Month: March 2006

Guardian report on Fairtrade:

Oppenheim points out that of the £1 extra paid for a bag of Fairtrade bananas, the proportion going back to the farmer is 4p, while of the 99p paid for a Fairtrade chocolate bar, the return for the cocoa grower is ‘less than 2p’. If a supermarket charges £2.49 for a packet of own-brand Fairtrade coffee, when the combined cost of buying, shipping, roasting and packaging it ‘cannot be much more than £1’, it results in a gross profit margin of 160 per cent.

It’s not exactly ethical, but it’s not exactly news. Retailers stay in business by driving down the prices paid to farmers and preserving their own profit margins – making Oppenheim’s article an indictment of capitalism rather than Fairtrade. As Harriet Lamb points out, ‘We set the price for the farmers, which is the only bit we could ever begin to control. If we tried in any way to set the price for the consumer, we would be taken to the Competition Commission.’ In other words, it is the retailers and middlemen who determine the mark-ups – based on the amount we are stupid enough to pay. At least under the Fairtrade system, it is consumers in the north who are being exploited, not impoverished farmers.

via Swampcottage

on my reading list:

Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”

started skimming thru and it looks good. Lots of imgs and examples and
cartoons to illustrate usability issues.

Writing a book about Africa? Consider these tips.

(and the same applies to films, TV reports, music videos, TV series and other media that help to foster wrong or one-sided cliches)

via: Swamp Cottage

reading TechCrunch feels very much like the dot com boom, non?

http://www.techcrunch.com/

The typical Web 2.0 story: somebody builds a web app. suddenly it pops up on del.icio.us or digg or both.
The web app gets swamped with hits. Next, registration is closed or the web app is down, while the app is moved to a new data center. For example see the following entry on Zooomr:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/11/flickr-has-some-catching-up-to-do/

Alex Wright writes:

[…] a great deal of important work gets “obliterated” if you measure influence purely in terms of citations (or, I would argue, hyperlinks). Whiles citation analysis gives an excellent picture of how influence works in the great middle tier of scholarship, the technique falls on its face when it comes to truly groundbreaking work, which often tends to get buried in an avalanche of footnotes for follow-on, derivative works.

Which leaves me wondering, is there a corollary effect on the Web? The sheer explicitness of Web linking seems to privilege measurable manifestations of influence: Google pagerank, Technorati rankings, traffic stats, and so forth. Does such a myopic focus on metrics mask the subtler dimensions of influence? Are there hidden works out there exerting a deeper, implicit influence that doesn’t show up in terms of pagerank? This is a tough hypothesis to prove, but I suspect that pagerank and other supposedly meritocratic weighting algorithms give us an overly simplistic and potentially misleading notion of how influence really works.