Phones are so last decade, expressing your griefs in public gets more attention and that’s not a good thing for a company’s image. The ease of communication of social networks combined with something bad to say about a product/service is a really powerful weapon to wield in today’s world. For now those events are rare enough to be resolved, maybe one day there will be so much noise that it will be as useless as a call to a 1-800 line. So use it while you can!

Want better service? Just complain on Twitter at WalletPop

Want Customer Service? Complain on Twitter at SmartMoney

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer talks with entrepreneurs at a JuicePitcher event about the history of his startup, Mint. Vator.tv recorded the video

By John Hasnas,

Political analysts frequently consider what it means to be a libertarian. In fact, in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled “What It Means to Be a Libertarian” that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy. But almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a libertarian. How does it actually feel to be someone who holds the principles described in Murray’s book?

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920’s that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. [...] It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

[...]

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Web technology is poised to shake universities, the way it rocked newspapers and the music industry—with convenient, cheaper alternatives.

“The economics of traditional schooling are so out of whack that there is an opening for new players,” says Fred Fransen, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, which helps donors more effectively give money to universities. From that perch, Fransen sees the typical university business model as prone to attack.

[...]

The Harvards of the world won’t go away. They will continue to be the high-fidelity players in the fidelity/convenience trade-off. But a large swath of the population might decide that going deeply into debt before even starting work is too high a price to pay for a high-fidelity education when a more convenient version will do. They will pull out of mid-level universities. Just as surely as many consumers gave up music CDs for Internet downloads, many students will soon decide to put aside a four-year stint at a traditional university for a cheap, easy, and good-enough degree delivered through laptop screens and smart phones. Schools in the middle of the pack—neither high-fidelity nor high-convenience—will have to adapt or suffer.

Rethinking the Long Tail Theory: How to Define ‘Hits’ and ‘Niches’

In a working paper titled, “Is Tom Cruise Threatened? Using Netflix Prize Data to Examine the Long Tail of Electronic Commerce,”Wharton Operations and Information Management professor Serguei Netessine and doctoral student Tom F. Tan pull information from the movie rental company Netflix to explore consumer demand for smash hits and lesser-known films. Netflix made its data available as part of a $1 million prize competition to encourage the development of new ways that will improve its ability to introduce customers to lesser-known titles they might find appealing.

[...]

The paper argues that the research findings have important implications because the Long Tail theory has gained momentum in the business world. “Whether or not the Long Tail exists is a fundamental question for decision makers in marketing, operations and finance who face the prospect of further penetration of the Internet channel, which offers expanding product variety and new recommendation systems to help manage it,” the paper states.

According to Netessine, the research is likely to generate controversy because of its findings that contradict the popular Long Tail theory. Nonetheless, Anderson is the first individual acknowledged at the end of the paper for “his encouraging comments and constructive advice.” Says Netessine: “We have agreed to disagree.”

How the panic over right-wing violence is being used to marginalize peaceful dissent by Jesse Walker on Reason.com

On June 10, 2009, an elderly man entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, raised a rifle, and opened fire, killing a security guard named Stephen Tyrone Johns. Two other guards shot back, wounding the gunman before he could end any more lives.

The killer was soon identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, an 88-year-old neo-Nazi.Von Brunn acted alone, but there was no shortage of voices eager to spread the blame for his crime. The murder was quickly linked, in a free-associative way, to the assassination 10 days earlier of the Kansas abortionist George Tiller. This, we were told, was a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence.”

[...]

It’s comforting to imagine that violence and paranoia belong only to the far left and right, and that we can protect ourselves from their effects by quarantining the extremists and vigilantly expelling anyone who seems to be bringing their ideas into the mainstream. But the center has its own varieties of violence and paranoia. And it’s far more dangerous than anyone on the fringe, even the armed fringe, will ever be.

Why not?  My “back to school” week made me think about that. Yes, between 40+ hours of work with Ex Machina and 4 master degree classes there’s still time to think (OK, not that much).

• It’s easy. Once an essay is written, publishing it is just a click away.
• It’s a good way to show what you can do. It beats just showing a diploma, it shows why you deserve it.
• When you publish in the public domain, you can’t let go a “good enough” text, it pushes you do to something you’ll want to show the world.
• You get a lot more for your sweat. Instead of just getting a grade you get a grade AND a chance to start an interesting conversation and/or get useful feedback.

So in the following months i’ll blog my stuff, let’s hope it won’t suck!