I've never been convinced that file sharing really has a negative influence on physical sales. As the RIAA and others advanced their war against file sharers, I thought it was pretty appalling that they never produced any compelling evidence that file sharing was the cause of reduced CD sales (for example).

Now, another nail in the coffin of that circumstantial argument. Slashdot is reporting about a Dutch studying finding the file sharing has positive economic consequences:

"In a study conducted by TNO for the Dutch government the economic effects of filesharing are found to be positive. According to the 146 page report (available for download, but in Dutch) filesharing is good for the prosperity of the Dutch: with filesharing more media are available, even though this costs the media industry some profit. One of the most noticeable conclusions is that downloading and buying are not mutually exclusive: downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders, but they buy more DVDs and games then people who don't download. They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise."

Unfortunately, it looks like the original news article and the report are only in Dutch. But, anecdotally, this makes a huge amount of sense to me for two reasons. First, these findings about media use are similar to findings about online sociality. For a long time, people thought that online social life was a replacement for offline social life, but evidence continues to mount that people who are more social offline are also more social online. Similarly, I think the most reasonable starting assumption is that people who use media more will use it more in both contexts.

Secondly, I think the hardest thing to measure about file-sharing is the degree to which sampling media via file sharing leads to more purchases. I, for one, can't count the times I've downloaded a song, an album, a movie, a TV episode from BitTorrent, and then later on purchased that same media or some other media in a legitimate form (CD, DVD, iTunes). Often it's because I'm not happy with the quality of the download, or I want the liner notes on the CD, or similar.

News is making the rounds about the untimely death of Peter Kollock in a motorcycle accident. I never met him, but I gained so much from his insightful scholarship around trust and public goods. More importantly, people who knew him thought the world of him, and can't say enough about his intelligence and generosity as a friend and scholar. These thoughts from Marc Smith:

I share the loss of Peter Kollock with the many people who knew him. Peter died Saturday after a motorcycle accident near his home. Many people in the social sciences and beyond have been influenced by Peter’s works of scholarship, teaching, mentorship, entreprenurship and friendship.

Peter had a big impact on his many students at UCLA and the larger academic community that built on his scholarship. A lecture from Peter was a great thing that left his audiences feeling both smarter and challenged with a whole new landscape of choices. Peter brought many people to a better appreciation of the issues of cooperation and conflict, collective action and common goods, of trust and deception in risky transactions. He made it clear how most of our biggest challenges on this planet are cooperation dilemmas. He gave many of his students the inspiration to think that conflicts could be resolved and cooperation sustained by leveraging insights from studies of these situations. His was the only class I ever took that proved mathematically that it paid to be good to other people, even if there were short term costs. He saw early on the importance of communication networks to change the landscape of cooperation and collective action. His scholarship extended to the very real world of high tech entrepreneurship- building tools for markets on the Internet.

My thoughts are with his family and friends who appreciate the great presence Peter had.

I am shocked by his loss and will miss him deeply.

In culinary school, the chefs basically dismissed the garlic press as a useless tool, but I think it's gotten a bad rap. The garlic press is an easy time-saver in many culinary situations. The key is knowing when to use it and when not to use it. A few simple guidelines are all we need:

• DON'T press garlic directly into a hot saute pan. The smaller you chop garlic, the quicker it cooks. If you've ever minced some garlic and thrown it into a hot pan with some oil, and turned around to prepare the spinach (or whatever), only to find that when you turn back the garlic is crisp and crunchy already, you'll know what I mean. You can use a garlic press in this way, but change the order. Get the pan hot, add the oil, then throw in the spinach. After a second, press the garlic on top and mix. The spinach will start to give up its liquid and prevent the garlic from cooking too quickly.
• DO press the garlic directly into whatever you're working on – right into the pan or the bowl. When you press the garlic you get a lot of tasty juice. If you press onto your cutting board (for example), you lose that flavor.
• DO use a garlic press to make tasty salad dressing. Tamar's favorite quick vinaigrette is just salt, pepper, pressed garlic, olive oil, and vinegar. Add a bit of dijon for a little spice and a creamier texture (dijon is an emulsifier).
• DON'T think you can substitute a garlic press wherever the recipe calls for chopped garlic. The size of the garlic pieces isn't just about how quickly they cook, it's also about flavor and texture.
• DO press several cloves of garlic directly on top of steaks before they go on the grill. One of my favorite ways to prepare flank steak is to hit it with salt, pepper, olive oil, and pressed garlic about an hour before it goes on. Spread the garlic paste around so it makes a semi-even coat. When it hits the flame, the garlic caramelizes, and adds a wonderful richness and a bit of savory spice. Just don't add too much, or it'll burn and be pungent

Happy 2009! I have high hopes for great things this year.

Tim Lee at Princeton's Freedom to Tinker blog has been writing a lot about Wikipedia, and it's sparked a series of interesting debates. A lot of great discussion in the comments, too. I want to highlight one particular back-and-forth in the comments on Tim's post about why he thinks free-riding isn't a problem on Wikipedia.

The argument is a pretty common one when it comes to online collective action, and it comes down to this: Wikipedia shouldn't exist at all. At least if we accept traditional economic models. Here's this from commenter Mitch Golden:

The issue with Wikipedia (and Firefox, and Linux, and all the other open source software) isn't the free rider problem, it's the fact that it disproves the model of homo economicus that is the basis for classical economics and the political philosophy of Libertarianism. There is just no rational reason for people to contribute to Wikipedia – they aren't paid anything, and the value of any benefit they might be getting from the trivial publicity associated with making an edit is overwhelmed by the cost of the often significant time it takes to do the work. So the question isn't one of free riding, the issue is to explain why Wikipedia exists at all. (It is, after all, the free riders that are behaving rationally!)

(link)

Mitch goes on in an interesting back-and-forth with Frater Plotter here, here, and here. In this play, Mitch is in the part of the typical economist, and Frater is in the part of the wise foil for narrow and outdated economic theories. It's really very entertaining.

But, Mitch makes a good and economic point: looking purely at tangible or monetary gain, it would seem like Wikipedia 'breaks' the economic model in which individuals are rational, self-interested people who therefore should free-ride all the time.

Here's how I respond. First, as an aside, the homo economicus model seems a little outdated to me. Most reasonable observers of public goods and collective action these days admit that bounded rationality is more like it. People use a variety of mechanisms other than pure self-interested cost / benefit analysis to make decisions in the real world. They act on biases, preferences, values, and norms. No surprises there. It's just that idealized economic models don't usually account for these distinctly messy, human, social factors.

But anyway, we have Mitch's main question to answer: what is different about writing information versus digging coal? (for example) Well, the example isn't quite right, because coal isn't a public good. But in the spirit of the question, I say there are two main differences that make Wikipedia work:

1. On the internet, the costs of participation can be extremely small. In fact, once you account for fixed costs like your computer and the internet connection, the marginal cost of contributing is just time. And the risk of carpal tunnel. You may choose to devote a huge amount of time and effort, but you sure don't have to. There's lots you can do at a very low cost. Not only that, but the massive communication network makes the costs of aggregation, coordination, and distribution similarly small. 1,000,000 people writing one word each can be as efficient as a few people writing it all.
2. When the costs are tiny, even small rewards can tip the balance towards participation. This is the key point. One of the commenters linked above points out some of the social psychological rewards people get from contributing: fun, feeling smart, status, power, reputation, group belonging. These may, on average, provide only very small rewards. On Wikipedia, that's ok because a very small reward is enough to offset a very small cost. Certainly some people will get far larger rewards from these things. Some people will develop reputations that they can later convert to material gain. Some people are rational zealots who believe so powerfully in open knowledge that they'll spend all their time working on Wikipedia. But for most people, the small rewards will do the trick.

So, what happens if we take this 'small costs, small rewards' point of view and apply it to Wikipedia? We find out that the traditional model actually does a pretty good job of explaining things. If, that is, we're taking a wider view of what benefits are in the real world.

Even this isn't a complete answer to the question, though. I think the larger project should be really coming up with a good answer to the question 'What makes Wikipedia work?' It'll be lots of things, but I think we know a lot about that. I'll be testing a lot of ideas about this in my dissertation work, and I'll be posting about it here.

The Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) maintains a really useful set of links to topical bibliographies on their wiki. Topics include blogging research, SNS research, and HCI more generally. Great stuff.

It's the first day of the rest of my life. Recently I realized that I have been a full-time course-taking graduate student for six consecutive years now. Six long years of coursework. If you count being an undergrad and culinary school, that makes 10 out of the last 11 years in higher education taking courses. That's a long, long time. And I'm tired.

Don't get me wrong. I have loved coursework (and still do). I've learned (and forgotten) more than I can say. But lately I've started to get a little weary. I'm so, so excited about the research I'm doing – or not doing, I should say, because the courses take up so much of my time.

But today, as I said, is a very special day. Last night I attended the last course that I will ever have to take. Oh, I'm sure I'll take a class here and there before and after I finish my degree. But I won't have to, and that matters.

Very soon, I hope to be blogging more, to have the time to pursue all the thoughts and ideas I've been pushing back for lack of time lately. It's all very exciting.

Take a look at these results, recently released by Hitwise and reported on TechCrunch. Couldn't be more skeptical, I must say. Hitwise's methodology seems pretty typical of web survey and analytics companies. They're subject to a huge number of biases to begin with, and systematically over-represent certain parts of the population and certain contexts, despite their best efforts. I know Hitwise is doing everything they can to combat these biases, but they don't go into enough detail on their website for us to be sure of how. I have a strong suspicion, for example, that these results are not so much representative of SES as of geography. But SES makes for a better story. That big purple blob at the bottom right probably represents suburban areas in a very few markets like San Francisco, New York, Boston. The top left quadrant, that's middle America. And none of this is news – Yahoo knows the heartland is their wheelhouse. Plus, what's 'Varying Lifestyles'? Is that the catch-all for all the people they can't pidgeonhole?

We'll continue to see analytics like this, of course, but I think recent news should make us all more skeptical. Advertising is a business that has been run on analytics from the beginning, and unsurprisingly, they got it very, very wrong from the beginning. The knowledge that a small percentage of individuals do most of the clicking (and very little of the buying) should shake the industry up, but it won't. So sad!

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And–which is more–you'll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

If right now you're thinking 'The what-us of who?', just hold on a sec. I'm doing that teaser-ironic title thing. Let me explain.

I've been reading through Ross and Nisbet's excellent introduction to social psychology, The Person and the Situation. One of the first chapters is about social influence and the pressures of conformity. So Ross and Nisbet are describing Muzafer Sherif's landmark 1937 experiments in social influence. You can read a summary of the research, along with Asch's studies, which are often mentioned in the same breath, here. Anyways, here's how Ross and Nisbet summarize the implications of Sherif's work:

[this was] a result showing that social norms did not have to evolve from the converging views of well-meaning but uncertain truth seekers; instead, thy could be imposed by an individual who had no coercive power and no special claim to expertise or legitimacy, only a willingness to be consistent and unwavering in the face of others' uncertainty.

And I thought to myself – this is the genius of George Bush. And of course, Bush is someone who has a great deal of coercive power. I doubt that Bush himself understands the immense strength of consistency – more than likely he is simply stubborn and deluded. I just hope that the overwhelming reality of the world is finally beginning to overtake him.