lucindigo.com

Tim Harford wrote a book I am currently reading, The Undercover Economist and writes a column for the Financial Times and my fave Slate, answering questions such as “why do I only have odd socks?” with the tools of economics. Have a look at the column “Dear Economist” here. Tim blames economists for the fact that people view economics as the “dismal science”, the early books on popular economics he says took it as a matter of pride to shock and offend people. Tim says another factor is the boring forecasters such as investment banks hiring “old talking heads” to talk on TV thats going up, thats going down. This is what people see, but these phenomena are not representative of what economics are about.

Tim’s view is that everything involves economics on a day by day, minute by minute basis. Economists think about everyday decisions, more efficient government, shopping, starting a family… And apparently enjoy a joke as much as everybody else. A lot of people don’t understand what economics is and what it can explain for them. Listen to a full interview with Tim Harford here

With this in mind, I thought I would dig out a few resources for those who want to get their head around this stuff. Enough to understand the Newspaper business pages, the cited economic indicators within these stories. What this stuff means for you now and what it could mean in the future.

Starter - What is economics?

1) Article: Beginners guide to economic indicators here

2) Investopedia Tutorials: Economics Basics

3) Three Economists and their theories: Smith (Invisible Hand), Marx (Its exploitation!) and Keynes (Govt should help the economy)

4) YouTube - Ali G Talks to the Chief Economics Advisor to Ronald Regan, “Economics, it’s well important innit?”

5) YouTube - Principles of Economics translated

And lets finish with the Freakonomics Blog (The Hidden side of everything) from the NY Times

• Web 3.0 and what it includes
• Semantic Web
• Semantic Apps
• Open Data
• Mobile Web
• Mobile Web Apps
• Recommendation Engines
• Also, some web predictions for the future and other resources

View Slideshow presentation from Readwriteweb’s Richard Macmanus on Slideshare

The Web solved a frustration, made life easier, created solutions for us and gave us a lot of information a lot faster.

It is my understanding that the semantic web has the potential to be a whole new shift all over again, to solve problems and provide solutions for our current frustrations. I’ve done quite a bit of reading on this topic, but must admit that the concept is still proving to be quite elusive and rather technical. Internet founder Tim Berners Lee said it holds both huge potential for enterprises as well as a very exciting long term.

In this article he claimed that Google could be superseded as THE preeminent online brand by a company that harnesses the power of next generation web technology.
This article also defines semantic web with some clarity, “The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data - not just a web page - so that it can “communicate” with other information.”

This week Yahoo announced a shift to adopt some of the key standards of semantic web. “The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search.” Read latest news about this here

“Calais” is powered by Reuters and the tagline states, “We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the semantic web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.”
So, lets see….

First Stop: Wikipedia on Semantic Web.
“The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.”

Stop Two: Readwriteweb, 11 things to know about Semantic Web

Stop Three: And if you are over reading, see if you can gain some understanding of Semantic Web from this YouTube video, Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Bonus for those with ample time: Also check this one out from Google Tech Talks on YouTube if you are up for a full 50 minute lecture!

The Project for Excellence will release the State of the News Media 2008 report on Monday, March 17. The report examines the health and status of journalism in America, and it includes major industry trends, specific analysis of the eight main media sectors, and the following additional features such as:

• A Year in the News, a new comprehensive content analysis of 70,000 stories from 48 news outlets in five different kinds of media.
• A survey of a cross-section of journalists that reveals how they feel about the future of the profession
• The view of the advertising industry from Madison Avenue
• A content analysis study of 64 citizen media sites
• Links to key industry statistics

Check out last year’s at this link:
http://www.lucindigo.com/2007/03/21/2007/