Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software best delivered as packaged bits. But the big problem with packaged software–or one big problem–is the risk associated with installation. It just might not work. The Web removes that problem.

In an anomaly that we would eventually recognize as commonplace on the internet, Touching the Void, a book that had gone out of print, remaindered before it hit paperback, was all but forgotten, started selling again in 1998. Chris Anderson wondered why, and found that user reviews in Amazon’s listing of publishing sensation Into Thin Air had people recommending Touching the Void as a better read. Today, Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air 2 to 1.

Clearly, Amazon and the internet had hit critical mass.

Based on statistics reported in 2005 or earlier:

• Over 200 million Americans have internet access
• 94 million Americans use the internet on an average day
• Over 62 million households (55%) have internet-connected computers at home
• 87% of youth 12-17 are active online
• 89% of college students and 87% of the general public start their research in a search engine, not a library
• 80% of internet users believe the internet is a reliable source of information

But it’s certainly not just youth driving this:

• Over half of 2005 US tax returns were filed electronically; the IRS is mandated to raise that number to 85% over the next few years
• Online banking is a reality for most Americans who have bank accounts
• The leading demographic of those purchasing movie tickets online is adults over 35
• The early adopters for the iTunes music store were adults over 35

And, as a measure of growth in the past year, John Battelle’s The Search in 2005 reported under 5 billion monthly searches on major US search engines. By July 2006 that number had grown to 6 billion.

The internet is truly changing us. The ability to instantly find anything we want and get recommendations from people of similar interest, irrespective of geography or time, is changing us.

Stories:

• Mark Michaelson is passionate about mugshots. He’s posted them on Flickr, people are finding and commenting and blogging about them, people are developing stories about them, and Mark is part of the conversation. Now he has a show, and a book, and if you send him a self-addressed, stamped envelope, he’ll send you a sticker.
• A friend who likes The Decemberists goes searching for more, finds a photographer who’s done some of their photos, browses more from her portfolio, finds some of a band called Dirty Martini, finds their website, finds their MySpace, previews a few tracks, and decides to purchase the album.
• Sam Brown, who can be found at explodingdog.com, bases his drawings on short phrases emailed to him at sambrown@explodingdog.com. He’ll also mail drawings to fans who mail him their phrases — “i will doing drawings from titles mailed to me. mailed in a truck. i will mail you the drawing back to you. in a truck.” Fans can buy t-shirts, books, and prints of his work. Wikipedia, updated faster than any print encyclopedia, offers details of the site and its creator.
• Then there’s Ranjit Bhatnagar, whose photos were discovered on Flickr by NY MTA Arts For Transit curator Lester Burg. Now his works are on display in the Atlantic Ave station through September 2007. I know all this, of course, because the story appeared in the Flickr blog.

How does this work? How do these thin threads come together to be woven into those stories?

If written a few years later, Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point might include a story like that of the re-emergence of Touching The Void long after it had been remaindered among the tales of the boom of Hush Puppies and Paul Revere’s social networking skills. But, as it is, the emergence of the internet does more to support Gladwell’s thesis than question it.

The internet has created new opportunities for people to make the personal — but often momentary — connections that Gladwell identifies as being so important, to the spread of an idea, a product, a phenomenon.

The internet adds links.

The internet adds comments.

The internet changes the basic economics of doing business, of making a sale, or finding an audience.

Chris Anderson, who was so fascinated by the story of the re-emergence of Touching the Void, followed up his initial article with a book-length examination of the changes that made it possible. What he found was that because was able to make findable an inventory of over two million books, dramatically more than a typical bookstore’s 130,000 books, and because Amazon had almost no inventory carrying costs, it was in a position to turn people who’d heard about Touching The Void, through Amazon’s own comments or elsewhere, into customers. By shortening the distance between interest and purchase, Amazon changed the shape of the marketplace.

But it’s not the technology that delivers success. It’s the personal connections made possible by the technology that are build success.

An example how that can go wrong comes from Reprise’s efforts to market Bonnie McKee. After premier a song on Yahoo!’s LAUNCHcast with good results Reprise decided to make a big CD release in September 2004. Despite being a huge hit with girls aged 12-17, and becoming a top searched name, the album ended up selling only 17,000 copies. An explanation cited in Anderson’s book notes “fans weren’t invested in the artist, only the song.” The explanation is that the internet has changed the rules, and music buyers, or consumers of any item, are becoming partners in a marketplace that expects more than the old marketing drivel, and has access to a broader selection than todays top 40 or whatever fits on a retail shelf.

Vincent Flanders author of Web Pages That Suck explains:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation
• They want/need to be entertained

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

And, for emphasis, from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter–and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

There is, perhaps, no better time to be a niche producer, a craftsperson, an artist. The world wants to hear human voices rather than marketingspeak. This is David’s moment against Goliath.

Long Tail, NH Visual Arts Coalition, art, arts, google economy, presentation

I’m not going to make this point well, but let me try.

Now that we’ve recognized the long tail of violence and the “open source insurgency” and seen the Hezbollah missile threat, it’s hard not to imagine a growing threat from enemy or terrorist missiles. In short, as technology becomes cheaper, the weapons people can use against us become more complex.

Iran and North Korea have been developing and testing missiles for some time, but the 800 pound gorilla here is Russia.

US hubris lead to the downing of a U-2 spy plane in 1960 by a salvo of Russian S-75 Dvina surface to air missiles, revealing how advanced the Russian technology was.

Thus began a small conflict that pitted Russian missile designers against US aircraft designers, each trying to neutralize or circumvent the other’s technology.

So today, in the context of US missile defense plans and increasingly sophisticated adversaries, I wonder if we shouldn’t take a moment to think about where we’re going.

Here are some facts: our missile defense system tests have yet to show any success, and those who know are saying it’s a losing battle.

Add to that Russian pride in their recently tested Topol-M missile, designed “to subdue USA’s $50-billion air defense.”

“[T]he missile performs unpredictable flight maneuvers,” making interception impossible. “The successful test launch of the Topol-M missile has proved that the up-to-date Russian warhead is capable of subduing the USA’s air defense, Russian military specialists say.”

The Topol-M test was performed in early 2006 in central Kazakhstan. Western response was largely silent, with two exceptions. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted:

As we predicted two years ago, the emerging U.S. antiballistic missile defense system has provoked a direct Russian response. Missile defense appears to be a major part of Russia’s decision to retain multiple-warhead ICBMs and to develop new weapons capabilities.

And the British American Security Information Council’s Missile Defense Update remarked:

Russia [has] successfully developed and tested a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multi-targeted independent vehicle (MIRV) warheads that could penetrate any ABM system in the world, including the US system.

So where does this end? Where is our time and money best spent? Should we build a largely ineffective missile shield, against which our adversaries will build ever more sophisticated (and deadly) missiles?

abm, ant-ballistic missile system, icbm, ied, iran, long tail, missile, missile defense, missile testing, missiles, north korea, russia, violence

This, from Chris Anderson: The Codex is a 20 episode series of machinimas made on Xboxes running Halo 2. The result caught the attention of his six- and eight-year-old children, and then him.

Machinimas are computer animated in real-time, using video games to create the environment, and human “puppeteers” to drive the action. The action is capture, edited, and voice-overs added. Because they remove many of the economic and technical barriers to film production, they hold the promise of emphasizing story and plot, and exposing talent among those who create them.

Good stories gain fans, and this is exactly what Anderson was remarking on:

[C]onsider this: My children’s favorite film was not made by Disney, but by a dozen Dallas teenagers playing a videogame in one of their parents’ basement. By Hollywood standards, the film cost essentially nothing to make and is free to download. It’s had 13m viewers so far. There is now a DVD and a soundtrack CD.

I’m downloading it now.

tags: animation, anti-hollywood, chris anderson, codex, computer animation, film, film production, halo, halo 2, hollywood, long tail, longtail, machinima, puppeteers, the codex, videogame, xbox

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:

I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health. [...] Google sent me to specialized sites such as peanutallergy.com, a shallow and grossly commercial web site pushing favored brands of nut free chocolate and soynut butter. Yahoo! and MSN didn’t perform any better. I did eventually find what I needed, but only by drawing on my advanced searching skills and familiarity with authoritive sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. If I weren’t a librarian who lives on the Web, I would have failed to find the right answers.

But don’t mistake Morville. He’s not blaming the search engines, and he’s certainly not blaming himself, for failing to find the information he needed. He’s blaming the people and organizations responsible for collecting, gathering, producing, and archiving this information.

A few pages later, he talks about some consulting he did with the National Cancer Institute. It turns out that the organization’s cancer.gov web site got top rank for a search on “cancer,” but fell off the front page when Googling specific cancers like “prostate cancer” or “mesothelioma.” Anybody who understands the Long Tail probably already suspects that searches for “cancer” are hugely outnumbered by the sum of all the searches for specific cancers, and Morville spends considerable time on that. The real question, however, is why did the cancer.gov folks miss this point? The problem is that very few people understand “findability.”

Because, like so many other design teams, they viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find what they need from the home page? It’s an important question, but it ignores the fact that many users don’t start from the home page. Powerful search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services are moving deep linking and content sampling from the exception to the rule.

At NCI, the team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

From where I sit, in a library, that means us too. As stewards of knowledge, it is our responsibility to make sure we catalog it in ways that optimize its availability and findability on the web. That means understanding the Google Economy and taking advantage of it.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely need to go order the book.

tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank