Lecture 12: I am the Long Tail, Maxine Armstrong

I tend to buy:

• Books/DVDs – on Amazon if I know what I want or sometimes I browse bookshops
• Music/Ringtones – don’t buy any
• Games – kids buy them from game shops from friends recommendations
  
• Groceries – supermarket (Aldi or Sainsburys), no longer use online
• Travel - online mainly by searching for somewhere already in mind
  
• Information – online mainly, I will always search online first and then follow up sources in the library etc.
  

I often research things online before I buy it at a store, if it is something easily available. More obscure items (such as art-deco ceramics) I buy online from Ebay etc. If I do buy something online I like to see it first before I buy.

Lecture 12; I am the Long Tail; Amanda Moffat

My purchasing identity is currently governed by my spending power - or rather lack of it. I buy very little other than what I consider essential items (e.g. groceries - which I buy from Morrisons because its local and cheap - although this takes up most of my weekly budget!) Consequently, I buy clothes from local charity shops (e.g. Oxfam), books from second-hand book shops (some local and some online) and other consumer goods off ebay (e.g. I just bought a tent to go camping). I research my holiday destinations online (currently UK based due to cost) and then generally book online or by phone. This research consists of using google - by entering location name and type of holiday required (e.g. self-catering), then searching through the results. I prefer to have a good indication of what the place looks like, so only book accommodation that has good range of images - particularly the interiors.

Lecture 12: I Am The Long Tail by Paul D. Found

Books - usually buy them from Amazon which is mainly due to price (they are very often cheaper than book shops), partly to do with convenience and partly because of the reviews.

Music - I still by CDs and vinyl, usually direct from the band online or at a gig, from the record label, and sometimes from general online retailers. Handily, I review music for a website so I get sent quite a lot of CDs too. I am a media elite and a taste-maker. Myspace is good for finding bands especially if they are from another, distant country (see below) but so are music magazines.

www.whisperinandhollerin.com

www.myspace.com/officialenvy

DVDs - I buy them online usually because they are cheaper, but the ability to read reviews is useful.

Groceries - Morrisons and the open market. I like to see what I am buying, especially for fresh goods. Plus, I actually quite like shopping for food.

Clothing - if I bother buying new clothes (which is not often), I buy them in shops because I am a strange shape and need to try things on.

Information - I often start with a library search because I like books, but it depends on how quickly I need the information. The Internet is useful due to ease of access and speed with which you can find what you need to know. There are free books here:

oll.libertyfund.org

Travel - I book tickets online as it is easier to compare prices.
www.thetrainline.com I don't go on holiday.

Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail" by Kieren Boddy

I am the long tail, apparently. I guess that it's true, in some respect, that I am in the sense that I am an individual with individual needs and the only way to fulfill them without much effort is through providers who disseminated through the long tail.

I still use "mass dissemination" medium to obtain goods and services i.e. Tesco (offline) and Waterstones (offline), but niche goods are obtained through digital medium. These niche "long tail" sources, through the medium of the Internet are as follows:
- News: BBC News Online, Fox News, Guardian Online News (Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell (I get around going to the Guardian website by using the relevant RSS feed and adding them to my http://zeusthunderbolt.soup.io Tumbler website)),also comidey news such as The Onion for "news"/entertainment
- Movies: DVD's, primarily bought from thrift stores, though quite a lot of my film and television series collections are from online sources, many of which have not been dubbed or translated in English yet.
- Games: Bought offline, again at thrift stores, but there are a few which are niche which are from online only sources, such as MMORPG game EVE Online, STEAM games such as Half-Life 2 etc, and World of Warcraft.
- Groceries: N/A, I do all my grocery shopping offline
- travel: online timetables, but I usually go in person to buy tickets as I do not trust some websites that I have never used before.
- Information: as with News, I get information from the BBC Website. I also get it from niche blogs such as BoingBoing (good articles from Cory Doctorow), Webcomics, some newspaper websites and from social media websites such as facebook, information about friends and events and such.

How this affects me? Well, it affects me by making me used to having such a slue of information and it makes me frustrated when I do not have access to the internet and these online sources.

Link: http://www.eveonline.com
Image:

Lecture 12: Brands, Business & Digital Culture

Advertising 1.0:

• censorship and government regulation (those this still applies at some levels today - China)
• editorial control
• limited choice of information retrieval
• one-way communication

Advertising 2.0:

• looser boundaries and wider parameters
• we are editors of our own content (flickr, facebook, twitter, blogs)
• more choice of information points
• many to many communication

Enter niche markets and the long tail:

"In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book."

This all leads to what Chris Anderson (a.k.a The Long Tail) terms as "people power":

First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

Class Work: Blog Post

Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail", Name

In your blog post note your own long tail - tell us where you buy your books, dvds, music, groceries, travel, clothing and where do you get your information?

Include an image or screen capture of one of your online retailers and a link to a place where you access information.

Lecture 11: Globalisation, Kieren Boddy

Sorry about the length, when I finished writing the script for this, it was about 1,000 words!

Nevermind.

If you want the just of the answer, go to the last 4 minutes.

If you can not understand my accent or slurring, I will upload my script somewhere and repost it here.

Lecture 11: Globalisation, Maxine Armstrong

Image Source: Globalisation by Guille3691 (2007)