Briefly noted

I've had a lot of email and comments encouraging me to stick with longer essays here, which is much appreciated. I'll try to get in one or two a week. In the meantime, I'll satisfy my own target of daily posts by extending my "Long Tail comment elsewhere" format to the main bar here, making it part of the feed. (The Six Apart folks have not yet implemented RSS in TypeLists, which is what the sidebar is, although they say that's on the way).

I'll start with a fantastic post on RSS by Kevin Laws, a venture capitalist who helped me articulate and think though the original Long Tail theory. RSS, as you know, is a really big deal and an important step in maximizing the potential of the Long Tail.  The key element of the publish-and-subscribe model is that it allows readers to indicate an interest once (by subscribing to a feed), and then get relevant content when it's published, without any thought or effort required.

Kevin describes this with the best analogy I've heard yet for RSS: Tivo for the Web:

One direction [in which RSS is expanding] relates to automating tasks for you. This is basically the return of agent technology. Now that a wider variety of web sites are available in machine readable format, it should be possible to tell your computer things like "tell me when an article about gnosticism appears". While this is similar to the stored searches on Google, the fact that RSS aggregators are closer to real-time makes this more valuable. The best analogy is "Tivo for the Web" - specify web sites to definitely "record" and the agent can also record a selection of potentially interesting web posts.

Unlike email, RSS feeds aren't mixed in with personal messages and subject to spam filtering, and there's no obligation for content to be written in the form of a newsletter.  The atomic element of RSS is the single post, which works perfectly well in the context of a reader that lays out many posts on a page  (like the fab Bloglines, which has just been sold to my friends at Ask Jeeves.)

The reason this is so important to driving demand down the Tail is that RSS feeds can provide a constant stream of links and suggestions for products and media that you otherwise wouldn't have heard of. Best of all, they don't have to be from conventional media and blogs; they can simply be notifications of availability or updates on what's selling where.

One of the best examples is Netflix's wide range of RSS feeds, which include a new release feed. It's a quick read, complete with paragraph summaries, of a hundred or so new DVDs a week. Two clicks on one that grabs my attention and it's in my queue, soon to appear at my door. They've also got RSS feeds for the latest bestsellers in niche categories that range from Independent and Foreign to Gay and Lesbian and Anime.  Invariably interesting, and often useful.

Comments

[David Jackson]

Chris,

Your work is terrific, and I've adopted some of your thoughts in analyzing stocks for The Internet Stock Blog.

A tip: look at what Hollywood Media could do with RSS in a transactional framework.

[freshelectrons]

fwiw, the RSS as tivo for the web metaphor has been around at least as far back as the summer of 2003 -- joi ito references it in his blog in 2003 also.

great long tail momentum you've created though-- viva la memeflow!

[Noah Brier]

I kind of have a problem with the Tivo analogy. Here's an explanation that comes from an article I wrote in September about RSS for American Demographics called "This Way App":

Many people describe RSS as TiVo for the Web. Part of what makes TiVo so appealing is the ability to pick and choose from across the network spectrum and record those shows you're interested in. RSS, however, records an entire opt-in spectrum of feeds, rather than one show at a time. It's like being able to choose your cable package with On Demand channels only. That way, when you get home from work, rather than watching what's on at that time, you are provided with a list of every show that has appeared on your chosen channel lineup since the last time you watched. This way, if you only watch ESPN, HBO and NBC, you only need to subscribe to those 3 stations. And for those who watch 100 different channels, RSS can handle that too by spidering across all the sites you've chosen and posting update signs and signals for each of them.

[fling93]

I've had a lot of email and comments encouraging me to stick with longer essays here, which is much appreciated. I'll try to get in one or two a week.

Yay!!

Regarding TiVo and RSS, one thought I've had for a while is that the one big weakness I see in both is that you can only get new content. Probably most obvious in TV shows, where you hear about the buzz and tune in, but have already missed the first three episodes. Ideally, you want to watch from the very beginning, and someday you should be able to tell your DVR that so it will automatically retrieve the earlier episodes (via bitTorrent or what-have-you).

Similarly, when you find a new blog and subscribe to its feed, sometimes you also want to catch up on older entries. Doing it yourself by surfing is rather tedious. It'd be nice to subscribe to an RSS feed from the beginning, or from a certain date or entry. Maybe even tell it to send you entries slightly faster than they originally appeared (to eventually catch up), or at fixed intervals regardless of when they were posted.

Not sure how this all fits into the Long Tail paradigm, but I would think these would be especially helpful for consumers exploring down the tail, especially for television. And help make the concept of "air date" irrelevant.

[Dee Rambeau]

how about this random long post about the "tail" from old Steve Hackett Genesis lyrics?
check out my post.
http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/item/84996?model=user/dvco/dvco-blog&style=user/dvco/dvco&scheme=corp