I was just perusing some blog feeds in the downtime on Christmas Day and came across a link on Brand New to an Economist article about the hit aspect of the Long Tail debate.

More and more articles about the Long Tail tend to devolve the theory into a general comment on the state of industries affected by Internet economics.  Whereas Chris Anderson’s original argument is very ‘niche’ and specific - describing a set of circumstances that result in a specific outcome rather than a large, generalized theory of everything Internet related.

As I see more commentary on the Long Tail, it’s like a Long Tail of the Long Tail - arguments that tend to twist and turn the original idea to suit a set of observations or opinions.  Sometimes interesting, sometimes a stretch.

But alas, that is the destiny of many a theory.  Maybe the best ones tend to devolve to this kind of reference state - their specifics long ago forgotten, but their general idea intact well enough to guide curious minds who happen along their path.

The Tipping Point is another one that has achieved this ethereal status - although I can’t but help wonder if that was the point all along.

I can’t also help wonder if, by reducing the original Long Tail argument to a reference point, a lot of the original intent and usefulness is lost.

The Economist article has a section on the success of hit TV shows despite falling ratings from wandering eyeballs.  The argument being that even with reduced audiences numbers, we are still gravitating towards these ‘hits’ - as if there is comfort still in broad and common social discourse based on shared entertainment experiences.  Yet network TV in the US is in no way, shape, idea, structure, form, construction, similar in anyway, at all, to the basic tenants that underly the Long Tail theory.

The Long Tail adds nothing to the argument other than a reference for the general idea - that TV is generally full of more choice, that some of this is useful, but we still tend to choose similar things.

Chris Anderson has largely given up the fight to defend different interpretations of his theory.  I think this is a good thing.

It’s time to let the Long Tail go silently into the night.  With the realization that in death, it’s infinitely more powerful than in life.

The Long Tail, I predict, will truly become the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Internet theories.

I recently took a readership survey on the Digg site and realized there were some fundamental flaws in the way we are trying to understand online behavior.  And this is by no means solely a problem at Digg, it speaks to a deep seated bias we have when trying to probe media behavior.

Some examples from the Digg survey:

Question: How often would you say you go online?  Many times a day, daily, weekly, etc.

Between my home computer that I never turn off, my work computer I turn off once a week, my cellphone and my Ipod Touch, I don’t think I am never NOT online.

At some point the distinction between online and offline blurred to such a degree that there is now no meaningful demarcation.   I can certainly ‘disconnect’ myself, and do.  But even then, I am conscious that my online presence still ‘exsits’ and perpetuates itself without my direct involvement.

In this sense, the more important measure is how integrated my ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives are, not how often I switch between the two.

Question:  Which of the following do you visit at least once a month?  <list of websites>

What exactly is a ‘visit’?  I have a iGoogle home page that streams 10 different RSS feeds, am I ‘visiting’ each of those sites every time I read the feed?  Do I have to click through to them for it to count?  What about my RSS reader where I look at the BBC news, is each article a visit?  What about the CNN Breaking News emails I get?  Are those ‘visits’?  If I never turn off Twhirl, how many visits is that a day to Twitter feeds?

Again, ‘visit’ is a remnant of an earlier online experience and one with roots in TV and radio - where the only way to get to the information was to physically change the channel.

We need to think about ‘consumption’ not ‘visitation’ when thinking about online media.

Question: Rank these reasons for spending time online - entertain, research, manage my life, etc.

Why do I go online?  What’s most important?  This question loses all meaning when you think of your online life as an extension of your offline one.  ’Online’ is not a destination with a cause and reason to visit, it’s a fluid extension of real needs/wants/desires.

‘Needs’ is the real issue here - what needs does your online life fulfill?

The survey continued in the same vein with subsequent questions.  Websites were treated as destinations and ‘visits’ and the online experience had reason and purpose.

I think it’s time to rethink a lot of how we measure ‘online behavior’.  Rather than assuming individuals online are ‘destination’ seekers, we need to think about how individuals aggregate and move between the nodes of the network they create.  It doesn’t mean destination seekers don’t exist, it just doesn’t adequately explain the complexity of their online world.

Bottom line, why measure online behavior like we used to measure offline behavior?  A mouse isn’t simply a different way to navigate, it’s a paradigm shift in your relationship to information.

I thought Digg, of all companies, would have understood that.

My wife and I went along to a local San Franciso screening of Fresh a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a documentary film by Ana Sofia Joanes about the Fresh food movement - locally grown and harvested food (pic is my abysmal attempt to document the occasion with a cell phone camera).

My wife has become very involved with the Fresh, locally grown food movement out here on the West coast.  So naturally, by osmosis, so have I.  Well, to the extent that I eat everything she buys.  If truth be told though, I generally enjoy fresh, locally grown food a lot more than supermarket fare nowadays.

The screening of this movie was the first time I’d really seen a collection of Fresh ‘foodies’ all in one location.  A real eclectic bunch - everyone from your ‘farmer Joe” types to hip urban chic.

The screening was MC’d by a local food entrepreneur who is opening a ‘locally grown’ community restaurant in Berkeley.  He introduced the movie and filmmaker and also chaired the post screening panel.

The panel was an impressive mix of ‘fooderati’ with the main attraction being Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food.   The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a great read and I would recommend it to anyone.  It was also, loosely, the basis for Fresh, the movie.

The whole ‘locally grown’ movement is a complicated one with many different strands.  At its heart though is the notion that you can’t build a sustainable food system based on the principles of the industrial revolution.  Economies of scale work for widgets, but not for tomatoes, or chickens, or beef, or fish.  As soon as you try to ‘manufacture’ these, you have to homogenize inputs and processes to such an extent that any components of the natural system Mother Nature perfected over millennia disappear.

That natural system is based on carefully calibrated feedback loops and symbiotic relationships.  Not the sort of things you find in chicken farms - where thousands of birds are kept alive through a combination of cruel mutilation and drugs.

The result, as Michael Pollan likes to say, is ‘there is no cheap food’.  To industrialize the food process means to introduce foreign agents (like antibiotics) to keep costs down and output high.  This results in lower and lower supermarket prices, but higher health costs as we all cope with diseases that were largely non-existent 100 years ago (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.).

I never really gave much thought to this until my wife (bless her) told me to look closely at the ingredients of the peanut butter I was eating.  As I was reading out the 20 different chemicals listed on the back, she told me that peanut butter is made from crushing peanuts and adding a bit of salt - why would you need anything else?  She was right.  The added ingredients are to make it taste a certain way and to keep you coming back for more.  Also to make it last longer on the shelf.

If you look at the vast majority of other processed foods, it’s the same story.  We’ve sacrificed natural form for convenience and taste.  And in the process, made huge sacrifices in our health.  Fixable, of course, by the benevolent pharmaceutical companies who have a pill for every condition (ok, that’s stretching the conspiracy side of the argument a bit, but it’s hard to ignore the modern trend of food that makes you sick and pills to fix the problem).

As I was sitting in the theatre and taking all of this in, it struck me what exactly this locally grown food movement is up against.  The combined might of industrial agriculture, big retail, and the drug companies.  That’s a pretty formidable set of opponents.

And the battle isn’t only over facts and figures, it’s to capture hearts and minds.  There is a long legacy of industrial food consumption in the US.  Long and treasured.  With some of the most cherished brands selling promises of homely goodness and holiday fun packaged in dangerous foods - Oreo Cookies, hotdogs, McDonald’s hamburgers, etc.

To destroy 50 to 70 years of brand equity is hard to do.  I don’t envy the their task.  But to win this battle, destroy it they must.

I’ve personally discovered that you can’t get half pregnant in this debate.  As you move your diet away from processed foods and wean yourself off junk, you can’t easily go back.  You body ends up rejecting the chemical tastes.  Your taste’s change entirely.  The thought of McDOnald’s, once the staple of my Friday nights, now makes me physically ill.

The locally grown food movement is drawing the battle lines for the next big conflict in corporate America - and this time it’s not just one industry in the firing line (as was the case with Tobacco), it’s multiple industries.  All supporting and sustaining the unsustainable industrial food chain.

So grab a chair, a bucket of locally grown organic popcorn, and watch the ride.  It will be an interesting one.

Consumerism has become a fashionable area of concern, centred on the belief that there is a compelling need to strengthen the consumer’s position in the market-place. Consumerism is essentially a societal problem, based on the efforts of the average person to come to terms with everyday companies in everyday transactions. Yet the growth in size of business organisations, together with the increasing complexity of their offerings, is such that it is becoming ever more difficult for the ordinary individual to participate in transactions with any real hope of equality and satisfaction. It is this inequality of bargaining position that has become the “centrepoint” of consumer pressures on the community to provide for intervention and regulation in a socially constructive manner. Experience everywhere suggests, however, that it is not an easy area in which to operate. The issues of consumerism are complex and difficult to resolve, concerning as they do some of the most basic human relationships: those involving exchange. 

Journal of Management Decisions, circa 1974

Bryan Appleyard (author of Understanding the Present) has interviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of the Black Swan) for his Sunday Times article. You can read the interview here.

Of all the books I’ve read in the past 20 years, I’d have to say that both of these authors have left the most lasting impressions. To see Appleyard interview Taleb is a real pleasure.

Both authors go against the grain of common thinking about science, mathmatics and ultimately how we view our own world. It’s about time a lot of that thinking was shook up.

I highly recommend reading the interview.

Here are Taleb’s top life-tips (from the Appleyard interview):

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.