Weekend Reading

There's been a lot of good economics & business related blogging of late. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists highlights many good recent articles. Below are some of the ones that caught my eye, plus a few other posts I read over the weekend:

• Michael at the Calico Cat discusses the 'free market of blogs'. He shows how blogs compete for traffic and makes the astute point of how a mediocre blog with great marketing can trump a great blog with poor marketing. The part that I liked the best was his observation about the supply & demand for topics. Michael saw a demand for information about the Jessica Cutler story and decided to provide some supply. The result was a huge bump in traffic to his site. He also points out something that I quickly learned when I started blogging over a year ago -- "people would rather read about sex scandals than read about economics. That’s why a great blog like Truck and Barter hardly gets any visits, while Wonkette, who Richard Leiby of the Washington Post just today called a 'foul mouthed vixen', gets about five hundred times as much traffic." My other blog, which covers everything from entertainment to technology, averages four times the traffic of this blog. And even within that blog the posts about some nonsense get way more response than anything that covers a serious topic. Oh well, such is life...


• Russell at the Mobile Technology Weblog makes an example of the mobile phone companies by showing how they're trying to push a technology, MMS, that is probably way ahead of its time at best. There are certainly lessons to be learned from this by many technology companies.


• TJ extracts some valuable business lessons from the disasters in the satellite phone business a few years back. My favorite is this one: "disruptive technologies (a satellite phone) can be disrupted by an even stronger disruptive technology (the mobile phone), don't believe too much in your own pitch".


• David at VoluntaryXchange has several posts examining the economics in HBO's new series 'Deadwood'. I've been fascinated by the series since it premiered. The underhanded schemes that went on in that camp reminds me so much of what went on during the internet bubble, and every other bubble for that matter. And Swearengen should be a business school professor with his "mind on my money & my money's on my mind" attitude. The Ferengi would be proud!


• Barry at the Big Picture highlights a very interesting economic study that was done on EverQuest On-Line. In another parallel to the stock market, EverQuest players are actually paying real money to buy intrinsically valueless items (characters or virtual possessions) via eBay auctions.


• And last but certainly not least, Dr. Duru gives us another of his market missives, and if I'm not mistaken he's dusted off his perma-bear costume.