend a long time bartering instead of stealing in a game may suggests that they are interested in the best deals rather than the flashiest items so the system may show ads reflecting value. As another example, users that spend a lot of time exploring suggest that they maybe interested in vacations, so the system may show ads for vacations. As another example, users that spend a lot of time chatting instead of fighting or performing other activities in online games suggest that they like to chat, so the system may show ads for cell phones, ads for long distance plans, chat messengers, etc.

More recently Google has had their network node targeting/FriendRank patent approved, "A computer-implemented method for displaying advertisements to members of a network comprises identifying one or more communities of members, identifying one or more influencers in the one or more communities, and placing one or more advertisements at the profiles of one or more members in the identified one or more communities."

The more psychological data they can gather about users the better they can target ads...not just on the virtual world, but across search and a vast array of content websites. And they already have widgets for recommending the content and feeds you should consume, which feeds back some of your own selection errors, re-enforcing some of your flawed logic sequences and personal biases.

Indeed, one of Google's employees working for Google Health Advertising wrote the following on an official blog:

Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?

We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.

After blowback the former statement was attributed to the beliefs of just that employee, but the post is still live online.

Since they claim to be fairly agnostic and automated about their targeting, they can get away with showing a person writing that they are happily married an ad suggesting you cheat on your spouse.

Other big life choices (like getting a person hooked on unneeded anti-depressant drugs, killed in a bogus military operation, or stuck in bad financial situation) will be aided by relevancy showing where you are weak and easily exploitable. Given that drug companies spend so much on direct to consumer marketing and that many of their websites are outright fraud, at some point we should question how much personal data we want an advertising network to have about us.

You are being sold off to the highest bidder (which, in some cases, has the largest profit margins and can afford the exposure through outright fraud). You may never know how much any given click or suggestion could alter your life for the worse.

You can believe that most people are good, but it is hard to believe that amoral profit driven algorithms designed to find and exploit your weaknesses are. Pessimistic perhaps? Sure, but most people do not advertise to get you to buy less stuff and spread world peace.

Give up your privacy and join the artificial conversation below

Good video on Allen Stern about how popular tech bloggers think a new system is exploding because of their own experience with it. FriendFeed made a few popular bloggers system defaults. So the recipe for rapid growth and a decent pay day goes like this:

• Come up with an idea that has social elements baked into it so it can grow rapidly.
• Reach out to a couple self-promotional thought leaders and get them to try your product. Hopefully you can get a mention too.
• Get a bit of market traction.
• Manufacture social proof of value through the use of default settings (FriendFeed), quadruple counting outbound referrals (StumbleUpon), or other similar strategies .
• Get coverage for how wonderful you are and how you are growing so much faster than competing services.
• Get a lot of users.
• Wait a year or two and sell to Yahoo! for 9 figures.

In this video Dr. Andrew W. Lo Ph.D. offers these 6 fundamental theories to The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis

1. Individuals Act In Self-Interest
2. Individuals Make Mistakes
3. Individuals Learn and Adapt

Linkfluence's Presidential Watch 2008 offers an interactive map of 500+ leading political blogs.

The big issue with their graph is that is so dense with data that it is hard to see any indivdual edge on the graph, even when chosing to only display mutual / reciprocal citations.

Revealing Questions

Many things that sound like large feats have limited value. Yes an online petition can get 1,000,000 people to click their mouses, but if that does not create other media exposure and momentum then it quickly dies out because people are not heavily invested in it.

Many communities are the same way. If there is little to no incremental cost of joining then the value of the community starts approaching the cost of participation. There are exceptions - where people passionately believe in projects, but generally the market is pretty good at pricing the value of interactions.

Take a Chace & Make Copyright Content Free

Youtube won a lot of distribution through viral syndication. They didn't care too much about what was published, just that it hopefully drew eyeballs and that some of it would get syndicated, building YouTube into a destination. The gravity and momentum that created (along with a loophole in the DMCA policy that allows them to host copyright work) built a self-policing community and lead to a $1.65 billion buyout by Google. Not bad for a company that relied entirely on user generated content.

Five of the core benefits of open source software are

• little to no built in business cost structure
• lots of exposure due to being free
• it is easy to help improve a project
• many people who help build a project become advocates for and marketers of the project, reducing marketing costs to ~ $0
• if a project stops being maintained but is a good idea others can run with the idea (Wordpress was built off of the B2 core)
• the cost of failing is negligable

Nick Carr, known for provocative titles, recently posted Was eBay a fad?, which highlights how this year eBay may do more fixed price business than auction business.

Many factors led to the demise of their auction income

• increased fees that lowered sales profit margins and drove away legitimate merchants
• improved eBay search features that made buy it now purchases easier than waiting out auctions