The Big Reveal

Now that the conference is over, it's finally safe to talk about what we've been laboring over in secret these three long months. Geoff and I left Clarium to found Udorse, a new kind of web application Geoff calls a 'visual endorsement engine'. The core idea is pretty simple - we give you a platform to tag interesting stuff in your pictures and link those tags anywhere on the web. To the extent you tag something that has a partnership agreement with us, a link there becomes a referral that generates a couple of cents every time someone clicks through or a couple of bucks every time someone buys something. Then whenever Udorse gets paid, users get paid. Your tags (we call them 'udorsements') function just like micro-sized endorsement deals, from the stuff you are already sharing online.

We applied to and were accepted as finalists at this year's TechCrunch50 conference, so we had to keep our plans secret so as not to spoil the big reveal at the show. But that's all over now, and you can see video of Geoff's riveting stage performance above.

Since this is like the sixth or seventh time I've taken this blog out of semi-retirement, you'd think I wouldn't make a big deal about but you would be WRONG, mister.

The Efficient News Hypothesis Fallacy?

The theory behind the efficient market hypothesis as applied to asset prices was that they would reflect all the information known in the market, and therefore the real underlying value of the priced assets. Trouble is, investors are strategic, and so the more of them know about and believe in the EMH, the more of them can free-ride on the pricing information produced by other investors, and the less true the EMH becomes.

I think there is, or will soon be, a similar dynamic in news and content aggregation. The more people try to get their content from aggregators, free riding on the search costs of others, the lower quality the aggregators become. As more people rely more on content that bubbles up through recommendations, the more you'll get bubbles in attention that resemble asset bubbles.

The question is, what happens when attention bubbles pop? Do they pop? Attention spent isn't a tradable asset, probably entirely a sunk cost. Is spending attention on aggregated content any worse than on US Weekly?