Matt Mason, author of the Pirate’s Dilemma, pithily says, Piracy is a market signal. Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator. Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go
Of all of the work I’ve done at Edvisors over the years, Scholarship Search Secrets, a free eBook on using Google and other tools to find money for college, is one of my proudest accomplishments. No other single piece of work has changed as many lives for the better as this one eBook, and the
I’m an avid gold-maker in World of Warcraft. Like real life, the amount of gold you have in the game is a direct measure of how much value you bring. If you quest like mad and rack up thousands of gold, you’ve got the skills and the time to complete lots of quests. That’s value.
I present two charts. First, via Blytic, a look at food stamp usage and unemployment. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an economist to figure out that this recession still has legs and a long way to run before we even begin to approach “normalcy”. Anyone talking about recovery is being a
Podcasters Across Borders 2009 has wrapped up and the team of Mark Blevis and Bob Goyetche threw yet another impressive event. This year’s PAB theme was ostensibly bringing outside knowledge into the podcasting world, but the general subject of many of the presentations was on story more than anything – ways to more effectively communicate
Here’s another serious topic for discussion: how do you, in social media, reconcile openness and secrecy? Let me give you an example from World of Warcraft. One of the side parts of the game (a very big side part for me) is the in-game economy. You make gold by creating stuff, by killing stuff, or
A couple of years ago, I posted a graphic of the mortgage resets from Credit Suisse First Boston. Let’s see where we are now. Congratulations to all. We’ve made it through the subprime crisis and only lost GM, every investment bank, nearly wiped out the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund, put 1 out of 8 homeowners
Take a look at these three charts. Bloomberg’s commodities index of indices: Commodities, or commodity futures, are investments in the future value of things like rice, gold, oil, cattle, and other tangible goods. Baltic Dry Index: The Baltic Dry Index is an index of costs to ship things on cargo ships. As BDI goes up,
There’s a popular expression, a cliche, that says time is money. However, time isn’t money. Why? There is no such way to intermediate time. There is no coinage for time, no way to purchase time back that you have spent. If time were actually money, you could buy back that missed softball game or child’s
The seeds of the economic recovery are beginning to sprout a little. While the broader economy still has a lot to shake off and the investment, credit, and financial markets still have more garbage to take out, there are small signs of recovery underway that will eventually grow to big signs down the road. A
