Recently in Reflections 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.
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.
A very interesting on how the native mobile application market is dying. In general I agree with the author's assessment. Monetizing this space has been hard and very fragmented, and even after looking at Android I still see it very tough.
I ran across two interesting articles today. These are not industry news but reflections and reviews, so depending on your level of interest you may or may not find them relevant to what you usually see here.
Welcome to Naked Generation is an interesting article looking at the implications of being too much in the open in the online world, and a very valid question of "guys, were are we heading?" There is a very wide spectrum of people with online lives, and social networks in general are creating more and more of a "it's ok to be in the open" attitude. Personally I don't like it - just an opinion - and I relate very much to what Caroline McCarthy says in the article.
The other article is Elinor Mills' experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk. The concept of AMT intrigued me from the early days Amazon announced it, and I still think it's a noble idea. But aside from volunteer collaboration, I have never been able to find justification in people contributing to it (read financial benefits). So it was interesting to see somebody actually spending some time to see if it makes sense or not. I guess I still think the same - it does not.
Welcome to Naked Generation is an interesting article looking at the implications of being too much in the open in the online world, and a very valid question of "guys, were are we heading?" There is a very wide spectrum of people with online lives, and social networks in general are creating more and more of a "it's ok to be in the open" attitude. Personally I don't like it - just an opinion - and I relate very much to what Caroline McCarthy says in the article.
The other article is Elinor Mills' experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk. The concept of AMT intrigued me from the early days Amazon announced it, and I still think it's a noble idea. But aside from volunteer collaboration, I have never been able to find justification in people contributing to it (read financial benefits). So it was interesting to see somebody actually spending some time to see if it makes sense or not. I guess I still think the same - it does not.
