Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Click exchanges
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/28/2005 - 16:46First there was Blog Explosion. Then, BlogClicker. Crystal suggested Wolfsurfer, and now there is Blogazoo. (If you found this through WolfSurfer, please leave a comment.)
Online Organizing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/27/2005 - 16:23During 2004, I ran a couple websites that attempted to organize what I considered to be important information online. Continue reading to share some current thoughts on this.
Exploding the Explosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/12/2005 - 14:23Today, I signed up for Blog Clicker. On first glance, it appears to be a cheap knockoff of Blog Explosion. People whave told me it is going to be much better than Blog Explosion. I will explore it a little bit and see what I think.
This does illustrate a little bit the whole idea of dealing with startups. The barriers to entry for new competitors is very low. If someone can come up with a slightly better way of doing Blog Explosion, BlogClicker, or whatever the next variant will be, they can draw away the traffic. However, there are a lot of people that will stay with Blog Explosion because they were first to market.
If any of you have looked at both Blog Clicker and Blog Explosion and would like to make comments about why you like one or the other better, I would love to hear it.
Micropayments in an open content gift based internet economy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/06/2004 - 13:42This morning, as I surfed blogs using Blog Explosion, I stumbled across this article: Another non-starter: Micropayments .
It notes, “Here's another non-starter: Micropayments. … There IS value in micropayments. They might work some day. But not any time soon. The problem isn't technology. It's the marketplace” It points to an article by Clay Shirkey, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, which goes on to talk further about why Micropayment systems are failing. Clay points to an article by Nick Szabo about the The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments. He goes on to talk about how most people are giving away free content, and why would people pay, when they can get the content free.
The mathematics of BlogExplosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/23/2004 - 09:46Yesterday, I spent a couple hours surfing through BlogExplosioin and I hit an interesting wall.
You have visted all the active sites in rotation.
The rotation is set up so that you can only visit a site once per 24 hours. Please come back later to visit more pages.
This got my thinking. I have earned about 700 credits from surfing sites around 1400, and another 300 mystery credits. In return I’ve had about 1000 visits to my site. I still have a few credits left for people to come to my site, but when those credits are up, my site won’t be in the active rotation. Based on this, there are more credits being used up than are being created, so eventually, unless they make some changes, BlogExplosion will implode with no more sites available.
To a certain extent, I am already seeing this. The number of hits from BlogExplosion have been decreasing steadily over the past few days. Based on this decline, I expect that I’ll be getting traffic from BlogExplosion for about a week more, and then it will dry up altogether.
I am wondering what other people have observed.
