the long tail

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The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Cost: ~$3000 → $35 = ~100 times cheaper Time to get paid: 9 months → 1 week = ~36 times faster Customer Communication: None → You own every customer’s contact info CD Baby revolutionized the music industry by escaping the limitations of the short head and “revealing” the Long Tail. In The Long Tail, Anderson recounts the story of a friend whose band, Birdmonster, saw the benefits of the Long Tail made possible in part by Derek and CD Baby. For bands looking to get started, there’s no way around hustling for gigs. While most bands are forced into pestering club owners for gigs, Birdmonster searched for clubs that had already booked headliners but still had “TBA” for the opening band.

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If we plot the same curve on a logarithmic scale, where each step is a factor of ten ($1, $10, $100, $1000, etc), then it should form a straight line as in the graph below. Source: The Long Tail – Chris Anderson In this example from Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, actual sales don’t follow the dotted line. Traditionally in movies, just as in music, if you aren’t making it into major distribution (in this case movie theaters), you aren’t making any money. After the top one hundred, we see movies that only got a little bit of regional distribution as the curve drops off, and then it falls to zero at around the five hundred rank for movies that got no distribution. What should look like the Long Tail graph we saw earlier actually looks like this: Source: The Long Tail – Chris Anderson Because movie theatres, record stores, and retail businesses can’t serve the area labeled latent demand.

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The fact that Max’s decision has been safe for the last one hundred years is in no way indicative that it’s going to be safe in the future. I don’t say all this to scare. I say it to make you aware. What was once safe is now risky. What was once risky is now safe. Section 4: The Long Tail How Entrepreneurs with Second Rate Degrees Are Getting Rich The Long Tail, a concept popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his book by the same name, explains that because of technology, primarily the internet, the traditional rules around business and entrepreneurship have changed. In 1998, Derek Sivers was a musician living in New York.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

If we are all empowered to use tools to meet those needs, or modify them with our own ideas, we will collectively find the full range of what a tool can do. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital—the Long Tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the Long Tail of things. My first book, The Long Tail, was about exactly this—the shift in culture toward niche goods—but mostly in the digital world. For most of the past century, the natural variation and choice in products such as music, movies, and books have been hidden by the limited “carrying capacity” of the traditional distribution systems of physical stores, broadcast channels, and megaplex movie theaters.

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HB615.A683 2013 338′.04—dc23 2012014398 eISBN: 978-0-307-72097-9 Jacket creative direction and design by Brandon Kavulla v3.1 For Carlotta Anderson Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Part One THE REVOLUTION Chapter 1 The Invention Revolution Chapter 2 The New Industrial Revolution Chapter 3 The History of the Future Chapter 4 We Are All Designers Now Chapter 5 The Long Tail of Things Part Two THE FUTURE Chapter 6 The Tools of Transformation Four Desktop Factories Chapter 7 Open Hardwares Chapter 8 Reinventing the Biggest Factories of All Chapter 9 The Open Organization Chapter 10 Financing the Maker Movement Chapter 11 Maker Businesses Chapter 12 The Factory in the Cloud Chapter 13 DIY Biology Epilogue The New Shape of the Industrial World Appendix: The 21st-Century Workshop Getting started with CAD Getting started with 3-D printing Getting started with 3-D scanning Getting started with laser cutting Getting started with CNC machines Getting started with electronics Acknowledgments Notes Chapter 1 The Invention Revolution Fred Hauser, my maternal grandfather, emigrated to Los Angeles from Bern, Switzerland, in 1926.

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But that is just the first wave of what is quickly becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Soon these early tools will become as ubiquitous and as easy to use as inkjet printers. And if history is any guide, it will change the world even faster than the microprocessor did a generation ago. We are all designers now. It’s time to get good at it. Chapter 5 The Long Tail of Things Mass production works for the masses. But what works for you? One recent Saturday, my two youngest daughters decided they wanted to redecorate their dollhouse. They’ve been playing The Sims 3, which is a video game that’s basically a virtual dollhouse where you can make any kind of home with a dizzying array of furniture and people choices (“Sims”), and then watch them live their lives in it.

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

We are likely to see many new and interesting kinds of database marketing as we transition from network to networked television. The lure of the direct response dollars is an exceptional motivator. The Tale of the Long Tail The Eskimos have 27 words for snow... The Great Wall of China is the only manmade object you can see from space... More than 20 percent of value is locked up in the “Long Tail.” These are all myths that have such romantic power, you just want to believe them; but they are still myths. In October 2004, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine wrote “The Long Tail,” a brilliant article. In it, Anderson argues that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers if sales and distribution costs are low enough.

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A Zipf ’s distribution is an excellent way to plot a demand curve and, if properly applied, the insight gained can be very useful. Results The problem with the long tail is not with the math, or even with the idea; the problem is the way people interpret (or more precisely, misinterpret) Anderson’s concept. With regard to content (audio and video on the Internet), there is a pretty good theoretical argument to be made for the value proposition of the long tail. After all, in theory, it goes on forever and it is full of valuable things like old Sidney Bechet and Bunk Johnson recordings. These 0.7 artists, by default, have a place 0.6 on the long tail. 0.5 But, how will consumers find this long-tail content, 0.4.

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In other words, you’ll need to determine which movies are in the top quintile (top 20 percent of the curve) of revenue producers to determine if the content is worth encoding at all. But isn’t the long tail an accurate way to look at content usage? Yes, it is. And it’s great if the content can be encoded and stored at a very low cost. It’s just not a profitable way to look at a back catalog that was not created with the long tail in mind. It is never less expensive to prepare content for long tail distribution than it is during the original production process. If you know that one day you will want to store your content online and make the files available for electronic distribution, you can easily take advantage of the long tail. However, after the fact or with existing material in non-digital formats, there are very real costs associated with encoding and storage.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Netflix offers seventy-five thousand titles today (about twelve thousand in 2002) in more than two hundred genres on its Web site. Blockbuster offered seven thousand to eight thousand in 2002.16 The Long Tail dynamic benefits those whose work lives in the niche. A wider diversity of films and books is available now than ever before in the history of culture. The low cost of inventory means wider choice. Wider choice is a great benefit for those whose tastes are different.17 Those who doubt the significance of the Long Tail are quick to argue that the amount of commerce generated in the Long Tail is small relative to the market generally. Anderson calculates 25 percent of Amazon’s sales come from its tail; but the Wall Street 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 129 8/12/08 1:55:17 AM 130 REMI X Journal’s Lee Gomes comments, “[U]sing another analysis of those numbers . . . you can show that 2.7% of Amazon’s titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues.”18 But this criticism misses two important points.

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But in each case, the skeptic misses something critically important: how the discipline of the yeoman’s life changes him or her as a citizen. The Long Tail enables a wider range of people to speak. Whatever they say, that’s a very good thing. Speaking teaches the speaker even if it just makes noise. Little Brother The Long Tail alone, however, is not enough to explain the great success of the Amazons/Netflixes/Googles of the world. It’s not enough that stuff is simply available. There must also be an efficient way to match customers to the stuff in the Long Tail. I may well want to buy a book that only five hundred others in the world would want to buy.

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See Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Jeffrey Hu, and Duncan Simester, “Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail: The Effect of Search Costs on the Concentration of Product Sales,” MIT Center for Digital Business Working Paper (2007); Paul L. Caron, “The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship,” Yale Law Journal 116 Pocket Part 38 (2006); Anita Elberse and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales,” Harvard Business School No. 07-015 Working Paper Series; Indiana Resource Sharing Task Force, “Wagging the Long Tail: Sharing More of Less; Recommendations for Enhancing Resource Sharing in Indiana,” White Paper (2007); Anindya Ghose and Bin Gu, “Search Costs, Demand Structure and Long Tail in Electronic Markets: Theory and Evidence,” NET Institute Working Paper No. 06-19 (2006); Teruyasu Murakami, “The Long Tail and the Lofty Head of Video Content: The Possibilities of ‘Convergent Broadcasting,’ ” Nomura Research Institute, NRI Papers No. 113 (2007). 18.

The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, Rand Fishkin

AltaVista, barriers to entry, bounce rate, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, cloud computing, content marketing, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, linked data, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, optical character recognition, PageRank, performance metric, Quicken Loans, risk tolerance, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steven Levy, text mining, the long tail, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, web application, wikimedia commons

., to see which version of a page ranks higher), as with SEO tests it can take weeks or even months to see results. Leveraging the Long Tail of Keyword Demand As we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the long tail of search is where 70% of search queries occur. Only 30% of those precious queries happen in the more obvious terms that people use, the so-called “head terms.” Another way to underscore this is that in May 2007, Google Vice President Udi Manber indicated that 20% to 25% of all search queries that Google receives on a given day are queries that Google is seeing for the first time. You can think of this as the “ultra-long tail.” The long tail of search queries in a given industry is typically not visible via any of the major keyword research services or search engine ad databases (Google AdWords, Yahoo!

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For example, if you run a site targeting searches for new york pizza and new york pizza delivery, you might be surprised to find that the hundreds of single searches each day for terms such as pizza delivery on the corner of 57th & 7th, or Manhattan’s tastiest Italian-style sausage pizza, when taken together, will actually provide considerably more traffic than the popular phrases you’ve researched. This concept is called the long tail of search. Targeting the long tail is another aspect of SEO that combines art and science. In Figure 6-22, you may not want to implement entire web pages for a history of pizza dough, pizza with white anchovies, or Croatian pizza. You may get traffic on these terms, but they are not likely to convert into orders for pizza. Figure 6-22. Example of the long-tail search curve Finding scalable ways to chase long-tail keywords is a complex topic. Perhaps you have a page for ordering pizza in New York City, and you have a good title and <h1> header on the page (e.g., “New York City Pizza: Order Here”), as well as a phone number and a form for ordering the pizza, and no other content.

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Take the time to go beyond the surface and use the tools to learn how your customers think, get your thinking in alignment with theirs, and then build your website strategy (and perhaps even your product strategy) around that. Understanding the Long Tail of the Keyword Demand Curve It is wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches per day, or even 500 searches per day, but in reality these “popular” search terms may actually comprise less than 30% of the overall searches performed on the Web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s commonly called the “long tail” of search (as published at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriting-the-beginners-guide-part-v-keyword-research); see Figure 5-1. The tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted only a few times in any given day, or even only once ever, but when assessed in aggregate they comprise the majority of the world’s demand for information through search engines.

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, bounce rate, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, information retrieval, iterative process, Kickstarter, machine readable, medical malpractice, Network effects, OSI model, performance metric, power law, satellite internet, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, Steve Jobs, the long tail, three-martini lunch, traumatic brain injury, web application

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Memorable Slogan Telestream Episode Pro, Optimizing videos for the Web temporal compression, Optimizing videos for the Web ternary operator, Use JavaScript Shorthand testing, Testing ads the easy way: AdWords optimized ad serving, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing Landing Pages, Adjusting Bids, Adjusting Bids, Multivariate testing with Google Website Optimizer, User Experience Testing Software, Designing a Sample Test, IBM Page Detailer, IBM Page Detailer ads, Testing ads the easy way: AdWords optimized ad serving, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Adjusting Bids confidence interval, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Testing ads the hard way: Confidence interval testing, Adjusting Bids designing sample tests, Designing a Sample Test, IBM Page Detailer, IBM Page Detailer landing pages, Testing Landing Pages multivariate, Multivariate testing with Google Website Optimizer UX software, User Experience Testing Software Text-Link-Ads.com, Pay for links Textlinkbrokers.com, Step 10: Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion, Pay for links themed ad groups, Organizing and Optimizing Ad Groups, Guidelines for Grouping, Example Themed Ad Groups, Example Themed Ad Groups advantages, Organizing and Optimizing Ad Groups example, Example Themed Ad Groups, Example Themed Ad Groups guidelines, Guidelines for Grouping themes, Step 1: Look through your site and identify major themes TIFF format, Step 2: Resize and Optimize Images time to live (TTL), Three ways to cache in timeout mechanisms, Timeouts, Retries, and Ordering, Addressing Server and Content Error, Timeouts, Retries, and Ordering, Addressing Server and Content Error title tags, Step 2: Sort by Popularity, Target multiple keyphrases, Keywords trump company name (usually) trackPageview function, JavaScript Page Tagging trademarks, Trademark Issues, Summary, How do I stop advertisers from bidding on my trademark?

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Overall, you'll get more leads because your keyword reach will be higher. Take advantage of the long tail of search query distribution by targeting very specific phrases (see Figure 1-3). Reinforce the theme of your site The theme of a web page should flow through everything associated with that page: the title tag, the headers, the meta tags (keywords and description tags), the content, the links, the navigation, and even the URI of the page should all work together. Figure 1-3. The long tail (picture by Hay Kranen/PD) ora: Playing the Long Tail Given enough choice and a large population of consumers, search term selection patterns follow a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution.

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, Microsoft, and Everybody Else asynchronous communication, Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Communication Asynchronous JavaScript and HTML (Ajah), Consider Ajah, Method 2: Make Requests with Unique URIs, Consider Ajah, Method 2: Make Requests with Unique URIs Atlas Search, Automated Bidding Atom news feeds, Step 10: Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion ATOS (average time on site), Website Success Metrics, Web Server Log Analysis attribute selectors (CSS), Tip #9: Use CSS2 and CSS3.x Techniques authority (persuader), The six persuaders, The six persuaders auto-expanding menus, List-based menus, Summary, List-based menus, List-based menus, List-based menus, Summary Autodesk Cleaner, Optimizing videos for the Web automated bidding, Automated Bidding average time on site (ATOS), Website Success Metrics AWStats tool, Web Server Log Analysis B background shorthand property (CSS), Shorthand properties, Shorthand properties bandwidth, Simulate connection speeds, Simulate connection speeds banner advertising, The cost of banner advertising Base64 representation, Inline Images with Data URIs, CSS and inline images benefit bullet format, Factor #8: Deploy Persuasive, Benefit-Oriented Content bid gaps, Bid Gaps, Bid Gaps, Bid Gaps, Bid Gaps, Bid Gaps BidRank, Automated Bidding bids, Pay-per-Click Optimization, Pay-per-Click Basics and Definitions, Differences in Minimum Bids and Quality Scoring, Broad matches versus direct bidding, Guidelines for Grouping, Penalties for New Accounts, Initial Bid Strategies, Adjusting Bids, Automated Bidding, Branding, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, The Content Network, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, The Content Network ad group guidelines, Guidelines for Grouping adjusting, Adjusting Bids automated, Automated Bidding branding considerations, Branding direct, Broad matches versus direct bidding e-grooming book example, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, The Content Network, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, Bid Optimization in Action: The E-Grooming Book Example, The Content Network initial strategies, Initial Bid Strategies penalties for new accounts, Penalties for New Accounts PPC recommendations, Pay-per-Click Optimization, Pay-per-Click Basics and Definitions vendor differences, Differences in Minimum Bids and Quality Scoring binary images, Inline Images with Data URIs blogs, Automatically categorize with blogs blurb (headline), Write compelling summaries BMP format, Step 2: Resize and Optimize Images body element, Delay Script Loading, Use progressive enhancement body ID/class method, List-based menus, List-based menus BodyGlove.com case study, PPC Case Study: BodyGlove.com, Summary, Market Analysis, Market Analysis, Campaign Creation and Kickoff, Summary border shorthand property (CSS), Shorthand properties bounce rate (metric), Website Success Metrics, Bounce rate (and simple engagement) BoxTop Software, Step 2: Resize and Optimize Images branding, Branding, Factor #4: Write a Memorable Slogan Breen, Optimizing Parallel Downloads broad matching, The Right Keywords and the Myth of the Long Tail long tail keywords and, The Right Keywords and the Myth of the Long Tail browser sniffing, Step 4: Convert JavaScript Behavior to CSS , Sniffing with BrowserHawk, XSSI browser sniffing, XSSI browser sniffing, CSS and inline images BrowserCam, Step 7: Convert Table Layout to CSS Layout BrowserHawk, Step 4: Convert JavaScript Behavior to CSS , XSSI browser sniffing, Sniffing with BrowserHawk, XSSI browser sniffing BrowserMatchNoCase directive, XSSI browser sniffing browsers, Use container cells for descendant selectors, Step 4: Convert JavaScript Behavior to CSS , Use a Reset Stylesheet, Shorthand properties, List-based menus, Ajax Optimization, Prelude to Ajax optimizations, Memory leaks and garbage collection in Internet Explorer, Minimizing HTTP Requests, Addressing the Caching Quandary of Ajax, Addressing Network Robustness, The problem with polling, Optimizing Parallel Downloads, Three ways to cache in, Load JavaScript on demand (remote procedure calls), Inline Images with Data URIs, Disadvantages of inline images, CSS and inline images, Unique visitors, Firebug: A simple alternative : hover pseudoclass, Step 4: Convert JavaScript Behavior to CSS Ajax considerations, Ajax Optimization browser toolbars, Prelude to Ajax optimizations caching considerations, Addressing the Caching Quandary of Ajax, Three ways to cache in conditional comments, List-based menus connection status, Addressing Network Robustness container cells, Use container cells for descendant selectors cookie deletion, Unique visitors cross-domain requests, Minimizing HTTP Requests CSS support, Use a Reset Stylesheet, Shorthand properties data URIs, Inline Images with Data URIs, Disadvantages of inline images, CSS and inline images download limitations, Optimizing Parallel Downloads IBM Page Detailer, Firebug: A simple alternative memory leaks, Memory leaks and garbage collection in Internet Explorer polling considerations, The problem with polling script tags and, Load JavaScript on demand (remote procedure calls) BSD platform, Compressing content in Apache Budd, Untangle Tables bulk editing, Google, Yahoo!

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For a perceptive study see Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. 14 Harris, “Under the Covers of the NSA’s Big Data Effort.” 15 Burkhardt and Waring, “An NSA Big Graph Experiment.” 16 Gardner, “Wikipedia at 10.” 17 Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. 18 Ibid., p 1. 19 Ibid., p 40. 20 Ibid., p. 16. 21 Chesky, “Shared City.” 22 Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. See also her earlier papers on the subject such as Elberse and Oberholzer-Gee, “Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales”; Elberse, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” 23 Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment., p. 71. 24 Ibid., p. 166. 25 Ibid., p. 159. 26 Lessig, Remix., p. 29. 27 Ibid., p. 132. 28 Ibid., p. 108. 29 Lessig, Remix., p. xvi. 30 Taylor, People’s Platform. 31 Ibid., p. 47. 32 Ibid., p. 141–42. 33 Keating, “What Should I Do about Youtube?”

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The Daily Dot, October 22, 2014. http://www.dailydot.com/business/uber-france-sexism/. Elberse, Anita. Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. Henry Holt and Co., 2013. ———. “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 7/8 (August 2008): 88–96. Elberse, Anita, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. “Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales.” Marketing Science Institute 4 (2007): 49–72. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Airbnb, Inc. v. Schneiderman, 2013. https://www.eff .org/cases/airbnb-inc-v-eric-schneiderman. ———. “Section 230 Protections.”

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It’s an appeal that still resonates in the “peer-to-peer” claims of Sharing Economy companies. Commercial Web 2.0 platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes may not be “open” in the sense that some of the content is controlled and licensed, but for the purposes of this book, we can consider Web 2.0 platforms to be inspired by ideas of “open content.” In his influential 2006 book The Long Tail,17 Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson tied the rise of Web 2.0 platforms like Amazon and Netflix to the same subversive and liberating visions invoked by open-source software. His idea is that the bricks-and-mortar world of Walmart, bookseller retail chains, and record labels represent “the world the blockbuster built” and have to build their business on the “short head” of high-volume products.18 In contrast, online stores are not constrained by “the tyranny of geography.”

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Popularity ricochets through networks of friends and acquaintances, creating power law relationships where a small number of performers garner almost all the attention. In the music industry, this can be seen in the extremely skewed distributions of concert income, music downloads, Shazam requests, Facebook and Twitter followers, and artists’ merchandise sales. In his bestselling book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, then a Wired editor, predicted that the Internet will lead to greater opportunity for those in what he called the long tail of sales, because smaller producers will be able to find niche markets.13 This has yet to materialize in the music business. Instead, the middle has dropped out of music, as more consumers gravitate to a smaller number of superstars.

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We’re still dancing.”20 Sad to say, his bank was not dancing much longer, and needed to be rescued by the U.S. government. The same type of dynamic that creates fads in music also can inflate and burst financial bubbles. What About the Long Tail Hypothesis? Some have predicted that the decline in the cost of producing music and distributing it over the Internet will lead to greater variety in music consumption, and move music away from a superstar market and toward a niche market. In his blockbuster book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson argued: Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

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These features reinforce bandwagon effects and strengthen cumulative advantage benefits for star recording artists. As discussed in Chapter 4, there is little sign so far that streaming has moved music away from a superstar market, where a relatively small number of performers garner the lion’s share of the rewards. The Long Tail Although the long tail of recording artists who soldier on with little recognition or reward is likely to remain long and lonely, the Internet and digital technology are changing the way that new superstars are discovered and how everyday musicians do their work. In the right hands, a laptop computer armed with GarageBand or Logic Pro software could have as much recording capability as the Abbey Road Studios.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

That’s because the reigning theory back then was that crime results when individuals with differing economic means are socialized into having the same desires. Yet with the arrival of the new economy, we’ve seen the steepest crime drop in recorded history.1 What’s going on here? Perhaps we don’t all want the same things, after all. Did the long tail solve the “equal wants” problem? Well, the long tail means that we might all want to download different songs on our iPods, or that everyone has a unique queue of movies on their Netflix accounts, but it doesn’t get around the problem that we all want to watch movies or listen to music and that these things cost money.

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So, when people talk about the dematerialization of the economy, what they should be really calling it is a de-necessitation of the economy, as in a deemphasis on basic, physical necessities; or, alternatively, a luxurification or positionification.1∗ This view of the role of goods and services in the new economy stands in sharp contrast to that offered by folks like Chris Anderson, for example, in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Busi- ness Is Selling Less of More. In this book, Anderson argues that the shelfless nature of online, centralized distribution means that niche markets have replaced blockbusters as the most effective way to sustain a profit.4 Specifically, in the old days when the number of books, videos, or records that a given store could carry was limited by physical shelf space, consumer choice was limited.

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Anderson claims that this tyranny has been lifted in the new economy, where there are no physical constraints to inventory so that everyone can live like an eccentric millionaire, ordering esoteric movies on Netflix, finding out-of-print first-edition books on the Web, and downloading obscure music on iTunes. Perhaps this is true for a certain class of goods—namely, cultural products that we consume privately on our iPods or DVD players. However, the positional aspect of other goods means that the long tail may actually be more like a long ladder that folks climb, each rung occupying a slightly higher status position. Little do we know that the tail—and the ladder—pretty much extend on forever. So, rising incomes won’t help the situation. They just up the ante. I mentioned in the first chapter that a historic shift has occurred with respect to work hours.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Sadly “winner-take-all” describes more and more areas of our economy. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). 27. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 8. 28. Anita Elberse, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 86, nos. 7–8 (July/August 2008). 29. Lee Gomes, “Many Companies Still Cling to Big Hits to Drive Earnings,” Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2006. Also see Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy, 93. 30.

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Ben Sisario, “Digital Notes: ‘Call Me Maybe’ Is an East Coast Hit, Spotify Says, but Gotye Is Tops,” New York Times, June 15, 2012; and “Music’s New Math: Pop’s Old Metrics Don’t Matter,” New York magazine, September 30, 2012. 33. This has been widely noted but one source is the State of the News Media 2010 report. 34. Quoted in Chris Anderson, “Does the Long Tail Create Bigger Hits or Smaller Ones?,” Wired, blog post, November 15, 2008, http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/does-the-long-t.html. 35. Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman, “The Persistence Paradox,” First Monday 15, nos. 1–4 (January 2010). 36. James Evans, “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship,” Science 321, no. 5887 (July 18, 2008): 395–99. 37.

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Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor, came to a similar conclusion based on her study of data from music streaming and movie rental services: “Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow.”28 Closer examination by Elberse and others shows that the leveling power of the long tail has been overstated. Netflix sees eight-tenths of 1 percent of inventory generating 30 percent of all rentals.29 A study of YouTube showed that the top 10 percent of most-played videos made up almost 80 percent of total plays, with the top 20 percent making up almost 90 percent. In music, too, the head still prevails: of the 76,875 new albums released in 2011 that sold at least one copy, the top 1,500 accounted for approximately 90 percent of sales.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Wired editor and economist Chris Anderson called this the “long tail” of widespread digital access, which would support many more times the artists, writers, and innovators than could be supported through traditional distribution channels. His theory was that the low cost of reaching customers online would enable thousands of hitherto unpopular titles to become popular. Since the marginal cost of selling different music files was negligible, Anderson argued, the online merchants would now make a profit by “selling less of more.”7 The marketplace would become more diverse and support more creators as the long tail of former losers fattened.

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Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, “Netizen: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet,” First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet 3, no. 7 (July 6, 1998). 6. “Organization: Organic,” www.crunchbase.com/organization/organic#/entity. 7. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 8. Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2013). 9. Will Page and Eric Garland, “The Long Tail of P2P,” Economic Insight, no. 14 (May 9, 2014). 10. Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality,” shirky.com, February 8, 2003. 11. Elberse, Blockbusters. 12.

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As an author, my books will be less valuable as objects for sale (people won’t be paying for things like books anymore, anyway) than as the publishing tool through which I accumulate followers on social networks, whom I then sell to brands. So my books had better be brand-friendly and my audiences preselected for their data-richness. And even then I’ll have to make it to the very head of the long tail to be of interest. Even social media deserves a better role in our lives and businesses than this. The unsustainable endgame is an economy based entirely on marketing and advertising. In its currently inflated state, the entirety of advertising, marketing, public relations, and associated research still accounts for less than 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), by the very most generous estimates.27 Furthermore, unscrupulous Web site owners have now learned to use robotic ad-viewing programs to juice their revenue from pay-per-click advertising.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

But then it w ­ ouldn’t be a good inductivist turkey; it would have prior knowledge, supplied by ­humans. Statistical AI ends up with a long-­tail prob­lem, where common patterns (in the fat head of a distribution curve) are easy, but rare ones (in the long tail) are hard. Unfortunately, some inferences made by humanly-­intelligent AI systems ­w ill be in the long tail, not in the sweet spot of induction from discoverable regularities in closed-­world systems. In fact, by focusing on “easy” successes exploiting regularities, AI research is in danger of collectively moving away from pro­g ress ­toward general intelligence.

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Here’s another fact: the limits of a machine learning system’s world are precisely established by the dataset given to it in training. The real world generates datasets all day long, twenty-­four hours a day, seven days a week, perpetually. Thus any given dataset is only a very small time slice representing, at best, partial evidence of the be­hav­ior of real-­world systems. This is one reason why the long tail of unlikely events is so problematic—­the system does not have an a­ ctual understanding of the real (versus simulated) system. This is enormously impor­tant for discussions of deep learning and artificial general intelligence, and it raises a number of troubling considerations about how, when, and to what extent we should trust systems that technically ­don’t understand the phenomenon they analyze (except as expressed in their datasets used in training).

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Though named entity recognition is a relatively ­simple task in natu­ral language pro­cessing, even ­here we see the inherent limitations of purely data-­driven approaches. A mention of Blue Box in a post about the product easily becomes a false positive, and gets labeled as about the com­pany. Th ­ ese examples might be out on the long tail of unlikely occurrences, but ­they’re common enough in ordinary language, and cannot be addressed by machine learning l­imited by the empirical constraint. All of this is to say that data alone, big data or not, and inductive methods like machine learning have inherent limitations that constitute roadblocks to pro­g ress in AI.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

The answer undoubtedly depends on the costs of those bets. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson explored the implications of power-law dynamics on the Internet, where the costs of storing and distributing products are low (as they are for digital middlemen like Amazon and Netflix); for such middlemen, Anderson argued, it makes economic sense to carry a wide selection: though each niche product brings in a miniscule amount of revenue, “all those niches add up,” he wrote,51 suggesting that collectively the long tail can rival the hits in the short head, especially if offering a wide variety makes the long tail not only longer but fatter.

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In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson explored the implications of power-law dynamics on the Internet, where the costs of storing and distributing products are low (as they are for digital middlemen like Amazon and Netflix); for such middlemen, Anderson argued, it makes economic sense to carry a wide selection: though each niche product brings in a miniscule amount of revenue, “all those niches add up,” he wrote,51 suggesting that collectively the long tail can rival the hits in the short head, especially if offering a wide variety makes the long tail not only longer but fatter. Even if the niches don’t add up to much, the digital middleman bears little risk if the marginal cost of each additional item is close to zero. As more data came in after the The Long Tail came out, some scholars have come to disagree with Anderson’s conclusions, most prominently Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School, whose book Blockbusters is a long retort to The Long Tail.52 But there’s no arguing with one of Anderson’s main premises: that the Internet has lowered the costs of distribution. That is why, for example, Jason Horejs can offer so many more pieces for sale on his website than in the Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale and can charge his artists a lower commission for these online sales.

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That is not so much an indictment of ordinary performers as it is a direct result of the fact that the most extraordinary people in each field performed so spectacularly well: the superstars pushed the average up significantly despite a large total number of contenders.47 Put another way, the big winners are outliers, just like they would be in a normal distribution—but the losers in the long tail of the distribution are more or less the norm. This is the same pattern we see in start-ups, where the top 15 each year outperform thousands of others. Such stark inequalities are even more prevalent on the Internet, in part because the rapid spread of information creates even greater rich-get-richer effects.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, argues in his book The Long Tail that in more industries a few hit products that reach millions of consumers will trail behind them a very long tail of many products that reach niche markets of a few consumers. Anderson’s long-tail thesis emerged from examining the economics of Netflix, the online movie-rental business, which makes a lot of money from millions of people renting a few blockbusters and almost as much again from a few people each renting hundreds of movies. When this long tail of mini-markets is added together it is as large as the mass market. Serving the long tail can be profitable, Anderson argues, because the web now makes distribution of products to far-flung markets much cheaper.

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On eBay you can buy everything from a Barbie doll to parts for a Rolls-Royce. Even Wal-Mart’s site cannot match that range. There are limits to how far the long tail can spread. There is no long tail in steel, oil, water, electricity, telephone services, aerospace and defence. Even where there is a long tail, smaller producers making cult products for tiny niche markets struggle to keep their heads above water. There may be little money to be made in the long tail unless, like Netflix, you can aggregate those small pockets of demand. Yet the combination of community and the market pioneered by eBay and Craigslist has created more ways for consumers to find a wider range of products.

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The members of this group, however, differ over why and how the net will be useful for society. The libertarian, free market wing believe the Internet is creating more diversity and choice, resulting in faster, frictionless markets and an abundance of free culture. In fact, the web is no less than a capitalist cornucopia. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail is the cheerleader for this camp. The communitarian optimists take a contrary view. They see in the Internet the possibility of community and collaboration, commons-based, peer-to-peer production, which will establish non-market and non-hierarchical organisations. It is not opening a new stage of capitalism and the market but laying the seeds for alternatives to both.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008 that the new utopia 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 artists’ works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales. The people who devote their lives to making committed cultural expression that can be delivered through the cloud—as opposed to casual contributions that require virtually no commitment—well, those people are, Kevin acknowledges, the losers.

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This can’t come from encountering just a few heterodox thoughts, but only from a new encompassing architecture of interconnected thoughts that can engulf a person with a different worldview. So, in this book, I have spun a long tale of belief in the opposites of computationalism, the noosphere, the Singularity, web 2.0, the long tail, and all the rest. I hope the volume of my contrarianism will foster an alternative mental environment, where the exciting opportunity to start creating a new digital humanism can begin. An inevitable side effect of this project of deprogramming through immersion is that I will direct a sustained stream of negativity onto the ideas I am criticizing.

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As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. But note that this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners. The popularity of amateur content today provides an answer to one of the old objections to Nelson’s ideas. It was once a common concern that most people would not want to be creative or expressive, ensuring that only a few artists would get rich and that everyone else would starve.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

But out here in the market, we call it “choice.” Give us more choice and we’ll take it. We’ll gravitate to our own interests, tastes, and communities. The natural state of life, commerce, and media is choice. The impending shift away from the mass-market economy was chronicled famously in Chris Anderson’s era-defining 2006 book, The Long Tail. Anderson said that as the internet creates the means to make, find, and pay attention to an unlimited variety of content about anything, culture and commerce will be less dependent on mass hits. Very few people might watch a single video about how to catch butterflies, but when we can create and watch an unlimited supply of such highly targeted content, the total audience for all these niches together will accumulate to take a sizable share of the audience’s attention.

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Haque says media 2.0’s three sources of value creation are revelation (finding the good stuff ), aggregation (distribution 2.0), and plasticity (enabling content to be extended through, for example, mashups). This economy, he says, requires openness, decentralization, and connectedness through niches—not blockbusters. The new opportunities lie in the long tail. I know the arguments to the contrary: the Oscars, the Olympics, Harry Potter, The DaVinci Code, American Idol, Wal-Mart. Yes, stipulated, there will still be blockbusters. But let’s also agree to these factors: The tools that enable anyone to create and distribute goods and media will yield almost unlimited choice.

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And that, in turn, changed the economics of TV content. Networks seeing their shrinking masses could less afford to gamble on expensive dramatic shows, let alone miniseries (remember them?). They were replaced by so-called reality TV, which was not only cheaper but also more sensational. What replaces the mass? The aggregation of the long tail—the mass of niches—does. We each gravitate to our own interests and, thanks to the new and inexpensive tools of content creation online, there’s sure to be something for everyone—and if there isn’t, we can make it ourselves. The 500-channel world never materialized. Instead, the billion-choice universe emerged.

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Security economics may well provide a platform on which companies can demonstrate the cost-benefit ratios of various kinds of security and derive a competitive advantage implementing them. 164 CHAPTER NINE Platforms of the Long-Tail Variety: Why the Future Will Be Different for Us All A “platform” is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers—users—and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate. —Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape In October 2004, Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of the popular Wired Magazine, wrote an article about technology economics.§ The article spawned a book called The Long Tail (Hyperion) that attempts to explain economic phenomena in the digital age and provide insight into opportunities for future product and service strategies.

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Summary 64 66 71 72 BEAUTIFUL TRADE: RETHINKING E-COMMERCE SECURITY by Ed Bellis 73 Deconstructing Commerce Weak Amelioration Attempts E-Commerce Redone: A New Security Model The New Model 74 76 83 86 SECURING ONLINE ADVERTISING: RUSTLERS AND SHERIFFS IN THE NEW WILD WEST by Benjamin Edelman 89 Attacks on Users Advertisers As Victims 89 98 vii 7 8 9 10 11 12 viii Creating Accountability in Online Advertising 105 THE EVOLUTION OF PGP’S WEB OF TRUST by Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas 107 PGP and OpenPGP Trust, Validity, and Authority PGP and Crypto History Enhancements to the Original Web of Trust Model Interesting Areas for Further Research References 108 108 116 120 128 129 OPEN SOURCE HONEYCLIENT: PROACTIVE DETECTION OF CLIENT-SIDE EXPLOITS by Kathy Wang 131 Enter Honeyclients Introducing the World’s First Open Source Honeyclient Second-Generation Honeyclients Honeyclient Operational Results Analysis of Exploits Limitations of the Current Honeyclient Implementation Related Work The Future of Honeyclients 133 133 135 139 141 143 144 146 TOMORROW’S SECURITY COGS AND LEVERS by Mark Curphey 147 Cloud Computing and Web Services: The Single Machine Is Here Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management Social Networking: When People Start Communicating, Big Things Change Information Security Economics: Supercrunching and the New Rules of the Grid Platforms of the Long-Tail Variety: Why the Future Will Be Different for Us All Conclusion Acknowledgments 150 154 158 162 165 168 169 SECURITY BY DESIGN by John McManus 171 Metrics with No Meaning Time to Market or Time to Quality? How a Disciplined System Development Lifecycle Can Help Conclusion: Beautiful Security Is an Attribute of Beautiful Systems 172 174 178 181 FORCING FIRMS TO FOCUS: IS SECURE SOFTWARE IN YOUR FUTURE?

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I have arranged this chapter into a few core topics: • “Cloud Computing and Web Services: The Single Machine Is Here” on page 150 • “Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management” on page 154 • “Social Networking: When People Start Communicating, Big Things Change” on page 158 • “Information Security Economics: Supercrunching and the New Rules of the Grid” on page 162 • “Platforms of the Long-Tail Variety: Why the Future Will Be Different for Us All” on page 165 Before I get into my narrative, let me share a few quick words said by Upton Sinclair and quoted effectively by Al Gore in his awareness campaign for climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, and which I put on a slide to start my public speaking events: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The scarcer the product, the more demand from buyers, the higher the price. And if you didn’t think the price was right, then you could always go next door and buy there. It was a perfect market. It was a perfect cultural experience, too. The former Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson invented the idea of the “long tail” to describe the supposed cornucopia of self-produced cultural goods available on the Web. But Berwick Street, that narrow stump of a Soho street, was the real long tail of musical diversity—existing years before Anderson came out with his theory. If you searched hard enough on the Golden Mile of Vinyl and in Soho’s many other independent record shops, you could dig up the most obscure recordings.

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“In today’s markets where, thanks to the Internet, buyers have easy access to millions and millions of titles,” she argues, “the principle of the blockbuster strategy may be more applicable than ever before.”7 “Winners take all,” mourns Robert Frank about a world dominated by a tiny aristocracy of creative artists.8 It’s the opposite of Chris Anderson’s profoundly flawed theory of the long tail, with its nostalgic guff of a cottage industry of middle-class cultural producers all making a reasonable living from the digital economy. The more abundant the online content, the more dramatic the contrast between the massive success of a few hits and the utter obscurity of everything else. Elberse notes, for example, that of the 8 million tracks in the iTunes store during 2011, 94%—that’s 7.5 million songs—sold fewer than a hundred units, with 32% selling just a single copy.

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“The recorded-music tail is getting thinner and thinner over time,” Elberse concludes about a music industry dominated by fewer and fewer artists.9 In 2013, the top 1% of music artists accounted for 77% of all artist-recorded music income while 99% of artists were hidden under what one 2014 industry report, titled “The Death of the Long Tail,” called “a pervasive shroud of obscurity.”10 This has been caused in part by the increasing monopoly of online music retail stores like iTunes and Amazon and partly by consumers being subjected to the tyranny of an overabundance of choice. This income inequality in the industry is reflected in live music, too, where, between 1982 and 2003, the revenue share of the top 1% of touring acts more than doubled, while the revenue share of the bottom 95% of artists fell in the same period by more than half.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Bressler, September 26, 2008. 3 Short and pugnacious: Ken Auletta, “The Invisible Manager,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1998. 4 Google’s private books revealed: from August 2004 Google IPO registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 4 Karmazin’s destination: description of 2400 Bayshore Parkway offices from visit by author, April 18, 2008; author interviews with David Krane, April 18, 2008, and with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008; and from Google video of headquarters, provided by Google. 6 25.2 billion Web pages: WorldWideWebSize.com, February 2, 2009. 7 It was Google’s ambition: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 several hundred million daily searches: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 the number of daily searches is now 3 billion: internal Google documents. 7 “our business is highly measurable”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 15, 2008. 8 $3 million spent: Advertising Age, September 11, 2008. 8 $172 billion spent in the United States on advertising, and the additional $227 billion spent on marketing: Zenith OptimediaReport, April 2009. 9 Mayer ... remembered the meeting vividly: author interview with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008. 9 “If Google makes”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 16, 2008. 9 “the long tail”: Chris Anderson, the Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2006. 10 “aggregate content”: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 10 from a peak daily newspaper circulation: Nicholas Carr, Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Norton; and The Project for Excellence in Journalism, “State of the News Media Report,” March 2007. 10 those networks... attract about 46 percent of viewers: Nielsen data on the 2008-9 season, May 2009. 12.

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Google fervently believes it is shaping a new and better media world by making the process of buying advertising more rational and transparent. In its view, the company serves consumers by offering advertising as information. It invites advertisers to bid for the best price, and invites media companies to slim their sales forces and automate part of their advertising and to reach into what author Chris Anderson dubbed “the long tail,” in this case to those potential clients who rarely advertised but would if it was targeted and cheap to do so. Google also invites users to freely search newspapers, books, and magazines in what it sees as both free promotion and an opportunity for publications to sell advertising off this traffic.

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He was wary of its deals with EchoStar satellite television and Clear Channel radio and some newspapers, allowing Google to serve as the media-buying middleman for their online ads. He was rightly concerned that Google could be trying to usurp his role. If that was Google’s intention, Gotlieb did not believe they would succeed. He welcomed Google reaching into the long tail to match advertisers with smaller Web sites. But he did not think Google/DoubleClick could make inroads with brand advertisers, in part because these clients want to be serviced, to have relationships with media agencies they can consult. And he also expressed skepticism that Google would loom as large in the future as it now does.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

There is nobody in the tech world who does not know Chris Anderson or respect his opinions. Anderson made his name with The Long Tail: How the Future of Business Lies in Selling More of Less (2006). The Long Tail is the product of a melding of the new business culture and the old one. The book started life as a blog in which Anderson conducted a sort of online seminar with his readers. It ended up as an old-fashioned business best-seller: a carefully packaged “big idea” that was supposed to reveal the secret of prospering in the new economy and that also includes a business tool that managers can apply to their businesses, the “long tail” of the title. This was Silicon Valley repackaged for the business traveler class.

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The rise of the Internet has shaken the management theory industry equally thoroughly. Most of the leading high-tech gurus made their careers in high-tech companies or technology journalism rather than in business schools. Don Tapscott (Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics) started out in enterprise collaboration. Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) is a long-standing technology journalist, most recently as editor of Wired. Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do?) made his reputation blogging about new media at Buzzmachine.com. Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus) is a jack-of-all-trades (including theater director, lecturer, and consultant) who happens to have a lot of clever ideas about the new media.

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YouTube, which adds twenty hours’ worth of new video every minute, throws up a few unmissable videos every day, funny, tragic, or riveting, among all the dross. “Talent is not universal,” Anderson argued, “but it’s widely spread. Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge.”10 Whatever you think of the cultural impact of the long tail, there is no doubt that it is producing a new economy, with new giants emerging to take advantage of the world of micro-markets. eBay, which was born as recently as 1996, is now worth in excess of $35 billion, with more than 200 million registered users shifting more than $40 billion of merchandise every year.

Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Although they seem grateful to find such films at Box O‰ce Video, many still continue to rent the bulk of their movies from the Blockbuster outlet a mile away, not making the connection between their regular patronage and Herskovitz’s ability to keep his business, with its broad library of films, afloat.28 MONOPOLIZED CONSUMERS 151 THE LONG TAIL? How have online retailers like Amazon.com and Netflix, which stock large numbers of titles, changed these dynamics? An idea that has caught fire in some circles is the notion of the “long tail.” It refers to the basic demand curve governing many products, which starts high and then drops steeply once you move beyond the top sellers, petering out and flatlining across a large number of items (books, albums, or whatever) that sell in relatively small numbers.

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This passion has a real value in the marketplace—certainly to creators and fans, but also to those who have a casual interest, as well as to the overall vitality of our culture and ultimately our democracy, which, after all, derives its sustenance from the free flow of ideas. MONOPOLIZED CONSUMERS 153 Another problem with the long tail argument is that the challenge for people who produce creative works is less about access to customers than it is about getting their attention. “I remain skeptical [of the long tail theory],” said David Kirkpatrick, who wrote the report on midlist books. “In my experience covering the book industry for the New York Times, the crucial ingredient is not the availability of a book; the crucial ingredient is getting public attention for a book.

…

Tod Herskovitz, interview, Nov. 8, 2005. 27. Herskovitz interview; Blockbuster CFO Larry Zine provided the figure on titles during a conference call with investors on Feb. 17, 2005, as transcribed by Events Transcripts. 28. Herskovitz interview. 29. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, Oct. 2004, www.wired.com/wired/ archive/12.10/tail.html. 30. Anderson, “The Long Tail”; Blockbuster CFO Larry Zine provided the figure on titles during a conference call with investors on Feb. 17, 2005, as transcribed by Events Transcripts. 31. Sheri LaPres, interview, Nov. 29, 2005; Paul Bond, “Amazon’s New Lease on Shelf Life,” Reuters, July 26, 2005; Chris Anderson, e-mail communication, Nov. 15, 2005. 32.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Netflix’s algorithm has a deeper (even if still quite limited) understanding of your tastes than Amazon’s, but ironically that doesn’t mean Amazon would be better off using it. Netflix’s business model depends on driving demand into the long tail of obscure movies and TV shows, which cost it little, and away from the blockbusters, which your subscription isn’t enough to pay for. Amazon has no such problem; although it’s well placed to take advantage of the long tail, it’s equally happy to sell you more expensive popular items, which also simplify its logistics. And we, as customers, are more willing to take a chance on an odd item if we have a subscription than if we have to pay for it separately.

…

In retrospect, we can see that the progression from computers to the Internet to machine learning was inevitable: computers enable the Internet, which creates a flood of data and the problem of limitless choice; and machine learning uses the flood of data to help solve the limitless choice problem. The Internet by itself is not enough to move demand from “one size fits all” to the long tail of infinite variety. Netflix may have one hundred thousand DVD titles in stock, but if customers don’t know how to find the ones they like, they will default to choosing the hits. It’s only when Netflix has a learning algorithm to figure out your tastes and recommend DVDs that the long tail really takes off. Once the inevitable happens and learning algorithms become the middlemen, power becomes concentrated in them. Google’s algorithms largely determine what information you find, Amazon’s what products you buy, and Match.com’s who you date.

…

Competing on Analytics, by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris (HBS Press, 2007), is an introduction to the use of predictive analytics in business. In the Plex, by Steven Levy (Simon & Schuster, 2011), describes at a high level how Google’s technology works. Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian explain the network effect in Information Rules (HBS Press, 1999). Chris Anderson does the same for the long-tail phenomenon in The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2006). The transformation of science by data-intensive computing is surveyed in The Fourth Paradigm, edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle (Microsoft Research, 2009). “Machine science,” by James Evans and Andrey Rzhetsky (Science, 2010), discusses some of the different ways computers can make scientific discoveries.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The world’s largest retailer wanted to know which snacks resonated enough to make you want to buy the full-size version. Goodies Co. subscribers helped Walmart understand how the consumer’s appetite for snacks had evolved, which helped it buy the right items to sell in its stores. The Long Tail As Chris Anderson argued in The Long Tail, the Internet has lowered the cost of distribution for many products and services, and our appetites have broadened as a result. As Anderson recounts, there was a time when you bought books in a bookstore. The bookstore paid rent and therefore had to stock only the best-selling books to ensure that sales revenue per square foot was high enough to cover its rent and staff.

…

However, the economics of information publishing deteriorated with the rise of the Internet, which eliminated distribution costs and commoditized content to such an extent that consumers began to expect it to be free. Not only did consumers expect content for free; the kind of content they were interested in also became more esoteric. As former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson revealed in his best seller The Long Tail, now that the entire world’s content is only a Google search away, we are no longer satisfied with the broad general interest information provided by mainstream publishers; our appetite for content has become more specialized. If you love the sport of curling, you can consume as much curling information as you want for free online without ever picking up a newspaper, which might run a curling story a couple of times per winter at best.

…

If you love chocolate, you can buy a Dairy Milk bar at your local Walgreens, but increasingly chocolate lovers are subscribing to New York–based Standard Cocoa for $25 per month and receiving a hand-picked selection of chocolate from around the world each month. Customers want to express their individuality, and increasingly they are using subscriptions to do that. Competing in the New Subscription Economy These four factors—the access generation, light-switch reliability, delicious data, and the long tail—have led some of the world’s most successful companies and promising start-ups to shift their business models to a focus on subscriptions. Take Apple, for example. Apple used to be thought of as a product for consumers, not a product for businesses. Businesses shunned Apple in favor of industry standard Microsoft—but that was before Apple, now the world’s most successful technology company, found a new way to get customers for its products.

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

It seems counterintuitive to our one-size-fits-all culture of generic blockbuster movies, derivative pop stars, mass-market fast food, and other things that appeal to the average of all our interests. Surely we should be more homogenized, not less? Back in 2006, my friend Chris Anderson delved into the value of niches in his book, The Long Tail. In it he shared: The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of ‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

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“/r/science metrics (Science),” Reddit Metrics, accessed May 9, 2018, http://redditmetrics.com/r/science. “/r/Sneakers metrics (Sneakerheads Unite!),” Reddit Metrics, accessed May 9, 2018, http://redditmetrics.com/r/Sneakers. 7. Internet Archive, “The Long Tail,” Wired Blogs, September 8, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20170310130052/http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/09/long_tail_101.html. 8. “PSY–Gangnam Style,” 4:12, YouTube video, July 15, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0. 9. “Study Finds Our Desire for ‘Like-Minded Others’ Is Hard-Wired,” University of Kansas, February 23, 2016, https://news.ku.edu/2016/02/19/new-study-finds-our-desire-minded-others-hard-wired-controls-friend-and-partner. 10.

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Index Abayomi, 1–3, 7, 9, 19, 35, 278 abuse of system, 158, 217, 233, 234 access, 7–8, 16–17, 54–55, 225, 226 accountability, 139, 146, 148, 149 actions, tracking, 158–59 active participation, 109 adaptability, 176–77, 268–69 Adobe, 244 advertising, 195–96 advocacy, 23–24, 49, 111 Airbnb, 57 ambiguity, 155–56 American Physical Society, 139 Amnesty International, 18 Anderson, Chris, 46, 47 Android platform, 65 Ansari XPRIZE, xviii Apache, 6, 26 Apple, 6, 58, 128 approachability, 69–70 Ardour, 44, 52, 66 Areas of Expertise, 172–75 Ariely, Dan, 17 assets, building, 68–69 assumptions, 137, 271 asynchronous access, 54 attendance, 157 attendees, summit, 247–49 audience personas, 100, 108–19 in Bacon Method, 33 choosing, 109–12 content for, 194–95 creating, 114–16 examples of, 116–19 on Incentives Map, 230–32 On-Ramp Model for, 131, 135–38 Participation Framework for, 130 prioritizing, 112–13 productive participation by, 162–67 and relatedness, 107 audience(s) access to, 7–8 assumptions about, 137 and community strategy, 13 irrational decision making by, 101–8 for local communities, 5 surprising, 73–74 understanding your, 33, 99–100 authenticity, 75, 111, 183, 224 authority, 55–56, 200–201 Author persona, 166–67 automated measuring of condition, 217–18 autonomy, 105–6, 123 awareness, 22–24, 59–61, 192 Axe Change service, 14 Axe-Fx processors, 49–50 backlog, 150–51 Bacon Method, 32–34 Bahns, Angela, 47 Bassett, Angela, 237 Battlefield, 24, 128, 228 behavioral economics, 102–4 Bell, Alexander Graham, 153 belonging, sense of, 15, 18, 20, 143, 187, 215 Bennington, Chester, 183, 184 Big Rocks, 33, 88–96 and cadence-based cycles, 168–70 in community strategy, 94–95 and critical dimensions, 157, 161 defined, 88–89 departmental alignment on, 263 examples of, 91–94 format and key components of, 89–91 and Quarterly Delivery Plan, 34, 145–46, 148, 149 realistic thinking about, 95–96 Black Lives Matter, 18 blocked (status), 147 blogs, 193, 275 Bosch, 13 brand awareness, 24, 59–60 brand recognition, 85 Branson, Richard, 190 Buffer, 214 Build Skills stage, 132, 136, 137 business cards, 241–42 buy-in, 67, 85 cadence, operating on, 34, 264–66 Cadence-Based Community Cycle, 167–70, 264 Canonical, 1, 121, 151, 167, 245 capabilities, persona, 114, 116–18 Capital One, 13 career experience, 83 CasinoCoin, 244 Casual members, 129, 140–42 advancing, 196–97 engagement with, 198–99 incentivizing, 219, 221, 226–27 maturity model for, 166 mentoring, 203 CEOs, reporting to, 260 certainty, 105 Champions model, 49–52, 63–64, 66–67, 113, 260 chat channel, 250 check-ins, 267 civility, 187 clarity, 69–72, 138–39, 234 closing party, 250 coaching, 82–83, 205–6 Coca-Cola, 57 Coffee Bean Rewards app, 145 Colbert, Stephen, 73–74 collaboration, 8–9, 74–75, 185–86 Collaborators model, 52–56, 64–67, 86, 260, see also Inner Collaborator community; Outer Collaborator community commitment, 122 communication, 121 Community Associate, 255 Community Belonging Path, 16–20 community building, 14 additional resources on, 274–76 Bacon Method of, 32–34 as chronological journey, 127–28 consultations on, 276–77 continuing to learn about, 272–74 defining your value for, 77–78 end-to-end experience in, 125–26 fundamentals of, 15–16 getting started with, 37–38, 62 key principles of, 67–74 monitoring activities related to, 206–8 risks associated with, 154–55 tools for, 8 see also successful community building community–community engagement, 157 community culture, 30–31, 70–72, 179–88 Community Director, 254–58, 260 Community Engagement Model(s), 49–67 in Bacon Method, 33–34 Champions model, 49–52 Collaborators model, 52–59 and Community Value Statement, 80 Consumers model, 45–48 importance of selecting, 43–45 and marketing/public awareness, 59–61 scenarios for selecting, 61–67 Community Evangelist, 255 community(-ies) defined, 13–15 digital, 2–3, 5–13, 237 experimenting in, 123 foundational trends in, 7–9 future of, 35, 277–79 local, 3–5 power of, 7 social dynamics of, 15–16 value generated by, 20–29 Community Launch Timeline Template, 191 Community Leadership Summit, 179, 239 community management staff, 254–61 Community Managers, 78, 125, 126, 195, 255–56, 260–61 Community Mission, 40–43, 169 Community Mission Statement, 42, 80, 113 Community On-Ramp Model, 33–34, 130–38 community overview cards, 241–42 Community Participation Framework, 128–45 building community based on, 151–52 and building engagement, 138–44 Community On-Ramp Model in, 130–38 described, 128–30 engagement strategy to move members along, 196–206 focusing on creativity and momentum in, 209 incentives and rewards in, 145 incentives on, 211–13 incentivizing transitions in, 218–22, 226–27 mentoring in, 202–6 Community Personal Scaling Curve, 184 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Community Promise, 70–71 Community Specialist, 255 community strategy, 30 Big Rocks in, 94–95 changing, 96, 208 control over and collaboration on, 74–75 Core members’ contributions to, 201 execution of, 253–54 importance of, 13 integration of, in organization, 261–68 learning from implementation of, 268–69 planning, 39 Regular members in, 143 risks with, 29–32 and SCARF model, 105–8 variability in, 30 community summits, 245–51 finalizing attendees and content for, 247–49 follow through after, 250–51 running, 249–50 structure for, 246–47 community value, 164–67 Community Value Proposition, 175 Community Value Statement, 80–88 and Big Rocks, 89, 95 in cadence-based cycle, 169 maintaining focus on, 97 and on-ramp design, 135–36 prioritizing audience personas based on, 113 updating, 83–84, 87–88 value for community members in, 80–84 value for organization in, 84–88 company–community engagement, 157 competitions, 194 complete (status), 147 CompuServe, 5 conditions, for incentives, 216–18, 230–32 Conference Checklist, 241 conferences, 194, 195, 239, 240–43 connection(s) desire for, 9 for Regular members, 200 constructive criticism, 122–23 consultations, on community building, 276–77 Consumers model, 45–48, 62–63, 260 content for community summits, 247–49 in Growth Strategy, 192–95 for launch, 189 as source of value, 82 Content Creators (persona), 110–11, 113–15 content development in Champion communities, 49–50 in Collaborator communities, 52–56 by communities, 26–27 as source of value, 82, 86–87 contests, 194 contributions, to communities, 17, 19 control over community strategy, 74–75 over Regular members, 143 co-organizing events, 239 Core members, 129, 140 advancement for, 196–97 characteristics of, 143–44 at community summits, 242 engagement with, 201–2 incentivizing, 215, 219–20, 222, 227 maturity model for, 165, 166–67 mentoring for, 203, 205 percentage of, 141 creativity, 209 critical dimensions, 156–58, 161 criticism, 122–23, 176 cross-functional communities, 88 crowdfunding, 23–24 Cruz, Ted, 73–74 culture, community, see community culture Culture Cores, 181–88 customer engagement, 20–22 customer growth, as source of value, 85 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, 21 Cycle Planning, 168 Cycle Reviews, 268 dashboards, 160–61 data analysis, 207, 208 Davis, Miles, 182 Debian, 6, 26 decision making irrationality of, 101–8 pragmatism about, 184 SCARF model of behavior, 104–8 System 1 and 2 thinking, 102–3 unpopular decisions, 186 decision paralysis, 38, 106 dedicated events, organizing, 239–40 delayed (status), 147 delivery commitment to, 263–64 successful, 162, 167–70 delivery, as critical dimension, 157 delivery plans, see Quarterly Delivery Plan demonstrations, 194, 244 departmental alignment, 263–64 developer community, Big Rocks for, 93–94 Developer Relations personnel, 255 Developers (persona), 111, 114, 115 Diamandis, Peter, 40 Dickinson, Emily, 211 difficulty, of condition, 217 diffusion chain, 54 Digg, 12–13 digital communities early, 5–7 evolution of, 9–13 foundational trends in, 7–9 in-person events for, 237 as local and global communities, 2–3 digital interaction, and in-person events, 251 digital training, 243–44 dignity, 17 discipline, for community building, 31 Discourse, 66, 228, 233, 267 discovery, in gamification, 233 discussion forums, 49 Disney, 128 Docker, 12, 56 documentation, 274 domain expertise, 256, 257 Dreamforce conference, 22 Drupal, 204 Early Adopter program, 189–90 Editorial Calendar, 192–95 education (about product or service) in communities, 24–25 as source of value, 82 efficiency, as critical dimension, 157 ego calibration, 234–35 empathy, 186–87 employees openness for, 182–83 training and mentoring for, 266–68 empowerment, 55–56, 222 end-to-end experience, 59, 125–26 engagement as Area of Expertise, 174 Big Rocks related to, 93–94 with community, 72 in Community On-Ramp Model, 133–34, 136, 137 and Community Participation Framework, 138–44 in Community Participation Framework, 129 at conferences, 242 critical dimensions related to, 157 customer and user, 20–22 and Growth Strategy, 192 positivity and, 185 quality of, 159 rules for engaging with community members, 119–22 and submarine incentives, 226 and understanding audience, 99–100 Engagement Strategy, 181, 196–206 engineering department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 equal opportunity, in Collaborator communities, 55, 58–59 estimated units, on Incentives Map, 231, 232 Event Evolution Path, 238–40 Event Organizers (persona), 111, 114–15, 117–18 events in-person, see in-person events online, 193 Everett, Noah, 224 execution of community strategy, 253–54, 268 successful, 162, 167–70 expectations clear, 70–72 in gamification, 234 in great experience, 127 related to Big Rocks, 95–96 experience, of audience persona, 114, 116, 118 experimentation, 123, 171 to build organizational capabilities, 206–8 with events, 251 expertise of community leadership staff, 256, 257 of community members, 28 in digital communities, 8 as source of value, 83 Exploding Kittens game, 24 extrinsic rewards, 214, 215, 216 on Incentives Map, 231 submarine incentives for, 224–25 Facebook, 13, 24 failure, as opportunity for improvement, 151 fairness in SCARF model, 107–8 of submarine incentives, 225 Fans as audience persona, 110, 113 community model for, 44, 62–63 fears, of audience persona, 114–15, 117, 118 Fedora, 66, 264 feedback about audience personas, 116 on Big Rocks, 94–95 from communities, 72–73 and community culture, 186 from Core members, 202 on mission statement, 41 on Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 176 in peer-based review, 204 from Regular members, 143, 200 Figment community, 10 Final Fantasy, 128 financial commitment, and creating value, 96 Firefox, 23, 209 Fitbit, 139, 145 focus for community building, 31 on Community Value Statement, 97 follow through after community summits, 250–51 after conferences, 242–43 formal experience, 114 forums, 91–92, 158 founders, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Four Rules for Measuring Effectively, 156–61 Fractal Audio Systems, 14–15, 49–50 freeloaders, 54 fun, in community experience, 84 gamification, 232–35 Garmin, 190 GitHub, 24 global communities, digital communities as local and, 2–3 Global Learning XPRIZE Community, 189 GNOME, 26 GNU community, 6 goals for community summit sessions, 249 of Core members, serving, 202 for employee participation with community, 267 in incentives, 214 on Incentives Map, 230–32 for new hires, 259 Google, 13, 57, 58, 65, 128 Gordon-Levitt, Dan, 11–12 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 11–12, 219 governance, in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 gratification, 120, 127 group dynamics, 100, 119–22 group experiences, referral halo for, 61 grow, willingness to, 257 Growth (Area of Expertise), 174 growth, as critical dimension, 157 Growth Strategy, 181, 188–96 growth plan, 192–96 launch plan, 189–91 guest speakers, 238–39 habits, building, 142, 267 HackerOne, 69–70, 194, 214 Harley Owners Group, 132 help asking community members for, 120, 144 as source of value, 82 high-level objectives, see Big Rocks hiring, 27–29, 256 hiring away approach, 258–59 HITRECORD, 11–12, 219 Hoffman, Reid, 152 HomeRecording.com community, 81 humility, 187, 257 hypothesis testing, 207–8, 271–72 IBM, 6 idealism, 153–54 IGN (Imagine Games Network), 47–48 Ikea Effect, 101–2 impact in Community Belonging Path, 18 and Engagement Strategy, 199 multiplying, with communities, 2, 3, 9 imperfections, 188 imposter syndrome, 142 inauthentic participation, 233 incentives, xvii–xviii, 197 in Community Participation Framework, 145 on Community Participation Framework, 211–13 components of, 213–18 in Growth Strategy, 196 maintaining personal touch with, 235 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 power of offering, 213–18 stated vs. submarine, 218–27 Incentives Map, 34, 229–32 Incentive Transition Points, 218–19 stated incentives for, 221–22 submarine incentives for, 226–27 incentivization building engagement with, 140 in Community Participation Framework, 130 Incubation stage, 171, 172 independent authenticity, 111 Indiegogo, 23 individual value, 164–67 influence, psychological importance of, 71 Influencing phase (Product Success Model), 52 information in community, 121 in digital communities, 8 infrastructure, for launch, 189 Inner Collaborator community, 56–58, 65–67, 86, 229 Inner Developers (persona), 111 in-person events community summits, 245–51 conferences, 240–43 and digital training vs. training workshops, 243–45 Event Evolution Path and strategy for, 238–40 fusion of digital interactions and, 251 in Growth Strategy, 195 launch, 190–91 in local communities, 4–5 managing, 237–38 value of, 77–78 in progress (status), 147 insight, from communities, 28, 72–73 intangible value, 78–79, 83 Integration stage, 171–72 Intel, 57 intentionality, 39, 69–70, 187 Intention stage, 171, 172 internal communities, 13 Community Engagement Model for, 66–67 importance of culture for, 180 personal interaction in, 185 value of, for community members, 83 Internet, 5–7, see also digital communities Internet Explorer, 23 intrinsic rewards, 215, 224–25 involved teams, on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Iron Maiden, 39 Jeep, 139 Jenkins, 26 job candidates, community members as, 27–29 job descriptions, community leadership staff, 258 Jokosher, 199 jQuery, 204 Kahneman, Daniel, 102 karma (Reddit), 228 Key Initiatives, for Big Rocks, 90, 91–93 keynote addresses, 245–47 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), 90–94 cadence-based cycles for delivery of work on, 169, 170 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 146, 148–50 tracking progress on, 159–60, 160–61 Kickstarter, 12, 23 Kubernetes, 26, 53, 66, 134, 204 labor, community members as source of, 120 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (television series), 73–74 launch event, 190–91 launch plan, 189–91 leaders, community, 3, 4 leadership as Area of Expertise, 174 and autonomy in organizations, 123 clear and objective, 69–70 in community culture, 186 community involvement by, 262 by Core members, 144 in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 leadership value, 165, 167 lead generation, 28–29 A League of Their Own (film), 39 learning about community building, 272–74 from community strategy implementation, 268–69 Learning phase (Product Success Model), 51 Lego, 9, 10 Lego Ideas, 10 Lenovo, 57 Leonardo da Vinci, 37 Lindbergh, Charles, xvii Linkin Park, 183 Linux, 6, 26, 273–74 Linux Foundation, 26, 74 live stream, 250 local communities decline of, 3–5 digital communities as global and, 2–3 The Long Tail (Anderson), 46 Ma, Jack, 77 Ma Jian, 125 Make:, 195 Management (Area of Expertise), 173–74 marketing, 22–24 audience personas in, 108–9 and Community Engagement Model, 59–61 as source of value, 85 marketing department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Mastering phase (Product Success Model), 51–52 Mattermost, 214 maturity models, 34 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 171–76 meaningful work, 9, 17–18, 27, 41 measurable condition, 217 measurable goals, 160 measurable value, in Community Persona Maturity Model, 164–65 measuring effectively, rules for, 156–61 meeting people, as source of value, 82 meetings after conferences, 242–43 with conference attendees, 241 in local communities, 4–5 Meetup.com, 133 meetups, organizing, 239 mentoring for Casual members, 142 for community-building employees, 267–68 for community leadership staff, 256 by community members, 29 in Community Participation Framework, 202–6 of new hires, 259 as source of value, 82–83 meritocracy, 55 message boards, 5–6 Metal Gear Solid, 128 Metrics (Area of Expertise), 175 Mickos, Mårten, 69–70, 74, 262 Microsoft, 6, 13, 23 Minecraft, 25 Minecraft Forum, 25 Minecraft Wiki, 25 Minimum Viable Product, 68–69 mission statements, 32, 42, 80, 113 momentum, in Engagement Strategy, 198 momentum effect, 209 in Growth Strategy, 188, 195 in marketing and brand/product awareness, 60–61 motivations for audience persona, 114, 117, 118 for community members, 119–20 Mozilla, 23 MySpace, 12–13 NAMM music show, 239 need, for community, 30 networking, 28–29, 242 New York Times, 23 Nextcloud, 134 niche interests, 45–47 Nintendo, 9, 228 norms, cultural, 70, 130, 180, 182 notification, 147, 148 not started (status), 147 objectives, see also Big Rocks objectivity, of leadership, 69–70 onboarding, 107 in Community Participation Framework, 129 Community Persona Maturity Model for members in, 164, 165–66 gamification for, 233 importance of, 130–31 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 online events, 193 On-Ramp members, incentivizing, 218–19, 221, 226–27 openness, 182–84 open-source code, 26, 53 open-source communities, 57–58, 261 Open Source community, 10 OpenStack, 26 optimization, in Engagement Strategy, 199–200 Optimizing phase (Product Success Model), 51 organizational capabilities building, with communities, 27–29 cadence-based cycles for building, 265–66 executing strategy to build, 253–54 experimentation to build, 206–8 success in terms of building, 162, 171–76 organizational experience, of community members, 122 organizational values, and community culture, 182–88 organizations community members as labor for, 120 identifying value for, 84–88 integration of community strategy in, 261–68 internal communities at, 13 leadership and autonomy in, 123 Orteig Prize, xvii Outer Collaborator community, 56–59, 64–65, 86 Outer Developers (persona), 111–12, 136–37 Owner of Big Rocks, 90, 91 in cadence-based cycles, 168–69 on Incentives Map, 231, 232 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Participant Rewards Peak, 215–16 participation active, 109 audience personas and types of, 109 by Casual members, 142 in Consumer communities, 48 inauthentic, 233 productive, 162–67 PayPal, 13, 57 Pebble Smartwatch, 23 peer-based review, 203–5 peer-review process, 55 peer support, 139–40 peer value, 164–67 Peloton, 133, 233 Penney, James Cash, 253 people person, 256–57 perfection, 268–69 performance review, community engagement in, 262 permanence, of communities, 14 personal interaction, 184–85, 199 personal touch with incentives, 235 and submarine awards, 222–26 personal validation, 120, 224–25 personas, audience, see audience personas Photoshop “Magic Minute” videos, 244 PlayStation, 233 podcasts, 194 Pop!

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine famously detailed this phenomenon from a business perspective in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Building from the research of Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, Anderson explained how online access creates not just lower prices but increased product variety. In the pre-internet era, where traditional local markets offered only a small range of high-selling goods, the World Wide Web offered an opportunity for things like books, music, and homemade goods to be sold at lower volumes over an extended period. The “long tail” referred to a high-frequency power distribution.

…

The “long tail” referred to a high-frequency power distribution. Quite simply, the internet made it possible for those on the fringe to sell their products to larger audiences over longer time periods, because there were no costs to keeping products on the market. The audience would eventually find what they wanted somewhere on the internet. The long tail didn’t just apply to products, but also to ideas. Remote-controlled airplanes, cross-stitch, fantasy football, brewing beer at home—somewhere in the world, someone was interested in the same topics, concepts, or even hatreds as someone else in the world. The internet removed the barriers between these people and dramatically lowered the costs of communication and, later, of the production of content.

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They worked alone in the beginning, but over time they came together in their illicit pursuits. Beyond the technical trickery of hacking, hate groups and terrorists found the internet an anonymous playground for connecting with like-minded people. There were only a handful of extremists, or possibly only one, in any given town, but with the long tail of the internet, there were now hundreds and even thousands of extremists who used online congregations to facilitate the physical massing of terrorists in global safe havens or remote compounds. Think back to jihadi militancy before al-Qaeda. It took the mujahideen a decade to raise awareness, radicalize, and recruit merely a few thousand international volunteers to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

That’s also why a small handful of artists land seven-figure recording contracts, even as thousands of others—many of them nearly as talented—struggle to get by as elementary school music teachers. Some of the same technological forces that have tended to concentrate rewards also exert countervailing effects. As Chris Anderson explained in his 2006 book The Long Tail, digital technology has been making music, books, movies, and many other goods economically viable on a much smaller scale than ever before.3 In past decades, for example, a film could generate revenue only by mustering audiences of sufficient size to justify screenings in movie theaters. Most niche markets—think Hindi-language movies in medium-size American cities—were simply not viable.

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But as the Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse recounts in her carefully researched 2013 book, the numbers suggest otherwise.4 The top one-thousandth of 1 percent of song titles now account for a much larger proportion of sales (15 percent in 2011, up from only 7 percent in 2007). Trends for weak-selling titles have also been running counter to the long-tail prediction. The proportion of titles selling fewer than one hundred copies annually, for example, was 94 percent in 2011, up from 91 percent in 2007. (This was a period during which overall sales nearly doubled, so sales of these slow-moving titles were growing substantially in absolute terms.)

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And as the Swarth-more psychologist Barry Schwartz argued in his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, most people find it unpleasant to sift through a plethora of options.5 Many people sidestep that problem by focusing on only the most popular entries in each category. But the mere fact that top sellers are becoming even more popular doesn’t mean that the long tail’s promise of a golden age of small-scale creative energy has been empty. It has indeed become less costly for producers to target buyers with highly idiosyncratic tastes, and sophisticated search algorithms increasingly enable such buyers to find just the quirky offerings they’re looking for. Creative people have never faced better opportunities to display their talent.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

OF NICHES AND LONG TAILS In an illuminating and instructive book, Chris Anderson celebrates niches and niche marketing, seeing them as an extraordinary development made possible by the Internet.10 To simplify his story, Anderson argues that companies can and do make increasing amounts of money by catering to niche markets through a large volume of products (books a la Amazon.com or movies a la Netflix). Few people buy many of these products. At a bookstore, little money can be made by the poor sellers, which are at the end of the long tail of the distribution system. At Amazon.com, by contrast, the immense stock of books and the large customer base can ensure that significant aggregate sales come from the long tail. Anderson sees this as an important and wonderful trend. With the aid of the Internet and other modern technologies, it is often nearly costless to sell not just the blockbusters but also goods that cater to small markets.

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He is right to emphasize that the Internet can greatly increase niche marketing in a way that offers extraordinary economic opportunities from the long tail. He is also right to suggest that communities can form around highly specialized tastes. But it is also important to see what might be wrong with a world of niches. The power to choose the particular good that each particular person particularly wants is not an unambiguous good; there is more to do than to notice and celebrate this process. Anderson’s analysis appears implicitly premised on the idea that freedom and the good life are promoted by, and maybe even captured in, the opportunity to choose what is specifically sought on either the large head or the long tail. Of course it is appropriate to celebrate the increase in available options, but from the standpoint of democracy, the assessment is not so simple.

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If you’d like a Toyota Camry, a Honda Accord, or an SUV, many sites are available for the purpose; wallets, watches, and wristbands are easily found online; and shirts, sweaters, and cell phones can be purchased in seconds. Nor is convenience the only point. As a result of the Internet, ordinary people have a much greater range of choices, and competitive pressures are, in a sense, far more intense for producers. Recall Anderson’s celebration of “the long tail”; people with unusual tastes are now able to find what they want, overcoming the barriers of space that limit the options in bookstores, movie theaters, and much more. To be sure, the growth of options for consumers has been a prime engine behind the growth of the Internet. Consider a little history.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It also accords with the fundamental models of companies like Amazon or Netflix, where the ability to carry huge inventories — without the restrictions imposed by physical stores —makes it feasible to carry an astronomical diversity of products even when very few of them generate much volume on their own. And ultimately, quantifying the importance of the Long Tail comes down to an analysis of power laws. 562 CHAPTER 18. POWER LAWS AND RICH-GET-RICHER PHENOMENA number of books There are j books that have sold at least k copies. j sales volume k Figure 18.3: The distribution of popularity. Visualizing the Long Tail. The first thing to notice, when we compare this discussion of the Long Tail to our earlier analysis of power laws, is that in some sense we’re now viewing things out the opposite end of the telescope.

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In the latter case, the company is basing its success on a multitude of “niche products,” each of which appeals to a small segment of the audience. In a widely-read 2004 article entitled “The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson argued that Internet-based distribution and other factors were driving the media and entertainment industries toward a world in which the latter alternative would be dominant, with a “long tail” of obscure products driving the bulk of audience interest [14]. As he wrote, “You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There’s the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers.

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We show a schematic plot of this new function in Figure 18.3; if we’re talking about the popularity of some item like books, 18.5. THE LONG TAIL 563 sales volume The j-th most popular book has sold k copies. k number of books j Figure 18.4: The distribution of popularity. then a point (k, j) on this curve means, by definition, “There are j books that have sold at least k copies.” So far, this is still the conceptual view from the previous section: as we follow the x-axis of the curve to the right, we’re essentially asking, “As you look at larger and larger sales volumes, how few books do you find?” To capture the discussions of the Long Tail more directly, we want to be asking the following question as we follow the x-axis to the right: “As you look at less and less popular items, what sales volumes do you see?”

Mining of Massive Datasets by Jure Leskovec, Anand Rajaraman, Jeffrey David Ullman

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, G4S, information retrieval, John Snow's cholera map, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, power law, random walk, recommendation engine, second-price auction, sentiment analysis, social graph, statistical model, the long tail, web application

In the first case, sales figures govern the choices, in the second case, editorial judgement serves. The distinction between the physical and on-line worlds has been called the long tail phenomenon, and it is suggested in Fig. 9.2. The vertical axis represents popularity (the number of times an item is chosen). The items are ordered on the horizontal axis according to their popularity. Physical institutions provide only the most popular items to the left of the vertical line, while the corresponding online institutions provide the entire range of items: the tail as well as the popular items. Figure 9.2 The long tail: physical institutions can only provide what is popular, while on-line institutions can make everything available Into Thin Air and Touching the Void An extreme example of how the long tail, together with a well designed recommendation system can influence events is the story told by Chris Anderson about a book called Touching the Void.

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(2)Sales of Products: Order products, say books at Amazon.com, by their sales over the past year. Let y be the number of sales of the xth most popular book. Again, the function y(x) will look something like Fig. 1.3. we shall discuss the consequences of this distribution of sales in Section 9.1.2, where we take up the matter of the “long tail.” (3)Sizes of Web Sites: Count the number of pages at Web sites, and order sites by the number of their pages. Let y be the number of pages at the xth site. Again, the function y(x) follows a power law. (4)Zipf’s Law: This power law originally referred to the frequency of words in a collection of documents.

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Thus, the techniques of Chapter 3 are not often useful for brick-and-mortar retailers. Conversely, the on-line retailer has little need for the analysis we discuss in this chapter, since it is designed to search for itemsets that appear frequently. If the on-line retailer was limited to frequent itemsets, they would miss all the opportunities that are present in the “long tail” to select advertisements for each customer individually. We shall discuss this aspect of the problem in Section 6.1.3, but for the moment let us simply consider the search for frequent itemsets. We will discover by this analysis that many people buy bread and milk together, but that is of little interest, since we already knew that these were popular items individually.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

A portfolio-hosting platform for highly proficient photographers, 500px, differentiates Top creations from Upcoming creations, to expose recent activity (often from undiscovered users) to the community. #7: THE LONG TAIL ABUSE For all its efforts at curation, Wikipedia successfully controls the quality of only the top 20% of articles that account for 80% of the views. As any platform scales, curation methods tend to work very effectively for the ‘Head’ but not for the long tail of user contributions. This runs the risk of long tail abuse. While it may be argued that most consumers do not get affected by abuse resulting from the actions of a few producers, the minority that are affected grows as the network scales and as the curation problem itself gets exacerbated.

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Most media businesses (publishing, performing arts) are industries with gatekeepers that determine which producers get market access. Platforms like Amazon Kindle Publishing, YouTube, and CDBaby reintermediated these industries to varying degrees by giving producers direct access to a market of consumers. The long tail of sellers on online marketplaces wouldn’t exist if not for the targeted access that online marketplaces provide. eBay created a large segment of sellers that never existed previously by lowering the access barrier, much like Airbnb unlocked apartments that would never have welcomed guests before.

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#6: THE RICH BECOME RICHER Consider an online platform that enables sharing of knowledge globally and helps those looking for an answer to connect with those who have the answer. The best contributions do not always come from existing experts, neither do the existing experts understand the context of needs in specific niches. Hence, micro-experts are needed to deal with the long tail of problems. The creation of new niche experts requires a curation model that, effectively, separates the best from the rest. Traditionally, the creation of experts relied on certifications or affiliations with trusted bodies. Creating a similar model of accreditation on an online platform is extremely important if one is to create new experts.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

Cosmic Variance, 2010; http://blogs.discover magazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/. 37 A quote from Science Daily: Census of Marine Life. “Giant Undersea Microbial Mat Among Discoveries Revealed by Marine Life Census.” Science Daily, April 18, 2010. 38 Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution: Kelly, Kevin. “The Long Tail of Life.” The Technium, 2010; http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_long_tail_o.php. CHAPTER 4: MOORE’S LAW OF EVERYTHING 41 The @ symbol has been on keyboards: Rawsthorn, Alice. “Why @ Is Held in Such High Design Esteem.” International Herald Tribune, March 22, 2010. 42 Moore wrote a short paper in the journal Electronics: Moore, Gordon E.

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A quote from Science Daily gives a sense of how unbelievable this is: On just two stops in the southeast Atlantic Angola Basin, they found almost 700 different copepod species (99 percent of them unfamiliar) in just 5.4 square meters (6.5 square yards), nearly twice the number of species described to date in the entire southern hemisphere. Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution as the “long tail of life.” In the media world, a small fraction of movies accounts for the vast amount of success and box office take—these are the blockbusters. The same thing happens on the Internet: a tiny group of Web sites commands most of the world’s attention. In the world of urban development, a handful of cities holds a vast portion of the world’s population.

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But there are uncountably more discoveries, although far rarer, in the tail of this distribution of discovery. As we delve deeper, whether it’s into discovering the diversity of life in the oceans or the shape of the Earth, we begin to truly understand the world around us. So what we’re really dealing with is the long tail of discovery. Our search for what’s way out at the end of that tail, while it might not be as important or as Earth-shattering as the blockbuster discoveries, can be just as exciting and surprising. Each new little piece can teach us something about what we thought was possible in the world and help us to asymptotically approach a more complete understanding of our surroundings.

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, financial independence, game design, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the long tail, trade route

For both the pirates and the paying subscribers, buying records is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. And yet the hits go on and on. In The Long Tail, the 2005 techno-utopian argument for the coming triumph of niches in popular culture, author Chris Anderson posits that hits are a scarcity-based phenomenon. Record stores have limited shelf space, he explains, and records that move 10,000 units are more profitable to stock than records that move 10. But on the Internet, shelf space is infinite, and therefore record companies don’t need to focus so much of their business on making hits. They can make money from the long tail of the artistic middle class—artists with small but loyal followings who will never be heard on CHR.

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Why bother to take on the risk of making hits, and endure the far more numerous failures, when the labels can make as much money licensing their back catalogue of hits, which are already paid for, so that the money goes straight to the company’s bottom line? The record label of the future will be like a 1-800 number, Flom says sarcastically. “Dial one for pop, dial two for the blues.” But that’s not what happened. Not even close. Nine years after The Long Tail, the hits are bigger than ever. Of the 13 million songs available for purchase in 2008, 52,000 made up 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Ten million of those tracks failed to sell a single copy. Today, 77 percent of the profits in the music business are accumulated by 1 percent of the artists.

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“In fact, it’s probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters, more concentration of brands.” In her 2014 book Blockbusters, Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse showed how mega hits have become more important across the whole entertainment industry. “Smart executives bet heavily on a few likely winners. That’s where the big payoffs come from,” she writes. The long tail is a lovely concept—more prosperity for a larger number of artists—and it makes sense in the tech world, where it is an article of faith that the fundamental logic of networks will foster a meritocracy. But the music business doesn’t work logically, and merit doesn’t always matter. Power, fear, and greed are the laws of the land.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

In times of significant change, what's really needed is a thorough analysis of the landscape and a topographical assessment of the new world. Even the big players — the new ‘big' — became big by creating highly distributed networks of small pieces that are more loosely tied together with many more fragmented products and services. The new digital dominators all live deep inside the long tail. * * * There's no shortage of books available with tactical tips on how to use the latest tech tool. If that's what you're looking for, this isn't the book for you. If you're lucky enough to be reading this preface in a bookstore prior to purchasing the book and you want a tactical ‘how-to' summary, please buy another book.

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Again, the first rule in economics is that increased supply results in reduced prices. It’s the most basic economic fact that everyone seems to forget. In a world where choice is increasing exponentially, it presents two simple options for retailers: be the cheapest and quickest, or live deep inside the long tail. The physical and virtual challenges Initial thinking as retail moved online was that online retailers were eating store operators for lunch, and this was sometimes the case. Excluding the online megabrands (Amazon comes to mind), it’s much harder for everyone than it was before the web, even those who are solely online retailers.

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Being the importer is no longer enough because we can now get what they can provide from anywhere in the world at the world’s cheapest price, delivered to our door. In order to maintain relevance, small retailers will have to sell something the others don’t; otherwise they’ll be forever competing on price and struggling to carry a wide enough range. They need to be as far down the long tail as possible, providing a specific offer for a small and passionate audience that’s far more likely to be appreciative of what they create or curate and far less price sensitive because it’s being delivered by you for them and their tribe. Border hopping and digital reinvention One of the terrific things the web enables is the re-birth of businesses that couldn’t survive in the mass-market era, couldn’t compete on price and didn’t have enough appeal to remain viable.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

The current buzzword for this trend is “long tail” economics; instead of concentrating exclusively on big mass hits, online businesses can target the “long tail” of quirkier fare. In the old model, the economics dictated that it was always better to sell a million copies of one album. But in the digital age, it can be just as profitable to sell a hundred copies each of a thousand different albums. Urban information mapping systems offer an intriguing corollary to the long-tail theory. As technology increasingly allows us to satisfy more eclectic needs, anytime those needs require physical presence, the logic of the long tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones.

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If you’re downloading the latest album from an obscure Scandinavian doo-wop group, geography doesn’t matter: it’s just as easy to get the bits delivered to you in the middle of Wyoming as it is in the middle of Manhattan. But if you’re trying to meet up with other fans of Scandinavian doo-wop, you’ll have more luck in Manhattan or London. The long tail may well lead us away from the dominance of mass hits and pop superstars toward quirkier tastes and smaller artists. But it may also lead us to bigger cities. page 225 The public spaces and coffeehouses “‘The coffee-house was the Londoner’s home, and those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.’

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The Internet wasn’t featured on Rosen’s list—its commercial introduction was still a few years away—but once it began to make itself felt as a mass phenomenon, there were a lot of good reasons to think this new technology would be the one that would bring an end to superstar economics. This, in the term popularized by its most visible advocate, Chris Anderson, is the theory of the long tail. As Anderson argued in his 2004 essay of that name, the long tail is “an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. . . . If the 20th century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.” Anderson’s point was that technology meant the end of the era of the blockbuster and the superstar; instead the new century would be the golden age of the niche artist and small audience.

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Anderson’s point was that technology meant the end of the era of the blockbuster and the superstar; instead the new century would be the golden age of the niche artist and small audience. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. While a great business can be built by bringing together millions of sales along the long tail—think Google—for individuals, the income gap between the superstars and everyone else is greater than ever. We see that in the overall income distribution, with the top 1 percent earning around 17 percent of the national income, and we see it within specific professions—in banking, in law, in sports, in entertainment, even in a quotidian profession like dentistry—those at the top are pulling ahead of everyone else.

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So, unless you believe that the random order of participating in the competition is linked to talent, the more obvious conclusion is that the music world celebrity brought by winning the Queen Elisabeth Competition, independent of how good you are, has a powerful effect on your professional success as a musician. But what about the long tail? One of the promises of the Internet has been that it can weaken the Matthew effect: the Web has low barriers to entry, and we all start out equal online. Matthew Salganik and Duncan Watts tested that premise in 2005 on 12,207 Web-based participants. The research subjects were offered a menu of forty-eight songs.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

The workers do this by manually marking up or ‘labeling’ thousands of hours of video footage, often frame by frame.”10 New companies have sprung up to offer labeling data as a service; Mighty AI, for example, offers “the labeled data you need to train your computer vision models” and promises “known, verified, and trusted annotators who specialize in autonomous driving data.”11 The Long Tail The supervised-learning approach, using large data sets and armies of human annotators, works well for at least some of the visual abilities needed for self-driving cars (many companies are also exploring the use of video-game-like driving-simulation programs to augment supervised training).

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As the renowned AI researcher Andrew Ng has warned, “Requiring so much data is a major limitation of [deep learning] today.”12 Yoshua Bengio, another high-profile AI researcher, agrees: “We can’t realistically label everything in the world and meticulously explain every last detail to the computer.”13 FIGURE 13: Possible situations a self-driving car might encounter, ranked by likelihood, illustrating the “long tail” of unlikely scenarios This issue is compounded by the so-called long-tail problem: the vast range of possible unexpected situations an AI system could be faced with. Figure 13 illustrates this phenomenon by giving the likelihood of various hypothetical situations that a self-driving car might encounter during, say, a day’s worth of driving.

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In February 2016, one of Google’s prototype self-driving cars, while making a right turn, had to veer to the left to avoid sandbags on the right side of a California road, and the car’s left front struck a public bus driving in the left lane. Each vehicle had expected the other to yield (perhaps the bus driver expected a human driver who would be more intimidated by the much larger bus). Companies working on autonomous-vehicle technology are acutely aware of the long-tail problem: their teams brainstorm possible long-tail scenarios and actively create extra training examples as well as specially coded strategies for all the unlikely scenarios they can come up with. But of course it is impossible to train or code a system for all the possible situations it might encounter.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

By 2020 there will be six billion Internet-enabled smartphones in the world, and how can it be that the arrival of digital networks composed of billions of music fans has not been a boon to musicians? 3. Even though we were assured by pundits such as Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson, who wrote his seminal article “The Long Tail” in 2004, that digital abundance would mean a much more democratic distribution of the spoils of the digital age, that notion has turned out to be willful self-deception. The long tail is a myth, a fact evidenced by the current music business, in which 80 percent of the revenue is generated by 1 percent of the content. Even at the height of the early blockbuster era, spawned by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 80 percent of the revenue was spread among the top 20 percent of the content.

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Chapter Two: Levon’s Story Though most of the story of Levon Helm and The Band comes from my own experience with them, there are two good books on that period in Woodstock by British journalist Barney Hoskins: Across the Great Divide: The Band & America (New York: Hal Leonard, 2006) covers most of their career. Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock (New York: Da Capo Press, 2016) has a much wider view of the whole scene in late 1960s Woodstock. Chris Anderson’s book from 2008, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hachette, 2008) is still fairly controversial. I believe he underestimated the power of search engines to push only the most popular content to the top. The best recording ever of Ray Charles is Ray Charles Live from a 1959 Atlanta stadium show with a big band.

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

Mullaney, “Netflix: The Mail-Order Movie House That Clobbered Blockbuster,” BusinessWeek Online, May 25, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/may2006/sb20060525_268860.htm?campaign_id=search; and a telephone interview with chief product officer Neil Hunt on July 7, 2006. 2. The “long tail” concept has been popularized by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 3. We define distinctive capabilities as the integrated business processes and capabilities that together serve customers in ways that are differentiated from competitors and that create an organization’s formula for business success. 4.

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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings notes, “If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte, ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual’s taste.”1 Netflix analyzes customers’ choices and customer feedback on the movies they have rented—over 1 billion reviews of movies they liked, loved, hated, and so forth—and recommends movies in a way that optimizes both the customer’s taste and inventory conditions. Netflix will often recommend movies that fit the customer’s preference profile but that aren’t in high demand. In other words, its primary territory is in “the long tail—the outer limits of the normal curve where the most popular products and offerings don’t reside.”2 Netflix also engages in a somewhat controversial, analytically driven practice called throttling. Throttling refers to how the company balances the distribution of shipping requests across frequent-use and infrequent-use customers.

Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

The area of each bar represents a set of samples that fall into the latency range depicted by boundaries of the bar on x-axis. Just underneath the x-axis, we can see markers indicating “quantile boxing” showing the q(0) (the minimum), q(0.25) (the 25th percentile), q(0.5) (the median), and q(0.75) (the 75th percentile). The q(1) (the maximum) isn’t visible on the graph, as much of the long tail of the distribution is outside the right side of the viewport of the graph. The vertical line (m) indicates the arithmetic average (mean) of the distribution. The graph in Figure 21-3 packs a punch! There’s a wealth of information in there. Figure 21-3. An example latency histogram for data service requests On the left side of the histogram, we see a spike (A), called a mode, that represents services that were served fast (likely entirely from cache) and the distribution between (A) and 1.0 ms looks composed of several different behaviors (B), (C), and (D).

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There are no perfect systems, and empathy is the best way to build interconnected systems. #hugops is a common refrain between customers and suppliers, and between competitors, precisely because it emphasizes our own humanity and that any day it could be one of us in the hot seat solving an outage. The Long Tail: Turning Action into Change Activism can be the journey rather than the arrival. Grace Lee Boggs In the technology industry, we work toward building better products and services as our sustained, long-term goal; toil, on-call shifts, and release days are necessary steps along the way, but it would be disingenuous to treat release days as the raison d’être of the average engineer’s career.

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In these times, we learn hard lessons about who we are and whom we are among. In the period of time after a major incident, we are often beset by doubts, feelings of guilt, and an urge to assign blame. Relationships, particularly those that were tenuous before the incident, can be strained or broken. In the long tail after an incident, it is worthwhile to reflect on which of those relationships we wish to maintain, which we wish to repair, which we wish to strengthen, and which we wish to sever. But broken trust is not an indication of a lack of worth or ability. The reality is that sometimes trust is broken beyond the point of repair.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Sales of books and music, classified advertising, and movie rentals, for example, are increasingly dominated by a tiny number of online distribution hubs, and one obvious result has been the elimination of vast numbers of jobs for people like journalists and retail store clerks. The long tail is great if you own it. When, however, you occupy only a single point on the distribution, the story is quite different. Out on the long tail, incomes from most online activities rapidly drop to the pocket-change level. That can work out fine if you have an alternate source of income, or if you happen to be living in your parents’ basement. The problem is that as digital technology continues to transform industries, more and more of the jobs that provide that primary-income source are likely to disappear.

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From the perspective of a great many workers, computers will cease to be tools that enhance their productivity and instead become viable substitutes. This outcome will, of course, dramatically increase the productivity of many businesses and industries—but it will also make them far less labor-intensive. The Tyranny of the Long Tail The influence of this distributed machine intelligence is most evident in the information technology industry itself. The Internet has spawned enormously profitable and influential corporations with startlingly diminutive workforces. In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry.

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Most techno-optimists would likely object to this characterization. They tend to view information technology as universally empowering. It is perhaps not coincidental that they also tend to have been very successful in the new economy. The most prominent digital optimists typically live at the extreme left of the long tail—or, even better, they’ve perhaps founded a company that owns the entire distribution. In a PBS television special that aired in 2012, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil was asked about the possibility of a “digital divide”—meaning that only a small percentage of the population will be able to thrive in the new information economy.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But Google wanted something that would work on Internet scale. Since Google searches were often unique, with esoteric keywords, there was a possibility to sell ads for categories that otherwise never would have justified placement. On the Internet it was possible to make serious money by catering to the “long tail” of businesses that could not buy their way into mass media. (The long tail is the term used to refer to smaller, geographically disparate businesses and interests. The Internet—particularly with the help of a search engine like Google—made long-tail enterprises easy to reach.) If you made the system self-service, you could handle thousands of small advertisers, and the overhead would be so low that customers could buy ads very cheaply.

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After Malone went through three start-ups—and two unpublished novels, because she believed that her true calling was fiction—Sandberg urged her to apply to Google. Twenty-five interviews later, she arrived in Mountain View to help sell AdSense to more small publishers. Malone dubbed herself “the high priestess of the long tail” and came to view her job—the dubiously virtuous task of sticking ads on pages that otherwise would have been ad-free—as a mission to empower small publishers in the age of search. She considered the AdSense arrangement the best sales pitch in advertising history. “Here’s the deal,” she’d say.

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“It was very important to find a way to monetize content for the entertainment industry,” Feikin says. “Putting stuff on the Internet was very new, and there were lots of clips and promos and stuff like that, but putting the full shows online was a very interesting thing to our partners.” Not as crucial to the Google Video approach was the long tail of Internet video. The web, along with new and powerful digital tools for making and distributing videos, offered an opportunity for the most obscure video auteur—meaning anyone with a cheap camera and a modem—to reach an audience of billions. It was a perfect opportunity for Google. But someone else was seizing it.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The last thing you wanted was to be pooled with everyone else. So no one thought this was a good idea. But not integrating was a really bad idea, too. Just a year or so after all the debates we’d had internally about ‘Berliner’ journalism we regrouped to start new discussions about web journalism. The ‘long tail’ for instance. The phrase had been popularised by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, in a book of that name published in July 2006.5 Print journalism had a very short tail: the effective life of a newspaper was 24 hours. Sure, you could go down to the library and seek out old copies. But, for most readers, the editorial value lasted no longer than a day.

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In the new world you would still usually attract most attention for a story on day one. But it would live for ever and would (if properly tagged) remain findable and (if appropriately written or edited) relevant. Commercially, its audience (and therefore value) over time could be greater than its value on day one. That was the theory of the long tail. What did an editorial long tail look like? We came to shorthand this as the ‘Nick Clegg’ problem. Nick Clegg was the rising star of the (centre-left) UK Liberal Democrat party. An MP in 2005, leader of his party by 2007 and (centre-right) deputy prime minister by 2010. Suppose you wanted to know all about Clegg and came to the Guardian (via Google) to find out.

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Interesting for a few hours, but of very little substance in the longer term. Go to the Nick Clegg Wikipedia page – edited by amateurs – and, by contrast, you found something which made more structural sense, even if you couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of the information. This was information that had been edited for the long tail. Was there a way of ‘long-tailing’ newspaper journalism so that it remained useful, well-organised and relevant for the future? Was it best done by humans? Too resource intensive and expensive. Could it be done by algorithms? The tech devs were gagging to have a go, but there was never enough time or money.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

We feed keywords into Google, Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and Amazon. We search for news, products, people, used furniture, and music. And words are the key to our success.23 Morville also draws attention to what cannot be found, by stressing the long tail phenomenon on the web. This is the place where all forms of content that do not surface to the top of a web search are located. Many sites languish, undiscovered, in the long tail because they lack the proper website architecture, or they do not have proper metadata for web-indexing algorithms to find them—for search engines and thus for searchers, they do not exist. Such search results are deeply problematic and are often presented without any alternatives to change them except through search refinement or changes to Google’s default filtering settings, which currently are “moderate” for users who do not specifically put more filters on their results.

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She confirms this this confluence of media production on the web is part of the exclusionary terrain for Black women, who are underrepresented in many aspects of the information industry.46 I would add to her argument that while it is true that the web can serve as an alternative space for conceiving of and sharing empowered conceptions of Black people, this happens in a highly commercially mediated environment. It is simply not enough to be “present” on the web; we must consider the implications of what it means to be on the web in the “long tail” or mediated out of discovery and meaningful participation, which can have a transformative impact on the enduring and brutal economic and social disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially among Black women. Social Inequality Will Not Be Solved by an App An app will not save us.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Circular in design and with a large watchtower in the center, the theory behind the panopticon was that prisoners would behave as if they were being watched at all times—with the mere presence of the watchtower being as effective as iron bars in regulating behavior and ensuring that everyone acted the same way. (A similar idea is behind today’s open-plan offices.) As former Wired editor Chris Anderson argues in The Long Tail, modern commerce depends upon market segmentation.47 Unless you’re selling soap, aiming a product at a homogeneous mass audience is a waste of time. Instead, vendors and marketers increasingly focus on niche audiences. For niches to work, it is important to companies that they know our eccentricities, so that they can figure out which tiny interest group we belong to.

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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 45 Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, Winter 1992. 46 Poole, Steven. “The Digital Panopticon.” New Statesman, May 29, 2013. newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2013/05/are-you-ready-era-big-data. 47 Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail (London: Random House Business, 2006). 48 Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964). 49 Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 50 Turkle, Sherry.

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“Can Alternate Endings Save the Hollywood Blockbuster?” Fast Company, July 30, 2013. fastcolabs.com/3015037/open-company/can-alternate-endings-save-the-hollywood-blockbuster. 32 This idea is backed up by Wired editor Chris Anderson’s concept of the “98 Percent Rule,” described in his 2006 book The Long Tail. In his discussion of how technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches, Anderson argues that niche products are now within reach economically thanks to digital distribution, and when aggregated can still make up a significant market—as Amazon’s business model has shown. 33 Warman, Matt.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Being able to personalize a search result allows platforms to leverage their wide selection without confusing buyers with too much choice. This has allowed Alibaba to push the concept of the long tail to the limit with in excess of a billion products listed. To make the most of this unique inventory, the same search engine powers a number of consumer marketplaces owned by the group, such as Tmall and Taobao. This means that a search on one consumer site can also return search results across all other Alibaba consumer sites. This guarantees customers complete inventory discovery and access to the long tail across all marketplaces. For example, a search on Taobao for the latest Burberry tote bag may come back with few results on Taobao, but with a relevant selection on Tmall.

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The flywheel of traffic is at play again: FBA leads to more sales for sellers,10 more FBA sellers lead to more value for Prime customers, who then spend more, to the benefit of both Marketplace sellers and Amazon. 62 Platform-powered ecosystems Amazon is getting the best of both worlds by combining the reach of platforms with the control of simple distribution models in order to be a ‘one-stop shop’. The combination of the long tail marketplace with the highly efficient high-volume reseller model attracts one of the biggest audiences across the world and makes it one of the most successful e-commerce sites. Amazon’s ecosystem When more control over the product proposition is required, Amazon uses more traditional business models.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek

computer age, crowdsourcing, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, lateral thinking, Norman Mailer, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog

THE HISTORY AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF HANDWRITING BY THE SAME AUTHOR A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses “I never saw a hotter argument on so unexciting a subject.” —Erasmus, 1528, “On Handwriting” CONTENTS Introduction: Handwriting Is History Chapter 1 The Strangely Familiar Very Far Past Chapter 2 The Problem with Very Beautiful Writing Chapter 3 The Long Tail of Greece and Rome Chapter 4 Human Xerox Machines Chapter 5 The Politics of Script Chapter 6 Handwriting as Distinction Chapter 7 Righteous, Manly Hands Chapter 8 A Devilish Contrivance Chapter 9 Long Descenders Chapter 10 Questioned Documents Chapter 11 Digital Handwriting Chapter 12 The Continual Revival of Fancy Letters Chapter 13 The Science of Handwriting Conclusion: Our John Hancocks Acknowledgments Notes Index Plates Introduction HANDWRITING IS HISTORY Ellie was sitting at her desk, across from Max and next to Isabel, writing in a small stapled book with a green cover.

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., the brain of an Egyptian scribe may well have required far more cortical activation and cognitive resources to handle the encrypted meanings than was required for most other writing systems in all of history.” * Of course, there are an enormous number of remaining hieroglyphics that were chiseled on walls, tombs, and buildings. Chapter 3 THE LONG TAIL OF GREECE AND ROME Most of us take it as a truism that writing is good, ennobling, and central to being an educated citizen. Socrates, ancient Greece’s greatest thinker, believed the opposite. He argued vehemently, through speeches Plato later wrote down, that writing caused humans to become less intelligent, less civilized, and less creative.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Bezos knew he could migrate to things people weren’t used to buying online yet, like CDs and DVDs. Foreshadowing Amazon’s threat to all things good in our society, Susan Boyle’s CD I Dreamed a Dream set sales records on the platform. To outrun competitors and reinforce the core value of selection, Amazon introduced Amazon Marketplace, letting third parties fill in the long tail. Sellers got access to the world’s largest e-commerce platform and customer base, and Amazon was able to balloon its offerings without the expense of additional inventory. Amazon Marketplace now accounts for $40 billion, or 40 percent, of Amazon’s sales.31 Sellers, content with the massive customer flow, feel no compulsion to invest in retail channels of their own.

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Facebook and Google accounted for 90 percent of U.S. digital advertising revenue growth in 2016. You are better off picking (if possible) one of a handful of winners (Google/FB/MSFT) or firms in their ecosystem. Disruptors that break open new markets are rare—lottery winners. In some traditional consumer goods industries, however, the long tail is growing. Thus, it’s better to work for Google than a niche search player; but conversely, it’s better to work for a craft brewery than Miller. The very concentration of tech space into dominant information platforms (Amazon reviews, Google, Trip Advisor) has facilitated the identification of breakout nontech products from unknown makers, and the niche-ification of traditional categories.

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The very concentration of tech space into dominant information platforms (Amazon reviews, Google, Trip Advisor) has facilitated the identification of breakout nontech products from unknown makers, and the niche-ification of traditional categories. Small players can get global reach and instant credibility without the massive ad budgets and distribution networks that their larger competitors once used to limit the market. The long tail has new life in consumer, as discretionary income wants special, not big. Kint, Jason. “Google and Facebook Devour the Ad and Data Pie. Scraps for Everyone Else.” Digital Content Next. We are seeing this across categories. In cosmetics, for example, brands including NYX and Anastasia Beverly Hills are challenging the traditional giants by going straight to influencers on Instagram and other social platforms, and responding to trends, registered on Google, with a supply chain that gets products to market in a fraction of the time of traditional players.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

In Germany and the Netherlands, the native-language versions of Wikipedia are ranked higher than any domestic news organization’s Web site.3 For many other cultures, in which there are no strong commercial incentives to create an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is the only comprehensive encyclopedia available at all. Therefore, the impact of Wikipedia has been more revolutionary and crucial for those cultures in the “long tail” of the language list. Wikipedia has likely been introduced to millions simply because they use Google and other search engines. Do a random Internet search, and it’s hard not to find a Wikipedia entry in the top five results. The clear, clinical style of its articles on matters whimsical or serious makes it an instant favorite for many Internet users.

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What was once only done top-down is now being viewed bottom-up. Books and essays have addressed the impact of projects freely driven by communities of scattered individuals: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Infotopia by Cass R. Sun-stein, and Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This book, however, goes in with a deeper focus on Wikipedia, explaining how it evolved to become the phenomenon it is today, and showing the fascinating community behind the articles and the unique online culture the site has fostered.

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The euphoria of exponential growth is just now wearing off. Both English and German Wikipedia, the two bellwethers of influence, have entered into a period of slowing growth. It’s only natural—the low-hanging fruit has been picked and both encyclopedias are entering into a maintenance mode, where current events and the long tail of minor topics will be the main areas for new content. The basic human knowledge articles about things like [[Earth]], [[Space]], [[Philosophy]] have all been written, and done quite well. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for the project overall. One cannot have blind faith that Wikipedia will be ever increasing in size, quality, and community.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

This is the shape behind the so-called 80/20 rule, where, for example, 20 percent of a store’s inventory accounts for 80 percent of its revenues, and it has been part of social science literature since Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist working in the early 1900s, found a power law distribution of wealth in every country he studied; the pattern was so common that he called it “a predictable imbalance.” This is also the shape behind Chris Anderson’s discussion in The Long Tail; most items offered at online retailers like iTunes and Amazon don’t sell well, but in aggregate they generate considerable income. The pattern doesn’t apply just to goods, though, but to social interactions as well. Real-world distributions are only an approximation of this formula, but the imbalance it creates appears in an astonishing number of places in large social systems.

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The curved line represents the power-law distribution of weblogs ranked by audience size. Weblogs at the left-hand side of the graph have so many readers that they are limited to the broadcast pattern, because you can’t interact with millions of readers. As size of readership falls, loose conversation becomes possible, because the audiences are smaller. The long tail of weblogs, with just a few readers each, can support tight conversation, where every reader is also a writer and vice versa. As is normal in a power law distribution, most writers have few readers. Such readers and writers can all pay similar amounts of attention to one another, forming relatively tight conversational clusters.

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Though I first did the research on Mermaid Parade photos, the subject doesn’t matter very much; there is some variation in the steepness of the falloff from the most popular items and the length of the tail of one-off contributors, but the basic power law distribution is stable over most of Flickr (and indeed, over most large social systems.) Page 124: power law distribution A good guide to the ubiquity and interpretive importance of power law distributions in social systems is Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Perseus (2002). Page 126: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, by Chris Anderson, Hyperion (2006). Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, also has a weblog on the subject at thelongtail.com. Page 129: fame I made earlier drafts of these arguments in the essays, “Communities, Audiences, and Scale”, www.shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html, and “Why Oprah Won’t Talk To You.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Cloud manufacturing will be a decentralized system, built on a foundation of ultra-large networks of small manufacturing companies. Wikipedia defines cloud manufacturing as systems “where various manufacturing resources and abilities can be intelligently sensed and connected into wider internet, and automatically managed and controlled.” In his landmark book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, author Chris Anderson described the collective power of bloggers as that of “ants with megaphones.”1 Until the Internet gave them a worldwide platform, individual writers struggled to make their voices heard. Now, the collective communicative capacity of bloggers exceeds that of journalists working for large media companies. 3D printing technologies will make Makers, consumers, and small companies into ants with factories.

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Mass manufacturing is becoming mass customization. In the future, as 3D printing technologies improve, everyone will gain the ability to design and make complex products. Barriers of resources and skill that are associated with traditional manufacturing will ease, democratizing innovation and unleashing the long tail of human creativity. The second episode of the journey is just beginning: control over the composition of matter—going beyond shaping just external geometry to shaping the internal structure of new meta-materials with unprecedented fidelity. Someday we will be able to make materials within materials.

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Chapter 3 1 Quote from a press conference covered by VentureBeat in May 2012. http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/10/3d-systems-ceo-we-want-3d-printing-to-be-as-big-as-the-ipad/ 2 Quote from Terry’s blog, July 2012. http://wohlersassociates.com/blog/2012/07/why-most-adults-will-never-use-a-3d-printer/ Chapter 4 1 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (New York, NY: Hyperion Press, 2008). 2 Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). 3 Eric Reis, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Assumptions about diverse preferences lead to the “Waiting for Godot” belief that audiences will eventually democratize (see chapter 1), or to Negroponte’s assertion that the internet would dissolve the mass 70 • Chapter 4 media (see chapter 2), or to Andrew Sullivan’s claim that the internet allows for “the universe of permissible opinions to expand, unconstrained by the prejudices, tastes or interests of the old-media elite.”24 If the economics of broadcasting produced bland, homogenized content,25 the internet is supposed to produce the opposite. Chris Anderson’s writings on the “long tail” similarly assume that consumers have strong, diverse content preferences that will finally be satisfied in the digital era.26 Yet the empirical case for diverse media preferences is surprisingly modest. Early work on the economics of media often assumed that people had strong genre preferences for radio or television shows.27 Yet empirical work soon found that genre preferences were rather weak.28 As one influential British study concluded, it is not true that “programs with similar content appeal to some particular subgroup of viewers.”29 Viewers’ likes are not strongly influenced by genre—though their dislikes are often grouped.30 Some might see the lack of strong genre preferences as an artifact of the broadcast era.

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Even progressive-leaning net neutrality advocates have made similar claims, suggesting that if the internet’s architecture can be kept open, the “natural” tendency toward decentralized audiences will reassert itself. This chapter challenges these claims. Most work to date has focused on either the concentrated head of the audience distribution, or the long tail of small outlets—alternately treating one or the other of these categories as exceptions. In contrast, this chapter builds new models that scale seamlessly from the largest websites down to hundreds of smaller ones. This approach does a better job of capturing the whole elephant, rather than just the tusks or the tail.

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Managing brands and customer engagement in online brand communities. Journal of Service Management, 24(3), 223–44. Amatriain, X., and Basilico, J. (2012, April). Netflix recommendations: beyond the 5 stars. Blog post. Retrieved from http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/04/netflix-recommenda tions-beyond-5-stars.html. Anderson, C. (2004, December). The long tail. Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired .com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. Anderson, D., and Mattingly, J. C. (2007). Propagation of fluctuations in biochemical systems, II: nonlinear chains. IET Systems Biology, 1(6), 313–25. Ariely, D., and Norton, M. I. (2008). How actions create—not just reveal—preferences.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Theirs is an intramural rivalry—Amazon bought Zappos in July 2009 for $850 million, its largest purchase ever. Curious to see what it could learn from its younger, more nimble counterpart, Amazon has kept the company separate thus far. Zappos has also been described as the “long tail” of footwear, borrowing a term typically applied to purely digital retailers like eBay or Apple’s iTunes Store, which offers a potentially infinite selection of music and sells more obscurities than hits. When Zappos opened in 1999, it relied on the long tail to find its customers—women wearing a size thirteen, for instance—who were frustrated by the selection at shoe stores. Zappos made its mark early by always being in stock.

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What’s driving the growth of Amazon Prime, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has told analysts, is the company’s third-party fulfillment service, which offers the same shipping options to its online partners and their customers. Or as one of his investors put it, “Amazon’s logistics is its secret sauce.” Prime’s higher sales velocity represents a significant shift in how Amazon does business. What drew Bezos to books was the long tail. Selection was his original selling proposition, not selection and speed, as with Zappos. Amazon was the poster child of a Net Age company— Bezos was Time’s Man of the Year in 1999—but with Prime, it has evolved into a retailer tailor-made for the Instant Age. Like Zappos, its velocity of shipping blurs the line between online and offline, erasing the last advantage of retail stores—that you can walk out with the merchandise.

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Amazon Prime numbers are hard to come by; many thanks to ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo for publishing some on his blog Amazonstrategies.com. E-commerce statistics are from Forrester Research. The impact on booksellers is taken from the paper “E-commerce and the Market Structure of Retail Industries.” And all the talk about long tails comes, of course, from Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Dexter Muller and Commercial Advisors CEO Larry Jensen gave me a crash course in distribution and the effect that the proliferation of warehouses has had on Memphis in particular. The plight of Whitehaven residents was detailed by The New York Times in “Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains” (May 30, 2010).

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The popular thinking of the time – repeated over and over by the era’s digital gurus and futurists – was that the net was decentralised and connected, and so would automatically lead to a competitive and distributed marketplace.1 No one knew exactly how, but influential figures like Chris Anderson called this ‘the long tail’ and were extremely excited about it. It seems obvious now that the nature of digital technology makes monopolies more rather than less likely. The most important reason for this is the effect of networks. If you join Facebook, your friends will be more likely to join too, which in turn makes their friends more likely to join.

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The most famous application of this is the cryptocurrency bitcoin. These are certainly very interesting, and we’ll examine them in detail in the next chapter. However, advocates of this new technology sound a lot like the techno-optimists of the nineties, again promising with huge conviction a world of peer-to-peer, distributed exchanges and the long tail. But similar patterns as happened then seem to be emerging already. A small number of people own a disproportionately large amount of the bitcoins. And because bitcoin ‘mining’ is reliant on having the best technology and most powerful computing rigs, the mining function of many crypto-coins are concentrated in the hands of a small number of already wealthy people and venture capitalists

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

business process, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, demand response, Donald Trump, estate planning, Firefox, folksonomy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, off-the-grid, Parler "social media", Salesforce, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, social bookmarking, social intelligence, Streisand effect, the long tail, Tony Hsieh

Seven weeks, for a total investment of $12,107.09: See Guy Kawasaki’s June 3, 2007, blog post “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” on the blog How to Change the World at http://forr.com/gsw1-25. 26. As Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: See The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson (New York: Hyperion, 2006). The author’s blog is at www.thelongtail.com or http://forr.com/gsw1-26. 27. Here’s what one FastLane reader, for example, said about one the new Pontiac GTO: See Bob Lutz’s January 25, 2005, blog post “Sharpening the Arrowhead” on the blog GM FastLane at http://forr.com/gsw1-27. 28.

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If you are a retailer, your lock on distribution is over. People are not just buying online; they are buying from each other. They are comparing your prices with prices all over the Internet and telling each other where to get the best deal on sites like redflagdeals.com. As Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail,26 has pointed out, shelf space creates far less power when there’s nearly infinite selection online. If you are a financial services company, you no longer dominate flows of capital. Trading happens online, and consumers get financial advice from message boards on Yahoo! Finance and the Motley Fool.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

It was news that had significant financial and safety implications for their entire family. Yet despite its urgency, the news had arrived on their doorstep via the word-of-mouth network of two neighbors gossiping together. All of this would seem to reinforce an observation Chris Anderson (of Wired and The Long Tail fame) made several years ago, part of what he called the “Vanishing Point theory of news”: Our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us. For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar.

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(http://www.archdaily.com/233194/can-you-crowdsource-a-city/). A number of sites and mobile apps are innovating in the area of peer-network urbanism; an overview of many of them is available at the DIY City website, http://diycity.org/. Chris Anderson’s “Vanishing Point theory of news” was originally published at http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/01/the_vanishing_p.html. Journalism. The Pothole Paradox For more on the debate over the future of journalism, see my discussion with Paul Starr published in Prospect, “Are We on Track for a Golden Age of Serious Journalism?” For another, more skeptical, overview of journalism’s future in the age of peer networks, see “Confidence Game,” by Dean Starkman, published in the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Craigslist, initiated as a “.org” by a single person, dominates the market for classified advertising online.33 Ideas like free Web-based e-mail, hosting services for personal Web pages, instant messenger software, social networking sites, and well-designed search engines emerged more from individuals or small groups of people wanting to solve their own problems or try something neat than from firms realizing there were profits to be gleaned. This is a sampling of major Internet applications founded and groomed by outsiders; start sliding down what Wired editor Chris Anderson calls the Long Tail—niche applications for obscure interests– and we see a dominance of user-written software.34 Venture capital money and the other artifacts of the firm-based industrial information economy can kick in after an idea has been proven, and user innovation plays a crucial role as an initial spark. GENERATIVITY AND A BLENDING OF MODELS FOR INNOVATION Eric von Hippel has written extensively about how rarely firms welcome improvements to their products by outsiders, including their customers, even when they could stand to benefit from them.35 His work tries to persuade otherwise rational firms that the users of their products often can and do create new adaptations and uses for them—and that these users are commonly delighted to see their improvements shared.

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Cybervisionary David Weinberger’s twist on Andy Warhol’s famous quotation is the central issue for the rest of us: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”70 Although Weinberger made his observation in the context of online expression, explaining that microaudiences are worthy audiences, it has further application. Just as cheap networks made it possible for businesses to satisfy the “long tail,” serving the needs of obscure interests every bit as much as popular ones71 (Amazon is able to stock a selection of books virtually far beyond the best sellers found in a physical bookstore), peer-produced databases can be configured to track the people who are of interest only to a few others.

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According to Alexa.com, which monitors Internet traffic, as of March 2, 2007, Ebay.com was the seventh-most-visited Web site in the United States, and Craigslist.org was the tenth. See Aexa.com, http://wwwalexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=US&ts_mode=country&lang=none (last visited Sep. 29, 2007). 34. See CHRIS ANDERSON, THE LONG TAIL: WHY THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS IS SELLING LESS OF MORE 50—51 (2006). 35. See, e.g., ERIC VON HIPPEL, DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION 19 (2005); ERIC VON HIPPEL, THE SOURCES OF INNOVATION 25 (1988); Eric Von Hippel, Christoph Hienerth, & Peter Kragh, Slides: Users as Innovators: Implications for Denmark’s User-Centered Innovation Initiative Address at Copenhagen Business School (on file with author). 36.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

I’m not going to summarize this body of work, because we’re in deep enough already; but I want to alert you to one small aspect that leads off irresistibly on a peculiar tangent. Escalante’s team reported in 2005 that P. vivax shares a recent ancestry with three kinds of macaque malaria. One of those is Plasmodium knowlesi, a parasite known from Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia, where it sometimes infects at least two native primates, the long-tailed macaque and the pig-tailed macaque. P. knowlesi occupies a strange place in medical annals, involving the treatment of neurosyphilis (syphilis of the central nervous system), which for a time in the early twentieth century was done using induced malarial fevers. The story goes like this. Dr.

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Expanding their search between 2001 and 2006, the team identified hundreds more cases of P. knowlesi, including 266 from Sarawak, 41 from Sabah (the other Malaysian state on the island of Borneo), and 5 from an area of Peninsular Malaysia just northeast of Kuala Lumpur—not far, probably, from where BW caught his case in 1965. They also found P. knowlesi in most of the long-tailed macaques from which they were able to take blood, confirming that those monkeys are a reservoir. More dramatically, the team detected four human fatalities—four malaria patients, each of whom had gone to a hospital, been misdiagnosed with P. malariae (based on microscopy, the old way), developed severe symptoms, and died.

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The piece appeared in print not long before I met them, and I was carrying a copy. Plasmodium knowlesi malaria, they wrote, is not a new emergent infection of humans. It has been getting into people for some while but it was overlooked. Three kinds of Asian primate serve as its reservoir hosts: the long-tailed macaque, the pig-tailed macaque, and the banded leaf monkey. Other monkeys, still unidentified, might be harboring the parasite too. Transmission from monkey to monkey (and from monkey to human) occurs by way of mosquitoes belonging to one group of closely related species, Anopheles leucosphyrus and its cousins, including Anopheles latens in Borneo.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Abrams, Allan McRobie, Bruno Eckhardt, and Edward Ott, “Crowd Synchrony on the Millennium Bridge,” Nature 483 (November 3, 2005): 43–44. 7. Neal J. Roese and James M. Olsen, eds., What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994). 8. M. E. J. Newman, “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf’s Law,” arXiv:condmat, May 29, 2006; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006); and Arthur DeVany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2004). 9. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), xvii–xviii. 10.

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“The Better-Than-Average Effect.” In The Self in Social Judgment, edited by Mark D. Alicke, David A. Dunning, and Joachim I. Krueger, 85–106. New York: Psychology Press, 2005. Anderson, Camilla. “Iceland Gets Help to Recover from Historic Crisis.” IMF Survey Online, December 2, 2008. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Anderson, P. W. “More is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972): 393–396. Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York: Harper, 2008. Armstrong, J. Scott. “Combining Forecasts.”

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

The MSN search engine that was being replaced had worked on an 80:20 principle: 80 per cent of searches would be for 20 per cent of terms (in other words, most people would look for the same things), so if you optimized for the 80 per cent you’d do all right. The 80:20 principle was right, but the second assumption wasn’t. The ‘long tail’ of queries is enormous, in both volume and unpredictability. It turns out that people judge a search engine on the results not of common searches, but of uncommon ones: not ‘White House website’, but an explanation for the strange symptoms being exhibited by your cat, or putting in the name of a prospective date to see whether he goes rock climbing in tight shorts. If people don’t find what they want in the long tail, they will often try another search engine – if they’ve heard of it. People had heard of Google, and when MSN failed to provide what they wanted they headed over there instead.

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If there is a single threat to the future of the smartphone, it is patents – and particularly software patents, which allow the patenting of an outcome rather than a process. If developers get too scared to develop, the apps market will become the province only of the well-funded and legally protected; the long tail of tiny developers with great ideas will be stunted. The outcome of the patent wars won’t be decided within a year or even two years. Yet, for Apple and Google and Microsoft, anything that dissuades developers from writing software for their platform (and so reduces the number of apps, which reduces the reliance on a particular OS) is bad.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky

centralized clearinghouse, index card, lone genius, market bubble, Merlin Mann, New Journalism, Results Only Work Environment, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, young professional

During the journey, communal forces are instrumental in refining the very substance of the idea, holding us accountable for making it happen, building a network that will push us to go above and beyond, providing us with valuable material and emotional support, and spreading the word to attract resources and publicity. By sharing your idea, you take the first step in creating the community that will act as a catalyst to making it happen. Take Wired magazine’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, as an example. Anderson wrote the best-selling book The Long Tail, which argues in favor of a business model that capitalizes on underserved niches (à la Amazon or Netflix), selling a large amount of rare (or low-demand) items in small quantities to a widely scattered cross-section of consumers. In many ways Anderson’s theories relate to how new technologies allow us to harness the power of the masses—and it’s a philosophy that he himself embraces.

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Anderson uses his blog to share and “beta test” the ideas that go into his books. “My philosophy is to give all of my ideas away for free,” he explains, knowing that those ideas “will be improved by a community that collectively knows more than I do.” A case in point is his latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which, like The Long Tail, evolved out of a feature article originally published in Wired. Using his blog, Anderson refined the concepts presented in the book based on feedback provided to him via comments and e-mails. In a sense anticipating his critics, an entire chapter of Free is “constructed around complaints or concerns or push-back,” wherein Anderson directly quotes issues raised by his readers and then responds to them.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

On the one hand, more books of greater variety are being published. There is a growing population of writers, and publishing is being commoditized.5 On the other hand, the books that receive widespread attention and land on best seller lists are a dwindling proportion of the total. The first trend is sometimes called “the long tail”; the second represents a “winner-take-all” economy.6 Commentators tend to highlight one or the other of these phenomena, but both are happening at once. Together they cause the shrinking middle that is the hallmark of any industry – music, movies, manufacturing – whose product can be replicated and distributed cheaply.

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The quotation is from Orwell (1936). 3.Barnes & Noble Booksellers (n.d.). 4.Thompson (2010) offers a rich history and analysis of the book industry in the four decades since about 1970. 5.Thompson (2010), pp. 389–392, describes this trend in detail and calls it a “winner-takes-more market.” 6.In respective, eponymous books, Chris Anderson (2008) describes the long tail, and Robert Frank and Philip Cook (1996), the winner-take-all society. 7.Duflo et al. (2012). 8.In another paper with different colleagues, Duflo herself writes, “[The] recent evidence suggests that many interventions which increase school participation do not improve test scores for the average student.

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Measles & Rubella Initiative, www.redcross.org/what-we-do/international-services/measles-initiative. American Sociological Association. (2006). Peter H. Rossi (1921–2006). Footnotes: Newsletter of the American Sociological Association, Dec. 2006, 34(9), www.asanet.org/footnotes/dec06/indextwo.html. Anderson, Chris. (2008). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion. ———. (2009). Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran. TED Blog, June 16, 2009, http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/16/qa_with_clay_sh/. Angelucci, Manuela, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman. (2013). Win some lose some? Evidence from a randomized microcredit program placement experiment by Compartamos Banco.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

[back] *** †journalist Chris Anderson described this phenomenon, which he called "the long tail," from the producer's point of view in an article he wrote for Wired magazine in 2004. Anderson's metaphor was based on the statistical bell curve. His point was that digital technology, cheap transportation, and the Internet have made it possible and profitable to sell to the smaller markets found on the long tails of the bell curve. Anderson contended that there are huge volumes of sales within these smaller markets. From a consumer's point of view, however, it still makes sense to live around those with similar tastes. See Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail," Wired, October 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

The first was that the asset-backed securities underlying the subprime bubble had become “toxic” and only by purchasing these toxic assets could the market come to terms with the ongoing factoring in of these assets. The second was that the crisis had created a liquidity and capital adequacy crisis for banks and that they could only free up funds for the general public if their liquidity was improved. The first goal may have been accomplished although the long tail may yet still appear. The second goal was a failure with respect to customer expectations, however. While banks achieved a welcome top-up that reduced their cash-flow problems, internal risk strategy dictated that in an economy in trouble, all but the very best customers represented too great a credit risk to chance lending them money.

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Figuring out the right mix between personalisation, responsiveness to individual needs, privacy rules and security will be an important distinction in creating a positive self-service experience. Initially, providing customisation around age- and gender-related services will be enough of a differentiation from a user-experience perspective. This is all part of a push to make our digital experience more personalised and human. The long tail of ATM networks In Australia, cash usage for retail payments has fallen more than 25 per cent in the last five years. In both the UK and US markets, cash usage as a payment method will decline between 17–20 per cent over the next five years. Now this is not the death of cash. In fact, it is likely that cash will be with us into the next decade.

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“For a generation of customers used to do their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is. The new tastemakers are us. Word of mouth is now a public conversation, carried in blog comments and customer reviews, exhaustively collated and measured . . . the ants have megaphones.” —Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006) Social media is also surprisingly effective in creating long-lasting ties. Business consulting firm, Bain & Company, released a report19 in September 2011 that concluded brands that were early adopters of social media (Dell, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, JetBlue, and American Express) have captured real economic value from their budget investments.

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

He makes writing books sound like a get-rich-quick scheme. I take my drink. I don’t pour it on his head. I remember this is a long game. I remember that both self-published authors and trad-published authors have the same small handful of breakouts and the same massive, slushy mire of “everyone else” clamoring for signal on the long tail. I think I’ve been on the long tail a long time, but the more I talk to other writers the more I realize that that whole slog—the shitty apartment with the shitty boyfriend, the frigid outhouses in Alaska, the cockroach wrangling in South Africa—wasn’t actually the start of it. That wasn’t the part where things got really interesting.

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

Road deaths are also on the rise. As a result, the US is the first country in the developed world that has seen a decline in life expectancy. More than 100,000 Americans died last year either from an overdose or in a road accident. This is the true American carnage. What the US is currently experiencing could be called the long tail of violence: there is plenty of it, but most of it is tailored to particular groups. It is rarely a collective experience. Violence has not disappeared. Instead, it has spread out and thinned out, touching individual lives in myriad ways that barely register with those not directly affected. Much of this violence is privatised, domesticated or institutionalised in places designed to keep it off the minds of the majority.

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In every long tail distribution, along with the proliferation of tiny events, there is a small number of overwhelming ones. Trump seems able to do almost nothing to reach out to the millions of Americans who are at risk from everyday violence. Yet he is quite capable of destroying millions himself. The long tail of violence is emblematic of the bind democracy is in: the threats it faces are either too big or too small. What the opioid epidemic and the risk of nuclear war with North Korea have in common is the difficulty democratic politics finds in getting a grip on them. The space between the personal and the apocalyptic, which is where democratic politics traditionally plays out, has become a battleground for rival world views which are informed by personal or apocalyptic expectations of the worst that could happen.

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, phenotype, random walk, silicon-based life, Steven Pinker, the long tail

It is often to be seen performing its spectacular display flight over the grasslands of Africa, wheeling and looping the loop, like an aeroplane with a long advertising streamer. Not surprisingly it can be grounded in wet weather. Even a dry tail that long must be a burdensome load to carry around. We are interested in explaining the evolution of the long tail, which we conjecture has been an explosive evolutionary process. Our starting point, therefore, is an ancestral bird without a long tail. Think of the ancestral tail as about 3 inches long, about a sixth the length of the modern breeding male’s tail. The evolutionary change that we are trying to explain is a sixfold increase in tail length.

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When the females of a population have strong preferences for male characteristics, it follows, by the reasoning we have been through, that each male body will tend to contain copies of genes that make females prefer his own characteristics. If a male has inherited a long tail from his father, the chances are that he has also inherited from his mother the genes that made her choose the long tail of his father. If he has a short tail, the chances are that he contains genes for making females prefer short tails. So, when a female exercises her choice of male, whichever way her preference lies, the chances are that the genes that bias her choice are choosing copies of themselves in the males.

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Returning to the Fisher/Lande runaway theory, what is needed now is evidence from real animals. How should we go about looking for such evidence? What methods might be used? A promising approach was made by Malte Andersson, from Sweden. As it happens, he worked on the very bird that I am using here to discuss the theoretical ideas, the long-tailed widow bird, and he studied it in its natural surroundings in Kenya. Andersson’s experiments were made possible by a recent advance in technology: superglue. He reasoned as follows. If it is true that the actual tail length of males is a compromise between a utilitarian optimum on the one hand, and what females really want on the other, it should be possible to make a male super-attractive by giving him an extra long tail.

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski, Adam Stubblefield

air gap, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, bash_history, behavioural economics, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, fear of failure, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information security, Internet of things, Kubernetes, load shedding, margin call, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NSO Group, nudge theory, operational security, performance metric, pull request, ransomware, reproducible builds, revision control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, self-driving car, single source of truth, Skype, slashdot, software as a service, source of truth, SQL injection, Stuxnet, the long tail, Turing test, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Valgrind, web application, Y2K, zero day

Where security keys were not supported (for example, in the case of some hardware device certificate management and third-party web applications), Google worked directly with the vendor to request and add support. We then had to deal with the long tail of applications. Since all OTPs were centrally generated, we could figure out which application to target next by tracking the clients making OTP requests. In 2015, the team focused on completing the rollout and deprecating the OTP service. We sent users reminders when they used an OTP instead of a security key, and eventually blocked access via OTP. Though we had dealt with most of the long tail of OTP application needs, there were still a few exceptions, such as mobile device setup. For these cases, we created a web-based OTP generator for exceptional circumstances.

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Letting the user know that their action was not in line with the desired policy within minutes or hours allows them to take action to fix the issue. Track progress and determine how to address the long tail. By examining user requests for OTPs by application, we could identify which applications to focus on next. Use dashboards to track progress and identify whether alternative solutions with similar security properties can work for the long tail of use cases. Long-Term Change: External Demand In some situations, you either have or need much more time to roll out a change—for example, an internally driven change that requires significant architectural or system changes, or a broader industry-wide regulatory change.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

New platforms leverage technology to create marketplaces that address the employment crisis by bringing together machines and human skills in new and unexpected ways: eBay and Amazon Marketplace spurred over 600,000 people to earn their livings by dreaming up new, improved, or simply different or cheaper products for a worldwide customer base. The Long Tail of new products offered enormous consumer value and is a rapidly growing segment of the economy. Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace make it easy for people with ideas for mobile applications to create and distribute them. Threadless lets people create and sell designs for t-shirts.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

., and Robert J. Shiller. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2009). Andersen, Kurt, and Tom Brokaw. Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (Random House, 2009). Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006). Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2008). Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984). Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means (Plume, 2003).

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Andy Hobsbawn, “Small Is the Next Big Thing,” http://smallbig.typepad.com/files/pdf/small-is-the-next-big-thing.pdf. 33. eBay 2009 Analyst Day slide presentation. Retrieved October 2009, www.slideshare.net/evanwolf/ebay-2009-analyst-day. 34. Magaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2009), 162. 35. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006). 36. “SwapTree Launches Free Swapping Service,” press release (June 28, 2007), www.redorbit.com/news/technology/983395/swaptree_launches_free_swapping_service__trade_books_cds_dvds/index.html. 37. Daniel Nissanoff, FutureShop: How the New Auction Culture Will Revolutionize the Way We Buy, Sell, and Get Things We Really Want (Penguin, 2006). 1.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

This term designates a person who is not very active, a mostly passive agent who is involved only occasionally in the life of the party, despite often being a fully registered member. It is a person who may occasionally participate in an online consultation or contribute to party communication by sharing a post or tweet, but only with great irregularity and often relapsing into latency. This is, to use the term of Chris Anderson, the ‘long tail’ of the party, which encompasses the great majority of supporters, and also of registered members.287 To refer back to Jacob Nielsen’s discussion of participation, this is the 90 per cent of party supporters, whose participation levels are mostly very low and mainly of a purely reactive type.

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Nicola Biondo and Marco Canestrari, Supernova: i segreti, le bugie e i tradimenti del Movimento 5 stelle: storia vera di una nuova casta che si pretendeva anticasta (Milano: Ponte alle Grazie, 2018). 284. John D. May, ‘Opinion structure of political parties: the special law of curvilinear disparity’, Political Studies 21, no.2 (1973): 135–151. 285. Bond and Exley, Rules for revolutionaries, p.134. 286. Bond and Exley, Rules for revolutionaries, p.2. 287. Chris Anderson, The long tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited demand (New York: Random House, 2007). 288. Michels, Political parties. 289. Sigmund Neumann and Frederick C. Barghoorn, Modern political parties: approaches to comparative politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956.). 290. Immanuel Kant, Toward perpetual peace and other writings on politics, peace, and history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp.74–75. 291.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Abraham Maslow, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, delayed gratification, different worldview, longitudinal study, off-the-grid, peak-end rule, Skype, stem cell, the long tail

And it all happened because of an assuredly normal circumstance: a patient and family unready to confront the reality of her disease. I asked Marcoux what he hopes to accomplish for terminal lung cancer patients when they first come to see him. “I’m thinking, can I get them a pretty good year or two out of this?” he said. “Those are my expectations. For me, the long tail for a patient like her is three to four years.” But this is not what people want to hear. “They’re thinking ten to twenty years. You hear that time and time again. And I’d be the same way if I were in their shoes.” You’d think doctors would be well equipped to navigate the shoals here, but at least two things get in the way.

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I think of Gould and his essay every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan. * * * FOR SARA, THERE would be no miraculous recovery, and when the end approached, neither she nor her family was prepared.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

p. 106 ‘when per capita income reaches about $4,000, people demand a clean-up of their local streams and air’. Goklany, I. 2008. The Improving State of the World. Cato Institute. p. 107 ‘because people were enriching themselves and demanding higher standards’. Moore, S. and Simon, J. 2000. It’s Getting Better All the Time. Cato Institute. p. 107 ‘The “long tail” of the distribution’. Anderson, C. 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion. p. 108 ‘now-unfashionable philosopher Herbert Spencer who insisted that freedom would increase along with commerce’. Quotes are from 1842 essay for The Nonconformist and 1853 essay for The Westminster Review.

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The market found it. Moreover, thanks to the internet, the economy is getting better and better at meeting the desires of minorities. Because the very few people in the world who need fishing rod attachments or books on fourteenth-century suicide can now find suppliers on the web, niches are thriving. The ‘long tail’ of the distribution – the very many products that are each wanted by very few, rather than vice versa – can be serviced more and more easily. Freedom itself owes much to commerce. The great drive to universal suffrage, religious tolerance and female emancipation began with pragmatic enthusiasts for free enterprise, like Ben Franklin, and was pressed forward by the urban bourgeoisie as a response to economic growth.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

There is even discussion about “charging corporate recruiters for access to the best students.”21 World-class universities are taking a gamble that the global reach and visibility that MOOCs give their “rock-star” faculties will draw the best and brightest students to their admissions offices. Like their counterparts in the commercial arena, they are hoping to grab hold of the long tail and profit by offering the courses free online to millions of students and corralling in a tiny percentage of those students to their campuses. Their rationale is that by giving their intellectual gifts away for free, they will be helping millions of online students who ordinarily couldn’t afford such an education, while capturing a sufficient number of the best students to maintain their own brick-and-mortar operations.

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The cost of serving the 100,000th student who enrolls in a MOOC is essentially zero, which is why the price is zero, too. Open-source textbooks and other free online resources will drive the prices of supporting materials toward the zero line as well.22 What Carey is talking about is patently obvious. Whatever “marginal value” elite universities might exact on the long tail by providing free education to hundreds of millions of students is paltry compared to the loss of revenue to the brick-and-mortar system of higher education as a whole, when the marginal cost of teaching online is nearly zero and the courses are nearly free. Does any academic or social entrepreneur really believe that the traditional, centralized, brick-and-mortar education will survive as we know it in a world where the best education money can buy is made free online?

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In a sober editorial on “The End of the Free Lunch,” it takes umbrage at what it regards as a faulty assumption that if social media sites can aggregate millions of users by providing them with free content, advertisers will be anxious to target ads on the medium, in the hope of capturing a percentage of the “long tail.” But what if the users aren’t listening, aren’t watching, and are looking to their peers for product recommendations and validation? The Economist concludes that “the number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought, and Silicon Valley seems to be entering another ‘nuclear winter.’”89 Advertising revenues are beginning to reflect the pessimism.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440–55. DiSalvo, David. “Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?” Scientific American Mind, January 2010, p. 48. Elberse, Anita. “The Power of Stars: Do Star Actors Drive the Success of Movies?” Journal of Marketing 71, no. 4 (2007). ———. “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” Harvard Business Review (2008). Erdogan, Zafer B., Michael Baker, and Stephen Tagg. “Selecting Celebrity Endorsers: The Practitioner’s Perspective.” Journal of Advertising Research 41, no. 3 (2001): 39–48. Facebook.com. “Press Room: Statistics.” www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf#!/press/info.php?

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Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars.” The effects have also been found in empirical studies of sports. See Lucifora and Simmons, “Superstar Effects in Sports,” and Nüesch, “The Economics of Superstars and Celebrities,” chapter 2. 23. DiMaggio, “Classification in Art.” 24. Elberse, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?” 25. See Adler, “Stardom and Talent.” Adler argues that increasing numbers of people consuming the same product generates greater consumption capital, which makes the product more valuable. A rock concert, after all, is more powerful when the stadium is full and people are engaging in a shared experience. 26.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

But when you typed in the name of even the most obscure song you could think of, it would grind away until it found the song on the computer hard drive of some stranger you would never meet. Someone always had your song; the system could not be stumped. (The ability of the Internet to expeditiously deliver items that appealed to only a tiny slice of the buying population, to the very few who wanted such goods, would later be dubbed the Long Tail effect.) Then you would begin the process—not always successful—of handshaking with that stranger's computer and downloading a song. Sometimes it took a while, but it was always amazing when the download was finished and you'd play the song. So amazing that the fact that you had gotten the song for free was almost a secondary consideration.

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Notes 139 MP3.com, Napster, WinAmp: In addition to my own reporting, I consulted Coleman John Alderman, Sonic Boom: Napster, MPS, and the New Pioneers of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001). My researcher Jodi Mardesch also supplied me with earlier interviews of MP3.coms Michael Robertson. 142 Long Tail: The best explanation of this by far comes in Chris Andersons The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less or More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 146 "the false lesson of Napster": Walt Mossberg, "Personal Technology," The Wall Street Journal, February 7,2002. 148 a major military campaign: Besides my interviews with people inside Apple and at the record labels, I drew on Peter Burrows, "Show Time!"

Applied Text Analysis With Python: Enabling Language-Aware Data Products With Machine Learning by Benjamin Bengfort, Rebecca Bilbro, Tony Ojeda

data science, full text search, natural language processing, quantitative easing, sentiment analysis, statistical model, the long tail

Bag-of-words models and the frequency representation in particular rely on the assumption that word count is a close enough approximation of the document contents, encoding enough information to differentiate it from other documents. However, this comes at the cost of highly frequent terms being represented by orders of magnitude over other terms. In the next section we will explore one-hot encoding, which eliminates this problem. One-Hot Encoding Frequency based encoding methods suffer from the long tail, or Zipfian distribution, that characterizes natural language. Because of this distribution, some features (tokens) are orders of magnitude more “significant” than other less frequent tokens and hapax legomena. This can have a significant impact on some models, particularly models which expect normally distributed features, generalized linear models for example.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

As a matter of disclosure, one of the authors of this book was a paid consultant for the plaintiffs in the antitrust case against Apple. 19. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, 593. 20. This results in what Chris Anderson called “the long tail,” where the low costs of distribution allow for works to remain in circulation, even if their audience is small in absolute terms. See Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (New York: Hatchette Books, 2006). 21. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm, accessed September 5, 2015. 22. Ibid. 23. Kevin Poulsen, “Hackers Sued for Tinkering with Xbox Games,” SecurityFocus, February 9, 2005, http://www.securityfocus.com/news/10466, accessed September 5, 2015. 24.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Until Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan made his famous Ruskin College speech about educational standards in 1976 it had barely featured as a political issue. For the past forty years it has moved much closer to the centre of national life—yet many established Anywhere biases have remained in place: the dominance of elite universities, the lowly status of much technical and vocational education, the negligence towards the ‘long tail’ bottom 20 or 30 per cent of school leavers still in often chaotic schools. Real spending on education has doubled in that thirty year period with a big increase under New Labour (though as a share of national income it has remained relatively constant). There has also been a big change in expectations towards the mass of pupils who, for the first time in British history, have been expected to take exams and acquire qualifications (including, for almost half the age cohort, higher educational ones).

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(Similarly, for the growing ethnic minority middle class there is evidence of clustering at the bottom of the top, see the Policy Exchange report ‘Bittersweet Success’ on glass ceilings for ethnic minorities.)11 It may indeed be the case that the longer-term trend is for high levels of social mobility—both absolute and relative—to become ever harder to achieve, particularly at the very top and in the long tail at the bottom. Social mobility has always been ‘sticky’ downwards—once people reach a certain level of wealth, or position, their children tend not to fall back too far; this was true even in the Soviet bloc. When, for example, the big bang swept out some of the old school tie brokers from the City they were more likely to become estate agents than binmen.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For example, almost everybody kind of likes Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours, so the fact that I bought it long ago says nothing special about me. But I am one of the few people who really digs their earlier, bluesy Then Play On. That says something about me that might be useful to marketers. As Joseph Turow explained in Niche Envy, and Wired editor Chris Anderson describes in The Long Tail, market segmentation is vital to today’s commerce. In order for marketers and vendors to target messages and products to us, they must know our eccentricities—what makes us distinctive, or, at least, to which small interest groups we belong. Forging a mass audience or market is a waste of time and money unless you are selling soap.67 Even the modern liberal state, like those of North America and Western Europe, wants us to be ourselves.

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Brower, review of Sonia Combe, Une société sous surveillance: Les intellectuels et la Stasi, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2 (2001): 88–92; Gary Bruce, “The Prelude to Nationwide Surveillance in East Germany: Stasi Operations and Threat Perceptions, 1945–1953,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 2 (May 1, 2003): 3–31; Sonia Combe, Une société sous surveillance: Les intellectuels et la Stasi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999). 67. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 68. Eric Lichtblau, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008). 240 NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 5–22 CH APTER 4. THE GO O GLI ZAT I O N O F T H E WO R L D 1. Amit Agarwal, “French Town Changing Name to Improve Ranks in Google,” Digital Inspiration, February 25, 2009, www.labnol.org; Mark Milian, “French Town Eu Considers Changing Name for Web Search Visibility,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2009. 2.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

As a result, DoubleClick proudly cites on its website “over 2,000 successful implementations” of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers apiece. Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the Web’s content. DoubleClick’s offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any Web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency-friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and pop-ups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.

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What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency-friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and pop-ups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising. The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire Web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. Not surprisingly, other Web 2.0 success stories demonstrate this same behavior. eBay enables occasional transactions of only a few dollars between single individuals, acting as an automated intermediary. Napster (though shut down for legal reasons) built its network not by building a centralized song database, but by architecting a system in such a way that every downloader also became a server, and thus grew the network.

The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

In 2007 both the U.S. government and Microsoft were caught by Wikipedia editors tampering with their own entries (editing your own Boundaries | 149 page is a practice frowned on by Wikipedia users). A 2005 study by the science journal Nature compared forty-two science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They found an average of four errors per entry in Wikipedia, three errors per entry in Britannica. But as Chris Anderson noted in The Long Tail, “shortly after the report came out, the Wikipedia entries were corrected, while Britannica will have to wait for its next reprinting.” Wikipedia is usually pretty reliable, and covers much more ground than a traditional encyclopedia ever has. It may not be perfect, but if you want detailed information on the history of the Jedi, the Pamela Anderson sex tape, or the Homebrew Computer Club, Wikipedia rules Britannica every time.

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Page 149 Brian Bergstein, “Microsoft Offers Cash for Wikipedia Edit,” Newsvine.com, January 23, 2007. http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2007/01/23/534218 -microsoft-offers-cash-for-wikipedia-edit. Stacy Schiff, “Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, July 31, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/31/060731fa_fact. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (New York: Hyperion, 2006), p. 69. Jimmy Wales, interview by author, November 14, 2006 (other quotes from Wales that appear throughout this chapter are taken from the same interview). Page 150 Gregg Keizer, “Linux To Ring Up $35 Billion By 2008,” TechWeb, December 16, 2004. http://www.techweb.com/wire/showArticle.jhtml?

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

So while Volta’s invention of the battery did not itself invalidate any of Galvani’s theories about animal electricity, it effectively shut down all further challenge. Volta had changed the terms of the debate, leaving his contemporaries so dazzled by the device and its potential that they forgot what the original fight was about. Galvani’s ideas weren’t so much disproved as abandoned. The long tail In the wake of Volta’s perceived victory, Galvani’s theories were shunned by science for nearly half a century. Galvanism was quickly overrun by quacks and their most gruesome pseudo-medical treatments. At the same time, the battery—and the “artificial” electricity it was able to make flow continuously for the first time—quickly went on to underpin many of the century’s most important advances in the physical sciences.

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Now, part of this is just the inevitable rollercoaster of the hype cycle. First, you get a big splashy announcement of a new possibility and everyone is very excited. Then the grind of basic research sets in, and there’s a long trough of disillusionment because the new hot devices aren’t ready immediately. Eventually, positive results start to emerge from the long tail of clinical research, and slowly the once-hyped revolution is integrated into routine care at your doctor’s office, and fades into the background of everyday life. And in fact there are signs that this is starting to happen—in 2022 Galvani put the first autoimmune disorder device into a clinical trial.7 So maybe electroceuticals are tracing this classic innovation curve.

A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson, the long tail

Inside the building rugs and tapestries warmed one central room, which was lit by a score of small torches. A big square bed against one wall was piled high with quilted blankets, and the queen pulled Thel onto them, kissing him passionately. As they kissed the cat purred and licked at him, its little tongue rough against his skin. Thel thrust with his cock at the cat's head, and the long tail pulled back up into the queen until cat and cock disappeared in her, in one fluid purring motion. Then they were joined and the queen was laughing at his expression, rolling over onto him and riding his thrusts. She rolled sideways and Thel buried his face in her tangled hair and plunged away, and they rocked in rhythm to the hand drums for as long as he could hold on, until his spine shot great bolts of electric pleasure down and around and up, the pleasure radiating sideways in him until he felt it tingling in his arms, his hands, his face, all his skin.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near zero audience they usually have now. It becomes easier to discover that labor-of-love masterpiece on the vegan diets of southern Indian priests. Far out in the long tail of the distribution curve—that extended place of low to no sales where most of the books in the world live—digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked.

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Would you rather employ the expensive studio pros who come up with a single campaign using their best guess, or a thousand creative kids endlessly tweaking and testing their ads of your product? As always, it will be a dilemma for the crowd: Should they work on an ad for a reliable bestseller—and try to better a thousand others with the same idea—or go for the long tail, where you might have an unknown product all to yourself if you get it right? Fans of products would love to create ads for it. Naturally they believe no one else knows it as well as they do, and that the current ads (if any) are lame, so they will be confident and willing to do a better job. How realistic is it to expect big companies to let go of their advertising?

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Less valuable, or more niche, resources can be ceded to ecosystem partners without significantly weakening the competitive position of the platform itself. This principle explains why platform managers need to keep a careful watch on new features or apps that appear on the platform. These will usually make their first appearance far down the “long tail” of adoption, with relatively few platform participants using them to co-create value. Most will stay there, but a few will show the ability to jump rank, climbing rapidly toward the head of the distribution curve. A few will even show signs of attracting their own interactive communities, which means they have the potential to become platforms themselves.

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In addition, we noted the need for tools that help clients benchmark their capabilities against other, similar companies on the platform, as well as tools to help developers benchmark their capabilities against other developers on the platform. Such tools can help SAP users compete more effectively with rivals who are not on the platform. A final set recommendation that we developed with SAP is to look for new business service capabilities that cut across industry verticals and new features that are rapidly climbing the long tail, meaning that they are growing in popularity among business users. These represent new sources of value that platforms like SAP can absorb into its platform for the benefit of ecosystem partners who have yet to discover them. Data analytics can thus significantly augment the capabilities of both the platform company and its ecosystem partners, making the platform more successful and greatly increasing its ability to generate value for users.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Unencumbered by moral considerations, it is free to profit without limit and use the very latest business practices to do so. Crime, Inc. uses freemium pricing, gamification, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, reputation engines, just-in-time manufacturing, online training, swarms for distributed project management in pursuit of the long tail of crime victims around the world. Global criminal syndicates such as Innovative Marketing in Kiev have earned upward of half a billion dollars (tax-free of course) in just three years. These outlaws, Moore’s outlaws, are fully networked and capable of leveraging and subverting any technology at will.

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That is why today it’s possible for hackers to rob not just one person at a time but 100 million or more, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation and Target data breaches. Exploit tool kits like Blackhole and SpyEye commit crime “automagically” by minimizing the need for human labor, thereby dramatically reducing costs to Crime, Inc. They also allow hackers to pursue the “long tail” of opportunity, committing millions of thefts in small amounts so that victims don’t report them and law enforcement has no way to track them. While particular high-value targets (companies, nations, celebrities, high-net-worth individuals, or objects of affection or scorn) are specifically and individually targeted, the way the majority of the public is hacked is by automated scripted computer malware—one large digital fishing net that scoops up anything and everything online with a vulnerability that can be exploited.

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(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 26 Modern criminals are innovating: John Leyden, “Malware Devs Embrace Open-Source,” Register, Feb. 10, 2012 . 27 To drive sales: Ablon, Libicki, and Golay, “Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data,” 11. 28 Organized cyber criminals: Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, rev. ed. (New York: Hyperion, 2008); Goodman, “What Business Can Learn from Organized Crime.” 29 RankMyHack.​com awards points: Riva Richmond, “Web Site Ranks Hacks and Bestows Bragging Rights,” New York Times, Aug. 21, 2011. 30 In Montenegro: Jim Finkle, “Inside a Global Cybercrime Ring,” Reuters, March 24, 2010. 31 In early 2014: Paul Peachey, “Cybercrime Boss Offers a Ferrari for Hacker Who Dreams Up the Biggest Scam,” Independent, May 11, 2014. 32 The concept of crowdsourcing: Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 2006. 33 While hundreds of examples: Marc Goodman, “The Rise of Crime-Sourcing,” Forbes, Oct. 3, 2011. 34 YouTube is replete: Ibid. 35 In Washington, D.C.: Elizabeth Fiedler, “Retailers Fight ‘Flash Robs,’ ” NPR.​org, Nov. 25, 2011; Annie Vaughan, “Teenage Flash Mob Robberies on the Rise,” FoxNews.com, June 18, 2011. 36 In the United States: Chris Foresman, “Senator to Apple, Google: Why Are DUI Checkpoint Apps Still Available?

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

If you can find a macro-trend that is going to drive behavior, it makes it a lot easier. Ride that wave, rather than try to make that wave happen yourself. What you do is simplify, figure out a way that companies can do small volumes at a lower cost, or just use similar platforms, because the M2M space is the long tail of most of the economy. But if I was going to invest in Machine-to-Machine, I would probably be investing somewhere in the analytics space. Glenn Lurie sees the largest potential in the connected home and the connected car: I do believe we’ll see breakthroughs in automotive; I do believe we’ll see breakthroughs in health care.

Relevant Search: With Examples Using Elasticsearch and Solr by Doug Turnbull, John Berryman

business logic, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, domain-specific language, Dr. Strangelove, fail fast, finite state, fudge factor, full text search, heat death of the universe, information retrieval, machine readable, natural language processing, premature optimization, recommendation engine, sentiment analysis, the long tail

These searches form the long tail of search. Figure 10.4. For long-tailed search, a majority of traffic is associated with rare search items. Search’s long tail can make purely data-driven relevance feedback challenging. If your application has a long tail, you may need to rely on more indirect qualitative measures for relevance feedback. In our gardening example, user data for popular searches such as “Hoses,” “Flowers,” and “Pots” could be useful. But for most other searches (“Rosa rubiginosa”, “Rosa rubiginosa Fertilizer”), user data may be a vague rubric. The long-tail data might tell you what use cases are important to users (such as searching on scientific names), but not much else.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Chris Anderson (my successor at Wired) named this effect “the Long Tail,” for the visually graphed shape of the sales distribution curve: a low, nearly interminable line of items selling only a few copies per year that form a long “tail” for the abrupt vertical beast of a few bestsellers. But the area of the tail was as big as the head. With that insight, the aggregators had great incentive to encourage audiences to click on the obscure items. They invented recommendation engines and other algorithms to channel attention to the rare creations in the long tail. Even web search companies like Google, Bing, and Baidu found it in their interests to reward searchers with the obscure because they could sell ads in the long tail as well.

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Even web search companies like Google, Bing, and Baidu found it in their interests to reward searchers with the obscure because they could sell ads in the long tail as well. The result was that the most obscure became less obscure. If you live in any of the 2 million small towns on Earth, you might be the only one in your town to crave death metal music, or get turned on by whispering, or want a left-handed fishing reel. Before the web, you’d never have a way to satisfy that desire. You’d be alone in your fascination. But now, satisfaction is only one click away. Whatever your interests as a creator are, your 1,000 true fans are one click from you.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Field biologists and naturalists – bearded, besweatered and booted – gradually found themselves Good-geners.25 Is Choosing Cheap? The first round went to the Fisherians. Fisher’s intuition was fed into mathematical models and emerged intact. In the early 1980s three scientists all programmed their computers to play an imaginary game of females choosing long-tailed males and bearing both sons that had the long tails and daughters that shared the preference of their mothers. The longer the male’s tail, the greater his mating success, but the smaller his chances of surviving to mate at all. Their key discovery was that there exists a ‘line of equilibrium’ at any point on which the game can stop. On that line the handicap to a female’s sons of having a long tail is balanced exactly by the advantage those sons have in attracting a mate.26 In other words, the choosier the females, the brighter and more elaborate will be male ornaments, which is exactly what you find in nature.

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It is a good question with a paradoxical answer, for which we owe a debt of thanks to Amotz Zahavi, a mercurial Israeli scientist. In 1975 he saw that the more a peacock’s tail or a bird of paradise’s plumes handicapped the male, the more honest was the signal they sent to the female. She could be assured by the very fact of his survival that the long-tailed male in front of her had been through a trial and passed. He had survived despite being handicapped. The more costly the handicap, the better it would be as a signal of his genetic quality; therefore peacocks’ tails would evolve faster if they were handicaps than if they were not. This is the reverse of Fisher’s prediction that peacocks’ tails should gradually cease evolving once they become severe handicaps.37 It is an appealing – and familiar – thought.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Proponents of a free model point out that adoption and attention are the most precious of currencies. Twitter waited until it had millions of active users before introducing advertising, and despite the outcry over promoted tweets, growth has continued. Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail (Hyperion), observes that King Gillette pioneered the idea of giving something away (handles) to make money on something else (razor blades).[103] But in many ways, online users have strong expectations that the Internet should be free, which means it’s hard to charge even for valuable things.

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Li, Charlene, Engagement Funnel Changes Libin, Phil, Backupify’s Customer Lifecycle Learning, Freemium Versus Paid Liew, Roger, Data-Driven Versus Data-Informed LikeBright case study, Getting Answers at Scale LinkedIn site, Finding People to Talk To, LikeBright “Mechanical Turks” Its Way into TechStars local maximum value, Data-Driven Versus Data-Informed Localmind case study, Build It Before You Build It (or, How to Validate the Solution) Lockheed Martin, Lean from Within: Intrapreneurs Long Funnel, The Long Funnel, What Mode of E-commerce Are You? The Long Tail (Anderson), Freemium Versus Paid longitudinal studies, Cohort Analysis Lord, Joanna, The Discipline of One Metric That Matters Lovell, Nicholas, Monthly Average Revenue Per Mobile User loyalty mode (e-commerce model), What Mode of E-commerce Are You?, What Makes a Good Leading Indicator?

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Another way of saying this is that the entertainment industry is the classic, indeed definitive, example of what economists call a “hit-driven” industry.6 In such a context, a few hits will outperform the rest, sometimes by several orders of magnitude. The difference between number one and number twenty on any entertainment media chart is well captured by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail (itself a hit). While the book is famous for celebrating Internet business models, what Anderson also shows, using actual industry data, is that a relatively small number of hits account for the bulk of the revenue in those businesses. Hence the peculiar distribution of demand, as pictured below, which typically confounds and frustrates management consultants.

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Economic perspectives on the film industry include John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny, An Economic History of Film (New York: Routledge, 2005), and the interesting discussion of uncertainty and the film industry in Arthur S. De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2004). 7. Anderson’s theory, and his discussion of the interplay of “head” and “tail” consumer demand, may be found in Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 8. De Vany, Hollywood Economics, 4. 9. Steven Ross’s biography is gripping reading, and also provides a history of the creation of Time Warner. See Connie Bruck, Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 10.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

There was the Head, consisting of top-shelf, quality stuff—footage from TV networks, studios, and musicians signed to labels. Then the Torso, amateur YouTubers like Fred and Smosh with prospects of going pro or at least having commercial appeal. The Long Tail was the bottomless heaps of clips where Google, for now, saw little economic value. (Google ranked these, as it did with everything. Videos categorized as nine and ten went to the Head, six through eight the Torso, the rest to the Long Tail.) George Strompolos, the Google Video transplant, sat at YouTube’s Torso unit. As a lanky teenager in Denver, he would set a camera on the pavement with his friends, hit record, and attempt skateboarding feats, gathering around TVs to watch the results.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture