Less information often means more, a point brilliantly illustrated yesterday by designer Jason Kottke, as he parodies the metadata overload around many blog posts.

Google, the metadata mogul, has done a great job of furling distracting details. Says Google interface guru Marissa Mayer

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That’s worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you’re terrified. That’s how other sites are – you’re scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

Unfortunately, a lot of sites are like geeky see-through watches — they are so proud of all the stuff under the hood they insist on inflicting it on the innocent passer-by… who just really wants to know the time, after all.

Hmm… what else should we strip out of this blog… or all of Blogads? (Yes, our order form will be reworked in coming weeks.)

Economist Robert Coase argued in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determines the size of a corporation, notes economist Everett Ehrlich, who then riffs on implications of Coase’s theory implications for modern political parties in the Internet age.

To an economist, the ‘trick’ of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase’s theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

…

Here are some predictions. First, if Dean loses the nomination, he will preserve his organizational advantage and reemerge as a third-party force four years from now. He has done with technology what Ross Perot could not do with money alone. Second, the evangelical right will become a separate political party in the near future, and will hold its own conventions and primaries. Like the Conservative Party in New York state, it will usually endorse Republican candidates. But evangelicals will use their inherent party-ness to make the Republican candidate stand in front of them and give a separate acceptance speech. And finally, in the next six or eight presidential elections, a third-party candidate will win the presidency. Issues — most likely the coming fiscal debacle and the inescapable abrogation of promises made on Social Security and Medicare — will give the third-party candidate an opening. But technology will give him, or her, the means.

(Since he’s writing in the Washington Post, Ehrlich graciously demurs from deconstructing the news business with the same logic.)

Funnily enough, I ran across this June 6 post earlier today, “Mark my words: blogs are going to drive the next presidential election.”

Moniker.com reports 40,000 domain registrations in the last two months, up from 7200 in the same period last year. That’s another sign that online business is booming as entrepreneurs realize that going online puts you only 1 click away from 600 million people.

Buying blogads delivers lots of things: boat-loads of cost-effective clicks, face-time with opinion makers, 150X200 pixels plus 300 characters of text…

Blog advertising also creates an intimacy traditional media can’t match… or doesn’t want to match. This weekend, five bloggers who had sold ads to the John Kerry campaign asked Kerry to disavow TV ads linking Howard Dean to bin Laden.

“We write this open letter as a group of bloggers whose audience you respect enough that you advertise on our web sites,” they began.

The provenance of the attack ads was murky and seemed entwined with Kerry’s operatives. “We feel it is incumbent on you and your campaign to make it clear that this kind of attack is unacceptable,” wrote bloggers Atrios, Talkleft, NathanNewman, Oliver Willis and Pandagon.

The Kerry campaign has since disavowed the ad.

Rick Bruner reports: “Steadily, we are furnishing our entire apartment with things our neighbors have thrown away. Not broken-down junk covered in coffee grounds and rotten cabbage. Stuff you’d actually want inside your home. Or we would, anyway.” Click to read what Rick and Adi have salvaged, including their huge recent coup.

(Blogging resembles scavenging: finding pieces of treasure in the stuff that other people discard or ignore?)

Wow, the volume of home equity loans has tripled since 1999.

WSJ: “…International Business Machines Corp. has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere. The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S.” And: “A former IBM executive in India, Pawan Kumar, now chairman of closely held vMoksha Technologies PLC, an outsourcing firm there, says IBM has 9,000 people in India and plans to increase that to 20,000 by the end of 2005. Mr. Kumar says the cost advantages of hiring Indian programmers aren’t as large as the salary differentials imply, because building in India requires more investment in infrastructure and more spending on supervision to smooth communications between U.S. customers and workers in India. He says the true costs amount to about $100,000 in the U.S. and $50,000 in India for people to do the same work.”

Fun links: Farm belt. Southern Lowlands. Upper coasts. The datasharing revolution.

Dave Winer obliquely suggests McGovern would have won in 1972 with blogs.

What other alternate histories could be explored? Would the Nazis have been stronger or weaker in a blogging Germany? Would a blogging Alfred Wallace have outshown Charles Darwin? Would the blogging Buddha have swamped Jesus? Could KingGeorgeIII.blogspot.com have hung on to the colonies?

(Image borrowed from Scripting.com.)

The uptake of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) has doubled in the last year, now accounting for one home mortgage in three, reports CNN. When rates head higher, which is inevitable with $600 billion yearly government debt sales looming, these folks are going to get squeezed out of their homes. The bankers who push ARMs on people should be ashamed.