Andrew Hazlett // This page is a notepad for ideas, links, and things of interest to me and probably few others. My Internet home-base is at http://www.TheOccasional.org.
I am establishing a cultural commentary and curation website called The New Modern. Visit http://www.TheNewModern.net for more information.
----
Update: I just came across this Consumerist post about the restaurant and venue review site Yelp deleting "secondhand" and irrevelant reviews. Why can't Amazon take similar responsibility for editing customer reviews?
We've been told repeatedly that the age of digital information would help people congregate around idiosyncratic interests, inspire producers to serve infinite niche markets, and make everybody more diversely and individualistically happy.
But what if the Internet age is making cultural consumers more herd-like? Is the world of online culture more homogenized than the offline environment? The analysis behind this graph would indicate that we are now less likely to purchase obscure niche products.
While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.
... Here are Lorentz curves for Internet World (blue) and Offline World (green), in which the products are lined up in order of increasing popularity along the x axis, and the cumulative choices for those products is plotted up the Y axis.
I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's TEDx event here in Baltimore. The Sun has a great article about the event and the army of volunteers who have put it together.
Watch live tomorrow at the TEDxMidAtlantic website.
1,000 True Fans
The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.
Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?
Lots of interesting thoughts in this post, but there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical about the idea that there is a sustainable midpoint between anonymity and stardom. Food for thought, regardless.
[H/T Virginia Postrel]
