30 Aug 2009, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Wunderkammer (the links), 0 Comments

Wunderkammer 8/28

This week the wonderful web served up a hearty dose of newspaper strategizing, useful logo design tips, and more economic theorizing. Taken together these links make up the wunderkammer for the week ending August 28.

• Craigslist vs. eBay – Excerpts from Wired article on why Craigslist thrives despite not going public, getting big, or selling out. “Craigslist, though huge in traffic, is small in every other way: small in staff, small in features, small in technical ambition and relatively small in revenue. But it has resisted attack from larger, better funded and more profitable competitors. In this post I’m going to try to explain how small beats big in this market.”
• Internet Infowar – John Robb provides his comments on Umair Haque’s information warfare principals. For example, “Don’t try to centralize defense, spread it across the board. Make it redundant and ubiquitous across your network, so no one node is vulnerable.”
• Vital Tips For Effective Logo Design – Fundamental design overview on why some logos succeed and some fail.
• The Craigslist Credo: Bad Advice for Newspapers – Excellent overview on the failings of self-proclaimed “Craigslist Killers”. In particular is detailed discussion on how the push for immediate revenue streams through advertising end up bloated eyesores.
• The US, Globalization and the Red Queen – John Robb on emergent verses stagnant economic systems: “The only likely process of evolutionary competition against globally systemic parasites is to decentralize core functions of the global system (resilience through scale invariance). The process of decentralization, one model being resilient communities, manufactures geographic and social heterogeneity. Heterogeneity makes it possible for the host to develop solutions to parasitic predation (be it financial, criminal, biological, technological, or purely violent disruption). In this way, any potential extinction event visited on the global system would be met by solutions emerging out of systems hidden in a socially/economically heterogenous geography. It’s only in this way that a stable relationship between parasite and host can develop. “

Those were my finds from the world wide web this last week. What did you cherish?