'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More,' by Chris Anderson - The New York Times - New York Times

Dr. Media says, here's the Times review of Chris Anderson's book , which has be come the latest hot book on predicting the future of the Net. Manly take on the book is a good one, and indeed Anderson has put a number of observations together in a neat bit sized package for the biz book buyer club. The deeper issue of the molecularization of culture into boutique interest groups is, IMO, correct, look at what happened to magazines, this is not a new concept, as the reviewer points out. However, what Anderson," hopes" will happen, and in the long run probably will, won't overcome the short term dislocations. After all the top searches on all engines are still for sexually related content, will human nature change?: Will the Islamists want to speak to the liberals or just yell at them? The virtual is a mirror of the real reality, we human being despoil things where ever we go, but sometimes , it's art, we hope.
So if all movies ever made in all languages are available 24/7 will it really make you a better person, or just give you more stuff to kill time with?

From a business POV, get ready for the endless garage sale.

‘The Long Tail’ Foresees a Marketplace of Pixel-Size Niches

By LORNE MANLY

In May 1985 two British mountain climbers set off to become the first people to climb the west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. But on the descent, one of the men, Joe Simpson, slipped down an ice cliff on the nearly 21,000-foot mountain, shattering his knee joint on impact; another mishap left him stranded in a crevasse, bereft of food, water and a partner.

Mr. Simpson’s account of his crawl to safety appeared three years later as a book called “Touching the Void.” Well reviewed, it sold only modestly in the United States before suffering the fate of so many books: being pulled from the shelves and relegated into publishing limbo. There it remained for nearly a decade until, as Chris Anderson recounts in “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,” a new force called Amazon.com intervened.

As another book about a mountain-climbing disaster, “Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer, scaled the best-seller lists, some readers wrote reviews noting the similarities of the two books and urging others to pick up “Touching the Void.” Once they did, Amazon’s software took over, noting the buying patterns and suggesting the same thing.

As more customers took Amazon up on its recommendation, the cycle kept repeating and intensifying, leading to more sales. A docudrama of Mr. Simpson’s ordeal was released in the United States in 2004 to appeal to this rekindled interest, HarperCollins printed a revised paperback, and “Touching the Void” moved on to the best-seller lists.

More than an illustration of the benefits online booksellers and a movie tie-in can provide a book, the “Touching the Void” example demonstrates for Mr. Anderson how a new technology-fueled explosion of choice, guided by human and algorithm-driven filters, is upending the rules that have underpinned the entertainment industries for decades.

“Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service — from DVD’s at the rental-by-mail firm Netflix to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody,” he writes. “People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video and Tower Records. And the more they find, the more they like.” For Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, blockbusters will matter less in the 21st century as supply blooms. “Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches,” he writes. And that, he says, is a good thing.

Mr. Anderson’s publishers at Hyperion are using their Disney-honed promotional prowess to market “The Long Tail” as “the most important business book since Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘‘Tipping Point,’ ” though it is not quite as felicitously written as that blend of science and sociology. At heart “The Long Tail” is a book about economics and carries the PowerPoint trappings of the genre, with its charts and graphs, lapses into business jargon and easily digested rules for success. And Mr. Anderson’s thesis suffers at times from overextending itself; a chapter near the end, with sections about KitchenAid and Lego, feels like a perfunctory attempt to give a more general-interest veneer to a book about entertainment and the news media.

But like “The Tipping Point,” Mr. Anderson’s book does an excellent job of spotting trends and fitting them into an easily accessible theoretical framework that helps explain the changing culture around us.

“The Long Tail” began life in 2004 as an article for Wired after Mr. Anderson found himself blowing a pop quiz in the offices of a digital jukebox company called Ecast. He had badly underestimated what percentage of the 10,000 albums available on the company’s Internet-connected jukeboxes had a track chosen at least once each quarter. The Ecast chief executive said that the figure was 98 percent. The average Wal-Mart, by contrast, carries 4,500 different CD’s and the top 20 albums account for 90 percent of its music revenue.

Mr. Anderson had hit on something. Remove the limitations of bricks-and-mortar retailers — like scarce shelf space, which leads companies to concentrate on the most popular products — and the infrequent sellers or undistributed merchandise suddenly start to acquire more value.

Mr. Anderson cites figures from Rhapsody for December 2005, when the biggest hits were downloaded in droves, but even as the demand fell off for less popular songs, interest was never completely extinguished. In statistics the resulting demand curve is called a “long-tailed distribution,” because the curve’s tail is much longer in relation to the head, which shows the performance of the best-selling products. Nomenclature notwithstanding, companies like Amazon and Netflix saw an opportunity. “The onesies and twosies were still only selling in small numbers,” Mr. Anderson writes, “but there were so, so many of them that in aggregate they added up to a big business.”

Mr. Anderson is not arguing that blockbusters are slumping toward extinction. “Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass,” he writes. “And niche culture will get less obscure.”

This is not a new thought. The atomization of culture has been going on for years. The creation of hundreds of cable television networks has whittled away the dominance of the broadcast networks. Yet the average household watches more television than ever, keeping the profits in the coffers of the entertainment conglomerates. But as Mr. Andersen persuasively argues, continued advances in technology, and the Internet in particular, are beginning to supersize this phenomenon and frighten media moguls to an unprecedented degree. The rise of YouTube, MySpace and the like give a taste of the power amateurs are beginning to wield in the creation of content, out of the control of the current titans.

These upheavals also concern some cultural commentators, who fret that the cracking of the social glue will lead to to a society in which people gravitate only to sources that reinforce their existing biases.

Mr. Anderson is not one of them. “Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views,” he writes, “I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.”

WSJ.com - The Undateables

Dr. Media says, this is a good one. Here we see a wonderful example of how the Net is changing intimate behavior, just as the phone and car did in the 20th century. How can you maintain your reputation in an environment where anyone can say anything about anybody, and do so anonymously, or using a pseudonym? Anyone seen don'tdatehim.com, remember that song" It's only just begun", have fun.

PS new growth industry , Personal Reputation Management, or Reputation Management Coaching, cool, it's all spin now!!

The Undateables

The next wave in online dating has singles rating each other -- and one misstep can taint a reputation. When popularity trumps the search for a soulmate

By ELLEN GAMERMAN
September 23, 2006; Page P1

The Internet lets people search billions of Web pages in a fraction of a second and instantaneously tap information around the globe. One thing it couldn't do: Find Brian Wolf a girlfriend.

Mr. Wolf was one of the 25 million Americans who visit online dating sites annually, lured by the industry's promise that there's someone out there for everyone. Four years and three dating sites later, he hadn't found a match. His profile -- which said that he likes to travel and play basketball and is looking for a long-term relationship -- found few takers.

THE NEW RATINGS SYSTEM

• Ellen Gamerman discusses the Undateables¹ in a podcast.

• Watch a video² on the difficulties people encounter at online-dating sites.

• Some tips on how to navigate top dating sites.

"It's like 95% of these girls didn't like me," says the 30-year-old marketing manager for a Chicago-area food manufacturer. "That's not a great feeling."

It's no exaggeration to say that online dating has revolutionized the world of relationships since it took off a decade ago. Now, with growth slowing, sites are looking for new ways to stand out. One increasingly popular strategy: Letting users rate each other, either based on their profiles alone or on the experiences of a first date.

Members of Engage.com³ can review people after one date for politeness and honesty. Consumating.com⁴ users give one another "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" depending on how clever their profiles are. JDate.com⁵ encourages members to talk about their dates on a message board, inviting them to share stories of "best dates, worst dates" as well as "turn-ons, turn-offs."

The result is an emerging caste system, where highly rated daters see a lot of action, and others are deemed undateable. The online romance industry doesn't talk about the folks in the latter category, but they're out there. They're singles with seemingly innocent attributes that are setting off digital flags signaling they're unfit to date, or maybe just slightly less fit than others. A forgetful dater who fails to return an email on Engage.com, for instance, could be branded as rude. Simply living in the wrong ZIP Code can push unlucky members of JDate to the bottom of the queue. Even at sites that haven't adopted a ratings approach, a growing cliquishness, combined with the viral nature of the Web, means an offhand comment to one person can come back to haunt you when you meet someone else just a few weeks later.

This is changing the way some online daters behave. For Sarah Schoomer, it's meant focusing as much on trying to boost her ranking as on searching for a soulmate. After trying other sites that failed to find her a match, Ms. Schoomer thought she'd give Consumating.com a shot. She had attended a party the site's members threw in San Francisco and liked the people she met there -- they reminded her of the creative types she knew as a student at Oberlin College a decade earlier. The site also seemed cooler than others, with its quirky ratings feature and offbeat questions that encourage sardonic responses.

The 32-year-old doctoral student in clinical psychology spent hours filling out her profile, fretting over questions like, "Other than the souls of small children, what do you collect?" (Her answer: high-heeled shoes, books and "ex-lovers.") She posted several photos, including one from a trip to Paris and another which she says captures her bubbly spirit.

But not long after her profile went up, the lines were silent. The site posts each member's popularity score, which changes based on positive comments from other users, and then ranks them accordingly. Ms. Schoomer, who had received few plugs from her fellow Consumaters, was ranked close to 6,000 -- far too low to break into the "Local Hotties" section that highlights top singles.

She tried to get more involved in the site -- not only would she make more friends that way, but she heard that members could boost their popularity and score "points" by sending each other notes. Soon, she was logging eight hours a day on the site, trying to up her score by being more visible in message boards and sending strangers clever notes; her laundry, exercise routine and sleep were suffering.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, she took drastic action: a plea to the site's 20,000 members. "I'm just a little too concerned with my standing," she wrote on one of the message boards, describing how she wanted to bust into the top 500 most popular. Since many Consumating daters expect points to be reciprocated, they doled them out to her liberally, and within days, she'd climbed to number 343. "It's all thanks to you," a grateful Ms. Schoomer later wrote.

Now, her profile pops up on more searches, and she shares more than 100 "tags" -- key words that describe her interests and personality -- with the thousands of other users on the site. She's seen a rise in inquiries from potential friends and suitors, and in one recent week, kissed three guys she met through the site. Her confidence is riding high, she says. "I'm pretty cute."

After coming this far, Ms. Schoomer says she now worries that she could get so caught up in the popularity game that her true match could look right past her -- or vice versa. "It does make me stop before posting something and wonder, 'Am I being authentic, or am I just saying something provocative?' "

Veteran online daters and consultants who help people write their profiles say there are ways to avoid the scourge of undateability. On many sites, recently updated profiles appear higher in search results, so it's a good idea to tinker with them often. Savvy users of AOL's personals service, for instance, make frequent and sometimes gratuitous changes to their listings, switching their favorite hobby, or ideal first date.

Photographs can be a minefield. A picture of yourself surrounded by friends is a big mistake -- one of them could be more attractive than you. Sometimes daters kill their chances with profiles that state the obvious -- people who say they like to go out for dinner or fix a cozy meal at home, for instance, are simply characterizing the eating habits of most Americans.

Others go too far in trying to please: Dating experts say women who talk too much about working out can inadvertently end up sounding like gym rats, and men who overstate their love of golf can lead a woman to believe that they'll never be around on weekends. And woe betide the dater with the smiling mountain biker shot: It's anybody's guess what kind of face is hiding behind those shades.

At its most extreme, of course, the new online dating gossip machine can result in someone being publicly humiliated and branded as a cad. That's what happened to Darren Sherman, a New York JDater whose recent dinner with a woman named Joanne became public after details of their date were posted on blogs and passed around via email. In recordings of alleged voice mails and transcripts of emails, the person identified as Darren Sherman repeatedly asks Joanne to reimburse him for her dinner and wine after she rejected him: "You ate the food, you drank the wine, you know, kindly pay your bill."

Googling his name turns up dozens of links to the story, including one that reads "How Not to Act on J-Date." Peter Shankman, a New York public-relations executive who related the story on his blog, says it received 26,000 page views a day for two weeks this July. "This is what happens when you're not careful," says Mr. Shankman. Efforts to reach Mr. Sherman were unsuccessful, and the emails and voice mails don't give his date's last name.

From top: Brian Wolf says after having no luck on Match.com, he set up his own site to find dates; Sarah Schoomer boosted her popularity on one site by encouraging other members to send her points; Denise Olmos received poor reviews on Engage.com from men she didn't respond to.

The majority of undateables are hardly what most people would consider poor prospects. They're not liars or criminals, but eligible single men and women who are being sidelined by the system. They're hitting the wrong note by listing hobbies that scream shut-in -- fantasy football for men, scrapbooking for women -- or by including shots with their heads obscured by skydiving helmets.

Denise Olmos's first foray into online dating came two years ago, shortly after separating from her husband. The 50-year-old blonde from Draper, Utah, who describes herself as a lapsed Mormon, was persuaded by her children to try out AOL's personals service to help boost her self-esteem after the break up.

Then an email landed in her inbox, an ad for a new site called Engage.com. She liked the look of the site, which includes a "matchmaker" feature for members to set each other up, and a "Promise" section that states: "We passionately believe that there is someone for everyone waiting to give and receive love -- and that means someone for you too."

Ms. Olmos spent a half hour putting together her profile, noting her love of hiking, religion and rock 'n' roll (as manager of her children's alternative rock band, Skarekro, she finds herself at more concerts than most women her age). Ms. Olmos, a former customer service manager, wrote that she was looking for a tall man who was spiritual and could appreciate her love of music and dancing.

One thing she hadn't considered was another of the site's prominent features: a ratings system that judges daters based on politeness, profile accuracy and responsiveness, then ranks them on a scale between one and five. After posting what she hoped would be an alluring photo of her in a tight white outfit lounging by a fireplace, the initial results were promising: Several email inquiries showed up in her inbox.

That's when Ms. Olmos made a crucial mistake that had lingering -- and unexpected -- consequences. Deciding that she wasn't interested in any of the men who had contacted her, she ignored their emails. Then, before she could go on an actual date, her politeness and profile honesty scores dropped to one. As it turns out, it's OK to decline an email on the site, but doing so courteously is important. She suspects that her failure to respond was probably responsible for the ratings drop. "Somebody felt rejected," she says.

Her poor marks are still posted next to her picture. But instead of trying to combat them by emailing back and getting others to give her better reviews, she has simply abandoned Engage. Now she prefers Myspace.com, where she says she has met a lawyer whom she has recently started dating. "You can give anybody you want a low rating" on some sites, she says. "I could have had a million dates, but I'm busy and I pick and choose."

Engage.com spokeswoman Trish McDermott says while some daters may feel bruised by a bad review, the rankings are cumulative, so singles can improve their scores as they continue to date. Ms. McDermott says the majority of daters on the site receive high rankings, and feedback can help singles improve their dating behavior by holding them accountable for their actions online. "On most dating sites your behavior isn't even tracked; there's no consequences for the behavioral choices you make," she says.

Todd Hollis, a 38-year-old Pittsburgh lawyer, says he was filled with hope about a new relationship this past spring when a family member called, directing him to Dontdatehimgirl.com, a site where women post names of men to warn other women off. The site included anonymous allegations that he has a sexually transmitted disease and is a poor dresser (Mr. Hollis denies both).

His first thought when he logged on: Everyone in the city will be able to see this. Later, he told the woman he was dating about the mention; the relationship fizzled. Over the summer, Mr. Hollis says he investigated the sources of the accusation. He is now suing several women who allegedly posted the claims, as well as the owner of the site, Tasha Joseph, for defamation, hoping to claim at least $50,000. Ms. Joseph says she is not legally responsible for the content of posts that others write; she adds that men who are targeted can log on and post a rebuttal.

Mr. Hollis says before he asks women out now he warns them that they might see some unpleasant hits on a Web search of his name. That's not much of an introduction, he says, and it often scares dates away. "It's made me very notorious in the eyes of many women," he says.

Another problem for online daters: overcrowding. With many sites allowing members to post for free -- many charge fees only when daters try to contact each other -- singles can get lost. Julia Gliner, a 28-year-old administrator for a New York City venture capital firm, joined JDate last winter and was confused when she couldn't find her profile anywhere on the site soon after. When she called customer service, she says, she was told her that her Upper West Side ZIP Code was so crowded with single women, it might take days for her picture to emerge.

Ms. Gliner's profile finally appeared a few days later -- she followed the site's advice and logged on repeatedly to show up in the "most active" search -- but by then her confidence had dimmed. "I was thinking, 'Wow, there's a lot of competition out there,'" she says. While she went on some dates, she didn't find a boyfriend and quit after two months.

Gail Laguna, a spokeswoman for Spark Networks, which owns JDate, says the site posts all new profiles within 24 hours, but Ms. Gliner may have missed it initially and, in the following days, the queue could have easily filled to the 500-woman capacity, thus bumping her profile from the standard search. "It's tricky because New York is our biggest market," she says. "You can get lost online as easily as you can offline."

As for Brian Wolf, the Chicago marketing manager, he says the best solution for his undateability was to take matters into his own hands. This spring, he launched Settleforbrian.com. Mr. Wolf says his site is what major online dating services would be if everyone were honest. Though he writes on the site that his nose is big and he doesn't want kids, he also touts his sense of humor and good job: "I'm by no means perfect, but you could also do a lot worse. …In the end, you'd probably be happier with me than chasing the dream of Mr. Right."

The upfront technique appears to be working. So far, Settleforbrian.com has netted more than 86,500 visitors in just over three months. He has received about 600 emails, gone on three dates, and says he's feeling more hopeful about his love life than he ever has before: "I'm going to keep this up until I meet the right girl."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com⁶

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t - New York Times

Dr. Media says this is cool, and how many times before this gets old. Is it a fake memoir, or merely a smart move to get some attention, who cares if it's true, after all, it's the internet, who knows what is true anyway, remember swiftboating!?




September 13, 2006

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN and TOM ZELLER Jr.

A nearly four-month-old Internet drama in which the cryptic video musings of a fresh-faced teenager became the obsession of millions of devotees — themselves divided over the very authenticity of the videos, or who was behind them or why — appears to be in its final act.

The woman who plays Lonelygirl15 on the video-sharing site YouTube.com has been identified as Jessica Rose, a 20-ish resident of New Zealand and Los Angeles and a graduate of the New York Film Academy. And the whole project appears to be the early serialized version of what eventually will become a movie.

Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the videos. The episodes suggested Bree was the home-schooled daughter of strictly religious parents who was able to find the time to upload video blogs of her innermost thoughts.

The discovery and the swift and subsequent revelation of other details surrounding the perpetrators of the videos and the fake fan site that accompanied it are bringing to an end one of the Internet’s more elaborately constructed mysteries. The fans’ disbelief in Lonelygirl15 was not willingly suspended, but rather teased and toyed with. Whether they will embrace the project as a new narrative form, condemn it or simply walk away remains to be seen.

The masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker. The high quality of the videos caused many users to suspect a script and production crew, but Bree’s bedroom scenes were shot in Mr. Flinders’s home, in his actual bedroom, typically using nothing more than a Logitech QuickCam, a Web camera that retails for about $150.

Together with Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer in San Francisco, Mr. Flinders contrived to produce and distribute the videos to pique maximum curiosity about them.

The photographs of the actress, which made it clear that Ms. Rose has been playing Bree in the videos, were cached on Google.

“We were all under N.D.A.’s” Mr. Steinfeld said, referring to non-disclosure agreements the cast — and their friends — were asked to sign to preserve the mystery of Lonelygirl15. “They had a lawyer involved,” he said. “My first impression was like, wow, can this be legitimate? Is this ethical? I was very concerned about that in the beginning.”

But after he came to understand the project, Mr. Steinfeld said, he came to believe that something truly novel was at hand. “They were like the new Marshall McLuhan.”

Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett obscured their location by sending e-mail messages as Bree from various Internet computer addresses, including the address of Creative Artists Agency, the Beverly Hills talent agency where the team is now represented. Amanda Solomon Goodfried, an assistant at the agency, is believed to have helped Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett conceal their identities. Moreover, Ms. Goodfried’s father-in-law, Kenneth Goodfried, a lawyer in Encino, filed to trademark “Lonelygirl15” in August.

The story of how Mr. Flinders, Mr. Beckett and Ms. Rose were discovered in spite of their efforts to hide, and prolong the mystery, sheds light on the nature of online wiki-style investigations and manhunts. When Mr. Steinfeld’s dummy site, which had been set up before the first Lonelygirl15 video was even posted, struck users as suspicious and unsupervised — Mr. Steinfeld says he grew tired of running it, and dropped out of the project — fans set up their own site devoted to Lonelygirl15, which soon attracted more than a thousand members.

Both sites drew contributions from novelists, journalists, academics, day traders, lawyers, bloggers, filmmakers, video game designers, students, housewives, bored youngsters and experts on religion and botany. In the cacophony of conjecture, analysis, close-readings, jokes, insults, and distractions, good information sometimes surfaced.

Last month, a Lonelygirl15 fan discovered and posted a trademark application by Mr. Goodfried, which seemed to prove that the videos, which presented themselves as nothing but a video diary, were at least in part a commercial venture. Then, last week, three tech-savvy fans, working together, set up a sting on the e-mail being used by “Bree”; the operation revealed to them the I.P. address of Creative Artists Agency.

On the strength of this information, Mr. Foremski was confident he could find some trace of Bree on the Internet. He was sure that any participant in a semiprofessional production like Lonelygirl15 would have posted pictures somewhere. Sure enough, they had.

Mr. Steinfeld, on learning that Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett had been found out, offered his photographs of Ms. Rose as proof of his involvement in the Lonelygirl15 videos. He had been hired to take the pictures on the set at the start of shooting.

The series, which Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett plan to continue on a site overseen by them, may play differently with fans now that they know for sure that Bree is an actress. Part of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.

On learning that Ms. Rose was an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, ran to parties and posing, one fan wrote, “Very cute, but she’s really not into Feynmann and Jared Diamond! (I’m heart-broken ...But a wonderful actress, had me fooled into thinking she was a geek like me.)”