BBC Radio 4 is on a quest to understand what makes an idea unique, where do great ideas come from, and whether there any original ideas left. Entrepreneur and curator of TED talks Chris Anderson and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton discuss why 'big ideas' often get stuck and why we need to get out of our normal routine to let our imagination flow. >> Listen to interview via TED blog and BBC Radio 4 blog (more...)...
I've finally managed to finished a book I've been spending the last few months reading called "Blogging Heroes" which was authored by Michael A. Banks. The book contains interviews with (at the time of writing) 30 of the world's top bloggers. People such as Joel Comm, Gina Trapani, Frank Warren, Peter Rojas, Robert Scoble, etc. offer their stories on how they have become successful through blogging. This post is the first in a two part series which will highlight 30 things I have learned by reading this book. Dave Taylor 1. Write only when your inspired and write more...
A few interesting posts drew my attention this morning. First there was Dave Winer who predicts that on-line advertisement will be dead. Not because it will completely disappear, or that it’s growth will slow down considerable. But because it will be replaced by something more valuable, commercial information. Interesting thought. I’ve always felt that on-line advertisement only makes sense when the advertisement itself has value to its user. Dave takes that thought one step further and explains why commercial information is more relevant. Erik Schonfeld at Techcrucnh shows statistics that advertisement growth is grinding to a halt. He uses the...
Wired editor Chris Anderson’s theories about the Long Tail have been the source of considerable controversy almost since the day his first Wired magazine piece on the topic was published in 2004. The initial criticisms of his thesis centered on whether there was such a thing as a “long tail” at all — in other words, whether digital distribution of music and other forms of content have allowed little-known songs, movies, and so on to prosper where they might otherwise have been ignored. Later attacks, however, have focused on how the Long Tail theory functions in certain markets, and whether...
You've probably never heard of Bob Cohn, but he played a major role in saving Wired from running aground in 2001. As executive editor,Cohn was the low-key second-in-command to Chris Anderson. He pushed editors and writers to abandon Wired's too-insidery voice and craft a new kind of tech journalism aimed at curious outsiders. Trust me, that sounds great until you try to do it. Starting in January, Cohn will take editorial charge of TheAtlantic.com, reporting directly to editor-in-chief James Bennet. "It's a great website," Bob told me via cellphone just now. Translation: Change a-comin'!...
Andrew Orlowski at the Register (UK) just published an interesting opinion piece that basically says that Chris Anderson's LongTail concept is a bunch of Silicon-Valley utopia, and self-perpetuating hype. His main argument is that 'evidence' collected by MCPS's Will Page et al suggests that digital music sales don't display a longtail characteristic, at all - rather, they exhibit the very same top-heavy, hit-centric income patterns that we've had in content sales since... well, the advent of electricity and the phonograph, I guess: the few hits make most of the money. Here are some quotes from Andrew and El Reg...
The Register has an article on a study on the long tail that puts an additional chink or two in the armor of the popular digital distribution theory. Economist Will Page (of the MCPS-PRS Alliance), his colleague Gary Eggleton and Mblox founder Andrew Bud looked at tens of millions of transactions and came to conclusions that are odds with Chris Anderson's long tail teachings. The transactions had a log-normal distribution, not the power law distribution common in long tail theory. The trio found a relatively concentrated head and a "rather poverty stricken tail." "They discovered that instead of following...
