del.icio.us bookmark wordcount
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

How long does an article have to be for people to bookmark it as ‘toread’ ? Here is a graph that tries to answer that question. I have taken 1500 most recent bookmarks under the tag ‘toread’ from delicious. I have then retrieved webpage for every single bookmark and calculated word count after stripping out HTML tags.

The graph plots log(wordcount) on y-axis and url index on x-axis. The normal distribution seems to start at 2.3, i.e. 230 words. 230 also has the first big spike when plotted on a histogram for word counts below 2000. But never the less, 230 seems too short an article to be bookmarked for later reading.

A few days ago, I chatted with Jakob Tigges, an architect who proposed building a 3000-feet mountain on the site of the airfield of the former city airport Tempelhof, which was closed down last fall. His proposal was a competition entry on what to do with the vast green space the size of Central Park.

His idea, in my opinion, beats most others, including just using the site to develop more housing (as if there’s any demand for that here). But the Senate of Berlin was quick to shoot it down: Not feasible. Right they may be. I have no idea if Berlin’s muddy foundations would even be able to support that kind of weight. Or where to get enough rocks (I don’t think the leftover concrete from the Berlin wall would be enough). Or what to do about those districts doomed to perpetual shade.

But it turns out the architect was misunderstood all along. What he merely proposes is to create the myth of a mountain. In people’s heads, but also in official communications, city guides, event calendars, weather reports, postcards and snow globes.

I’m very fond of this idea. For one thing, it saves us from any mediocre, short-sighted ideas of “what to do with the space.” Says Tigges: “If you don’t have an idea, maybe it’s better to do nothing.” For another, I think there’s something about the mysticism of an invisible, intangible mountain, the stories that are bound to evolve, the tourists trying to get a photo of the attraction. It matches the spirit of the city much better than any half-assed, actual project might, because much of Berlin’s appeal is due to its intellectual capital, the music and artsy stuff, the ephemeral night life spots.

The idea also has practical advantages: It’s bottom-up. No centralized decisions are neccessary – people can simply start creating. A pen, Photoshop, an Internet and a devoted community is all it takes to create a parallel universe. Compare to the appeal and mythology of ‘Lost’.

And it’s cheap. Which is always good. Especially here (my favorite for official city slogan: “Berlin. It’s cheap!”), a place that wants to be a real city, but lacks the economic engine, the business climate, the jobs, to attract real money.

Trapcall can unmask callers who have blocked caller ID.

From Wired’s Kevin Poulsen:

The service, called TrapCall, is offered by New Jersey’s TelTech systems, the company behind the controversial SpoofCard Caller ID spoofing service. The new service is likely to be even more controversial — and popular.

“What’s really interesting is that they’ve totally taken the privacy out of Caller ID,” says former hacker Kevin Mitnick, who alpha-tested the service.

TrapCall’s basic unmasking service is free, and includes the option of blacklisting unwanted callers by phone number. It also allows you to listen to your voicemail over the web. It’s currently available to AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers, with support for the other major carriers due within weeks, says TelTech president Meir Cohen.

It works pretty well, I must say. I signed up with the service that then left a voicemail for me with a PIN number. I used that to confirm I have the cell phone on their web site. Then I dialed a cryptic authorization number that trapcall used to reprogram my phone to redirect blocked calls which I send to voicemail. This sends them through trapcall’s system and then the call gets forwarded back to me with the blockage removed.

I tested this by dialing from a friends phone blocking caller ID with the “*67″ block and it worked well: the call came through as blocked, I pressed the iphone power button twice (to normally redirect to voicemail) and the call came back seconds later as from my friends phone. And the indication on the other line is noticable, but not by much.

The best part about their basic service is that it’s free. The paid options include voicemail transcriptions (where you obviously consent to have humans listen to your messages) as well as call recording. I wonder a bit about the last capability… it would seem that I could steal someone’s phone, program it with a beartrap account (the more expensive trapcall account) and have access to call recordings from that phone. It’s not clear to me that there is any necessary indication to the user of the cellphone that all of this is happening.

Kachingle’s Business Model
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

Financial crisis has been particularly harsh to newspapers and many people have written about how to save newspaper businesses. Walter Isaacson of Aspen Institute thinks an iTunes of newspaper articles will save the industry [1]. He proposes a pricing scheme to charge $.50 for an article, $1 for an issue and likewise. It is essentially a micropayment based argument bolstered by the recent success of iTunes store.

Clay Shirky, among others, argues against micropayments [2]. He contends that iTunes worked because of a closed system and non-existence of a real alternative. He thinks micropayments are destined to fail because they break the ecology of information sharing. If some of the below listed URLs are behind a gateway and you share this story with some of your friends, chances are not everyone of your friends has a subscription to those articles behind gateways. This clearly is a bottleneck for sharing.

He also points at other problems in Isaacson’s pricing mechanism. He talks about mental transaction costs, where in the consumer has to make a purchase decision for every single article he wants to access. Consumers in the United States and elsewhere have been reluctant to such pricing schemes in related markets like bandwidth and DVD rentals, which brings us to a new startup idea called Kachingle.

Kachingle relies on an NPR like voluntary contribution from readers. Content providers partnering with Kachingle get to keep a little badge ontheir webpages that keeps track of the amount of time a reader spends on the website. Kachingle later distributes readers’ voluntary contribution among partners based on the amount of time he or she spends with them.

There are many things that are elegant about the above solution. It lets the reader set a monthly budget that acts like a flat rate minimizing mental transactions. It also lets the readers set their individual budgets based on their willingness to pay. It could report back to the reader the time they spend on individual websites and thereby let them perceive the value for what they paid for. It could also potentially let them redistribute their donations based on their perception of the value they received.

Where I see it failing is its inability to address a couple of perverse incentives. In the world of content, there are original contributors and there are voracious readers with an excellent eye for quality writing. The latter hyperlink to the former acting as a quality filter for the less voracious mortals. The Kachingle idea parts a tiny slice of its donations to the voracious linkers and a major part to the contributors, which by all means is very fair.

But it can also encourage these voracious readers to crystallize lengthy original contributions into comestible morsels and not link to the original article in the first place [3]. This should help maximize their slices from donations, which again sounds fair given the ubiquitous information overload. This has implications for original contributors, they need to come up with several variations of their essays.

Mr. Isaacson wonders how come users wouldn’t pay for professionally written articles when they pay for music, in spite of mountains of amateur music freely floating on the Internets. The problem I think is, it is far more easy to summarize or meaningfully excerpt a piece of an essay than a song, and there lies the trade off between original contributions and elegant synopses.

[1] http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html
[2] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/
[3] I believe the credibility of the summary is enhanced by linking to the original article, but readers may not be spending as much time as they should be on the original article’s website.