Regular readers – there are regular readers, right? – will know that I reserve a special scorn for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free section; a comment and opinion subdirectory that collects viewpoints from across the political spectrum.

In itself, a section like this is laudable. It exposes people to new viewpoints, attitudes and lifestyles that the print version of The Guardian does not. It’s strapline is ‘Comment Is Free… but facts are sacred’ – a quote from Grauniad progenitor CP Scott.

It’s a broad church, features some fascinating articles and regularly generates some vigorous debate.

However, I feel that that concept has been somewhat bastardised to create a deliberately provocative and emptily heated section of the website, where drivel like Sarah Palin’s climate change invective is published without comment.

Another recent article on video games relating to rape was similarly witless, and pulled apart by Comment Is Free regulars. And I think that’s the point.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that much of Comment Is Free constitutes link- and flamebait, dog whistling, tail pulling – whatever you want to call it.

It’s like the post on a forum that exists simply to irritate, the equivalent of poking a bee’s nest and running away. In web parlance it’s known as trolling.

It exists to provoke, and provoke it does. There are regularly hundreds of well-informed, well-written and well-argued comments on Comment Is Free posts, coming from many points of view.

Thousands of words of user-generated content, lots of outraged inbound links, lots of return traffic from people keeping tabs on the latest debate.

The Guardian’s site has become a slick SEO machine, as evinced by its URL keyword stuffing and habit of publishing several permutations of the same story, and perhaps a bit too good for its own good.

It’s clever, but it’s a step too far for me. I can’t believe that a lot of Comment Is Free isn’t simply designed to rile up The Guardian’s own readership, the very people who buy the newspaper, in order to generate more copy, links and hits from them.

Is this what happens to a newspaper’s content when too much thought is given to chasing traffic and the holy grail of user-generated content? Is it OK to debase and undermine your moral weight and editorial line in search of more web traffic?

Is the trade-off worth it? Crap, often dishonest, generally lazy, frequently hysterical and badly-structured arguments and articles in exchange for a few more hits, and a bit more cash?

There are other symptoms at other papers – the Indie seems to print a diet of increasingly outlandish lists, while the Torygraph recently printed this beauty, a disingenuous piece of phony conspiracy-theory outrage about Google gaming its own algorithm.

The Telegraph article is breathtaking in its dishonesty, but The Guardian is the worst – a serial offender that sticks two fingers up to its own readership every time it wittingly publishes another bad article.

I’m all for a broad church, I’m all for challenging viewpoints, and I’m all for user interaction – but it’s come to something when the newspaper is the troll.

Oh hello, didn’t see you there. Mainly because this is a blog which I’ve prewritten and which you are reading from a remote and distant source. I’ve spent much of today not doing things I need to do, including filming my vlog and writing here. As Advent is nearing its end, I’m quite proud of the fact that I will soon have uploaded 25 consecutive videos and written 25 consecutive blog entries. However, I am taking a brief trip to London tomorrow morning early and so will not have the time to write an entry for the 22nd, certainly not a specialised one. Thus, I am resorting to my previous trick of inserting a poem into the blog.

I am actually rather happy to be able to put these somewhere to be read and remarked on. Poetry is for many people a rather private occupation – the world is full of poets and few are professional. It is composed in lonely bedrooms by tormented midnight souls, or scribbled on thudding train journeys by patient watchmen with notebooks, or snatched from the hubbub of a walk through the city centre and placed carefully in a text message for later. Stephen Fry (yes, him again) wrote a fantastic book called “The Ode Less Travelled” which is a brilliant study in poetic style, form and content, but also a heartfelt credo regarding poetry as a HOBBY, a personal pastime or act of confession.

So, I have the luxury of this cyber-soapbox, a place where I can toss my words to the wind and watch them drift off under the gaze of others. I hope you like the two poems that are going up in today’s post and tomorrow’s and that, as Christmas is coming closer, you’ve bought me a present.

What? You haven’t?

Get the fuck off my blog!

- This poem, “The Web”, takes the image of the spider’s web and uses it to explore the World Wide Web as an access point to anything and everything (the word “Googolplex” hints at this, as does “world of worlds”). The possibilities the net allows us are many and the poem is, perhaps, more focused on the evils rather than the goods. It is a savage scene in many ways, the spider catching the fly and devouring him. It is for the reader to decide whether the internet user is the spider or the fly, the hunter or the hunted.

The Web

Stephanie and I landed out West for our Christmas vacation last night, and woke refreshed this morning to find this awesome review of “The Retributioners” on Visioweb.TV, an excellent new site devoted to Web shows. The legions of Web TV fans are growing, and if this site is any indication, they’re an increasingly savvy, sophisticated, articulate bunch. We should all be switching off our cable now! (at least until the Soup and 30 Rock are on, or maybe until Mad Men gets going again).

So if you do love Web TV, and you want to show your appreciation to the proliferating numbers of plucky, independent-minded Web artists coming online, maybe you’re wondering: How do I get my favorite shows the attention they’re due? Well, how about with some awards?

The 2nd Annual Streamy Award season just launched, and Stephanie and I are excited to nominate not only ourselves, but also to nominate the incredibly talented actors who lent us their rapier wit and masterful acting chops in 2009. For your consideration, we humbly submit our fresh, funny, acerbic, retributive Web show in a number of categories. Check out our Streamy site to find out how you can get The Retributioners nominated.

Steph and I, again, are on vacation, so the posts will be a bit less frequent over the next couple of weeks, but check in anyway. You never know when I’ll spring some holiday cheer on you.

http://www.realtythoughts.com/

As a real estate professional your main focus in business has to be people. Converting those people into clients can be a tedious process which heavily weighs on trust and reputation. In the past the main avenue for getting new leads and networking was handing out business cards whenever possible. With the increase of social networks and the Web 2.0 culture, real estate pros must engage people where they frequent – the web. So I guess you’re wondering what this has to do with business cards? There’s a neat tool I want to share that encompasses both worlds of live interaction and social networking online. It’s called a dropcard, and it allows you to give people you meet your business card via text message or over the web. Not only does it allow you to give your contact and business information, it also enables you to connect with these new contacts via the various social networks you have a presence in.

www.mydropcard.com

By: David

The Mike Webb Team:  www.NorthernVirginiaHouses.com

Take a look at this video care of Ideas Project

“I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface yet of understanding how to leverage the power of these social dynamics, but I think a key to unlocking the potential is going to be through developing better tools to visualize our human capital, which would be a combination of our strengths, our skills, and our social connections.”

“Honey! Could you open this jar of pickles for me?”
“Sure, but i’m gonna need a handjob first.”

Ok, so that may be the strangest way i’ve ever started a post, but i’m not talking about a sexual act here. I’m talking about the Handjob! Multi-Grip System. It’s this product that helps you open bottles, jars, and other hard-to-open items. That’s not the best part though; it’s the commercial. The ad for this is overly lewd and sexual, but downright hilarious! Just watch it above.

I’m still trying to figure out how legit this video is, though. I mean it just seems way to ridiculous to be an actual product. However, it has an official website where you can order from.

If you want to buy a Handjob! for just $4.95, go here. You can be the envy of the neighborhood with a Handjob! in the front yard!

So on the morning of the Physical release of Joe McElderry’s début single, original tipped as a sure-fire Christmas smash, Rage Against The Machine’s guitarist praises the UKs “spirit”, while the nation continues to be at each other’s throats over the festive number one.

Brilliant isn’t it?

A quick trip over to BBC Radio Five Live’s debate this morning shows just how into this people are getting. I mean, even the people who don’t care are getting angry, thus putting throwing a bit of doubt onto how little they actually care:

“I hate X factor and I hate Rage, I just don’t care about the charts! In fact, I DON’T care about all this so much that I’m going to make the effort to call a radio station and TELL EVERYONE HOW LITTLE I BLOODY CARE!! IT DOESN’T BOTHER ME!! I DON’T CARE!!! REALLY!!! RAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHH!!!!”

As I said: Brilliant.

Meanwhile, Rage’s guitarist Tom Morello has been interviewed by BBC 6 Music about the campaign on Shaun Keaveny’s Breakfast Show.

Apparently, he decided to find out more after hearing about the campaign through some mates in the UK (I’m sure it has nothing to do with curiosity as to the size of the royalty cheque he’ll be receiving as a welcome stocking filler!)

He said: “A little dose of anarchy for the Christmas holidays is good for the soul.”

Morello praised “the independent spirit” from British rock fans, and said “Your country has a great rich history of cutting-edge, exciting rebel music. I think that people are just fed up with being represented every Christmas holiday, being spoon fed some overblown, sugary ballad that sits at the top of the charts.”

Ho Ho Ho, Mofo.

As things currently stand, it all still looks to be on a knife edge. Joe is now 2nd in all download charts, with iTunes, HMV, Amazon and Play all putting the Rap Metallers in the top slot. Obviously, this could all change once sales of the actual CD are announced later this week. (Joe has had a CD pressed – a luxury not bestowed upon RATM, due to their single no actually being a single!)

Rage in the downloads charts...

In this video, Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk about their finding that you are 8 times more likely to die walking drunk than driving drunk.

Levitt says this

“anybody could have done it, it took us about 5 minutes on the internet trying to figure out what some of the statistics were… and yet no one has every talked or thought about it and I think that’s the power of ideas… ways of thinking about the world differently that we are trying to cultivate with our approach to economics.”

Dubner cites the various ways a person could die walking drunk

1. step off the curb into traffic.
2. mad dash across the highway.
3. lie down and take a nap in the road.

Which leads him to see how obvious it is ex post that drunk walking is so much more dangerous than drunk driving.

I thought a little about this and it struck me that riding a bike while drunk should be even more dangerous than walking drunk. I could

1. roll or ride off a curb into traffic.
2. try to make a mad dash across an intersection.
3. get off my bike so that i can lie down in the road to take a nap.

plus so many other dangerous things that i can do on my bike but could not do on foot. And what the hell, I have 5 minutes of time and the internet so I thought I would do a little homegrown freakonomics to test this out. Here is an excerpt from their book explaining how they calculated the risk of death by drunk walking.

Let’s look at some numbers, Each year, more than 1,000 drunk pedestrians die in traffic accidents. They step off sidewalks into city streets; they lie down to rest on country roads; they make mad dashes across busy highways. Compared with the total number of people killed in alcohol-related traffic accidents each year–about 13,000–the number of drunk pedestrians is relatively small. But when you’re choosing whether to walk or drive, the overall number isn’t what counts. Here’s the relevant question: on a per-mile basis, is it more dangerous to drive drunk or walk drunk?

The average American walks about a half-mile per day outside the home or workplace. There are some 237 million Americans sixteen and older; all told, that’s 43 billion miles walked each year by people of driving age. If we assume that 1 of every 140 of those miles are walked drunk–the same proportion of miles that are driven drunk–then 307 million miles are walked drunk each year.

Doing the math, you find that on a per-mile basis, a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.

I found the relevant statistics for cycling here, on the internet. I calculate as follows. Estimates range between 6 and 21 billion miles traveled by bike in a year. Lets call it 13 billion. If we assume that 1 out of every 140 of these miles are cycled drunk, then that gives about 92 million drunk-cycling miles. There are about 688 cycling related deaths per year (average for the years 200-2004.) Nearly 1/5 of these involve a drunk cyclist (this is for the year 1996, the only year the data mentions.) So that’s about 137 dead drunk cyclists per year.

When you do the math you find that there are about 1.5 deaths per every million miles cycled drunk. By contrast, Levitt and Dubner calculate about 3.3 deaths per every million miles walked drunk.

Is walking drunk more dangerous than biking drunk?

Here is another piece of data. Overall (drunk or not) the fatality rate (on a per-mile basis) is estimated to be between 3.4 and 11 times higher for cyclists than motorists. From Levitt and Dubner’s conclusion that drunk walking is 8 times more dangerous than drunk driving we can infer that there are about .4 deaths per million miles driven drunk. That means that the fatality rate for drunk cyclists is only about 3.8 times higher than for drunk motorists.

That is, the relative riskiness of biking versus driving is unaffected (or possibly attenuated) by being drunk. But while walking is much safer than driving overall, according to Levitt and Dubner’s method, being drunk reverses that and makes walking much more dangerous than both biking and driving.

There are a few other ways to interpret these data which do not require you to believe the implication in the previous paragraph.

1. There was no good reason to extrapolate the drunk rate of 1 out of every 140 miles traveled from driving (where its documented) to walking and biking (where we are just making things up.)
2. Someone who is drunk and chooses to walk is systematically different than someone who is drunk and chooses to drive. They are probably not going to and from the same places. They probably have different incomes and different occupations. Their level of intoxication is probably not the same. This means in particular that the fatality rate of drunk walkers is not the rate that would be faced by you and me if we were drunk and decided to walk instead of drive. To put it yet another way, it is not drunk walking that is dangerous. What is dangerous is having the characteristics that lead you to choose to walk drunk.

These ideas, especially the one behind #2 were the hallmark of Levitt’s academic work and even the work documented in Freakonomics. His reputation was built on carefully applying ideas like these to uncover exciting and surprising truths in data. But he didn’t apply these ideas to his study of drunk walking. Of course, my analysis is no better. I just copied some numbers off a page I found on the internet and applied the Levitt Dubner calculation. It only took me 5 minutes. (And I would appreciate if someone can check my math.) But then again, I am not trying to support a highly dubious and dangerous claim:

So as you leave your friend’s party, the decision should be clear: driving is safer than walking. (It would be even safer, obviously , to drink less, or to call a cab.) The next time you put away four glasses of wine at a party, maybe you’ll think through your decision a bit differently. Or, if you’re too far gone, maybe your friend will help sort things out. Because friends don’t let friends walk drunk.

Well butter my arse, I honestly didn’t see this coming.

According to The Guardian RATM are heading toward the festive top slot for 2009. A rumour that’s backed up by reports from HMV, Amazon, and an across-the-board slashing of their odds to clinch Christmas number one. Mental.

But before the funk-metal fans amongst us start going too crazy, it’s important to note that TOMORROW is the big day. That’s when the physical CD of Joe’s version of “The Climb” gets released.

Yeah, CDs.

C’mon. You remember them, right? Round? Shiny?

So tomorrow will be judgement day, and although it pains me to say it as a left-leaning lover of a a bloody good riff, I believe Rage’s days are numbered come the dawn.

However, I’ll finish this update on an amusing anecdote; while perusing the many sites offering their input into this fascinating race to national glory, I stumbled across a comment on one of the stories. It said:

“lol, ratm shud win becuase Joes songs shit. if neone else released it it wudnt even get to the top 10.” (all sic)

If this is what you’re up against McElderry, there’s more than a little hope for you yet.

So, Señior Guppie got me mildly hooked on this wesite called Geekologie wherein all the secrets of the universe can both be viewed through possibly-organized thumbnails and explained with clever witticisms and amazingly ironic and sarcastic rhetoric.
Also, they have Zelda. This is a fan-made, full-length video of Lengend of Zelda video. I haven’t watched it yet, because I only have Guppie’s iPhone and it doesn’t play flash, but I’m going to watch it next time I’m home and not dying of sickness. Someone watch it and tell me how it is?
Ah well, that’s all for Dru for now. I’m going back to sleep so I can get better.
xxdruxx

PS My kitty cat is the cutest thing since pikachu. <3

A few thoughts on Facebook’s new terms of service changes, which have hit the net this week.

What this change boils down to, if you’ve been living on a small island for a while or using BT internet, is that your Facebook stuff potentially defaults to public if you don’t pay attention when going through the pop-ups.

You may have noticed these “Oh hai, we’ve made some changes”-style pop-ups recently. If you weren’t paying attention and simply clicked through you may have opened up your Facebook profiles – Nazi fancy dress party photos, drunken status updates and NSFW links – to Google and co.

This, basically, means it’s all indexable by the search engines. Potentially, anyone can see what previously only your friends could see.

This is a pretty big deal, because potential employers will merrily check whatever public real estate you have on the web even though, for my money, this is highly unethical.

All of your public data can be harvested too: your geographical location, birthday (a particularly bad one to share), relationship status, work and education information…

This is all pretty reductive, and an absolute moral minefield. However, when hard clicks and hard cash come into play – the reason behind the Facebook shift – ethics tend to go out of the window.

So, is there an upside to this? Potentially, because any indexable real estate can be leveraged by the enterprising journo, PR or generic rampant self-publicist.

However, when I joined Facebook I acted in such a way that most people would when alone with their friends. I never thought it would all be publicly available, so I didn’t modify my behaviour. On other public profiles I’m aware of this and filter my public actions accordingly.

I don’t suppose there’s anything on my Facebook profile that would get me binned by an employer or associate, but why would I take the risk? And, frankly, I’m uncomfortable with anyone being able to access data I previously considered private.

Another issue, only just coming to light, is the murky issues regarding who owns all the stuff you’ve put on your Facebook page.

Facebook will say it does, or at least has some claim over it, but there’s not much set in stone to say that anyone can’t nab your Facebook pictures and blogs and use them to their own ends.

How do you fancy finding some of your photos in the Daily Mail aka the world’s worst newspaper?

So, there are two sensible alternatives. Delete your profile and start again, with a profile that is fit for public viewing. Or tell the search engine spiders to sod off.

For the sake of ease I’ve outlined how you go about doing this below.

Update your Facebook privacy settings:

1. Find ‘Settings’ at the top of your Facebook page

2. Find Privacy Settings

3. Untick ‘Allow indexing’

Done. Better safe than sorry.

The now infamous campaign to stop X Factor winner Joe McElderry becoming Christmas number one is gathering pace, but still may not be enough to stop the Simon Cowell pop machine reaching the festive top slot.

According to figures from ‘Hitwise’, searches for Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name are on the rise. Searches for the term ‘Rage Against The Machine’ increased by almost 600 per cent last week – a slightly higher volume than ‘Joe McElderry’. Promising stuff for the campaigners, especially after yesterday’s news that the track had screamed to the top of the iTunes download chart.

However, the initial bubble was – if not burst – then very rapidly deflated this morning; less than 12 hours after Joe’s X-Factor victory, his cover of ‘The Climb’ by Miley Cyrus had already knocked RATM off the top spot. The question now is has the Anti-X-Factor campaign peaked? Was it nothing but a pipe-dream from the disillusioned? Or will it gather speed as the stats suggest and really give Cowell and Co a run for their money?

The Facebook group set up earlier this month to back the campaign now boasts more than 720,000 members. A number that actually means very little the moment someone asks ‘how many of them are actually going to buy it though?’ especially considering the 20 million people who watched the 18-year-old from South Shields announced as the X-Factor winner over the weekend.

A solid foundation - but how many will actually buy the song?

So, as bizarre as it may sound, this year’s Christmas hit is a two horse race between a 90s anti-capitalist hip-hop/metal crossover, and a teenager described as the ‘next Cliff Richard’. But regardless of who wins the race, the phenomenon that will be talked about for years to come will not be Joe, or Rage, or the potential end of Cowell’s five year reign as Xmas supremo – Surely it’ll be that this Christmas was the year the disillusioned masses, fuelled by the empowerment of social networking, took on the bigwigs and gave them a bloody good run for their money, with a rallying cry of “f**k you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

1) Thank you
Thanks to all who downloaded and listened to the new track “Don’t You See”. What did you think of it? I always appreciate your comments and support.

2) New song in January and new shows
Last Thursday, I recorded vocals and guitar for a track called “You Again.” Right now it’s being mixed and mastered and I will release it sometime in January. I’ve also scheduled a few shows that I’d love to catch up with you at.

3) Nashville Update
As far as Nashville is concerned, I’m working on acquiring an internship through JMU. I’ve already secured a place to stay but I  need to find a job. This is an exciting step for me and I know it will lead to all things musical.

I’ll leave you with a link to this soulful folk singer rocker girl named Serena Ryder. Check out her cover of “Racing in the Street” by Bruce Springsteen here. It’ll blow you away.

The Web #3
Written by Angela Robinson
Art by Roger Robinson
Co-Feature by John Rozum
Art by Tom Derenick

Why aren’t more people reading these red circle books?! They are really good and this issue is no exception. Guest-starring Oracle and the new Batgirl (Cassandra I miss you) and it is a great exploration of how a hero could work in the 21st century. I love that The Web has his own social networking site and data feed. DC should make it a real thing! How about that for viral marketing! The Hangman back-up was still awesome. He is such a cool pulp-like hero.  I would rather have someone else on the art but it is not that bad. The new water villain seems cool as well.

“RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR XMAS NUMBER ONE.”

D’you know what? Originally I wasn’t too fussed about this campaign, but the continued self-righteous, smug, posturing coming from some bloggers who think they’re oh-so clever to be pointing out the blindingly obvious has motivated me to get behind RATM as Christmas number one this year.

At first I took the Facebook Group for exactly what it was – a bit of fun. But over the last few days, the pseudo-intellectual wing of Citizen Journalism HQ has gone into meltdown.

“Ho ho, these silly metal heads” they pontificate with tones so smug and patronising it makes Cowell himself look like a picture of humility. “Don’t they KNOW that RATM are on Sony, and it is Sony who own Simon Cowell’s company, so their futile campaign is just lining the high-trousered one’s pockets?”

Oh the poor, narrow-minded little Facebookers! How naive of them! I bet they’re so pleased that there was a much more intelligent species – the blogger – on hand to do a 5-minute Wikipedia search and act like they’ve just found evidence that the bible was a hoax.

“Don’t people know that the song was actually about racism in the police force” Well, I guess it depends if they can be bothered to spend a few minutes on Google as well, doesn’t it? But I think the message of defiance in the songs lyrics is what people are drawn to; and forgive me for sounding equally patronising here, Mr. “authority on music because I am capable of web-searching facts and regurgitating them with a smattering of self-importance” but maybe – just maybe – these simple Facebook folk might actually UNDERSTAND the irony of taking such a song out of context!! GASP!! YES!! Some might actually be ferociously fighting the corner of a 90s rap-metal band against Cole and Co with their tongue in their cheek! MAYBE PEOPLE AREN’T THE IDIOTS YOU CLEARLY TAKE THEM FOR!

Yes, Simon Cowell’s label is a subsidiary of Sony, yes, The X-Factor contestants singles will technically be on the same label, yes, RATM are meant to be an anti-capitalist band and the act of mass-buying their single from 17 years ago with the profit going to Sony has vaguely ironic undertones which you are clearly a great mind for being one of the millions to point it out.

Well done. Have a biscuit.

BUT – and here’s the money shot: THIS ALL COMPLETELY MISSES THE FRICKIN’ POINT!!!

The point, in my humble opinion, is that people in the UK are fed up of there being no choice as to what goes to number one at Christmas. The Christmas number one is a time when people pay attention to the charts when they wouldn’t usually (especially in more recent years where downloading has opened up the possibility of ANYTHING getting into the charts). And this campaign isn’t designed to bring down Sony, it isn’t designed to upset Cowell, it isn’t designed to make money for any particular person OR indeed was it created with any financial motive in mind whatsoever.

What it IS doing is making an effort to show the producers of the X-Factor and the music industry mafia that people do still have a choice when it comes to what goes to number one – now, more than ever. Music fans feel strongly about the art they support, and many don’t like seeing the entire country being essentially sold a couple of singles on TV two nights a week for 4 months by some very good salespeople just to get a nobody to number one for Christmas in the most cynical way possible. And no amount of negative, small-minded, pedantry on the part of the blogger community can break that spirit. And I think that is something De La Rocha and friends would be bloody proud of.

I’ll be buying my copy and donating to Shelter via the link on the campaign page: A song about defiance, solidarity, authoritarianism and hypocrisy. It could easily be applied to the way people have reacted this whole Anti-X-Factor campaign.

Ironically, of course.

From today’s San Francisco Chronicle: Provocative remarks by Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz at an investor conference in New York (print version of the Chronicle erroneously said “San Jose”) this week illustrate how major Internet channels and niche publications are benefiting from the Woods controversy.

Known for her off-color commentary, Bartz told financial analysts Tuesday that the Woods story is “better than Michael Jackson dying” for helping Yahoo make money, because it is easier to sell ads against salacious content than morbid stories…

In response to a question, Bartz even said Woods will “absolutely” help Yahoo make its numbers this quarter, a comment the company now says was meant to be a joke.

Auction sites are popping up all over the place with new ideas about how to attract bidders with the appearance of huge bargains.  The latest format I have discovered is the “lowest unique bid” auction.  It works like this.  A car is on the auction block.  Bidders can submit as many bids as they wish ranging from one penny possibly to some upper bound, in penny increments.  The bids are sealed until the auction is over.  The winning bid is the lowest among all unique bids.  That is, if you bid 2 cents and nobody else bids 2 cents, but more than one person bid 1 cent, then you win the car for 2 cents.

In some cases you pay for each bid but in some cases bids are free and you pay only if you win.  Here is a site with free bidding.  An iPod shuffle sold for $0.04.  Here is a site where you pay to bid.  The top item up for sale is a new house.  In that auction you pay ~$7 per bid and you are not allowed to bid more than $2,000.  A house for no more than $2,000, what a deal!

I suppose the principle here is that people are attracted by these extreme bargains and ignore the rest of the distribution.  So you want to find a format which has a high frequency of low winning bids.  On this dimesion the lowest unique bid seems even better than penny auctions.

Caubeen curl: Antonio Merlo.

Via kottke, Clusterflock gives five simple rules for effective bidding on eBay:

Step One:Find the product you want.

Step Two:

Save the product to your watch list.

Step Three:

Wait.

Step Four:

Just before the item ends, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the item.

Step Five:

Click submit.

This is called sniping.  That’s a pejorative label for what is actually a sensible and perfectly straightforward way to bid.  eBay is essentially an open second-price auction and sniping is a way to submit a “sealed” bid.  It’s a popular strategy and advocated by many eBay “experts.”  But does it really pay off?

Tanjim Hossain and I did an experiment (ungated version.)  We compared sniping to another straightforward strategy we call squatting. As the name suggests, squatting means bidding your value on an object at the very first opportunity, essentially staking a claim on that object.  We bid on DVDs and randomly divided auctions into two groups, sniping on the auctions in the first group and squatting on the other.

The two strategies were almost indistinguishable in terms of their payoff.  But for an interesting reason.  A lot of eBay bidders use a strategy of incremental bidding.  That’s where you act as if you are involved in an ascending auction (like an English auction) and you bid the minimum amount needed to become the high biddder.  Once you are the high bidder you stop there and wait to see if you are outbid, then you raise your bid again.  You do this until either you win or the price goes above the maximum amount you are willing to pay.

Against incremental bidders, sniping has a benefit and a cost (relative to squatting.)  You benefit when incremental bidders stop at a price below their value.  You swoop in at the end, the incremental bidders have no time to respond, and you win at the low price.

The cost has to do with competition across auctions for similar objects.  If I squat on auction A and you are sniping in auction B, our opponents think there is one fewer competitor in auction B and more opponents enter auction B than A.  This tends to raise the price in your auction relative to mine.  In other words, squatting scares opponents away, sniping does not.

We found that these two effects almost exactly canceled each other out for auctions of DVDs.  We expect that this would be true for similar objects that are homogeneous and sold in many simultaneous auctions.  So the next time you are bidding in such an auction, don’t think too hard and just bid your value.

Now, I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do with all these copies of 50 First Dates we won in the experiment.