Inlägg December 2009

2009-12-08 20:23

An unprecedented event

Yesterday, 56 newspapers around the World decided to publish the exact same editorial. They did this to stress the importance of achieving a sustainable result at the United Nation Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (link) - also called COP15.

The editorial reads:

"Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security...Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time, and our projects of taming it will be demtermined in the next 14 days."

Postad av Martin Kaarup

Kommentarer (0)   Kategorier:  Climate Change Conference

2009-12-03 00:27

The death of a star

It’s not often you get to experience a star dying. Up until yesterday, I was unaware that I had accidentally collected evidence of this happening. How and what evidence you might ask. Well, this was how it happened.

Primo November I did a minor study where I wanted to correlate the structural elements of web sites with the actual content it provided. I knew this would definitely be possible on the broader level, but I was unsure to what degree this differentiation was possible and what the similarities would look like.

Therefore I began to partition a lot of different web sites into categories. Examples of such categories are portals, blogs, and media. I also choose specialized search engines. Further to this, I knew beforehand that there existed a type of search engine that specialized in finding one thing, and one thing only, namely the infamous torrent files. Torrent files are small files that contain information pointing to the whereabouts of other files. In other words, a torrent file is quite simliar to a telephone book that contains information about the whereabouts of people and businesses. In turn, these search engines knows the whereabouts of lots and lots of phone books, each having information about the whereabouts of a certain number of people and businesses.

To put it simple, choosing this specialization would provide me with a near perfect setup for a comparative analysis.

The dying star I am referring to is the web site Mininova (link). Mininova, whos name literally means little star, is one of these highly specialized search engines I mentioned above. Some weeks prior to November 26th it showed evidence of being a highly used and visited web site. Amongst other things, it showed the top ten most popular torrent searches for each major category. Example of such categories are movies, music, games, and other.

This is the structure of the web site primo November (see picture below). Notice the big flower-like structures emanating outwards from the center. These are the categories I mentioned earlier and testify to its heavy usage.

Figure 1: Structural evidence of a widely used and visited torrent search engine.

So what happened November 26th? Well, according to Mininova, they decided to change their business model on that specific date. And they did.

Actually, it began August 2008 when the Dutch court of Utrecht ruled that Mininova’s business model was illegal according to Dutch law. The changing business model was therefore a response to this court decision and its purpose is to comply with Dutch law while hopefully retaining a revivable business opportunity.

This is what happened to Mininova’s web site within 24 hours after launching their new business model (see picture below). Pretty remarkable isn’t it?

Figure 2: A drastically deteriorated structure that bear witness to a failing business model. (zoomed in)

The structure is heavily deteriorated because the consumers have disappeared to other sustainable search engines. Even Google’s hit counter show clear evidence that Mininova is becoming a virtual black hole. Its Swedish counterpart, The Pirate Bay, who might also face changes to its business model in the near future, is doing more than twice as good. The real winner is surely the other competing search engines, mostly specialized but also generalized, and of course the plaintiff’s new and unique legal position within the Dutch free market.

Ending on this business opportunity note, I strongly recommend that all other business areas take a very hard look at how they can achieve similar unique legal positions before they are overrun by the plaintiff’s unique area of expertise.

Notes

If you're unsure of what the pictures above show, please read my previous blog "Visualizing the web", where I explain the details. (link)

Postad av Martin Kaarup

Kommentarer (0)   Kategorier:  World Wide Web    Self-organization