In case Amazon cleans it, that is a product for a ‘steering wheel desk.’  Clearly a horrid idea due to inevitable misuse.  But the remarkable thing is that, of 287 reviews (when I clicked on it) every single one in the 5 pages I skimmed was completely tongue-in-cheek and sarcastically humorous.

For example:

“…loved my Laptop Steering Wheel Desk so much I got one for my 90yr old mother. She is an avid crossword puzzle fan and now she can work on them while she is driving back and forth from bingo at the senior center…”

“…great! I use it as a “mini-bar” when the friends and I go out to the bars. I can quickly fix multiple shots of tequila for myself and the friends as we drive from one bar to the next…”

—–

287 reviews.  All consistently tongue-in-cheek.  Now I recognize that its entirely possible that some honcho over at 4chan dreamed up a campaign… but if that isn’t massive coherent behaviour (and humorous!) I don’t know what is.

(I’m pretty sure they took down the review about the male gigolo already.  Or it’s buried.)

Anyhow, a recent news story came across my consciousness. I don’t recall which one, precisely – let’s say it was the balloon boy thing. Now, I have a decently established methodology for learning about what’s been going on, at least things that I care about. Generally, I don’t care about the balloon boy thing. General news falls pretty low in my process, I’ll admit, but I noticed the balloon boy thing, and one thing about it stood out. Almost everything of ‘general news’ that I’ve noticed lately I didn’t notice from the internet news services, or twitter, or my RSS feeds, or the paper on the tube.

So what do Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, recent US football scores, the balloon boy, the old guy on the Tube, and other general news stories have in common?

Facebook. People talking about these stories on this bizarre misanthropy of a social networking site, one that doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s purpose is. And I’m not an avid Facebooker, nor do I track down history streams (whatever they’re called?) when I don’t log in for a couple days.  Yet I still noticed all of these via my friend’s ramblings on Facebook.

So – I end up with heavily filtered, likely inaccurate pictures of what’s going on of general import. Once or twice was understandable… but lately its been a trend. Are we creating a method of social news distribution that is more focused on inaccuracy than accuracy? Sure, we can see what people care about – but people are going to come to rely on this, something the opposite of journalistic distribution.

Opinions?

*On the subject of Twitter – yes, I could learn of things like this from twitter, but for whatever reason I find twitter tends to carry more professionally relevant information. I can think of a couple reasons out of hand, but that’s not the point of this post.

This morning I was browsing my feedlist (nevermind why I was up in the AM, I assure you that it’s not something I care to repeat (;   .)  At the end of a post by a useful but ad-heavy site, I got a distorted image, which turned out to be a phrase.  Quick investigation revealed that it was a Google Adwords ad – turned to image, and then mutilated by my feed reader – Google Reader.

So, Google Adwords, meet Google Reader.  If we can’t trust Google to talk to Google successfully… what else?

Together with one of my friends who also aspired to be a Management Graduate, I set out to attend the fair. It was quite impressive, as we got a chance to hear directly from a few of the best entrepreneurs in the country who graduated from these schools a few years back. We were briefed about the application process, and were given an opportunity to ask questions. Due to limited time slots not all the questions could be answered, and so we were asked to be patient, when in the second half of the event we could speak one-to-one with the admission officers at stalls hosted by each B-school in a large hall.

In the second half, I and my friend started off by visiting select B-schools in the hall, going to their stalls and speaking to their representatives and getting our doubts clarified in respect of the application process and procedures of the schools. These representatives encouraged us to leave our  visiting cards in a drop box so they could get back to us with answers to some questions we were looking for. I did just that, and left feeling that attendance of the event was a most pleasant experience. I can highly recommend these fairs to anyone who is looking for a Management degree. They certainly helped me clarify my thoughts and ideas, and introduced me to quite a few new facts.

The days passed and I started receiving communications from a few schools to the email address printed on my visiting cards. In a few days, I realised there was too much! Quite a few schools had started spamming my mailbox with events on their campus, newsletters, guest lectures and what not! I tried unsubscribing from a few mailing lists, but for some that did not work. But worse. I was now getting e-mails from B-schools that I hadn’t visited, some of  which hadn’t even attended the fair. This  was two years back, and I am still receiving emails from some of these schools.

As best practice,  I would recommend that you create a brand new e-mail address, and print it on visiting cards produced solely for such fairs and exhibitions. Then you won’t be inviting a whole lot of spam into your regular mailbox!

Some call it ‘entertainment shopping,’ to others it’s gambling; some even say it’s a scam. Welcome to the controversial world of ‘penny auctions’ like Swoopo, in reality a highly innovative web-business model, a ‘bidding fee scheme,’ which budding Web Ecologists should check out – although having said that, they should be very wary of getting sucked into any bidding.

The idea is simple. The site will show a wide range of very desirable products, like expensive digital cameras, laptops, games consoles, TVs and mobile phones; each to be auctioned. The auction is run simultaneously around the globe, although each country has its own unique interface showing prices in a local currency. Clever. It maximizes the audience, and ensures a 24-7 auction.

The current bidding price is shown on the screen (starting at zero), and each bid entered with the simple click of a button adds a ‘penny’ to the auction price. The successful bidder will pay the displayed price for the product, usually a fraction of the full retail price.

However, each bid actually costs a UK bidder 50 pence (75 cents in the US). Note that not all auctions are ‘penny auctions’ – some increments are 10 pence or more with each bid, but we’ll stick with the penny’ variety here as they are typical.

A date for the end of the auction is given, often a couple of days or more away. But there’s a twist. There’s a running clock that starts with the auction, but it is set to a much shorter time (typically the order of hours). It clicks down second by second, and if it reaches zero then the final bidder wins the product. And there’s twist. Each new bid not only adds the one penny to the price, it also extends the time on the running clock by a few seconds. The 24-7 clientele means the clock won’t run down in the middle of the night, keeping the auction going and maximizing Swoopo’s profits.

It’s fascinating to watch an auction. When the clock goes down below fifteen seconds it glows red, and when it gets close to zero the bids start coming in, and not only does the price go up, but also the time on the running clock is extended. It’s fascinating to watch the behaviour patterns of individual bidders – very easy to do since the site displays the bids as they come in.

What a brilliant business model. If the final ‘penny auction’ price is £x, then the total number of bids will have been 100x (100 penny bids for each pound in the final price); and the income for Swoopo is £51x pounds. (For every penny in the final price Swoopo gets 50 pence for each bid, plus that penny from the sale). This is a profit of £(51x-y), where £y is the original retail price of the product. The break-even point is just less than 2% (1.9607…) of what the product cost Swoopo.

Take a real example: a popular brand of TV (retail price £679.99) sold for £86.83 in a penny auction. The income for Swoopo was £4341.50+£86.83 (that’s £4430.34): profit £3750.34. Not bad! Swoopo would have broken even at £13.34, and that’s always assuming they bought the TV at the full retail price.

The rational Web Ecologist in this situation would note that if Swoopo can make £3750 selling a £680 product, then there will be a lot of losers out there. Granted the winner gets the goods at a very reasonable price, but hundreds of failed bidders will have spent a lot of money. A classic example of the “victory of hope over experience.”

So it was bound to happen! Now there are sites that sell books purporting to provide a strategy to win on Swoopo. Let me give you a word of warning from Game Theory! If more than one bidder is operating according to the same strategy, then the non-linearity introduced into the situation will negate the strategy.

It only goes to show that the great American showman Phineas T. Barnum was right: “There’s one born every minute!”

Flash mob pillow fight

So far on Web Coherence we’ve been exploring many different phenomena.  Web vigilantism, twitter clatter, the trail of online activity, and some of our earlier work on email spam exploration – that we still want you to perform, by the way.

But that’s what it’s been about so far – exploration.  We have talked about the phenomena, and gotten a few of you involved in the conversation.  But we haven’t taken the other part of this story to fruition yet.  And that is the role of the active web ecologist.  Part of our mission is to do more than just comment on the coherent behaviour that comes out of the web – it is to study it actively, to use the massive resources of our activated minds to see really what is going on.  And of course, maybe we can give these web creatures a little prod from time to time, just to see how they react!

So what does this mean?  It means we want you to participate.  Read our experiments, and send us your data – we promise that even if you accidentally give us something of value (like your IP,  name, email address, etc.) we will not use it or keep it.  Suggest your own experiments – what we want is kick-start a community of self-motivated ecologists who think this sort of thing is cool.  Those who think that if, one day an internet-flash-mob of ecologists all decide to check certain preferences in snazzy-web-retailer-A’s marketing profiles, it would be cool to see what the reaction is, how things happen from there.  How do we as individual humans, acting in a coherent group (a mob!), affect the internet?

But to get there – well, it’ll be a long journey.  So sign up – become a web ecologist.  Propose experiments, listen to ours, send feedback, spread the word.  We want to tweak this internet and see how it reacts – it is not just the commercial world’s creature anymore.

But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon.  On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information.  Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.

I mean think about it.   By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use.  These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting.  And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel!  This is despite the heckling!  Emergent phenomena indeed.

And to what effect does this have?  It depends on your point of view.  I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying.  But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked -  through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.

Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.

clatter … clatter … clatter …

“Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

“Welcome to the London School of Economics”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

“and the opening session of the Communia Conference”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

That’s what the 100 delegates to the conference heard as I stood up to speak. Because a full ten percent of the audience was online  - clattering away on their keyboards, oblivious of the cacophony they were creating. How did I know for a fact that at least eight were on Twitter ready to discuss conference papers in real time? Because, as a Web Ecologist, I was ahead of the game. My fellow Web Ecologist, Gabe, had already set up an experiment to check on Twitter conversations related to the conference. (I should note here that Gabe is the first Web Ecologist – since he coined the term!)

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

Then there were others answering e-mails, and one lady half way down the auditorium was even playing Solitaire (and half the audience could see what she was doing). This was another experiment: Gabe was sitting at the back of the room, observing the screens of the laptops arrayed before him.

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

Well I suppose I should be grateful.  At least the Twitterers were listening! Welcome to the lecture environment of the early twenty-first century.

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

Though most corporations claim not to disclose or sell user information to third parties, the reality is quite the opposite.

During the registration process in some recent dealings with a major bank in India, I ended up giving a relative’s cell phone number as my contact number because I was about to travel abroad for a few months. I would normally never give out this number, and I clearly remember only ever giving it away once, on this occasion to the bank.

A few days later my relative received an SMS message on his cell phone, but addressed to me. I was informed that I had won thousands of dollars in prize money, and was asked to register on their website with my bank details to claim the prize.

It set me thinking about how this could happen. Did the bank sell my information on to someone? OR, as is more likely, was my information stolen from their database, and then sold?

I am not sure what happened, but I know one thing for sure: I am a victim.

As Professor Ian Angell so rightly says “Be afraid, be very afraid”.

Once I received an email from a source that claimed to be a globally operating airline company with a job offer for the post of an IT Manager. It was a nice warm personal message, containing details of the job they were offering, the nice fat salary, and a lot of extra perks like a company car and telephone.

 I had in fact previously posted my resume on a popular job portal, and a few weeks earlier someone claiming to be from that same company had interviewed me over the phone. I thought I’d ‘cracked it’, and was delighted to receive a job offer in these difficult times.

 The email seemed completely authentic, but doubts started to creep in when I spotted a spelling mistake in the company brand: a household name. I decided to check out the email in detail before conveying the ‘good news’ to friends and family.

 Of course, on careful inspection I found that it was fake!

 a) The email address was incorrect, and was sent from a domain name that looked almost identical to the actual airline company … but not quite.


b) The company postal address was incorrect.


c) What is more, they had asked me to pay 1500 pounds via wire transfer towards my Work Permit expenses, and also to post my passport to a local company they had nominated. They assured me I would be reimbursed, and that my passport returned within 2 weeks of signing up.

 It was a scam!  They had extracted information about me that was available on the Internet, and then sent me a fake job offer, with the intent of not only extracting money from me, but also stealing my passport.

 All web users should be very wary of  (often unsolicited) job offers that arrive unexpectedly over the web. Next time it could be you receiving the offer of ‘a job that never was’.