Posted on

Curiosity and interest driven approach towards open source Joomla 1.5 technology and a backward shift

Recently my actions has been driven more by curiosity and interest than monetary purposes. I just splashed USD99 on this Joomla 1.5 component called the JomSocial. At first sight after having it installed on one of my instances, it looks rather promising. I will over the next few days during the weekends go through the documentations of JomSocial to explore the various features they have. Also I will try to see what cross features they have available with other more established Joomla 1.5 components.

The main difference between working on an interest driven project and a monetary driven project is that of the heart and the soul.

In the latter, there is always someone breathing down your neck, crazy deadlines to meet, the need to manage customer expectations so that interest of stakeholders are not compromised. high blood pressure often results. The downside risk is significant in the event of mismanagement in terms of additional cost incurred due to scope creeping by clients or misinterpretion by the technical team.  The upside rewards and capped. Do your job well or totally screw it up, the budget made available by the client is still the same. Haha, like Garis once said ” get bought, get used, and get discarded just like a bloody condom!”

In the former, I am free to explore any possibilities I can envision and things are pretty much dictated by my imagination with no strict deadlines whateverso. I can choose either to rise to great heights or crash and burn, all for the sake of fun and adventure, without the need to be answerable to anyone. The downside risk is ultimately determined by me (time and money), while the upside potential is remains hitherto undiscovered!

Also in terms of the long run, when we are looking at buidling up the volume of passive income, the former is the area to look at. Already a few of my sites are generating income of a comfortable level. Once it hits critical mass, I will do away with the latter option of selling my time to others for the sake of building their sites.

Taking one more step backwards, I am now spending less time ultilizing the skill set I acquired in university (that of programming and software architecturing) and more time ultilizing the skill set I acquired while I was back in junior college (that of reading financial statements and analyzing GDPs). Surprisingly the staff at the various banks have been very helpful in providing me with the information I need. I am also spending more time now receiving instructions from my dad on a daily basis for another skill set I have been thinking of acquiring for a while now. It seems he does know me very well and started imparting all the knowledge he acquired over the years in this field before I even asked! More than that, it seems I have already crossed path with the people of whom knowledge I need.

Talking about the alignment of stars!

Posted on

Tactics that salesman uses all the time that totally annoys me

Normal salesman always attempt to appeal to the emotive side of my decision making process (which I leave at home while at work) when I specifically instruct them to come present and just stick with the technical details.

The most recent one just took place this evening. Dad had bought some policy on my behalf years ago and since he is now planning his retirement he was hoping that I took over the financing of this policy. I asked him for the details however he had no idea what it was, thus it happened that we arranged for the insurance agent to come present herself.

Question number one what is my ROI?

Huh? ROI?

Yes. The interest rate per year for this account?

Oh. Sorry but due to regulations by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, we are not allowed to guarantee any interest yearly rates. However, this funds has been performing quite well and will definitely continue to perform well till your age of 55.

Ok then. What kind of portfolio is this fund used for maintaining?

Loans and financing of business operations, stocks and bonds.

Ok then.

I smiled at the back of my mind thinking “so basically the shit that is happening back room is masked from us and we are presented instead with a number that is written on paper.”

One experience like which got me into some really serious shit last year was more than enough. I have no inclinations to repeat that shit again.

I continued pounding the figures away on my excel sheet while she tried to distract me from my excel sheet.

Viola, I got the figures I wanted and it didn’t seem all that good to me. I finally focused my entire attention on her.

But your dad bought this for you, it is a gift from him. You should treat this as a gift and accept it, continue financing it.

Oh yeah, I replied once again smiling merrily,  my dad is a good person. I respect him for that.

She smiled back too, thinking she finally managed to re-secure the deal once again.

So how do I close this account?

She got shocked. Why?

It is just 3% per year barely even enough to cover our inflation rate, I can get more somewhere else.

Ok then, maybe you should return this gift to your dad.

Yes I must.

Suddenly she focused her entire attention on my dad and brought out this new stack of paper about some new scheme which my dad so happened to qualify for.

“Mr Teh….”

“Thanks for your advice. I will consider it. My son should keep this funds for it.”

“Nope, dad buy your long dream about boat. You are retired now. ”

End of scenario…..

Start of next scenario…..

More capable salesman will come forth with a more logical looking proposal.

And here we have with us a product that will guarantee you lose your fats in no time. Here on this banner is one of our success stories. This person lost 19kg in 6 months out of which 70% are fat.

Wow. I am so impressed. He does look better after that. But wait what happened to that other 30%?

The salesman was momentarily caught off guard.

Uh…

Oh man. 19kg * 30% =  5.7kg of something else that is not constituted by fats. Muscle mass? That is a lot of muscles too lose in just 6 months. Are you sure this drug of yours is safe.

End of next scenario…..

More capable salesman are like the 3 accursed witches in William Shakespear’s McBeth. They always tell the truth. Their truths are always so logical too. However it is just half truths.

What you know, won’t kill you
What you know you don’t know, might kill you
What you don’t know you don’t know, that will definitely kill you!  (the black swan)

Thankfully most cases presented by capable salesman fall into the 2nd group (What you know you don’t know, might kill you) if you bother to spend time to sort through the whole logic of things.

I thank my stars for the instructions I have received thus far as well as for the instructions I have yet received through all the people I met and yet to meet. Each of them bring to me in their own ways some really valuable teachings whether they are consciously aware of it or not. It is always there right in front of your eyes if you just bother to spend time to put the pieces together.

Life is great and always an adventure!

Posted on

Process innovation will create a strong barrier to entry for businesses in the 21st Century

Recently, I start pondering the chasm that exists between what the sales team promises the clients and what is technically feasible by the operations teams given the resource constrains. This is not a new question, but one that surfaces from time to time during my discussions with countless people working within IT companies.

The first time this question surfaced was more than 8 years ago when I was just in the midst of stepping into the IT service provider arena. The name is Patrick. He was then studying in NUS in the school of computing and had teamed up with a few of his ex-classmates from his polytechnic to start an IT company. One of his two chief sources of headaches then was the problem of the sales man over promising the client in order to clinch the deal and thereby leaving the technical team to deal with the issue of implementation. This issue coupled with the second of headache of excessive scope creeping by the client often lead to projects handled by his company falling from the profitable regions to the regions that are down right unprofitable. He soon closed down his IT Company. The last time I met him, he was working as an employee in one of the government run business entities. Whilst it may not be what he had intended prior to his graduation from NUS, he no longer had to deal with the problems he faced when he was venturing in a start up.

A few months back I managed to sit down with Mathew Noble who is currently working in SQL Star. SQL star is an IT company that specializes in Microsoft Sharepoint projects that are mid ranged in size, with projects normally ranging from $50,000 to $80,000. Interestingly what I managed to glean from Noble during our coffee session together was the fact that SQL Star has a very strict and well defined standard operating procedure set in place for its entire staff to adhere to. This has enabled SQL Star to maintain a project success rate of 95%, impressively higher than the market average success rate of 50% for projects this size.

He did share some of the procedures that his company’s sales staff and technical staff engage in prior to the pre-sales phase of and IT project. There are high levels of interaction between the sales staff and the technical staff during this phase of the project. The sales staff does commit huge amounts of effort in the pre-sales phase to work on potential clients to bring them from the phase of being potential prospects to the phase of closing. Often towards the latter phase of this process conflict occurs between the sales team and the technical staff team. It mainly occurs when the technical team does a feasibility check after having acquired feedback from the sales team the client expectations of the potential project. The sales staff having spent lots of effort to work on this prospect is eager to close the deal, whilst the technical team states clearly what is about to be promised by the sales staff to the potential client is not feasible. Often in this scenario, the sales team differs to the technical team, and the sales staff is thereafter delegated to work on another potential lead. SQL star thus manages to ensure quality and fast turn around time for their projects thereby profitability.

Once during a drinking session with a close friend of mine, he brought up the subject of dropping the use of the off shore development center he has been working closely with for close to the the past 10 years. The main reason was because he finally lost his patience with them. His complaints were mainly the fact that sales staff from this off-shore company attempts to promise everything within the job scope all the time and more often than not above and beyond what was asked for. Had this off-shore company delivered what was promised, this friend of mine would have been an extremely happy man. However such is usually not the case. What often happens thereafter is pro-longed delay to the delivery of the required scope and at times only 20% delivery of what was promised. My friend remains a very unsatisfied person thus.

My brother on occasions when we have the chance to hold discussions does reveal some of the knowledge he acquired while being in the same trade as I did. The main difference between him and me is the fact that he has always been working within a corporate environment where the technical team and the sales team are two different groups of people. One of the main things he sometimes mentioned during our discussions is the need to keep the sales team in check so as to avoid unnecessary and sometimes damaging over promises by the sales team to the clients. Such scenarios often lead to contingencies in the midst of the operating process.

Such a thought was also expressed by the current Chief Marketing Officer of Huelabs, an IT company that specializes in education software. The last time we met, this company was rapidly expanding overseas to Dubai, Australia and parts of Europe under the guidance of this CMO. He always states “a company will not die from starvation, but will definitely die from indigestion.”

This dichotomy in philosophy could not have shown itself better than these two recent projects I had the chance to come into contact with. The first project is one that is worth a few hundred times the salary of an average working adult in Singapore. The essence of what happened in this project could be surmised in this statement by the project manager from the client’s side “just between you and me and off the records, the sales team has been lying to me since day one. What was built does not even conform to what we wanted.”

While it is too harsh to call what the sales man did as lying, I would rather express it as failure by the sales man in the management of client expectations, thus leading to unrealistic expectations by the client.

The status of this project has since fell from the profitable range into the reds for the vendor IT Company.

The second project was a pretty challenging one as the client company had more financial muscles than the vendor IT Company. The truly fortunate situation that occurred is the fact the project manager had the strong support of the company director and that the both of them stepped in prior to the sales closing of the project. Attempts had been made by these two individuals to ensure expectations of both parties were realistic prior to project commencement. The project manager was deeply involved with communications with the end users of the client company. In the process, he managed to identify potential pitfalls and steered the project clear of them, thus far keeping the project within the profitable region.

Based on so many examples I have had the chance to come across it seems that while the end products remain almost similar in nature what truly ensures the successful completion of a project has really a lot to do with the process that runs within the existing company.

Thinking back now to the statement made by one of the consultants who conducted one of the courses I took back in NUS, it is very true indeed. Product innovations and process innovations both take place within an organization. Knowledge about a product can be easily diffused out of a company and quickly copied by a rival company who there after produces a rival product. Knowledge about a process remains large tacit and has difficulty in terms of adoption by rival companies. In that sense, in the 21st century arena where information flow is so rapid, the true edge that a business can create over its competitors is not in terms of product innovation but in terms of process innovation. This is in line with the factors that result in the dominance of UPS and Wal-mart in their own markets.

Posted on

An interesting and perhaps useful observation

My revenue from Google adsense has suddenly fallen to a record low despite the same quantity of click throughs per day.  At first I thought it was to do with something I did and I thus went to study the data available in Google analytics. All data available shows that things were still pretty much unchanged within the sites I am maintaining.

I was puzzled. I was speculating if some advertisers managed to identify low paying keywords for their adwords campaign. I studied the advertisements on display. They were still pretty much the usual ones. I remained baffled.

Over the period of the past two week similar signs started showing up in other non related areas.

Dad commented that the stock market was experiencing diarrhea for reasons unknown. This was after slowly recovering from beginning of the year. Stock prices were falling all over again.

The volume of sales lead over various channels started to slow down after somewhat peaking from two weeks back. Potential leads that have yet to  enter into closing stage of the sale started becoming hesitant too.

A few days ago, the real cause of things finally reveal itself. The European economy was facing finanical problems within three countries that were in the peripheral regions of the union. Last reported, it seemed that Germany the main power house within Europe was in the process of being adversely affected. All these tell tale signs that were happening before were in fact somewhat related. They were symptoms for the next wave of financial crisis that will be spreading around again.

Nassim Taleb, said in his book the Black Swan that thanks to the vast improvements of our communication systems (internet being one of them), we are now experiencing increased levels of connectedness between different regions of the world. As such we are becoming more susceptible to the black swan phenomenon.

The above statement translates to mean that there has been an increase in the occurrences of  unforeseeable events, per unit time of late as compared to the last century, which affected the world on an extremely large magnitude in terms of repercussion.

The way I see it is that all these events (e.g. European financial crisis, Layman brothers collapse) are like the coming into existence of new strains of formidable viruses of the non biological kind. The effects you see (severe drop in stock market prices) are symptoms. The communications channels (internet, television, newspapers) we have available at our disposal are the like vectors that spread the effects around.

While our communication systems are advanced, they are not altogether perfect. Effects take time to spread still. So if its possible for you to plant a tracker somewhere further up the communications channels, you will get better data faster and make more informed decisions. Thus far it seems out of the various channels for communication available, trackers related to the internet channel seems to be the most sensitive of the lot.

Posted on

Huge influx of opportunites and the hidden opportunity cost

Suddenly I experienced a surge in the amount of opportunities coming my way these few weeks. Being faithful to the teachings in the topic of Economy during my times in the commerce faculty back in Junior college and in the stream of electronic commerce  back while I was doing my honours in the university, I understood and felt strongly the other side of the equation.

Opportunity cost!

Opportunity cost is defined as the lost incurred when you forego the next best alternative in the process of deciding on one of the available opportunities.

Let me talk in layman terms for your better understanding. Suppose one day you decide to spend 5 hours of your time reading a book in the library instead of spending those 5 hours sitting by the beach and reading the same book. The opportunity cost to you in this situation is the joy you feel when you sit by the beach. In this scenario, the cost is hard to quantify.

Let me illustrate for you a better example which I will draw from a real life situation.

Client A approaches me presenting before me a deal that could potentially make $4000. It requires an upfront investment of my real time of 80 hours. (as opposed to virtual time – aka asynchronous delay or some one else’s time) There exist 2% chance of complications happening. (this we will define as risk)

Client B approaches me at the same time presenting me another deal that could potentially make $10,000. It requires an upfront investment of my real time of 300 hours. (as opposed to virtual time – aka asynchronous delay or some one else’s time) There exist 10% chance of complications happening. (this we will define as risk)

As both clients came to me at the same time in need of my real time immediately, I am now faced with a situation whereby I will need to choose one and forego the other. To a normal person, he would very likely choose the deal that offers $10,000. However on closer inspection, the second deal is not actually a very good deal as compared to the other.

Let me work out the mathetics

Total likely incurrable man hours for deal A – 80 hours X 1.02 = 82 hours
Total revenue receivable $4000
Actual hourly rate for real time sold = $48.5

Total likely incurrable man hours for deal B – 300 X 1.05 = 315 hours
Total revenue receivable $10,000
Actual hourly rate for real time sold = $31.75

Some might explain that the lower rate justifies for the large sum of potential revenue receiveable in deal A. Ok then lets do the math for the other part of the equation still left invisible.

Given this active period in the market, the percentage of closing more deals simlar to A in nature is around 60%. Translated into hours it would be estimated at  (315-82 hours) * 0.60 = 140 hours

Appling the prevailings rates in deal A to this equation, I will get 140hours X 48.5 = $6,790

So if I choose to take up deal A and forego deal B, below are the mathematics:

I will have saved [315 – (140+82 )] 93 hours of my precious time and still potentially make [$10,790 – $10,000] $790 more.

Also since, I have a few channels which I could devote my time to build up recurring  income, this 93 hours extra time available at my disposal could thus be used to expose myself to the effects of the positive black swan, with zero opportunity cost incurred by me. So basically, the net comparison will be as per below :

[$10,790 +++ versus $10,000 nett]

Actually the equation that brought me to the conclusion of never getting myself employed into a full time job and a fix salary per month is almost similar to this. Get employed with a fix salary of $3000 per month and the possible financial situation you will be facing for the next 12 months will likely be

($3,000 X 12 ) = $36, 000 —

  • The minus sign is just in case your boss decides to fire your ass before the year ends.
  • also your maximum potential income has been capped at $36,000

Go about living life as a free bird

$0+++ = ???

  • Don’t worry God is kind
  • you normally won’t die from what you already, it is usually what you don’t know that will kill you.
  • You know what is your base but your upper boundary has no limits!

Life is great live free!!!!!

Posted on

New Zealand is calling!

Pasha went tracking in New Zealand in December and brought back a bone penchant from the Maori’s. It is now hanging off my neck along with the previous one I acquired years ago before I left the land. This new penchant symbolizes a new beginning.

14th of January 2010, inevitably I was brought out of Singapore, if not Philippines then Korea.  I eventually arrived in Korea and dropped by at Mansu’s place. We met when we were back in Auckland for student exchange.

Upon my return to Singapore Joseph another friend whom I met back in Auckland dropped by in Singapore for a visit.

The name New Zealand seems very visible of late. Just a while ago, I saw this advertisement by the New Zealand Government specifically targetted at Singaporeans. It was like an open invitation to drop by in Kiwiland to stay for long if we want to.

The northern winds has been blowing incessantly still, despite the fact that it is now February nearing the end of its season. Strangely, I have always this acute case of wanderlust when the winds from the north come visiting in Singapore.

Over supper, I kept turning these occurrences one after the other in the back of my mind. Is this a sign? Has Fortuna finally shuffled her cards and dealt a card from a new deck. This new path seems so clear all of a sudden and it is beckoning me along. And it seems to be pointing to the land of the Long White Clouds once again. Perhaps the stars have finally shifted. Coincidentally it occurred just when the predestined quest of aiding Alena in Singapore came to an end.

Inshallah as Sean always says. Perhaps I should settle all outstanding matters over here in Singapore and explore what New Zealand has to offer. If there is one thing Alena has giving me during the past one year’s quest, it is the knowledge that while my ascendence is ruled by Saggittarius (one constantly struck with an incessant wanderlust), my house of Sun ruled by Leo (The eternal pilgrim seeking the Holy Grail) deems that I will start craving for a glorious battle when the time comes.

I wonder what is the possibility of setting up a supply chain to New Zealand and Australia?

Already I have set my eyes on this office space which I am planning to occupy soon when the next project comes in.

Posted on

Eternity be damned

On and off, I do join some folks for jamming sessions. Once in a while during those sessions, I do suddenly find myself caught in some songs where there were just 3 to 4 chords maximum that just kept on cycling mindlessly one after the other.

Such occasions are a real torture to the soul, most especially when you ran out of new ideas what to do over those re-current chords. The torture is especially acute when you know that there outside this 4 chords are a whole universe of chords to explore.

Lately observing the people around me that have entered the work force. It seems their daily lives are imposed strictly within the limits of those 3 to 4 metaphor chords. From an outsider’s stand point, life seemed unbearably tasteless, in a sense tortorous.

I suddenly recalled from one of my lectures in Computer security how random numbers one after the other are created. Random numbers in computing are articifically created through the segmentation of an extremely large prime number. Within the domains of the prime number, all occurances appear random. However once past the pre-specified domain, a pattern starts to appear and becomes painfully apparently

Example:

13 expressed in binary will be 1110111100110010001110

We take a section of 4 places each time at an increment of 1 place per interation

1: 1110
2: 1101
3: 1011
4: 0111
5: 1111

…

23: 1110

On iteration 24th we get 1110 which is exactly simlar to 1

What has first been interesting has started suddenly to become boring, unpredictable and uninformative (Law of Anthrophy) Each additional iteration becomes less and less significant.

Translating it back to every life, we start to live more and more like machines losing our souls to the daily toils of live all for this false sense of security, the need to modulate back to iteration 1, once all available iteration within the set has been exhausted.

Exploring the exceptions available within our limited environment, I suddenly found that though my life has been rather random thus far, it has started to modulate back unto itself. It is starting to get really boring.

The possible solutions I could think of are either to getting myself into a new environment or seriously attempting at getting myself old and senile way ahead of my time.

The first seems pretty hard, with Alena serving as the drag, chaining me to this limited set of permutations with her inherent god be damned need for security and predicability. The second seems highly impossible, considering the fact I am no from the medical field by training.

Perhaps a third then. I think I should quietly slip away once all work has been settled for the year. India looks pretty foreign and exotic a place to explore. Perhaps I should even volunteer myself to work there in one of those NGO venues. That’d be a nice change of sets.

Imagining a existance that last for eternity, where all possible permutations has be tried and exhausted, life be really tortorous that way. Thankfully, we dont live forever.

Posted on

The dawning of the new age

With on the onset of the latest trends happening in the internet, borders are actually being teared down. Compared to 5 years ago the type of sites I am now building for clients is a totally different breed.

Back then, clients were all asking for sites that look sleek, cool and standalone. When I first built an ERP system for my second company Frontiera Group that was integrated with the EBay API, none of the other companies in Singapore were doing.

Nowadays instead of looking sleek and cool, clients are actually demanding for sites that are CONNECTED!

Yes! connectedness. This is the new buzz word with this web 2.0 trend that has dawned upon us. By connected it means the ability to populate multiple strategic places with our intended content with just the click of a button.

A simple illustration could be that of ThingsToDoSingapore.com, a single entry on ThingstodoSingapore.com results in a post on the Facebook Fan Page, your own facebook profile page as well as a post on the Twitter Page. Plus and update on Ping.Sg

At the same time, it aggregates contents from YouTube.com and other blogs too.

Not to say the other mirror sites:

blog.thingstodosingapore.com
thingstodonear.info
thingsfuntodo.com

Companies are starting to demand for increased ability to put contents in front the face of their target audience with less effort. That is the expectation that an IT company has to meet in the Web2.0 age.

Thankfully all hope is not lost, no single programmer has to spend long hours in front of the computer just to create those functions. We have the open source community to back us up. All we have to do is to just fill up the gap when we do find one. What we fill up, we give back to the open source.

In this web 2.0 day and age, power is no longer held in the hands of the few but divided amongst the mass.

Then again on the other side of things. while this utopian view is what most observe, conforming to social norms, a few tends to rise to the top. This commonly is called the black swan.

It is indeed worrying. Consider these black swans as the hubs and the rest of us as spooks. Suppose if someone does cripple the hub, the rest of us the spooks will definitely get affected.

Such a scenario was experienced on ThingsToDoSingapore.com when the Russians decided to do a denial of service attack facebook one day due to some renegade Russian expressing one radical view too much over the internet and harnessing too much support.

Due to the connectedness ThingsToDoSingapore has with the facebook connect API, it experienced slow loading times for the period until the facebook team fixed the Russian problem.

While it seems connected is a good option, it does have its pros and cons like all systems.

Posted on

Facebook connect performance issue

Last night I was sitting with Satheesh and Jim working on SingaporeRental.com. We happened to talked about ThingsToDoSingapore.com during our conversation in my living room.

Satheesh said that the site was experiencing very very slow loading time. I knew that the site was slow in loading since before I stopped touching it in terms of coding. I have been getting rather busy with my own IT projects recently.

Today finally finding some time for myself I decided to do some tweaking to my favorite pet project. The coding was familiar. I have yet to port it to any content management system. I actually have two systems in mind which I could do the porting to. One is WordPress the other is Joomla.

Given the choice between the two I rather like WordPress better. First off, it is lighter more agile and has this well established PingBack System which could be easily used for generating more Traffic on the world wide web.

Once again on that hosthi server I experienced very slow loading time. Nothing knowing which was really causing this problem I decided to do some split testing. I suspected that it could either be the server running low of bandwidht or that google friends connect was unstable again. So I pointed ThingsToDoSingapore.com to my local testing web server and ran the scripts.

Much to my surprise, the stage when I was experiencing the bottle neck was at ak.connect.facebook.com. So apparently it was the part where Things To Do Singapore gathers content from the facebook server that things start to really slow down.

From my experience, Facebook has been experiencing very bad performance issues the past few weeks. If you went to the site and tried to login, half the time the images do not load properly. Suspecting that it would only affect facebook.com, I was wrongly, apparently it does affect other sites which uses facebook connect as well.

Searching on the web for the possible reason, I identified the denial of service attack on facebook as a possible contributing factor. It is crazy actually that things nowadays are so interconnected that when a hub goes down the spooks get affected too.

I believe somewhere along the way, with all the interconnectedness as well as cloud computing, it will really be easy to bring down the whole world wide web with a touch of the button. Another possible black swan is in the making

More References on the Black Swan

http://samdavidson.blogspot.com/2009/01/black-swan.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

Posted on

Network effects on the internet.

I bought myself the book the long tail by Chris Anderson the other day and started experimenting with the web all over again this time using the paradigm he presented in his book.

I was amazed suddenly how powerful the web could be again. These past few days I am slowly beginning to realize the power of blogs, something which I relegate to the realms of pointless online diaries and gossips.

Big news agencies broadcast news that is important to a broad base of people in various categories. Due to the economic restrictions of traditional news agency structure, what they can provide is but information that is broad and lack depth to the general audience. This is because as they drill down into more detailed levels, it gradually becomes less profitable for them to provide these information, due to the decreasing level of viewership. Information that warrants more detailed and indepth report are normally Black Swan events (unforeseeable but high impact occurances, eg. Obama becomes president, H1N1 flu comes into existence).

So in summary what we get on the news is meant for the general public but does not always serve specific needs. This is the economics of the top down approach.

We next look at blogs. Blogging is fast becoming a prevalent phenomena. The network effect of blogs (aka linking between blogs via rss) means that one can easily navigate from one blog of one topic to similiar blog of the same topic. This is similiar to what one does when watching one video on youttube and navigating to the next video that is closely related to the current one.

While Google search engine is good in the fact that it allows the retrieval of information that is highly relevant to certain keywords, the limitation of Google mainly resides with the users. Some topics are just too hard to define in words. It is hard to summarize some topics into specific keywords. This thus has to do with the problem of filters.

The problem with Google search is semi alleviated by the network elements found on social networks where likes tend to link together and are found in closer proximity than unlikes. (Traditionally known as birds of the same feather flock together.)

Of course we should not forget to take into consideration the piles of crap and garbage found on some blogs. But wait, what some perceives as garbage are usually perceive as treasure by others.

So in short do not dismiss the relevance of blogs on the internet.

Here is the relationship that I have thought about:

YouTube is to video, as is
Facebook is to Friends, as is
Blog is to information

The future it seems is fast becoming dominanted by network effects. Like it or not it is here to stay.