Mitch Lipka:

Twitter users are about to become major marketing fodder, as two research companies get set to release information to clients who will pay for the privilege of mining the data.

Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc and DataSift Inc, based in the U.K. and San Francisco, are licensed by Twitter to analyze archived tweets and basic information about users, like geographic location. DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days.

“Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. As details emerge on the kind of information being mined, he and other privacy rights experts are concerned about the implications of user information being released to businesses waiting to pore through it with a fine-tooth comb.

Daniel Jalkut:

I’ll take this a step further: advertising is on the way out. Technology loathes a middle-man, and advertising as an industry is the king of all middle-men. The purpose of advertising is to connect customers with companies, so as to facilitate a transfer of money in exchange for goods or services. As time goes by, customers and companies will be more and more capable of achieving this on their own.

In the history of the world so far, there has been considerable opportunity for advertisers to misguide customers, and to lure their money toward products or services that can be framed as perfect for them, even when they are not. That’s the art and the holy grail of advertising. But going forward, technology will offer customers and companies the tools to connect effortlessly, optimizing for compatibility without the help of the bogus, outdated advertising system.

Craig L. Garthwaite:

This paper studies the economic effects of endorsements. In the publishing sector, endorsements from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club are found to be a business stealing form of advertising that raises title level sales without increasing the market size. The endorsements decrease aggregate adult fiction sales; likely as a result of the endorsed books being more difficult than those that otherwise would have been purchased. Economically meaningful sales increases are also found for non-endorsed titles by endorsed authors. These spillover demand estimates demonstrate a broad range of benefits from advertising for firms operating in a multiproduct brand setting.

torrentfreak.com:

The dramatic shutdown of Megaupload and the US government’s case against the operators of the service has the potential to alter the entire service provider landscape, not just in the United States but all around the world. Indeed, some observers believe that has already happened. After defeating attempts to put him back behind bars yesterday, Mega founder Kim Dotcom is back with more insights into the reasons behind the site’s closure.

After speaking with TorrentFreak on Monday, Kim Dotcom has elaborated on his situation in an interview with 3news’ Campbell Live, which now gives us the opportunity to reveal a bit more detail about the current musings of the Megaupload founder.

Aside from the heavy-handed nature of the shutdown, the underlying shock in this case has its roots in the undermining of a previously presumed level of legal protection for service providers.

Earlier this week, Dotcom told us that in recent years Megaupload had spent millions of dollars seeking out the very best legal advice and the conclusions drawn were clear – providing the site did its part in tackling infringement it would be protected under the DMCA and could not be held liable for the actions of its users.

Guest Author:

When I turned 55 years old back in 2009, I did a study to determine what the 80th percentile 55 year old household looked like financially, in general terms. I originally called the EBRI (Employee Benefit Research Institute) in Washington D.C. because I wanted to get a feel for how well prepared my cohort was for retirement. I was referred to an economist at the University of Chicago who heads up the Survey of Consumer Finances for the Federal Reserve Board. Not exactly the beginning of a movie script, but I struck up a very informative relationship with this individual who lived and breathed the financial reality of the American household.

What unfolded was an eye-opening effort to determine what it would take for the Baby Boomers to retire with a lifestyle befitting the upper middle class of one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the human race. After all, who could be so pessimistic as to forecast failure for the people who sit at the center of our most influential demographic age group? But the data on their current financial condition is, to say the least, daunting. And particularly now, at 57, they do not have much time to prepare.

There were three primary reasons why I chose the 80th percentile 55 (now 57) year old household. First, people in the 80th percentile have the where-with-all to change their behavior to adapt to changing financial goals. Second, I am 57 and I was curious about whom I was hanging out with. Finally, the people born in 1954 are practically at the center of the Baby Boom, which is defined as those born between 1946 and 1964.

oldmapsonline.org

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.

It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.



OldMapsOnline has been created by a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland.

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