The Long Tail

Rupert Murdoch, Longtailer

From the fantastic Forbes special issue on Networks, a piece by Rupert Murdoch that shows why he stands out as the one old school media tycoon best prepared to adapt to the new world (i.e. MySpace wasn't a fluke):

Media companies don't control the conversation anymore, at least not to the extent that we once did. The big hits of the past were often, if not exactly flukes, then at least the beneficiaries of limited options. Of course a film is going to be a success if it's the only movie available on a Saturday night. Similarly, when three networks divided up a nation of 200 million, life was a lot easier for television executives. And not so very long ago most of the daily newspapers that survived the age of consolidation could count themselves blessed with monopolies in their home cities.

All that has changed. Options abound. Fans of small niches can now find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people's expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.

Read the whole thing here. And get the print edition to read the rest of the excellent essays--it's one of the most thought-provoking special issues I've read in years (yes, I'm a bit envious).

A thought on managing in an open source era

I hate it when my ideas are the best in the room. That just means I didn't make the room big enough.

(Related: Bill Joy--"Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.")

The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles

In physics, the greatest (theoretical) latent power in the universe is dark energy, waiting only for us to find a way to tap it (and to prove it actually exists; in the meantime it powers fictional superheroes). In people, the equivalent is "spare cycles"--the human potential that isn't tapped by our jobs, which for most of us is a lot of it. People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be. The guy playing Solitaire on his laptop at the airport? Spare cycles. Multiply it times a million. 

I am at this moment, somewhat randomly, in the Salisbury (MD) regional airport. It is tiny airport like thousands of others across the country. But, like all the others, it has to meet standard TSA security standards. There is a flight (which I am on) at 2:30 pm. It is the only flight out of this airport for the past hour. There will not be another flight out of this airport for another hour. Yet we need our full TSA apparatus. That includes the local police, who are represented by a sheriff.

I'm watching him right now. He's in his room, labeled "Sheriff". Young guy. He's watching a movie on a portable DVD player. That's fine--he won't be needed for another half hour. But of course "needed" isn't quite the right word. "Required" is closer to it. He will be required by policy to stand by, gun in holster, while I take my laptop out of my nerd backpack. He may, fingers crossed, go his entire career without a terrorist going through that security checkpoint. He may indeed never unholster that gun in the line of duty.

That sheriff is watching a movie because he has spare cycles. Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet.  It's what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They're the Soylent Green of the web. 

In the next issue of Wired we've got a great story about a woman who cyberstalked the lead singer of Linkin Park. She correctly guessed the password to his cellphone account. The rest was easy. She was a technician at a secure military facility, the Sandia National Labs. When eventually confronted, she explained that her job only took her half an hour a day. The rest was spare cycles. She used them to stalk the lead singer of Linkin Park.

Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we're underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We've got spare cycles and they're finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you've tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history. Solitaire Players of the World Unite!     

The Time 100, with Gladwell writeup

The Time 100 is out and I'm in it, with an incredibly generous write-up by my favorite author, Malcolm Gladwell. Many thanks to all of you who voted me up in the online poll, which may not have decided the outcome but was certainly gratifying to see (I ended up solidly in the middle of the pack, but ahead of Osama Bin Laden!) 

Here's what Gladwell wrote. I'm totally beaming:

All writers are in search of the Big Idea. A Big Idea has to matter. But you can have only one of them. Your Big Idea can't be that there are, say, 89 Rules of Power. E=mc(2) was, technically speaking, a Big Idea. But not really, because the best Big Ideas are also transparent. Truly Big Ideas are the rarest of phenomena, and when I first came upon Chris Anderson's The Long Tail last year, I knew this was one.

Born in 1961, Anderson became a physicist and conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. As editor in chief of Wired, he described the idea of The Long Tail in a 2004 article; the book came out in 2006.

Here is what the idea says: Many of us see the same movies and read the same books because the bookstore can store only so many books and the movie theater can play only so many movies. There isn't enough space to give us exactly what we want. So we all agree on something we kind of want. But what happens when the digital age comes along, allowing the bookstore to store all the books in the world? Now, it doesn't sell 1,000 copies of one book that we all kind of want; it sells one copy of 1,000 books each of us really wants.

Five sentences to explain something that, if you think about Amazon and Netflix and iTunes, will make you see the world a different way. That's a Truly Big Idea.

Inside HP's Long Tail strategy for DVDs

(Note: I chatted with the HP team behind this initiative this morning at the ATG Insight Live 2007 conference in Charleston, SC, where I was speaking. What they told me seems to agree with the account below. The main thing I'd add is that one of the key parts of making this work is finding really cheap and scaleable ways to add cover art, descriptions and other metadata to archive content. For the cover art, for instance, they've developed a way to upscale frames from the video itself so they look okay on the DVD box. Clever):

From John Fortt at B2.0's excellent Utility Belt blog:

Tech titan Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has an ambitious plan to get a piece of the $35 billion U.S. consumers spend each year on TV and movies. The company wants to help studios automate the process of digitally archiving video and then help retailers sell more of that digital video onto iPods, phones, PCs, TVs, and any other platform that comes along.

...

At the center of that strategy is a secret facility outside Sacramento where HP has placed its first big bet on the future of video distribution. (I call it secret because I was the first reporter HP let in, and some of the company’s own employees haven’t been allowed to see it yet. HP has requested that I not spill the beans on exactly what city the facility is in.) At the facility, set to go live this summer, where HP can crank out DVDs on demand. Order Karate Kid 2 on a website, and rather than send the order to a warehouse where the movie’s being stored on a shelf, the system will place an order in HP’s on-demand facility where a professional-quality DVD will be burned especially for you.

The most obvious benefit under this system would go to retailers, who would no longer need massive warehouses to store movies. But longer-term, the system could allow retailers to sell the “long tail” of video content that’s too obscure to give shelf space in your local Wal-Mart. (I’d love to mix and match old episodes of Quantum Leap, for instance.)

Wal-Mart (WMT), the world’s top seller of DVDs, happens to be the first customer for HP’s on-demand service. Customers ordering through the DVD site HP built for Wal-Mart will be able to access the on-demand facility in Sacramento. (The Wal-Mart site itself needs work, and both companies assured me they’re continuing to upgrade it.)

“We're quite optimistic about it – the amount of untapped content that could be made available is pretty substantial,” said Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart’s divisional merchandise manager for digital media. “Long tail businesses are not easy to develop, but there's plenty of opportunity there.”

Read more here.