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.

Comments

[Siva]

Congrats!!

You deserve a place there!

[BWJones]

You know the Time thing is OK, but to get a write-up from Malcolm Gladwell... well, now *that* is something. Seriously though, congratulations Chris.

[Tommy Weir]

Well deserved. The simplest of things can be the most profound. You deserve it, it's the idea of the hour.

[Josh Bernoff]

Mazel Tov, Chris.

The Long Tail. The Tipping Point. And . . .

All the rest of us really want is to be on that short list.

This post is about what makes you and Malcolm great:

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/05/buy_business_bo.html

[PeaceLove]

Hee hee, I'm tickled! I had the same mind explosion when I first read the original Wired article.

Congrats! Well deserved. Glad you beat Osama Bin Laden, too...

[Michele Miller]

Congratulations and kudos, Chris - well deserved!!

[Kempton]

Congrats Chris. My friend was just talking about how your ideas has changed his thinking completely. Great stuff and keep up the great work with you blog.

[andersbrown]

Congrats Chris -- like others, I've been fascinated by this concept and see it being applied in places where users don't even think about it as the "long tail", they just know they are experiencing value in a way they never could have before (the craft industry, as an example... ). Keep it up!

[Irene]

It's hard to define what's happening at the time it is happening. You thought, researched, listened, and reported on an important change in practice that is a social paradigm shift. You gave me a handle on bewildering, messy growth by providing a theoretical framework.

[Darren Johnson]

Congratulations Chris. Very well deserved. I second all of the comments here and thank you for sharing your revolutionary ideas and creating a new framework to view the world through.

Keep up the great work!

[Pietro Gentile]

Hi Chris,

we met in Paris last september, during the IDC European IT Forum.

In my interview for "La Stampa" (3rd most red Italian newspaper), i asked you about the italian edition of your book.

Finally, two month ago, the book arrived even in the "Bel Paese". So, I was already happy about this, until i received last week my copy of TIME Europe.... great!

Best,

Peter

[wow powerleveling]

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. I totally saw this magazine in my mom’s bathroom once! There was a whole stack of them actually, and some magazine about guns.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.maple story powerleveling I guess I’m hurting for fun facts about Malcolm Gladwell…but maybe he should write another book called Nail: The Power of Nailing Without Nailing! I’m not sure how that would work but it’d definitely be something I’d tell my friends to read.

[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner