Mark Cuban has a very compelling piece up today that discusses some of the economics of the Long Tail. It is interesting mostly in that it is a very harsh, and potentially telling, view on just what success might take. There are quite a few interesting points, though I recommend you read the whole thing.

Mark’s first point is to provide more context around the Long Tail’s topography. He identifies new labels for two areas of the graph - The Vert Ramp and the Content Ceiling. Mark’s done a nice job explaining it but I just though the diagram needed some help so I created a new one:

Now, as I’ve shown it here, there are the Capital Needs on the Y-axis and Commercial Interests on the X-axis. Mark makes a good point that when you really are in it for the money - you need to be in it for the money. The last PEW study estimated that more than 10% of “bloggers” wanted to blog for the money. I’d imagine, however, that given the insight that blogging might net them more than pennies, quite a few more individuals would be interested in shaking the money tree. As Mark notes:

First content providers, whether podcasters, vloggers, bloggers, movie makers, writers, poets, whatever the content type make the decision of the creation of the content is about love or money. Is the goal of the finished product commercial, or purely personal ?

If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins.The bottom line is that people want to get paid for their work. Creators have a vision. They think there is something special about it, and they want to get rewarded for their effort. Its a simple goal in concept, but its incredibly difficult to achieve.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? - Blog Maverick

Mark introduces the notion of a Content Ceiling - reflecting the point where the tail starts to transition upwards. The Ceiling is actually the threshold where enough circumstances become positive that an actual business can ignite. For this reason, Mark refers to the many individuals toiling in the lower recesses of the Long Tail as the Ghetto. In the Long Tail Ghetto, there is an abundance of people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into a proposition that barely nets them minimum wage.

For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? - Blog Maverick

This is an interesting point as well, though I am not sure how much I agree as of yet. On the one hand, I believe that the economics of the Long Tail are fundamentally flawed if not solely than that they still revolve around hits. We are still in the very early stages of learning what influence and attention are valued, but ultimately, I believe that the eyeball model will cede in many different places to one based on influence. To that end, moving from a small scale publisher with a small audience, you will need a lot of money - the kind of money that makes publishing and distribution broad and meaningful quickly. Mark’s point seems to be that the crux of that happens in unline (that place not online).

Naturally, my role at SocialRoots taints my views on this world. Whereas I believe there is a ghetto.. I think there’s also a market. When the conversation is made granular - note a different set of tools is required to handle boulders than gems, it may be that distribution and reach are things that can equally be distributed.

If a hit today is 100M (viewers, listeners, readers, downloads, etc), what will it be in 3 years? How many tails are there? As infinite as the tail itself?

technorati tags:mark+cuban, long+tail, socialroots, content+ceiling, vert+ramp, blogging, podcasting, social+media

I’ve quickly posted some thoughts on the increasing trend towards parallel entrepreneurship over at the Blue Whale Labs blog. Read The Rise of the Parallel Entrepreneur.

For the last two weeks, Brian Solis and I have been discussing events and the role that blogging has had on them. We’ve done this largely as we actively engaged in the process at a variety of events in the Bay Area. More than a year ago, my life with syncPEOPLE was dedicated to the study of the role that social media can and would play in the event/conference business. It was a difficult process filled with fear and uncertainty. I’m happy to hear that there has been quite a sea change and the tide is moving in the right direction.

One of the major trends I have been observing is the migration to media. Almost every event organizer wants to hold onto the audience they have and to grow it in as many ways as possible. Remember this simple fact, sponsorship can’t grow without growth in attendance (up to the point of saturation, that is). It is this understanding of the world that has driven a lot of the experimentation in the conference industry. The truth, of course, is that there is not much room to not embrace new media and methods. Attendees have ever-changing needs and event organizers must adapt to new models.

In the last 2 weeks alone, I’ve been approached by no less than 4 events to assist in integrating social media into the attendee experience. I think it is a definite sign that more and more, everyone is looking back to the social dimension of events. It’s quite amazing how unsatisfying many events seem now when this is not properly planned and accounted for - after all, conferences are really about the contacts more so than the content.

This post was inspired by some discussion flowing today regarding the Nielson BuzzMetric client-only conference. The official word from the organizer was that the event was intended for its clients and that there were presentations of case studies from a variety of clients. Steve Rubel’s poses a broader question in response, “Should conferences ban blogging?” My simple answer: it depends.

While there are a number of reasons that organizers should consider integrating blogging and other social media into their event experience, I can undertand that under certain circumstances they might seek some privacy - though I do beg they consider it very carefully. In this case, it was a private event and there is no requirement for transparency. Naturally, asking people not to do something is often more like demanding they do the opposite - potentially undoing any attempt to “contain” the content.

Ultimately, I think we need to be more constructive in our criticism (Scott Karp agrees). While we all are empowered with our new suite of media tools, entitlement is still something quite different.

Since I’ve moved out to San Francisco, I’ve made it my personal mission to try and bring as many people together as possible - mostly just to see if I can. To further that agenda, I’ve been working with my partners at the Lab and good friend Brian Solis to organize something new and interesting.

The Crawl will take place on November 10th, 2006 at 5pm.
Here’s the details:

The Bubble-Free Bar Crawl is a celebration of our sacrifice. This event is for everyone toiling late at night to launch their own startup and take a piece of the pie. Most importantly, it’s a time for you to bring all those who are supporting you out for a good time and a thank you.

The Crawl will focus on the emerging tech corridor in downtown SF. There seems to be a huge number of startups cropping up and down 2nd Street. We’re starting at the Embarcadero and moving our way towards Market.

We’ll be hitting these places:

5:00 pm - Web 2.2 Conference / Citizen Space Open House
6:00 pm - Momo’s
6:45 pm - Nova
7:30 pm - Bacar
8:15 pm - Thirsty Bear
9:00 pm - House of Shields

We welcome anyone and everyone, just bring a friend, a happy disposition, and be on time.

Hope to see you there. RSVP here.

I’m in the process of putting together the Bubble-Free Bar Crawl for November 10th in San Francisco.  I’ve identified a number of bars that I want to put on the list but thought I would check with anyone who’s got some insider information on where we might want to target.

The plan is to make our way from the Embarcadero up to Market (or somewhere near there).

I’ll have more on the event once we finalize the list of bars.

Chris Anderson, purveyor of the Long Tail, has been heard discussing the related concept of the Abundance Economy. While I would love to provide you with a succinct definition, but David Hornick has done a very nice job already:

The Economy of Abundance allows business owners to defer choices to the end users. What better way to find out what consumers want than to give them everything and see what they actually buy. That is the paradigm of abundance. Why get your news programmed by CNN.com when you
can have your news bubble up from the collective wisdom of end users at Newsvine or Reddit? Why get your television programmed by CBS when you can leverage the collective wisdom of the web to find great shows like Lonelygirl15 or Ask a Ninja?
No longer will the success or failure of content be dictated solely by the Economy of Scarcity (e.g. Walmart). Rather, it will be dictated by the will of the consumers, as empowered by the Economy of Abundance.

Much like the Long Tail, the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business. But it points to another significant force at work in the new economy and suggests that entrepreneurs should think creatively about how their businesses might be transformed by utilizing abundant resources in a disruptive way. Like the Long Tail before it, I suspect that I will be seeing the Economy of Abundance permeate the presentations that I see in the coming months and year.

Source: VentureBlog, “Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance”

This ties in, of course, to the crowdsourcing theme started yesterday that all data needs to be transmuted into information before it is truly useful. In this abundance-driven model, it seems quite reasonable that we are increasingly forced to deal with depleted reserves of attention.

Perhaps the scarcity Anderson says ruled the world has simply been re-assigned to our own attention engines?

technorati tags:longtail, scarcity, abundance, chris+anderson, david+hornick

One of my resident roles in the Lab is to work with clients as they consider different methods for Crowdsourcing. Today, CNet’s got a quick writeup about the efforts at Collective Intellect:

The idea is to give traders back the early and easy access to critical data that they used to have when this information came through many fewer channels. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a Bloomberg terminal or subscriptions to news services could give you a jump on the hoi polloi. Today, it’s the masses that often have the jump, thanks to blogs and other tipster sites.

“They aren’t sure where a story will break and how it will break,” said Don Springer, Collective Intellect’s CEO. “Traders are going crazy.”

The system examines about 150,000 new postings a day. Then it analyzes them for sentiment–is it causing a stock to go up or down?–and credibility. The company then sends out data feeds and e-mails on stock activity and interesting news to subscribers.

Putting blogs to work for Wall Street | CNET News.com

I am sure that this arena will continue to mature over time in many different directions than we’re considering now. As an old friend from JD Power taught me: “There’s data and then there’s information.” We’re still in a data-rich world as far as it comes to social media - companies like Collective Intellect and BuzzLogic are starting to lay down the bridges that materialize the intelligence we’re seeking.

technorati tags:crowdsourcing, wall+street, collective+intelligence, buzzlogic

Tomorrow I will be joining a wide cross-section of the web development community at the Web Guild 2006 Annual Conference - Web 2.0, The New Web. I’m going to borrow some verbiage from Brian Solis:

This event is targeted at web professionals, such as usability & design engineers, internet marketing professionals (SEO and SEM), web application developers and internet entrepreneurs, as well as anyone that creates applications or services for users. From my conversation with the WebGuild, registered attendees include CxO, VPs, and Directors of Engineering and Marketing from Google, Yahoo, Cisco, AOL and more. There will also be VCs from Intel, Sequoia, Mayfield, Storm, Shasta, among others.

Source: PR 2.0, “This Thursday, WebGuild’s Annual Conference – Web 2.0, The New Web”

I’m most excited in all the coverage they will be having as relates to usability and user experience, two of the more interesting catalysts of the Web 2.0 environment. Om’s moderating a panel on just this topic.

If you would like to attend the event, there’s a special $40 discount I can hook you up with. Use code WGDY6 to get your discount here.

Since I’ve been out here, I’ve been trying to do my best to get to know the area and meet with a wide range of new people.  So far so good.

One of the most important friends I’ve had out here has been Anthony - a friend of a friend I’ve known for about 4 years now.  He’s a graphic designer, an artist, and a DJ.  Most importantly, though, he’s just a great guy and done his best to get me out and about.

This Saturday, we’re having a special party for him over at Otis.  He’ll be spinning for part of the night for sure so we hope you’ll come out and celebrate with us - starts at 8PM.

Details are posted on upcoming. There will be lots of people outside the tech bubble, to be sure.

The Social Media Club is getting things rolling quickly with their first workshop. Brian Solis published the press release today. I’ll definitely be in attendance.

PALO ALTO, CALIF. 10/17/06 – Social Media Club today announced its first workshop for high tech communications professionals. On October 23rd, From Social Media to Corporate Media (SM2CM), will offer an interactive workshop for high tech communications, PR, and advertising professionals to better understand Social Media. SM2CM will be held in SAPs conference center in Palo Alto from 1 to 6 p.m.This workshop is a unique hybrid of a traditional conference and an unconference. During the course of the afternoon on, attendees will hear short talks from leading Social Media practitioners and engage in conversations with other Silicon Valley professionals, leaving the workshop with an understanding of how their company can benefit from producing Corporate Media using Social Media tools.

PR 2.0

technorati tags:socialmediaclub, chris+heuer, kristie+wells, brian+solis