Anderson's Long Tail

Chris Anderson launched in 2004 the Long Tail hypothesis in an article in Wired Magazine, which he reworked into the book The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. It is based on the graphical representation of a Pareto distribution. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who saw that in 19th Century Italy 20% of the population controlled 80% of the country's wealth (this is why it is also known as the 80/20 rule). George Zipf saw the same phenomenon in the use of words. The most commonly used words (such as "the") account for the largest proportion of use. The frequency of words is inversly proportional to its rank in the frequency table. When you display this graphically you get what is known as a Powerlaw distribution. The high use of a limited amount of resources can be found in the "Head", while the low(er) use of a huge amount of resources can be found in the "Long Tail".

Anderson noted a similar distribution in online shops like iTunes (music) and Netflix (movie rentals). In bricks-and-mortar retail stores the amount of available items are limited because of real world limitations to shelf space and distribution issues. In the digital realm, the cost of an SKU is virtually zero. This means that the less mainstream items can also be placed in inventory. His research showed that in these cases selling a little of a lot can also contribute to profit. Simply put, business is ruled in most cases by a given level of scarcity. Thus the most viable business model is one that focuses on selling as much hits as possible, whilst avoiding losses. Anderson postulates that when confronted with more choice, people tend to buy more and with more variety. Niches become more important and generate revenue. In order not to be swamped by the multitude of niches good filters are absolutely mandatory. Filters are not the same as the traditional cultural gatekeepers.

Even though I'm not sure how pervasive the concept of the Long Tail is in the world-wide economy, I am convinced that (for now) in certain sectors and/or for certain ways of doing business it is a force to be reckoned with. Long Tail economics is an important new business model. The classic examples of Amazon, iTunes and Google have shown its viability. Anderson states his case in a convincing well written way. For anyone interested in how the internet is changing our way of living, this book is a must read (together with Weinberger's books). It is a perfect introduction to a new way of thinking about business. The natural follow-up read is Wikinomics, which provides a complementary insight. In short: heartily recommended.

Wikinomics

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams' Wikinomics, how mass collaboration changes everything tells us how the internet and the digital culture is changing how we are interacting with each other, with the world, and how we are doing business. It is the natural follow-up to their The Digital Economy.

The basic premises of the book is that in thanks to the web 2.0 era the possibility to share information has encouraged a growing number of people to work together and to make better use of worldwide supply-chains. The large, established corporations have not always responded well to this, and most of them are not quite ready yet to change their business models. The authors however encourage companies to become what they call an "enterprise 2.0". The main attributes of such an enterprise are being open, peering, sharing, acting globally.

Being open implies being transparent (to a certain level) towards the world. On the one hand this means that you do not hide skeletons in your closet, on the other hand the authors state that opening up part of your system (which is not core business) can be beneficial. The common example of the latter is the opening up of applications and infrastructures by Amazon, Google and Facebook (but also the outsourcing of innovations by P&G).

Peering concerns working together in an open-source fashion to incrementally improve a given product. IBM has been able to extract considerable innovations from investing in the Linux community.

Sharing information and resources speeds up the process of innovation. The tricky part here is to share important information which do not count as trade secrets. In the beginning of the book, the example is given of a gold mining company in Canada, which couldn't find an important source of gold. Tests had shown that their must be a vast gold vein somewhere on their grounds, but their top geologists couldn't track it down. In the gold mining industry it is considered not done to share geological data. This is exactly what they did, and soon enough the new gold reserve was found thanks to the help of a huge amount of external contributors.

Acting globally is not deciding as a company what you will be doing and then doing this globally. Collaboration should be done on a global scale. Involve all the players in your supply chain. Share the gains and losses, and develop the product together.

All of this doesn't just happen by itself. It needs to be managed properly and done for the right reasons at the right time. Just opening up all your knowledge for the sake of opening up is not the answer either. Coca-cola can share the way they produce large quantities of cola, but they don't need to tell the details of their secret formula. Work together where it is beneficial, share information where possible and keep the secrets of your core business to yourself.

Tapscott and Williams flesh out their basic idea by detailing the components and prerequisites for the creation of an enterprise 2.0, to which they add a large amount of examples in the business world. All in all they make a convincing case. Part of what they are describing is already happening, part might be on its way. What is sure is that the information revolution and globalization is changing our world. The old business models are slowly outliving their usefulness in their current forms. The path sketched in wikinomics (although I'm not really a fan of the word) seems reasonable and well thought out. Only history will tell if it will all play out like that, but I for one hope it will. A culture, and a business, based on an open mentality can only make us evolve faster as a species. In a way capitalism, with the aid of the internet, has succeeded in creating the building blocks for a more egalitarian society in a way that communism never has.

NISO guidelines for building good digital collections 2.0

The NISO Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections "provides an overview of some of the major components and activities involved in the creation of good digital collections and provides a framework for identifying, organizing, and applying existing knowledge and resources to support the development of sound local practices for creating and managing good digital collections. It is intended for two audiences: cultural heritage organizations planning projects to create digital collections, and funding organizations that want to encourage the development of good digital collections."

It is now editable by anyone who has an account. "With the third edition of the Framework, we open the document up for ongoing contributions from the community of librarians, archivists, curators, and other information professionals. We encourage you to contribute your own ideas and experiences, suggest resources, and evaluate those that have been suggested."

Zoetrope: historical browsing

Interesting new publication and tool from the University of Washington:

"Zoetrope: Interacting with the Ephemeral Web
Eytan Adar, Mira Dontcheva, James Fogarty, Daniel S. Weld

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations."

Grazzhoppa's DJ Bigband: Around the world in 80 beats

DJ Grazzhoppa is back with his Bigband. The latest incarnation contains 11 DJ's, a horn section and two singers. On the 19th the new show was presented at the KVS (the Royal Flemish Theatre) in Brussels. At first I was a bit apprehensive, because the previous show wasn't all that. Every track they did had a build-up, layer per layer, and then just stopped instead of going somewhere. They weren't really songs, but more a basic backbone to what might become an actual song. This time around though the songs were there. I was actually impressed. There were some classic "let's drop a beat and a scratch" moments, but the interplay between the dj's, the horns and the singers worked remarkably well. The previous to last song, called Anywhere but here, even gave me goose bumps, it was that amazing. They still need to get rid of some sloppy execution here and there, but with touring I'm sure that will disappear. In short, if they're in your area, go and see that shit! In the meantime, go to their homepage for some music and videos.

"around the world in 80 beats" live snippets from grazzhoppa on Vimeo.

Gza presents Liquid Swords

Last night's concert was more than I hoped for. Gza played his seminal album Liquid Swords at the AB. Hardcore beats from the early Wu-Tang period. The best record he has ever made. It's a bit strange to hear every track from a record live, but even if you know what the next track will be it still remains too good when it drops. After he did all those songs, he followed up with some new stuff, but also with some of the old like clan in da front, crash your crew, Triumph and even ODB's Shimmy shimmy ya. As a support the amazing Killah Priest was there. Unfortunately the latter didn't do Tai chi, but ya can't have it all I guess.

This is the third time I've seen Gza, and each time he sucked ass. Too drunk to stand up straight, he didn't finish any of his sentences while rapping over a DAT tape. Luckily Dreddy Krueger was there to make the shows acceptable. This time however, he was sober, and spot on. The best Gza show to date, with nothing (or as good as) but dope ass beats. The only let down, was the fact he refused to do an encore. Killah Priest did something which resembled half a song and then just stopped. What can you do? Rappers are mostly amateurs when it comes to being professional musicians. I'm very happy with the Liquid Swords experience, and I hope other hip-hoppers will do follow his lead. Imagine Nas doing Illmatic, KRS doing Return of the boom bap or his self titled album, Gang Starr doing Step in the arena, Jeru doing The sun rises in the East, Black Moon doing Enta da stage, ... One can only hope.

Here's a video from a show two days earlier:

Five Peace Band

Last tuesday Chick Corea and John McLaughlin were incredible. The are now on tour in Europe with the Five Peace Band, which is made up of three (as McLaughlin put it, in excellent French) heavy-weights in the world of Jazz: Kenny Garrett on sax, Christian McBride on bass and the incredible Vinnie Colaiuta on drums.

Chick Corea started his career with the likes of Herbie Mann and Stan Getz, before replacing Herbie Hancock as Miles Davis' pianist (appearing amongst others on Bitches Brew). After leaving Davis he formed the fusion band Return to Forever, with Stanley Clarke, Bill Conners and Lenny White. After the break up in the late 70ies he played in a variety of settings before forming the Elektric Band in the mid 80ies, which included the amazing drummer Dave Weckl. In the 21st century he's still releasing strong (solo) records, which are jazz and fusion oriented.

John McLaughlin is another virtuoso who featured on the classic Bitches Brew record. He was the leader of the Mahvishnu Orchestra and was a member of the incredible Lifetime, both classic examples of the fusion era.

The show was an absolute tour de force. At times soft, at times hard as fuck. But with a craftsmanship to be reckoned with. The songs were a mixture of some new and some old tracks, blended with a lot of improvisation. What more can you ask? Admittedly there were two or three minor moments where it was probably more fun for the musicians than for the listeners. But these moments didn't last too long. Herbie Hancock was also there. He was invited at the end of the show to play an improv track which was absolutely amazing. They may be getting a bit older, but these guys have not lost their energy. Absolutely amazing.