One of the interesting features of RescueTime is that it allows you to embed on your blog or website live graphs of how you’re spending your computer time. This provides a very nice way to commit yourself to being productive, by laying your laziness bare for all the world to see.

Needless to say, I’m too scared to try it!

Facebook’s “walled garden” strategy is sometimes annoying. I was thinking it would be nice to have a little social aspect to my blog. I can create a group related to my blog on Facebook, but to join the group or see who’s a member etc, you actually have to go to the Facebook site. I doubt that many people will be bothered to do that. Instead I’d like to have a little widget on my own site where people can sign up to the group and easily view the members and any other data related to the group. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be possible, as Facebook wants to keep people coming back to facebook.com.

I agree with The Economist that this is going to backfire for Facebook. There’s nothing special about social networking that means it must be embedded only in facebook.com. The same idea could be set free, “widgetized” and embedded anywhere. A more open and “sociable” platform could easily become more attractive than Facebook’s garden. Such a platform would probably be a lot harder to monetise than a garden that generates a lot of traffic, but it would certainly be a lot more useful.

Loyal blog reader Chewxy pointed me to RescueTime. It’s a web-based time-logging service that keeps track of how you spend every minute in front of your computer. The idea is to make you feel guilty and improve your productivity. I’ve signed up and I’m feeling more productive already. Hence this blog post will be brief.

Alex at UsableMarkets writes about Inspectd.com, which calls itself a “training tool for traders”. It’s basically a stock market game based on technical analysis. They show you a stock’s chart, minus its name, and you have to pick whether to buy or sell. Then they calculate your performance. Rinse and repeat.

Alex criticises the charts, which I agree are terrible. But I have a bigger problem with the entire concept. As far as I know, there is no evidence (from many studies) that technical analysis can outperform the market. In fact, once you take trading costs into account, it’s quite likely to underperform the market.

Yet, when playing Inspectd’s game, some people will have good performance simply due to luck. It’s just like roulette. Sometimes you get on a “winning streak”, which is not due to your skill, but simply by chance. Or, toss a coin many times and sometimes you’ll get runs of heads or tails. It’s just the nature of randomness, and you don’t have any control over it. However, Inspectd could give you some false impression that you actually have some talent at technical analysis. Your confidence boosted, you then go out and start playing with real money in the real stock market, and it ends in tears.

I think Inspectd needs to come with a health warning, like cigarettes.

For what I think is the first time, a paper in a top econ journal (the RAND Journal) has appeared on the front page of Digg (via an article in ScienceDaily).

The paper is by Isabelle Brocas and Juan Carrillo and is titled “Influence Through Ignorance”. I’d like to explain what it’s about, but I found the article in ScienceDaily was pretty confusing. The basic idea seems to be that you can gain influence over people by strategically limiting the flow of information, not just to them but to yourself as well. I guess some sort of strategic commitment to self-ignorance gives you some bargaining power or something. This is somewhat contrary to the standard model of asymmetric information where the party with the most information usually comes off best.

The original paper (pdf) is available, but the server it’s on seems to be down at the moment thanks to the Digg effect.