The Long Tail

An independent filmmaker's lament

Jeff Bach at Quietwater Films sent me a thoughtful email that I'll post here in its entirety (with permission):

"When first purchased, your book opened my eyes and got me quite excited about this "Long Tail" segment of the economy.  While my eyes continue to be opened and I continue to be in learning mode, unfortunately the excitement over this Long Tail has faded away as "reality" has set in.

My reality as a content creator and producer is that it is basically not possible for anyone in the "normal" realm to make a living in this Long Tail space.  I create and produce "paddlesports" content.  Canoes and kayaks.  I am a provider of niche content.  My customers are John and Jane Public and are people who like outdoor recreation, especially the watery kind.  Affluent, active, with disposable income to spend on products like mine.  They are doing it as I had hoped.

But the reality at this time for me and my company is that I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game.  And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis.  In short, I am a much smaller and more struggling version of the giants that have preceded me.  I have the same issues and problems my predecessors did.  The only thing that has changed is that I am trying to do it with an awareness of Web 2.0 and Long Tail and several other "New Media" phrases that you can insert here.

Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER.  But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom.  Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.  I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth as I see more and more that the "old school" of thought, economy and media will continue to endure and dominate until.......I don't know when, because I'm not seeing a change in the economics of selling enough to support yourself.

Still - you wrote a great book! Although I think you are fortunate it was one of the "hits" and that you do not need to depend on its Long Tail sales to make your living."

Social Networking is a feature, not a destination

Between my day job at Wired, this blog, my startup BookTour and my hobby DIYDrones, I've been thinking a lot about how to integrate social networking into websites better. Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy--social networking as a feature, not a destination.

At the moment, my sites range from virtually no social networking (BookTour and this site) to heavy social networking (DIYDrones, which is built from the ground up on the Ning platform). Wired is on the minimal social networking side, with only our Reddit news submission and voting service doing much of it at all.

(BTW, by "social networking" I'm not including basic "chat amongst yourself" stuff like comments, wikis and voting. Instead, social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful).

In the case of Wired, social networking is clearly a feature that we should have more of. But we shouldn't move the brand onto a MySpace page or a Facebook app simply to gain access to the tools that could connect our readers to each other (which is not to say that we couldn't image a Wired Facebook app of some sort; we just haven't released one yet). Instead, it's mostly something we should build or buy and integrate into wired.com wherever it makes sense.

In the case of DIYDrones (image above), we fortunately chose a technology platform that has rich social networking built in (indeed, that's why we chose the platform). Ning represents the "Long Tail of social networks"--more than 100,000 hyperfocused microsites, each with their own community. In this case, Ning is not a destination itself--instead, it provides hosted social networking tools for niche sites to create their own destinations.

In the case of this blog, which is built on Typepad, the hope is that Typepad will introduce more and better social networking tools that I can deploy to help readers talk amongst themselves and otherwise make useful connections. SixApart has some such features on its Vox service, but has been slow to bring them to TypePad. Hope springs eternal, but if things don't seem headed in the right direction I can always move this blog to another platform, either wired.com if we can build out the technology fast enough or Ning if the blogging tools there improve (which I'm told they will, very soon).

Finally, there's the tricky question of BookTour. Right now we're primarily a destination site, but there are a lot of other book sites out there, including at least three "MySpace for books" in the form of LibraryThing, GoodReads and Shelfari, and we're unlikely to get as big as any of them given our singular focus on events. So we've been debating internally whether we want to shift to a distributed functionality strategy (AKA "go where the people are"), where most users interact with us via a widget on third party sites, clicking through to our site only when they want to go deeper. We're embarking on some experiments with a few partners we like to see how that goes. Hopefully a distributed strategy will help us reach critical mass as a destination, too, but right now we're simply experimenting to see what works.

All this brings me back to the title of this post. As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else (which is why I like Ning, which suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts. See this post for more on that.).

Instead, I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I'm sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I'm placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

Halo 3: the best father/kid bonding ever?

Thanks to my unexpected voice acting cameo in Halo 3, Microsoft sent me an early copy of the game, which just arrived today via DHL. So needless to say, that was the afternoon. We haven't had so much fun since, well, Halo 2. Split-screen cooperative mode, which was already the best father/kid bonding experience in the world in the previous versions, is even better now that one person plays Master Chief and the other plays the Arbiter. The graphics are amazing, the sets and vistas breathtaking, the vehicles more varied and the weapons...well, there's a huge mace thing called a Gravhammer that's worth the price of the game itself. BOOM!

The game's rated M for Mature, but my view on figuring out what's appropriate for kids is that the rating isn't that helpful. It depends on the game and the kid. In the case of Halo, where the enemies are aliens, the blood blue and the setting hundreds of years into the future, I don't think we're running the risk of promoting realistic violence. This is very much in fantasy mode, closer to the Power Rangers than Grand Theft Auto. So we played it today with kids aged 7-10 and the only reason I think it's better for 10 and up is that you need to really be pretty good at first-person shooter videogames on consoles to master it.

Anyway, you'll read plenty of reviews of this game over the next few days, but I wanted to be the first to look at from a GeekDad perspective. And I'm delighted to report that it is every bit as good as anticipated. Game of the Year, hands down.

[crossposted from geekdad.com]

Best comment of the day

Found on Gizmodo's coverage of this video of a Packbot robot getting blown up by an IED:

"Admit it - back in the 20th Century, none of you imagined that World War III would be Robots vs. Muslims. Seems obvious now."

 

(Thanks to Noah Shachtman of our DangerRoom blog for the original video find.)

UAV image processing with Pict'Earth

Now that we've got several UAVs running well, it's time to show what they're good for. Aerial photography is fun, but it's not really useful unless you can cover large areas and integrate the imagery into Google Earth. I've been stitching together images optically and superimposing them on Google Earth, but it takes forever, still requires a lot of hand tweaking and isn't really well integrated into Earth. What I needed was an automated solution, which is why I was so pleased to see the service Pict'Earth recently announced.

The image at right is one that they processed for me. I uploaded a bunch of photos taken by a camera in continuous shooting mode (it was a Canon SD650 shooting twice a second) and a GPS record of the same flight (we just put a GPS data logger onboard and downloaded the data later). The Pict'Earth software synchronizes the time stamps on the photos with the GPS records and then outputs a KML file that automatically mosaics all the photos into Google Earth. It's really quite cool.

The example shown here is a screen shot of one run over the Alameda Naval Air Station. Here's the KML file--download it and it should load automaticaly into Earth so you can see how it all works.

The Pict'Earth team is still developing the software to do this on a large scale and is working out pricing plans. They're updating their website and should have that all available there soon. In the meantime you can contact them directly here. You can also follow their progress on their Ning community site, which is well worth visiting.

The Black Wire and the White Wire

[UPDATE: For real-world horror stories of IT vs Web 2.0, see this excellent ComputerWorld article]

On my desk at work I have two ethernet cables. One is black and one is white. The black one is connected to our corporate network. I use that one when I want to print things. I could also use it for Internet access and stuff, but I don't because the corporate network blocks a number of ports, including those used for Skype and Second Life. It's also pretty slow.

The white cable, meanwhile, is a standard consumer-grade DSL connection to the Internet, with nothing blocked at all. Our local IT staff installed it by popular demand, possibly without checking with headquarters (we love our local IT staff!). It's fast. I use it all the time.

These two cables are a handy metaphor for the two worlds of corporate computing: end users and the IT department. The chasm between them has never been greater, in part because the tools available on the wide open web have never been better.

Earlier this year, I described this divide in a controversial post entitled "Who needs a CIO?" Today I returned to the subject, perhaps unwisely, in a speech to, er, CIOs at an Accenture meeting in Boston. I told the story of my two cables not to dis our own central IT department, who are only doing their job of supporting mission-critical applications (Hi guys! please don't block any more ports), but to illustrate that there are really two IT functions in any company these days, and each demands a different approach.

The first is the traditional one of core software functions, from HR to Accounting and file storage and backup. The second is cool web stuff, from blogs to wikis, social networking and, yes, even Second Life, despite my skepticism about its business utility.

I don't think one network approach can suit both. Our PeopleSoft system is crucial to the company's accounting and has transformed our business processes, and I wouldn't want to do anything to put it at risk. Likewise, we need rock-solid data backups, which have saved our skin more than once. So too for other enterprise apps, from our Exchange server to our workflow management. Keeping that stuff running and secure is no joke, and I'd hate to think that it was one of my malformed Twitters that brought it down.

But at the same time we all live online and the distinction between work and life is blurring more every day. Experimenting with the latest Web 2.0 goodies is not only part of being part of the modern age, it's part of our job (we are Wired, after all). I'd hate to think that our PeopleSoft protectionism was stopping us from that.

Hence the need for the second network, which I think of as our sandbox. We can try things out there without fear of endangering our core business functions. 

I spoke to a number of CIOs at the Accenture meeting who were rolling out a similar dual network strategy. Some of them have two physical networks; others create several virtual networks on a single physical one. But all of them understood the need for a sandbox where users could experiment with new software, web services and modes of working without introducing too much risk to the core business.

The technology world inside companies shouldn't be users vs IT, innovation vs. operations. But the main reason that it so often is, that they're so often in direct conflict, is the dependence on shared infrastructure for everything.

Hence my two cables--in a sense, my computing ego and id. Scratch most companies and their employees and you'll find the same. So why not build IT infrastructure that reflects the reality that one size doesn't fit all? To encourage experimentation at the edge while protecting operations in the core, two networks work better than one.