Chris Anderson – “The Long Tail” 03/26/2011
Posted by Derek Belt in Reviews.Tags: business, Chris Anderson, communication, digital media, digital technology, long tail, marketing, web economics
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Chris Anderson – The Long Tail
Reaching Millions
The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatchable efficiency. But it can’t do the opposite–bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well. (Anderson, p. 5)
One Size Doesn’t Fit AllThe era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes. (Anderson, p. 5)
What Consumers Want
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service–from DVDs at the rental-by-mail firm Netflix to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video and Tower Records. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander farther from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a hit-centric culture, and simply a lack of alternatives). (Anderson, p. 16)
Hits And Niches
For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability. (Anderson, p. 24)
The Nature Of Markets
When you can dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. (Anderson, p. 26)
David Weinberger – “Everything is Miscellaneous” 04/23/2010
Posted by Derek Belt in References.Tags: communication, digital media, digital technology, long tail, social media, web economics
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David Weinberger – Everything is Miscellaneous
Information Wants to Be Miscellaneous
As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous. (Weinberger, p. 7)
The Limitations of Atoms
The problems with the first two orders of order go back to the fact that they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work. Things made of atoms tend to be unstable over time—paper yellows and disintegrates, negatives turn to soup—so we have to take measures to sway nature from its course. Atoms take up room, so collections of photos can get so large that we have to build card catalogs to remind us of where each photo is. And things made of atoms can be in only ones spot at a time, so we have to decide whether a photo of a soldier eating should go in the Civil War folder or the Outdoor Meals folder. But now we have bits. Content is digitized into bits, and the information about that content consists of bits as well. This is the third order of order and it’s hitting us—to use a completely inappropriate metaphor—like a ton of bricks. The third order removes the limitations we’ve assumed were inevitable in how we organize information. (Weinberger, p. 19
The Digital Revolution
The digital revolution in organization sweeps beyond how we find odd photos and beyond how we organize our businesses’ information assets. In fact, the third-order practices that make a company’s existing assets more profitable, increase customer loyalty, and seriously reduce costs are the Trojan horse of the information age. As wel all get used to them, third-order practices undermine some of our most deeply ingrained ways of thinking about the world and our knowledge of it. (Weinberger, p. 22)
Who Has the Authority To Tell Us So
We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severly limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas, and knowledge and put them neatly away. But now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think thw world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so. (Weinberger, p. 22-23) (more…)
