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{ Category Archives } long tail

Long tail, small earnings?

In a post from "The long tail" a small movie director has written an interesting e-mail to Chris Anderson. 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. 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. The general idea of the e-mail is that the long tail with niche content is nice for the consumer but that it is hard for the producer. Fundamentally there are only a few customers in the long tail so ...
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2007 09 29 Martijn Kriens Tags: , , , Comments (0)

Conversation

Some books are very helpful in making you understand developments. This summer I have read a book called "The Cluetrain manifesto". Central theme of the book (which by the way is written in 2000 but started as as website in 1999) is the statement that markets (and a lot of other things) are conversations. The way companies use corporate communications and PR to tell us how we should think about them simply does not work anymore. It makes you think. When I go to the market each Saturday to get the ingredients for a nice dinner I am in constant conversation. I tell the girl that always helps me with the vegetables how they were last week and she tells me what kind of specials she has this week. Sometimes we discuss how the ingredients are best used for the recipe I will be making. I learn from her and sometimes I can tell her new things. Same with the small butcher that I go to. In essence this is a weekly conversation that accompanies the business we do together. The one greatly enhances the other. In ...
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2007 09 06 Martijn Kriens paticipation
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A thousand lies

This is such an interesting example of how our new production of information can go wrong:This is an interview with Christine Boutin, the French minister of housing, about the conspiracy that George W Bush is behind the attack on the WTC towers on 9/11. A small translation of the first part goes like this: I think that it's possible. I think that it's possible... I think it is possible. I think it more especially as I know that the sites that speak of is problem are the sites that have the greatest numbers of visits....And so, I tell myself, I who am extremely sensitive...to the new techniques of information and communication, that this expression of the mass of the people cannot be without any truth. I'm not telling you that I adhere to that position, but let's say that, nevertheless, I'm questioning myself a bit on this question Some time ago I talked about the fact that due to ease of copying information of the Internet it is possible for an item of ...
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2007 07 09 Martijn Kriens diversity
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Ladybird

LadybirdOriginally uploaded by Vigdis T Sometimes the power of the long tail amazes me. The picture on the side is of a ladybird. It is coming from the group "Tiny animals on fingers". Oh yeah, I suppose this is not a picture of a ladybird but a picture of a ladybird on a finger. Of this group there are 448 members. Amazing.
2007 06 30 Martijn Kriens Tags: Comments (0)

Skeeler 2.0

Delegation of work and responsibility should be done to the people with the greatest stake in the result and who are best equipped to handle the task. This is true in organisation theory as well in the cooperation between companies and their customers. In interesting development in this area is TomTom Map Share. Here it is possible to add changes to the card and share these improvements with others (and TomTom). It is a logical division of labor: I can change the map when something is wrong and it bothers me and TomTom can use it to improve the map. There are of course some dangers like somebody who changes the map because they do not like the traffic through their street. But if enough people use this service it will be possible to use the wisdom of crowds. In the past I used an application called Wayfinder which used real time map data on the mobile phone over a GPRS link. Here I could suggest changes and some days later my phone used the improved map data. In a world where "content is king" these methods to improve the data by using the large groups of user is promising.  Another example is "skeeler 2.0" at Telematica Insituut. In ...
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2007 06 09 Martijn Kriens social networksTags: , Comments (0)

Is your past coming to get you?

Just after my last post I read this article about the way digital traces from a young and sometimes foolish past can catch up to you. In the article I mentioned above from danah boyd a hypothetical case is written where somebody gets confronted during a job interview with the fact that she has protested against the WTO and Chinese policies (full case from the Harvard Business Review can be found here). In the guidance committee for Rathenau I talked about in the last post we also talked about a similar issue: what about all the pictures, video's and other digital traces that show that we did some pretty silly things (well, I did... of course way past ...). Some of these things we would like not to be brought up during a job interview (or during a sales call, or ...). Privacy seems to be terminally ill if she would not already have been deceased during my last post. Or is the context changing? I think that the context is changing rapidly. Not just my silly actions from the past are online, yours are too, with the rest of the world. If people do not put the information online ...
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2007 06 06 Martijn Kriens privacyTags: , Comments (0)

Dumb and Dumber

Evolution is driven by selection and attrition. The adapted ones flourish and the others wither away into oblivion. That also means that new and improved versions (of our genetically previous us for example) are build upon the DNA of the already improved version. And that is a Good Thing. As well as being the main reason we evolved in creatures that created Internet, Blogging and Youtube. One of the nice aspects of the days before the Internet was that a lot of mechanism were available to filter talent so we will not be pestered by people incapable of the content they are pestering us with. In order to make a movie you had to go to a academy and before somebody gave you a budget you had to prove you have the talent by showing previous work, e.g. work done as an assistant to somebody else. Also, quality costs money. Well, in most cases anyhow. You can not imagine a movie like Schindlers list, Moulin Rouge or Forrest Gump made on a shoestring budget. Talent costs money. High level camera's costs money. There are of course the proverbial exceptions: El Mariachi from Robert Rodriquez (7000 dollar budget) and maybe The Blair witch project (or was this the first example of Internet hype?). ...
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2007 06 05 Martijn Kriens Tags: , , Comments (0)

Bubbles

Don't you get tired of choice? I do. Some time ago I had to arrange a new connection for TV, Telephone and Internet for my mother who has moved from Spain to Arnhem. In the old days you just called KPN and: presto. Now there is unlimited choice with very little help. In the end I always have the nagging feeling that I probably did not make the best choice possible... I have the same feeling when looking at sites like Youtube. There is so much choice and I have to make all those choices myself. Yesterday I was drinking a beer with Rene van Buuren and, beside other issues I will not talk about here :-), we had a conversation about choice. His statement was that unlimited choice (for example in TV channels) is a temporary thing. In the end we will have a limited number of channels that we watch. The difference with now will be that on those channels there are no fixed broadcasters but a selection will be made from the unlimited supply of content. Partly by experts and partly by "the crowd" in a "free zone". Though I am not sure about the fixed ...
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2007 06 01 Martijn Kriens Tags: , Comments (0)

Career moves

Maybe, given other choices, you could have been another Steven Spielberg. Maybe even better. Steven Spielberg became Steven Spielberg because he made the choices early on that were fitting with his talent. And since in a short tailed world success breeds success he became one of the most successful directors since producers are inclined to play it safe in the choice of directors (everybody is going to look at the latest Spielberg). But no doubt there are many more people out there that have the talent of a spielberg but made different career choices and became mediocre architects. On of the interesting aspects of the long tailed world introduced by youtube is that more people can try out their talent. With hard work, bit of luck and lots of recommendations you can get popular in the long tail and slowly but surely move up the tail to where it gets interesting for producers. A series on youtube I love is "mr. Deity". On their websitethey explicitly state they are making this series on youtube because they wish to make a series on TV. What is Mr. Deity? Mr. Deity is a semi-monthly video series (every two weeks) that looks at God and ...
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2007 05 27 Martijn Kriens social networks
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