Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The very long tail

So we all know about the long tail, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

The long tail says that nowdays marginal products (physical or electronic) have as many, even more combined customers (people who pay money or attention) than popular products. If a product has only one customer, it adds to the total customer count of marginal products.

The very longness of the tail adds one important aspect. Some products are not interesting to anyone, not even to the creator's mother. Some products are not even marginal, they are just junk! This is not a joke, instead this is very important. Junk creator contributed resources and time to the product. Junk creator had a big enough motive to start the creation process.

If you spend 5 hours doing junk and it gets total attention of 5 seconds, the attention time is not important, but the creation time. The creation happens with a set of production tools. How the 5 hour creation process changes the creator, what is the role of the tools?

With ethical shopping this is very important. I would say that ethical content creation changes ethical point of view much more than ethical content consuming. I think Consumer Gadget should provide a set of research tools and a set of information publishing tools that encourage to discuss what is good or bad, not just facts.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Server up and running again

Apparently configuring Linux is not my strongest point. Managed to screw it up and had to buy some expertise from the hosting company.

The idea of "legal entity framework" has been strenghtened. I have learned three new words: taxonomy, ontology and folksonomy. "Legal entity framework" is somewhere in between. There should be similar thinking out there, but I haven't found it yet.

The next academic step will be to find the right terms, google them and start understanding the name of the field I have wandered into. But now is not time for academic steps, instead I started doing the API.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Consumer Gadget 2.0 API

Consumer Gadget just turned into a construction site. This spring we will introduce Consumer Gadget 2.0 API, which allows anyone to access Consumer Gadget information. Until the new version is ready, consumergadget.org will be very unstable.

The information model will separate "legal entities" from other content. Legal entities model the real world where we live in. Every product, company, geographical area or person is a legal entity. They can be linked together into a network, which can be used for example to understand "where the money flows".

This "legal entity framework" has nothing to do with ethical information. Ethical information is just added on top of this framework. I hope the same framework can be used by similar projects, which add information on top of "the real world".

Addressing legal entities is very intersting question. What is a link between virtual and physical reality? With Consumer Gadget, EAN barcodes are essential, but also stock exchange codes or simple keywords can act as links to virtual legal entities. Very interesting link to real world is GPS coordinates -- every location on Earth is a legal entity, that someone owns.

But now I have to learn how to install new versions of Debian, Apache, MySQL and PHP.