Briefly noted from Australia

I've been near Sydney all week visiting family, and also testing my theory that little kids adjust to time zones at the rate of one hour per day. Sure enough: they woke up 3:30 am the first day, then 4:30 am, then 5:30 and then....damn. The sun rises here at around 5:30am, the weird birds start mocking us with monkey noises and the kids are up and ready to party. There's nothing we can do to get them to sleep any longer. So much for the whole R&R thing.

I should be updating my sidebar, but I've been so spoiled by the Microsoft Live Writer, which doesn't support Typepad's Typelists, that I won't edit in a browser anymore. So here, in post form, are the top five interesting things I've just read as I caught up with my feeds.

1. Nick Carr has another astute post that analyzes a recent study on concentration in web traffic that seemed to contradict the Long Tail trend of decreasing concentration of the hits. Richard MacManus found that top ten sites accounted for 40% of total Internet page views in November 2006, up from 31% in November 2001. But Nick rightly noted that two of the biggest of the top ten sites--MySpace and Facebook--are actually Long Tail aggregators. All those individual pages on the two social networks are, in a sense, just personal blogs. Take the two out, and the top ten have about the same traffic as they did five years ago. Why not less, as the theory would suggest? Perhaps because it's harder to count traffic to all those Long Tail sites that are scattered among millions of stand-alone domains. An interesting comparison data point would be the share of incoming links that go to the top ten sites and how that's changing, something I'll bet Technorati could answer. Dave?
2. Roger Ebert, in his introduction to his 2007 Video Yearbook, discusses the Long Tail of movies, and offers some of his own data: "There may be only one person in a city who wants to see a film or read a review, but because of Netflix and the Internet, that person can do it. We observe that pattern at www.rogerebert.com, where there are more than ten thousand reviews and our Web traffic statistics show that even the most popular film represents less than 1 percent of our business. As of June 15, 2006, "The Da Vinci Code" and "Brokeback Mountain" were tied at 0.8 percent of our page views; the next most requested reviews in 2006 have been for "V for Vendetta" (0.7), "X-Men: The Last Stand" (0.6), and "An Inconvenient Truth" (0.5). The lesson: People are curious about a lot of different movies."
3. Liked the book's Lego example of the Long Tail of toys? You'll love Vicale's Long Tail of action figures, a way to mass-customize characters with outfits and accessories, all with a nifty flash interface (see above).  (Thanks to BoingBoing for the link)
4. The Long Tail of Holiday Music. Says Digital Audio Insider: "Over at eMusic, of the 1,226 holiday albums in the catalog, 1,128 have been downloaded over the past month. That's a whopping 92% of the catalog!"
5. Finally, for people who can't get enough Netflix data, Ilya Grigorik has done some useful analysis of the huge ratings database Netflix released as part of its recommendations contest. Meanwhile, Anita Elberse from Harvard Business School has been doing the best Netflix data crunching around (she and I have proprietary data from Netflix, which gives us some unique insights that you can't get from the public data), and you can read an interview with her about this research here. Look for more from her and me on this early next year, as we now have new data sets from both Netflix and Rhapsody that will allow us to take Long Tail analysis to the individual subscriber level, something that I don't think has ever been done before.

Comments

[Phil]

Terrific to know that you're here in Oz Chris, co-incidentally I'm reading the book right now and up to the Short Head and the Library of mis-shelved books.

And loving it.

Merry Christmas!

[Barry Ritholtz]

November 2006 (vs November 2001) may not be the ideal date to test that theory -- it was, after all, the month of the mid-term elections in the US, and the heavily travelled political blogs were extra busy.

I'd like to see similar comparos with other months to see if there is a genuine pattern, as opposed to a one off factor (like an election) skewing the results . . .

[Jason]

Hi, I'm a big fan of you. I'm reading the book right now. Long Tail theory is a fantastic one and I've found many applications in life. "Mass-customize" is a magic word and I LOVE your analysis of google mass-intelligence search and Wiki thing. I'm from China and the book is in Chinese, so I don't really know the terms here.

Thank you and Merry Christmas!

[Erwin Scott]

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[anonymous]

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[Todd Woody]

Did you happen to be at Freshwater Beach (near Curl Curl) in Sydney on Thursday, December 28? Saw someone who looked familiar then read your post.

[Kevin Lam]

Chris,

I just had to stop by and tell you how inspiring your Long Tail book was. Despite being delayed 7 hours at the airport, flew 13 hours and stranded again at my final destination with no public transportation of any kind, I found comfort in reading your book.

After reading just the first 5 chapters I have already brain-stormed a COMPLETELY new niche product that will further enforce the long tail theory. I have you to thank for it because prior to reading your book, the idea was VERY premature and incomplete.

With the idea of democratizing the tools of production, distribution, connection of supply and demand and then aggregating the unlimited supply of products (or participants, rather), I am certain my new niche product/service will be of a great long tail business.

I am currently busy with my most important project, FairAdsNetwork.com (which will be another long tail business), I will work on my newly-discovered one in March when I have launched Fair Ads Network.

Thanks, Chris, for your wonderful research and work.

Sincerely,
Kevin Lam