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Content Tagged with web + Web2.0

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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Just because the Internet makes it possible to offer a near-infinite inventory of goods for sale does not mean that consumers will start wanting more obscure items in any great numbers. That is the conclusion Harvard Business School associate professor Anita Elberse comes to in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that takes on some of the sacred cows of the Long Tail theory.

The Long Tail is Wired editor Chris Anderson’s theory (based on an article and resulting book of the same name) that as it becomes easier to distribute a wider variety of items, consumers will venture down the long tail of the distribution curve and find the products that exactly match their interests and idiosyncratic needs. Elberse questions this notion:

Is most of the business in the long tail being generated by a bunch of iconoclasts determined to march to different drummers? The answer is a definite no.

. . . Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail.

Elberse looks at data from Rhapsody, Quickflix (Australia’s version of Netflix), ans Nielsen for songs and movies. Out of one million tracks she studied on Rhapsody, the top one percent accounted for 32 percent of all plays and the top ten percent accounted for 78 percent of all plays. Similarly, the top one percent of videos on Quickflix accounted for 18 percent of rentals and the top ten percent accounted for 48 percent of rentals. Anderson responds that she defines “head’ and “tail” differently than he would. Even so, he adds, that top one percent of Rhapsody songs is still 10,000 songs, more than what you’d find in a typical record store.

What is more interesting about the study is that Elberse cites evidence that, even given more choice, consumers still flock to the blockbuster products that make up the “head” of the distribution curve. This might be because we are all lemmings or, more likely, that taste in music and movies has a social component. We tend to like a song or movie, in part, because other people like them too. Taste doesn’t form in a vacuum. It is socially reinforced.

Even adventurous consumers who venture into the more obscure realms of inventory tend to buy more hit products than long-tail ones. For instance, QuickFlix customers who rented the most movies from the bottom 10 percent of the distribution curve only did so 8 percent of the time. The largest chunk of their consumption (34 percent) came from the top 10 percent of titles just like everyone else. (In the chart below, the red parts of the bars represent the top ten percent of movie titles, and the black parts represent the bottom ten percent. Each bar, in turn, represents a different set of customers and how their rentals are distributed among each decile of popularity). Elberse concludes:

No matter how I slice and dice the customer base, customers give lower ratings to obscure titles. A balanced picture emerges of the impact of online channels on market demand: Hit products remain dominant, even among consumers who venture deep into the tail. Hit products are also liked better than obscure products. It is a myth that obscure books, films, and songs are treasured. What consumers buy in internet channels is much the same as what they have always bought.

So does this disprove the Long Tail theory? Not exactly. (Lee Gomes’ gleeful grave-digging notwithstanding). All it proves is that blockbusters are more durable than we’d like to think, even in an age of limitless inventory and perfect search.

But to say there is no money in the Long Tail is nonsense. It is just more finely distributed and harder to find. True, there are not many businesses that have figured out how to collect it. Google is one with AdSense and search ads. Each search ad is insignificant in and of itself, but all of those obscure terms add up to billions of dollars.

Is this repeatable in other markets? Elberse herself notes that demand is being pushed down the tail. Even if they can gather up that new demand, Long-Tail businesses may not become the most profitable. The economics have changed. And Google is likely the exception rather than the new rule. But neither can that Long-Tail demand be ignored.

In the end, Elberse presents a false dichotomy. The choice is not head or tail. It’s both.

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Tripwolf, the social travel guide that we introduced last month, has launched in public beta. The site allows users to network with friends to create an ideal travel trip, and also has a number of features designed to help research destinations and points of interest. To coincide with the launch, Tripwolf also announced that MairDumont, a travel guide publisher, has invested about $1.2 million into the company, in addition to the backing it has received from Austrian/American incubator i5invest.

One of the most appealing features of the site is the ability to generate a printable pdf travel guide by dragging and dropping the POIs you’ll be visiting. Unfortunately, while the dragging and dropping functionality works well, the guides themselves are very sparse, offering little more than an address, the hours of operation, and a one paragraph description. It would be nice to see a bit more content in these, even if it was only a summarized version of a Wikipedia article.

Tripwolf draws its data from a number of external sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

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Internet Broadcasting, a local media network for broadcast publishers, announced today the official launch of Slantly, an online opinion tool. Slantly is intended for web publishers to integrate into their site to create discussions and spark debate. Several major web publishers have already partnered with Slantly to use the tool, including Meredith Publishing and NYCtv.

Slantly offers several key features to online publishers. With their customizable polls, publishers are able to create polls on news and issues to engage their readers. Through these polls, users can vote and add comments to a forum attached to each poll, after they vote. These polls and discussions, while hosted on each publisher’s site, are all available on the Slantly site. A very useful feature to publishers is the ability to track the demographics of your voters and commenters. All of this is available on the Publisher Dashboard, where you can create, moderate, and manage your discussions, track activity, and customize the look and functionality of your discussions to match your site. Slantly also offers an open API, enabling publishers to customize the tool to suit their needs. I’ve included a widget from Slantly that rotates through several popular opinions.

var SLANTLY = (typeof SLANTLY!= "undefined") ? SLANTLY : {}; SLANTLY.embedconfig={ version:"1.1", topic: "Technology", layout: "custom", width: "100%", height: "250", query_type: "top-opinions" };

There are several competing online opinion sites, in the form of polling sites like Polldaddy, Survey Monkey, dPolls, SodaHead (recently received new funding, covered here), and Vizu. Slantly does offer a similar service, but a bit differently. After playing around with the site a bit, they focus more on the opinions, not the polls. Given the nature of the associated sites (local news outlets), the audience is a bit older, and presumably a bit more opinionated and educated. This allows for more consistent users, as opposed to SodaHead, for example, which is marketed mainly for MySpace pages.

Internet Broadcasting, a company established in 1996, has been leading the market in local media online solutions. Originally, a web development company for major TV stations, IB saw the potential in the local media market. They have developed a system to optimize the way TV stations converge with the web to enable viewers to access and interact with the local news. Their network currently reaches 16 million unique visitors per month nationwide. Some of their clients include Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., Mcgraw-Hill Broadcasting, NBC, Meredith Broadcasting Group, Cox Television, and CNN.

IB is hoping that Slantly will bring their network a better user experience by enabling users to interact with their local news station and media outlets. Their intention by offering Slantly to any web publisher, in addition to their partners, is to engage readers in active discussion in order to provide meaningful interaction on their sites.

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