Downswing? Dick's Sporting Goods, America's Largest Employer of Golf Pros, Lays Off All Due To Declining Consumer Interest and Sales

More golf courses closed than opened in 2013 - for the eighth straight year. But lest you think this is part of nature's rejuvenating cycle, 14 opened - while 157 closed.

This appears to symptomatic of a larger, broader malaise engendered by expense of the game in a time of declining household income, 24-7 work pressures, disinterest on the part of Gen Xers andYers who, in interviews, consider it too time consuming, unhealthy compared to alternatives and, frankly, boring. And as if all that weren't enough, the game's one true star, Tiger Woods, has never regained his championship form following a series of incidents highlighted by his ex-wife's demonstration of a powerful foreswing aimed at his SUV's windshield.

Dick's Sporting Goods, one of America's largest sports retailers had hired hundreds of golf pros to staff its 500 stores, thinking this would provide a distinct competitive advantage. Alas, it was not to be. Expertise could not overcome a lack of interest - a lesson for any business. Generally in such situations one would expect a cutback, not an elimination of the category. However the retailer's CEO was quoted as saying 'we dont feel we've found the bottom yet.' Fore! JL

Michael Sanserino reports in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Golf sales are dragging nationwide as fewer people are taking interest in the sport.

Hacking Google's Nest Thermostat and the Fight for Personal Data

"In between the dark and the light," as the Eagles once sang, "in between and wrong and the right" is precisely where Nest and its corporate daddy Google find themselves.

The debate over whether the sort of omniscient internet of things device like the Next thermostat is good or evil is still being argued.

Nest/Google argues that sending it all that information will help reduce carbon monoxide in homes, manage the cost of heating, cooling and electricity use, which saves on bills and improves the environment. Skeptics are concerned about how the 32MB of data the device sends out a month (according to the researchers who've studied it) will be used by whoever has access to it.

As the lyrics of that song imply, there is not necessarily one answer that will satisfy everyone with an opinion on the issue. But from the standpoint of corporate design, ownership and oversight, the fact that enterprising technicians are learning to hack these systems in order to give consumers added features they may want is a sign that there is a growing market not so much for privacy, but for more individual say in how these devices can and should work. JL

Kashmir Hill reports in Forbes:

Over a month-long period, the researchers’ device sent 32 MB worth of information to Nest, including temperature data, at-rest settings, and self-entered information about the home, such as how big it is and the year it was built

States That Raised Minimum Wage See Faster Job Growth Than Those That Didn't

The news that states which increased the minimum wage experienced higher job growth than than those that did not is really not that surprising.

Logic dictates that increasing the amount of capital circulating in a local or regional economy, especially a consumer-driven economy like that that exists in most of the US, means that more consumer/employees will have more income to spend which, in turn, will stimulate other enterprises to expand their operations and will encourage entrepreneurs to establish new businesses. The geographical, sociological and economic breadth of the states increasing minimum wage supports that contention.

This is especially true because the industries most likely to be impacted by such a minimum wage increase are precisely those that are projected to be the source of the greatest current and future job demand, which is to say those service industries that need the most workers - and which can benefit most from reductions in turnover, frequently tied to inadequate compensation.

This logic, however, is often lost in the ideological sparring over moralistic arguments about whether paying people more is 'right,' though whose interpretation of what is right leaves lots of room for disagreement. What remains certain, however, is that the laws of economics respond to irrefutable demands whose inputs and outcomes leave little room for moralizing. JL

Scott Neuman reports in NPR:

 "America's minimum wage has long been low by international standards, equalling just 38% of the median wage in 2011, close to the lowest in the OECD. The wage was last raised, to $7.25 per hour, in 2009. Since then its real value has slipped back to where it was in 1998."

Logo Logic: New Jersey Turnpike Authority Sues Florida Pizza Joint Over Trademark Infringement

Movie stars, college football players, deposed dictators and now, the Garden State Parkway. Everybody has gotten very touchy about the value of their image, likeness, data, look and feel.

The specific issue at hand involves Jersey Boardwalk Pizza, a small business in southern Florida with a couple of pizza joints. The antagonist is The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, owner and operator of the Garden State Parkway, one of most famous by-ways in well, the northeastern Middle Atlantic states. A broader audience, such as those who followed TV shows like The Sopranos or Jersey Shore may know that the Garden State is how most people get to the Jersey Shore, but the highway's ostensible charms are probably lost on most of the world's population.

Now the interesting thing about this case is that it may actually have global implications. Anyone familiar with how logos like those of Starbucks, Apple and Mercedes are tweaked slightly in various parts of the world - though China and India, we're looking mostly at you - and then presented as legally defensible marques. This requires a fair amount of cynicism and a relationship with regulatory authorities that might or might withstand scrutiny.

But the larger point is that despite lawyerly claims of product differentiation, consumer understanding and corporate innocence, in a developed world in which household has stagnated and in a developing world where it has yet to attain aspirational heights, there is an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of what constitutes intangible value. Information may want to be free but its owners want to be paid. JL

Emily Babay reports in Philly.com:

"Given the very distinct difference in the goods and services offered by our respective clients (yours being a governmental agency providing highway maintenance and travel related services exclusively in the state of New Jersey -- ours being a franchisor providing delicious pizza), there is no plausible likelihood of confusion,"

Are Tablet Computers a Passing Fad, After All?

Tablets were initially dismissed as a toy, a fad, a plaything for people with more money than sense. But then they surprised everyone by enjoying several years of blow-out sales. They were predicted to surpass PC sales and to keep growing.

But the recent announcement by Apple that tablet sales have fallen for two straight quarters has analysts wondering whether demand has peaked.

The strategic problem is that the tablet is the monkey in the middle. It is convenient and easy, but it is not as powerful as a PC for most business applications and it is not as easy to lug around as a smartphone.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that they have become an acceptable electronic baby-sitter for upscale parents because they are interactive rather than passive (though a review of some of the available content might cause those concerned to yearn for the days of the old tube). They also seem to pop up in the first and business class sections of airlines, among board members attending quarterly meetings and in other affluent venues.

 The issue, as the following article explains, is that those who want them now have them. The news that internet access in China via smartphone now exceeds that from other sources like PCs suggests where this is going. As if no further indication were necessary, Apple's hint that it would be introducing a new line of larger screen iPhones indicates that the tablet will be supplanted by that device. The notion that busy and cash-strapped people would carry three devices always seemed a stretch. The tablet has been written off before and has proved nay-sayers wrong, but with larger and more powerful smartphones, it may now become as much of an evolutionary curiosity as its linear predecessor, the cuneiform tablet. JL

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Shira Ovide report in the Wall Street Journal:

They aren't as essential to many users as smartphones, nor are they as portable. They don't handle many work chores as well as laptop or desktop PCs. And while many people watch videos or read articles on a tablet, it isn't quite a must-have device for many consumers

Precrastination: The Very Human Response To Digital Demand

Apparently  procrastinating was just totally 20th Century. Putting stuff off was fine when the only mail was The Mail, when people wrote with physical implements like pens or pencils and when people actually paid to have real experiences not available on a small screen or at least digitally enhanced.

So here we are in the electronic wonderland we have created for ourselves, only to discover we have found a new means of procrastinating. Owing to our insatiable demand for action, however, it is being called precrastinating because it entails addressing myriad unimportant errands and tasks in order to avoid taking on the big, honking challenges like figuring out whether your digital media strategy is actually producing results.

As a result, emails get returned immediately, even those in which you were the forty-third person copied on the copy line rather than the address line and we dutifully take our tablets to the gym in order to scroll through all those articles we bookmarked when we were doing something else. We may be running in place but we are doing something about it. Sort of. JL

Matt Richtel reports in the New York Times:

Cellphones, computers and other technology are powerful tools that let people tackle a constant stream of tasks, but they can also become hard to ignore, given people’s powerful desire to want to complete those tasks, he said.

If Apple's Products Were Independent Companies They'd Be As Big As...

You think McDonald's is omnipresent? That Google controls your life? That Coca-Cola is the world's greatest brand? That Amazon dominates every facet of every business it enters?

Yeah, ok, they all have their points. But as the following article explains, if Apple were to unbundle its products and set them up as separate companies, some of them - especially the iPhone - would be as big or bigger than most of those other enterprises.

Apple advocates will no doubt cheer the news. There is a strong emotional component to that relationship, wherein some, perhaps many, Apple users feel  superior precisely because they own Apple products. And perhaps they are.

There could be a downside to this, which is that any company that gets too big, however beloved, creates its own weather, as the saying goes. Apple's impact on the financial market averages has already been noted and the ubiquity of its architecture or those who have cloned it, make it susceptible to certain bugs or intrusions.

Most importantly, however, there were once companies named Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia whose smartphones were the primary drivers of their businesses. Need we ask, where are they now? JL

Jordan Weissman reports in Slate:

Apple moved 35.2 million of the devices this quarter, generating $19.75 billion in sales—a sum larger than Amazon's last reported quarterly revenue. It's also more than the revenues at Coca-Cola and McDonald's combined. Stack Google and eBay on top of one another, and they barely beat out the little hand-computer.

How Should You Hire When Everything Keeps Changing?

How can we be certain there's a skills shortage when we cant be sure what skills will be needed?

This is one of the conundrums facing enterprises as they attempt to figure out how to build for the future.

The only constant we see is change, but we are, in part, responsible for that state of affairs. We are more concerned with exit strategies than growth, unwilling to invest unless acceptable returns are guaranteed, more focused on the short term than the long because we are not sure whether the institution or we who work in it will be around that long.

We may rail against the counter-productive nature of this situation but it is unlikely to change as long as financialization remains a fixed arbiter of value rather than a variable service cost.

Some organizations address this by hiring more part time and contract employees, hoping to manage risk by lessening their dependence on people. But a more logical approach may be to hire people who have evinced the capacity to be flexible and adaptive. Skilled, yes, in certain core occupations or talents, but able to see the possible, to be fluid rather than rigid, open minded rather than closed.

The focus on narrow job descriptions and relentless cost containment is a logical extension of the psychological  need for certainty. But in a world where control is ephemeral and assurance is fleeting, it may make more sense to find people who are as resilient and versatile as the circumstances in which they find themselves. JL

Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google comments in Yale Insights:

A portfolio perspective in which most employees are chosen for inherent abilities. “The most important thing is to have these universal and general attributes which allow you to pick up new ideas and apply them in new and interesting ways.”

Russian Roulette, Chinese Checkers? Hacking the Financial Markets for Fun, Profit and Competitive Advantage

Yes, the financial markets can be hacked. In fact, they have been hacked. It's the how and why that is so interesting.

The developed economies have become increasingly dependent on the finance as manufacturing and production are outsourced to less expensive venues. This has not been an entirely organic or natural process: the financial services industry has lobbied hard for the tax breaks and regulatory freedoms that, in turn, helped generate the wealth that could then be recycled into political influence, after those in the know got their very substantial cut.

Biology teaches us that becoming too dependent on one source of sustenance makes one vulnerable and, ultimately, a logical candidate for extinction. Ask the Irish about potatoes. Ask Detroit about cars.

So the west is setting itself up for catastrophic attack, it's just been a question of who and when. The case we know about, as the following article explains, is a Russian cyberattack on NASDAQ, the market for smaller entrepreneurial companies. The Russians and Chinese are none too happy that most of their businesses prefer to list on western exchanges where inconveniences like the rule of law discourage government interference. And what is chilling about this is that NASDAQ is the market through which innovation is monetized, making the funding of new developments even riskier than it already was.

So, increased risk, decreased certainty: if your goal is to undermine an entire economic ecosystem, that would be a pretty good place to start. JL

Michael Riley reports in Business Week:

'We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges'

The Discontent With Content Marketing

Content marketing's first challenge is overcoming the that it is a euphemism. It is advertising masquerading as journalism or other seemingly objective information narratives designed to obscure its ultimate purpose, which is to get customers to buy whatever the content is purportedly about.

Assuming there is nothing overtly misleading in the presentation of the material (though the definition of overt is open to interpretation) there is nothing illegal about this.

Content marketing came to the fore because the net made frantic mobile ADHD-like internet scrolling a perfect environment for those who had a message wrapped in experts' clothing to provide in order to catch the attention of anyone whose neurons or synapses might respond, however momentarily,  when their eyes flicker past a keyword of potential interest. Seemed like a clever idea: rather than wait for actual writers to generate 'content' that those in a hurry - which is to say, everyone - might notice. In reality, however, content marketing results have been disappointing.

The reasons for the dissatisfaction, however, may have to do with our over-reliance on technology - eg, we'll just program a computer to do that - and our under-appreciation of actual writing skills. Turgid prose turns out to be no more of a substitute for compelling or entertaining narrative online than in any other medium. Score a small victory for education, discernment and taste. JL

Alex Kantrowitz reports in Advertising Age:

Many marketers come into the field via functions such as sales, product design and business development. These marketers, she said, come from places where communication is important, but where being provocative, intriguing and informational isn't as valued

The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence

All of us are being encouraged to get in touch with our own feelings as well as those of the people with whom we interact.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the workplace, where the imperatives of the post-industrial economy challenge us to manage in ways that reflect the intelligence and skills of the technologically sophisticated workforce.

As a general proposition, this has been considered a net positive: that people should be treated courteously and encouraged rather than threatened is more defensible morally and more effective operationally. But given the power that technology provides, this should not be considered an unalloyed positive. Knowledge can be applied in ways that encourage manipulation and abuse of customers, employees and anyone else in the business eco-system. As the following article explains, creating a values-driven framework within which such intelligence is considered is essential to the effective application of any knowledge-based construct. JL

Adam Grant reports in The Atlantic:

If we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and where it’s actually useful. It is high time that emotional intelligence is “pried away from its association with desirable moral qualities.”

Curb Your Enthusiam? Netlfix's Growth Redefines It's Competitive Position

One of the verities of business wisdom is that periods of  rapid growth are usually  the most dangerous to management and to the enterprise. The reason is that growth sucks up a lot of resources and because of its psychological allure, can become an end in itself, divorced from strategy - and not infrequently, from reality.

Netflix has exceeded analysts' estimates 31 times in the past nine years. It has now passed the 50 million subscriber threshold and could well continue to grow at a stirring pace. But a corollary of faster growth is that while it gives you more heft with which to challenge current or incipient competitors, it puts you on the radar screen of those who are even larger. Among the effects this has is that it draws more attention to the enterprise's strengths and weaknesses by entities which may be even better endowed - and changes expectation of performance.

Netflix, as the following article explains, has enjoyed a 400 percent increase in its stock price in the last year. But it is also locked in a struggle with cable providers over whose pipes its content is carried. The cable guys argue that Netflix sucks up a lot of bandwidth and should pay more for the privilege, while Netflix pleads net neutrality and the mutual benefits of customer satisfaction. The reality is that Netflix and the cable networks will do what they perceive is right for them, but with an eye towards the day when, inevitably, they become direct competitors. Investors, meanwhile, will no longer view Netflix as a scrappy digital startup but as a full fledged media conglomerate - and their expectations will reflect that change. JL

Spencer Jakab reports in the Wall Street Journal:

While its business model is no house of cards, it may be time to curb your enthusiasm.

Games People Play: Deposed Dictator Manuel Noriega Sues 'Call of Duty' Game for Exploitation of His Image

Memo to game makers: uh yeah, so this whole image value thing seems to be getting, like, serious.

First it was relatively unknown college athletes demanding royalties for the use of their images on games like EA Sports' NCAA College Football game. Then it was aging child actress Lindsay Lohan suing Grand Theft Auto because in the latest version there is a character who bears a more than casual likeness to her.

So in terms of popular entertainment, we have sports and entertainment covered. What's left? Oh, that's right! Politics. So prototypical Central American dictator Manuel Noriega, formerly the supreme leader of Panama but currently serving 20 years in Panamanian prison for various crimes against the state, is now suing Activision, maker of the Call of Duty shooter game, for misappropriating his image and likeness for profit.

No virtuoso cellists or Nobel prize winning astrophysicists have yet sued game makers, but they cant be far behind. To say nothing of pizza makers, cocktail mixologists and celebrity masseuses. This is a wake-up call not just for the gaming industry, but for the entire tech field. To the extent that anyone thinks their personal data has value, they are going to file a lawsuit demanding a piece of the action. And who can blame them? Hey, even evil drug-dealing dictators have commercial interests. Why should all the loot go to game industry geeks and their venture capitalists? The free data party's over folks. JL

Blake Brittain reports in Bloomberg:

The game has sold nearly 25 million copies worldwide, and Noriega is seeking lost profits and damages for "blatant misuse, unlawful exploitation and misappropriation for economic gain.

Insurers Dispute Half of All Business Claims

Insurance is so boring that few outside the industry pay attention - which is exactly how the insiders like it. 

Whether in a professional or personal setting, we tend not think about it - until we need it. This has allowed certain processes to evolve that greatly benefit the insurers at the expense of the insured. But what it particularly amazing is that businesses appear to suffer to the same degree that individuals do.

This is surprising because given the laser like focus of the financialization avatars on everything from salaries to real estate to legal representation, it would be reasonable to assume that the growth in insurance premiums would have been given the same treatment. Not only does this not appear to be the case, but as the following article explains, insurers challenge fully half of all business claims and take almost three years to settle even the most prosaic claims.

The insurance industry may finally be receiving some of the same scrutiny that so many others have had to endure, almost always to their disadvantage. The only question is why it took so long. JL

Alistair Gray reports in the Financial Times:

Insurers take an average of 35 months to settle disputed claims, often through arbitration proceedings with gagging clauses and for a fraction of the sums sought.

Prepare for the Rebranding of Money

It's emblematic of the old startup issue: people optimistically leave a steady gig with a reputable employer because they believe their talent and ideas can attract capital and skilled colleagues. Only to discover that the former employer's reputation provided a lot more value than they had realized.

Which is obviously not to say that people never add that incremental value and make a go of it. But our various successes with tech have led some to believe that they can improve upon the concept of money.

The bitcoin bubble started it. It was techy, libertarian, tax-advantaged and smarter-than-thou. Until some problems cropped up which, to our credit as members of a socio-economic system, were identified early, proved to be prescient and to which people paid attention. Way to go, humanity.

The challenge faced by those intent on reinventing and rebranding money is that they tend to focus on the tangible issues, like the underlying economic and technical details rather than paying more attention to the crucial intangibles like - as the following article explains - trust, brand and that 'full faith and credit' thing that gets bandied about whenever governments want to issue more debt. The intersection of technology and finance has come in for some well deserved criticism so anyone attempting to supplant the current system is going to have some rather large hurdles to overcome.

Given the persistent growth of various innovative payment systems, it is likely that alternatives will emerge, though they will probably be more incremental and complementary than radically disruptive. But in order to succeed, whatever their structure and purpose, they will require belief on the part of users: ultimately, a brand is a promise to the consumer and money in its various guises, is no different than anything else. JL

Molly Flatt reports in TechCityNews:

The single theme that united disparate tech visions was the importance of trust and the power of branding. For all their disruptive potential, alternative financial models will only convert the mainstream when they offer the consumer a sense of equal, or greater, security than state-endorsed systems and currencies

The Buy Button: Why Twitter and Facebook Are Clutching Ecommerce

When Twitter and Facebook both announced they were testing new means of making impulse purchases from within their own networks, the presumption was that they wanted a larger piece of the revenue being generated.

That both systems are designed to encourage impulse purchases, eg, those that require little forethought and are most prone to promotion, if not outright manipulation, well, who could be surprised: these were hardly departures from the exploitation ethos that reigns over so much of the big data shopping interface.

But taking on Amazon is no one's idea of an intelligent strategy. So as the following article explains, in a departure from the usual linear ecommerce  progression that leads from attention to engagement to purchase, what the social networks are doing is reversing the sequence so that ecommerce is a source of validation for the other elements of their platforms. Given the broader concerns raised about valuations and effectiveness, this could be a clever tactical advance in the short term, with potential strategic implications down the road. JL

Seth Fiegerman reports in Mashable:

"The motivation has to make the whole advertising process easier, to prove the returns and the conversion rates. If it results in them being more of an acceptable platform for e-commerce... that's sort of gravy. But I don’t think the motivation here is say, 'We’re going to be Amazon.'"

Should Travelers Avoid Flying Airlines That Have Had Crashes in the Past?

Unlucky? Imprudent? Poorly managed? How to assess the safety record of airlines in an increasingly transportation-dependent world.

Was Malaysian Airlines just a victim of random chance or did its policies, procedures and systems make both the plane that disappeared several months ago and the one that was shot down in the Ukraine the likely result of increased and possibly inevitable risk? Who hired those pilots, who thought it was logical to fly over a war zone filled with thugs whose weapons were far more powerful than their training, discipline or intellect?

The answers turn out to be less conclusive than one might hope. As the following article explains, the safety records of most major airlines are fairly similar. Socio-economic development of the home country may be a more statistically significant predictor of future behavior than past performance.

It is possible to extrapolate and deduct that wealthier countries simply have more resources to apply to the procedures that safeguard affluent citizens who demand that level of service. But Malaysia is a developed nation with a strong economy and a relatively impressive infrastructure. Which is to say that there is risk in most human endeavors but it may be that the prevalent culture may be the best indicator of future results. JL

Nate Silver reports in 538 Blog:

If you want to predict an airline’s future rate of crashes, you’re best off looking at its home country’s GDP and largely ignoring its track record.

Running on Empty: Just Whose Job Is It to Train Employees?

Your most valuable assets walk out the door every evening, or so the CEO keeps saying. But corporate investment in training has dropped in half since the financial crisis - and it was already in rapid decline then.

Meanwhile, enterprises claim they can't find good people or the right people or people with the right skills or, apparently, anyone else for that matter.

This is not hard to understand when job descriptions are written so narrowly that only the person currently performing that task is considered qualified by the algorithm doing the recruitment screening. While you're at it, incomes are declining and the funds available for government training are being cut so that potential pool of talent can no longer afford to invest in their own skills improvement.

And even if you are willing to bend the rules and invest a little in training, you have to do so without telling disapproving investors that you might be spending money on people, because there are no tax advantages in making contributions to staff productivity and effectiveness.

In other words, as the comic book character Pogo once famously observed, 'we have met the enemy and he is us.' 

The evolutionary system institutions have tolerated and, in many cases, encouraged, has left them with a limited pool of talent that puts them at a competitive disadvantage in a global economy. Potential recruits dont have the skills, nor thanks to a paucity of paid opportunities to learn, the potential to do so from organizations themselves nor from the governments that might be encouraged to offer funding for training.

The rationale for investment in training, both in terms of macro benefits to consumer-oriented post-industrial societies and due to the micro benefits to enterprises whose return on improving the performance of the people they hire or contract with as well to the benefits of enhanced productivity, efficiency and effectiveness will generally more than meet most reasonable hurdles.

Enterprises used to do this as a matter of course because they believed that they were building for the future. It is possible that we now seem more focused on exit strategies than investment opportunities. The challenge then, is overcoming our own fear of the future. JL

Lauren Weber reports in the Wall Street Journal:

If employers want only people who can step in immediately because they are currently doing the job, [they] narrow the pool to almost no one.

Piracy on the Plate: The Mysterious Mathematics of the Lobster Economy

Because we love them? Because they remind us of summer with friends and family and sunburn and plentiful adult beverages and greasy fingers and that life can be good even if it isnt always?

And because it's a habit we cant seem to break even though we profess to be be shocked at how much they cost on the table, if not at the dock.

They being lobsters and it being the ridiculous prices we are charged for an cherished sea food icon of which there is, has been and probably will mostly likely if not always be a glut.

Business people have laughed for years at movie accounting where gargantuan hits never make a profit, at least by the definition found in industry fine print while those who thought they were entitled to a piece of the gross - forget about the net: even novices know there has never been and will never be a net - wonder why their hoped-for return is like a bad reprise of Waiting for Godot. 

But compared to the economics of putting lobster on the table in front of paying guests those movie guys are rubes and tin horns. The following article explains how it works. JL

Ian Brown reports in The Globe and Mail:

The voodoo of lobster economics never goes away: a chunk of tail meat on a $23 apple, truffle and spaghetti squash salad may shout “Fancy!” to a diner, but the restaurant is making less profit than it can on steak, which isn’t alive and doesn’t spoil as quickly.

Eye of the Beholder: Why Content Is No Longer King

The theory was that content attracted page views, which were the digitally enhanced kissing cousins of clicks who then begat sales.

What was in it for the content providers was reputation which, when enough data points were ostensibly aggregated, could also add up to potential revenue because it translated into personal equivalent of page views.

So consultants and authors and subject matter experts of all types happily contributed content to whoever the aggregators were because that's how points are tabulated and reputations earned. No money changed hands - usually - because in this reputation economy, those with the ability to collect and dispense content were offering something more powerful than mere lucre, they were offering immortality!

All of which meant that conference organizers and publishers and webinar producers and, of course, TED talks promoters were able to fill the hungry maw of the digital beast and keep the dream alive.

The problem seems to be that that was a phase. Living organisms require food and shelter for which fame is, at best, a temporary alternative - and not much of a barter value. Content still matters, but the people who consume it have gotten ever pickier about what they'll choose which means everyone else in the food chain has to re-calibrate what the meaning of essential might be for them. And it just may be that given the alternatives, the members of society will be willing to embrace their relative obscurity or superficiality  - or both - as a fair price for something more tangible. JL

Amy Westervelt comments in Medium:

Looking for ways to have more and more content for less money, because more content means more page views, which enables a few more drops of blood from the stone of online ad sales.

Data Decides: Behavior, Reputation and a Future Based on Algorithmic Regulation

So what if the way in which you are regulated - by ecommerce merchants, by access to others in your social network and by, say, the police, is based on your reputation; and what if your reputation is based on a compilation of data about your behavior?

That would seem a tad oppressive, no? A little controlling, a bit much, just too-too?

What a joker you are to even think that someone might find that acceptable, let alone legal. But guess what? It's already happening. Social media is already shaping content based on statistical analyses of your psychographics, your response to happy or sad, angry or peaceful.

Governments, too, want to get into the game. So welcome to really big data. Your record of interactions with the authorities cross-referenced and correlated with standardized norms. From overdue library books to traffic tickets to credit reports and late filing fees to the more positive behavioral cues you might have evinced, this all contributes to a profile that either cuts you some slack or tightens the bonds.

Paranoid? Delusional? Or simply the reality of living in a dangerous world? Society will have to decide, assuming that it, that it can take back whatever authority has already been ceded without thought or comment. JL

Evgeny Morozov comments in The Guardian:

The imperative to evaluate and demonstrate "results" and "effects" already presupposes that the goal of policy is the optimisation of efficiency. However, as long as democracy is irreducible to a formula, its composite values will always lose this battle: they are much harder to quantify.