I enjoyed Mike Culver’s presentation, especially regarding Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). I began to think about how MTurk is conceived of today and the NASA Clickworker experiment that Benkler mentions in Chapter 4 of the Wealth of Nations. While this may seem a natural coupling in thought, I wonder just how many much larger organizations, like NASA, are finding methods to parse existing work items out to MTurk Clickworkers (if you will)? One of the observations Benkler and others pose is that the smaller and more discreet an item of work is, the more likely you can get an average individual to sign up to “take the HIT”.
Author: Jeff Hora
Comment on Raquel’s Book Critique
I find your critique of The Long Tail well balanced. Given the tone of the book and audience for which the book is written, it would be easy to agree with Anderson. By focusing on the sociological shifts that the information economy technologies afford and staying within that scope, it is a little easier to make the case.
Reflection – Class readings and discussion: 7/14/08
The guest speaker, T.A. McCann, was an energizing visitor. His presentation about various manifestations of The Long Tail and Web 2.0, in particular Facebook Answers, LinkedIn Answers and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, demonstrates the kind of personal production that is not only interesting to me as a participant but to my business. Businesses spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to incent their communities. Many of them never get beyond transactional (cash) incentives. Further discussion about what incents production the further one goes into the tail was thought-provoking since you get into intrinsic value and prestige in varying degrees. His description and demonstration of his new business, MineBoxx, was interesting. His preface about tightly focusing the scope of the target market makes me wonder how valuable this service would be to a broader audience in different context, price points, and levels of functionality.
Comment – Long Tail and HBR
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There seem to be a number of things that influence The Head and The Hit. The sheer volume of content available has made it more unlikely that a high number of, say, movies will achieve Blockbuster status. More consumers with more choices, both for content and when they can consume it (now = theater, later = DVD, On Demand, premium cable movie channel, Tivo) means a Hit need not attain enormous initial box office returns. According to a new poll by AP-AOL, 73% of adults said that they prefer watching movies at home on DVD and VOD (Video on Demand) over going to the theater. Another study by the Journal of Marketing found that studios stand to gain a 16% increase in revenue in the U.S. if they release films in theaters, on rental DVD and video-on-demand at the same time, followed three months later by a DVD sell-through release. The nature of The Hit is changing, and much more attention should rightly be centered in The Tail, but The Head isn’t going away. As businesses figure out where to draw the line between what they and their customers define as The Head and The Tail, semantics and definitions become more important. This is culture shift, which may take some time and never actually be complete.
Questions – 7/14/08
- How are Information Economy dynamics changing society? In particular, how do they affect neighborhoods and local politics?
- How would you frame the significance of the fact that roughly three quarters of the world’s population appears to not be presently part of the Information Economy?
- Where is the significance of the individual when compared to or made part of the “Wisdom of Crowds”?
Review – The Long Tail: Atoms and Bits
“The Long Tail”, the title of the book by Wired magazine’s editor Chris Anderson, is a phrase that has entered the popular business lexicon with nearly as many interpretations as there are people quoting it. The term describes a graph showing very high sales and demand on the left (the head) and the rapid decline of the same on the right (the tail). This decline, while initially radical, flattens out and goes on to the right without ever actually getting to zero. Anderson’s book is about:
- what is significant about this tail
- what enables it to be important today with digital distribution, social means of production and effective filters and search capabilities, and
- what makes this a game-changing opportunity for businesses, consumers and society.
Reflection – Class readings and discussion: 7/7/08
The level of discussion was more broad this week. I found the discourse intriguing on what constitutes free and the emerging requirements for effective filters, given the scale of information available. Attention and reputation as the stuff of value, with the decline of the cost of the information in an information economy, is significant as each of us only has so much time (an aspect of attention). To invest that wisely becomes critical for individuals, as do both of the above for groups/businesses/organizations.
Thoughts – on Free
The idea of Free as put forth in Chris Anderson’s article invites scrutiny, especially around assumptions and (more or less) hidden connections.
So much of the discussion seems to assume that everyone has access to the digital marketplace. While that is a goal that is represented by efforts like One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the fact remains that the greater part of humanity has no access to a computer or other online portal. Perhaps, that being understood, discussion about the portion of humanity that does have access becomes just that.
Abstract – How Not to Build an Online Market
A challenge I have in relating the article “How Not to Build an Online Market” to the book is the former isolates business-to-business (B2B) markets while the greater portions of Long Tail that I have read so far deal primarily with business-to-consumer (B2C). However the markets described still rely upon online technologies, breath of scale, aggregation of products, economics of distribution and the ostensible “demise of the middleman”. This last point seems to me to more closely model the more human element in business.
Reflection – Learning Goals
Identifying my learning goals for the Net-Centric Economics class has required my spending a little more time drilling down into my own thoughts more specifically than I might normally. I generally approach learning with a very open mind and with seemingly vague expectations. This can have the effect of allowing me to identify interesting directions and goals as I go and keep me from “rat-holing” my study by only looking for the things that I really am trying to find; this enables “found knowledge and insight” in my opinion and experience. Unfortunately, it can also have the effect of causing me to float through a learning experience without as much direction as might be helpful. So, this has been a helpful exercise.
Authentic Voice 