Recently in Ideas Category

There has been quite a bit of discussion around the article by Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School, on the Long Tail theory and its validity: "She focused on the music and home-video industries--two markets that Anderson and others frequently hold up as examples of the long tail in action--reviewing sales data from Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen VideoScan, the online music service Rhapsody, and the Australian DVD-by-mail service Quickflix. What she found may surprise you: Blockbusters are capturing even more of the market than they used to, and consumers in the tail don't really like niche products much."

I did not post anything here until I got a chance to read the whole article for myself (it's six pages long and can be found at Should You Invest in the Long Tail?) and now that I've read it I think it has some very interesting valid points, although in my opinion it does not invalidate the Long Tail theroy.  Like many other things in life, it boils down to interpretations.  I think both the Long Tail theory and Elberse's thoughts are important when one is thinking about a market, and they are not contradictory.  To understand this better, it's important to read Anderson's response (although it's a bit light), and more importantly a comment posted underneath it by Ali Partovi, founder of iLike.  Partovi's observation is very interesting.

Also, Elberse refers to McPhee's Thoey of Exposure in her article, which I think deservers to be noticed and is a great descirption of mass consumer behavior.  This is one of the areas where I think Anderon's conclusion on taste for niche products is wrong and Elberse's idea (i.e., McPhee's) is closer to reality in large.

Some interesting interviews and commentaries:

Interview with Google's Eric Schmidt by CNBC

Interview with Google's Larry Page by Fortune Magazine

Future of the Web - commentaries by ten visionaries via BBC (a couple of them with more details here)

 

Mashable has compiled an extensive list of various open source and free applications in various categories.  Definitely worth having around as a reference.  At this point it is beyond denial that open source startups have a good chance of success:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/23/open-source/

This is funny because I have been looking at this issue for some time now, and I was feeling the need for it, and I even had a prototype of something like this in the making.  Another one of those ideas that feels like a good service and a few months down the road is launched by one of the big gus...  Oh well.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9782108-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph is an interesting paper from a person who understands social networking - the creator of LiveJournal.  Brad Fitzpatrick has looked at key interoperability issues and user requirements that are becoming harder and harder to address as more and more social networks and social-network-look-alikes are popping up.  With him being at Google now, I think this paper shows that he's up to something big.