Stumblings...

Innovating problems: why DJ Hero flopped

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:57:45 +0100

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Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:11:27 +0100

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

via Gizmodo: Top by John Herrman on 10/29/09

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs—they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

What’s Out There

Click for larger

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe).” It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything—they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the EIC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

Still something you wanna know? Still can’t figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

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The End of Marketing

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:55:08 +0200

http://kozinets.net/archives/346

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Five essential things to know about evolution

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:08:46 +0200

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/five-essential-things-to-know-about-evolution.ars

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The next generation bends over

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:06:29 +0200

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bends-over

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German Blogger Manifesto On Journalism Makes Headlines

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:47:47 +0200

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/SKa7iHjlAVM/

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25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:59:31 +0200

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/52WswWOK7qk/

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The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:15:50 +0200

The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana

via Damn Interesting by Matt Castle on 8/24/09

The humble banana almost seems like a miracle of nature. Colourful, nutritious, and much cherished by children, monkeys and clowns, it has a favoured position in the planet’s fruitbowls. The banana is vitally important in many regions of the tropics, where different parts of the plant are used for clothing, paper and tableware, and where the fruit itself is an essential dietary staple. People across the globe appreciate the soft, nourishing flesh, the snack-sized portions, and the easy-peel covering that conveniently changes colour to indicate ripeness. Individual fruit—or fingers—sit comfortably in the human hand, readily detached from their close-packed companions. Indeed, the banana appears almost purpose-designed for efficient human consumption and distribution. It is difficult to conceive of a more fortuitous fruit. The banana, however, is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the “miraculous” banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana’s problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.

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The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool - Great Fun

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:19:20 +0200

The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool

via TechCrunch by MG Siegler on 8/21/09

Go here and put your name in the box. Just do it. It’s awesome.

The project, called Personas, comes from the MIT Media Lab built by Aaron Zinman. Basically, it takes your name and searches the web for some context around it. It then takes the words and sites it finds to build a profile of your presence on the web. Or in MIT-speak using words like “corpus”:

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Simply put, Personas represents the way the web sees you (or more specifically, your name). Of course, if someone has the same name as you, the results will vary, but for someone with a name like mine, it works very well. Basically, it says that “online” dominates my life, while I’m also associated with sports and books. Not really sure about the books part, but I am really into movies, perhaps it mistook some of my talk about a certain movie for me talking about the corresponding book (but there is a movies section as well).

But the process of it scouring the web for you name is probably actually cooler than the result. Watch it in action in the video below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Multitaskers bad at multitasking

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:14:06 +0200

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/technology/8219212.stm

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Recession: The Mother of Innovation?

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:01:43 +0200

Recession: The Mother of Innovation?

via BusinessWeek.com — Innovation & Design on 7/22/09

Our special report looks at innovative ways businesses can turn the troubled economy to their advantage

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Change is Never Linear

Wed, 06 May 2009 08:46:47 +0200

Change is Never Linear

via Buzz Marketing for Technology by noreply@blogger.com (Paul Dunay) on 5/5/09

Notes from a speech by Paul Saffo, Professor from Stamford University, the opening speaker at the World Innovation Forum.

Any interesting change looks like an S curve – except in Silicon Valley where it looks like a hockey stick :-)

The ghost behind the S curve is Moore’s law – i.e. the number of circuits that could fit on a chip was doubling every 6 months and the performance was doubling every 6 months.

But we are really lousy at understanding the net effect of the S curve running through our lives. Otherwise we would be standing right at the inflection point of the S curve and monitizing it, even in Silicon Valley.

Cherish Failure

Especially if it is someone else’s failure. Silicon Valley is built on the rubble of other people’s failure – big companies grow and have their day then collapse and restart. And progress is built on other people’s failure and in the last year we have seen a lot of rubble!

How do you find a short term success? – find something that has been failing for YEARS. Take Virtual worlds – ex Habitat vs Second Life – took 35 or more companies that tried virtual world between when habitat started and second life started to make it work.

When someone says they have a new idea and you hear “we tried that but it failed and its been failing for 20 years” – quit the company and get venture capital – because it is going to be a big success.

Inversion

The world of inversion is all around us. Most advanced technologies began to appear in places like NASA. But now the most advanced technology is now appearing in computer games. It’s coming in at the bottom of the market and for consumers and now companies have to wait!

The future has already arrived it just hasn’t been distributed to everyone yet.

There is an leading indicator that showed up a few years ago – take a look at the personal excellorometer (aka the cardio watch) do a search on the web or on Facebook and you will see people publishing their personal workout plans and results on the web!

Again more obscure technology is all of a sudden in consumer devices like Nike and Apple who created shoes that talk to your iPod and collects data. Now Nike holds virtual races online. This is a specific instance of a larger trend – it’s not the semantic web – its sensors!!

Go back in history and look forward – new fundamental technology arrives every 10 years – like cheap micro processors in 70s which set the stage for the innovation of the personal computers in the 80s – then another new technology came along – cheap lasers came along in the late 80s and set the stage for cheap optical storage.

I am here to tell you the next big thing is Robots – it’s already starting to happen.

Look at the Rhumba – it’s a robotic vacuum cleaner (by iRobot). And people even give them names. The Rhumba thing is an indicator – look for clusters of indicators that tell you that you are starting to get into the trough in the S curve. A robot revolution is a lot more than people building robots. It’s about the start of an era of innovation that will be coming into our lives for years.

Do not fear change embrace change.

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Innovations of the Future

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:42:23 +0100

Innovations of the Future

via BusinessWeek.com — Innovation & Design on 2/25/09

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Always Innovating Touch Book Is Part-Netbook, Part-Tablet, Open Source Frank...

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:15:25 +0100

I think I want one…

Always Innovating Touch Book Is Part-Netbook, Part-Tablet, Open Source Frankenstein

via Gizmodo: Top by Adrian Covert on 3/2/09

The Always Innovating Touch Book does something I’ve never seen from a netbook: it has a fully detachable keyboard dock and transforms from a standard looking 8.9-inch netbook, to a stand-alone tablet.

Spearheaded by Gregoire Gentil, the man behind the Zonbu Desktop and Laptop, the Touch Book is his latest project, and a promising one at that. Gentil says the Touch Book’s hardware and software are fully open source and ready for modifications. While the device will come preloaded with a custom Touch Book OS, Gentil says this machine is capable of running mobile operating systems such as Android or Windows CE.

The hardware I saw wasn’t quite complete—the software was demoed on a prototype, and the final hardware above were just empty shells to give an idea of the design—so I cant comment too much on how well the end product performs, but I saw enough to consider this thing more than vaporware.

The Touch Book is the first netbook powered by a 600 MHz TI OMAP3 processor (built around ARM technology), 256 MB RAM, 3-axis accelerometer, an 8-gigabyte microSD card for storage and two batteries providing up to 15 hours of usage between charges. The 8.9-inch screen can display resolutions up to 1024x768 and uses a resistive touch panel.There’s also the usual offerings of 802.11b/g/n wi-fi and Bluetooth.

As a standalone tablet, the Touch Book is roughly 9.5”x7”x1” and weighs about a pound. When docked to the keyboard, it is about 1.4-inches thick and weighs 2 pounds. All of the Touch Book’s guts, except for one of the batteries, are housed in the tablet portion of the device, so that it’s fully functional while detatched from the keyboard.

The chipset fits on a motherboard about the size of an index card, and is heavily optimized to get the best performance out of the hardware. Part of this involves stacking the RAM directly on top of the processor in a package on package configuration. The lid of the touchbook also pops off, so you have easy access to the hardware and it’s two internal USB ports you can use for dongles you dont want hanging off the side of the tablet.

As far as software goes, the OS is based around the Open Embedded Linux platform, but fully customized for the Touch Book hardware. As such, the Touch Book has the power to handle full screen video, and render OpenGL 3D graphics. Gentil says the Touch Book can run some of the same games found on the iPhone and plans to offer them in the future.

The Touch Book UI design depends on what configuration the hardware is in. When docked to the keyboard, the Touch Book uses a standard, cursor-based UI that looks like other Linux desktops. However, when in tablet mode, it uses a custom-designed, touch-based UI. The touch UI is based around spherical icons that rotate in a circular fashion as you swipe to the next one. Content is divided into three categories: web, apps and settings.

On the apps side, Touch Book will ship with both Firefox and Fennec (Mobile Firefox), games that will make use of the accelerometer, plus various sorts of web and productivity apps, such as word processor and spreadsheet-type programs.

Always Innovating plans to start shipping the Touch Book in late May or early June, priced at $300 for the tablet alone, or $400 for the tablet and keyboard dock combination. Pre-ordering will begin next week, and you can order the Touch Book in either red or dark grey colors. Gentil says he would also like to release future iterations that include support for GPS and 3G mobile broadband. [Always Innovating]

NEW TOUCHBOOK COMBINES NETBOOK AND TOUCHSCREEN TABLET; PROVIDES THREE TIMES THE BATTERY LIFE AT UNDER TWO POUNDS

PALM DESERT, Calif. March 2, 2009: Always Innovating today unveiled the Touch Book, a versatile new device that works as both a netbook and a tablet thanks to a detachable keyboard and a 3D touchscreen user interface. The Touch Book, previewed at DEMO 09, weighs less than two pounds as a netbook and has a battery life of 10 to 15 hours – three times longer than most netbooks.

“The Touch Book is perfect for these tough economic times because you can use it in so many ways,” said Gregoire Gentil, founder of Always Innovating and creator of the Touch Book. “You can use it as a netbook computer, a hand-held game device, or a video player. You can even reverse the keyboard to prop it up on a table in an inverted ‘V’. Finally, because it is magnetic, you can remove the keyboard and put the tablet on the fridge to serve as a kitchen computer or digital frame.”

The Touch Book combines the best of open source software and open hardware with a sleek industrial design by designer Fred Bould. The innovative design includes internal USB plugs. “I hate having dongles hanging from my laptop – I often end up disconnecting them accidentally – so we opted to put the USB inside,” said Gentil.

The Touch Book is the first netbook featuring an ARM processor from Texas Instruments, resulting in outstanding battery life, and a fan less, heat-and-noise-free system.

According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conferences, the Touch Book’s innovative architecture and industrial design earned it a spot on the DEMO conference stage. “The longer battery life is a boon to netbook users. But the Touch Book’s versatility – its ability to function as a netbook as well as a standalone touchscreen tablet – makes it a breakthrough product,” said Shipley

The Touch Book is expected to ship in late spring and will start at $299. Advance orders can be placed at http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/store/.
>

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Do We Need a New Internet? - Two decades ago a 23-year-old ... (John Markoff...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:46:55 +0100

Do We Need a New Internet? - Two decades ago a 23-year-old … (John Markoff/New York Times)

via Techmeme on 2/14/09

John Markoff / New York Times:
Do We Need a New Internet? — Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

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A World Transformed: What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years?

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:22:03 +0100

A World Transformed: What Are the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years?

via Knowledge@Wharton on 2/18/09

Is it possible to determine which 30 innovations have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years? That is the question that Nightly Business Report, the Emmy Award-winning PBS business program, and Knowledge@Wharton set out to answer to celebrate NBR’s 30^th anniversary this year. The list includes innovations from the world of technology, health care, energy and even finance. Can you guess which one is No. 1?

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120 Twitter Mashups and Growing Fast

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:12:52 +0100

Going nuts with Twitter

120 Twitter Mashups and Growing Fast

via ProgrammableWeb by John Musser on 2/19/09

What’s the hottest API on ProgrammableWeb today? It’s the Twitter API. This is not surprising to folks tracking the latest news on Techmeme where hardly a day goes by without another Twitter-related headline. And indeed we’re seeing the impact here on PW, with a large spike in the number of Twitter applications being added to our directory. Just look at today’s entries where all three of the new mashup listings use the Twitter API. We now have 120 Twitter apps in our directory.

As we’ve discussed before, Twitter’s API gets at least 10x the traffic of their web site. And it’s likely much more than that today given the proliferation of the third-party apps using this one API. Good thing they’ve raised $35 million to grow the platform

Here’s a sampling of some of the most recent Twitter apps here:

ChirpCity: ChirpCity is Twitter by city: top users list, latest tweets from your city, latest tweets about your city. APIs: Google Maps, Twitter. More at our ChirpCity profile.

Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about? Real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter. APIs: Twitter. More at our Cursebird profile.

Twippr Twitter Payments: Twippr is a safe, simple way to send and receive money online, using direct private messages from your Twitter account. Accept Twippr micropayments to save Paypal fees. APIs: PayPal, Twitter. More at our Twippr Twitter Payments profile.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API, 120 mashups

Posterous February Newsletter - Private sites, a new bookmarklet, and more...

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:26:24 +0100

Hi Joep

Is it February already? Crazy. It’s been busy in Posterous Land.
Here’s what’s new…

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Annual cutting the Long Tail down to size roundup

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 23:40:53 +0100

Annual cutting the Long Tail down to size roundup

via The Long Tail by Chris Anderson on 12/23/08

Around the Christmas season each year there are a flurry of stories about hit toys, books and other retail blockbuster phenomena that seem to defy the overall trend towards more niche demand. This year is no exception, so I’ll round up a couple of the recent pieces here:

1) Quite a good article in New Scientist surveys recent research on consumer behavior in the face of massive variety, and concludes that we still like to buy stuff that other people buy. It mentions the Elberse research as well as comments from Duncan Watts about how socially connected groups tend to clump in their taste. (Image from the article shown above.)

My take: I’ve already discussed the problems with Elberse’s research (it’s based on percentages, not absolute numbers, which become meaningless when inventory grows by orders of magnitude. She also defines head and tail in a way that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t correspond to my own definitions).

Watts’ work is more interesting, and touches on the same point Eric Schmidt from Google made about network effects creating winner-take-all consequences. My answer to that is that fortunately social media creates an infinite number of networks, many of them focused on niche subjects, so that many winners can take “all” of their micromarket, while still having the collective effect of redistributing demand in the entire market over more variety. This is the “fractal dimension” of the Long Tail that I’ve written about in the blog and the book.

2) The Times UK did a piece on Will Page’s work on music sales, which I wrote about here. The piece is a bit confused, and seems to think this refers to all music online, rather than some UK online retailer(s) that has not been disclosed, as is actually the case.

My take: Nothing new, and my problem with the work remains. Because Will hasn’t published the data or said where it came from, we can’t really know what it means. Is it iTunes UK? Some mobile provider? Ringtones? Some streaming provider? Some combination of the above? Ugh.

His observation that the data is fit better by a lognormal than a powerlaw is interesting, but until we know what filters were available in that marketplace (or marketplaces), we can’t say whether that’s surprising or not. In general, marketplaces with good filters (recommendations and other discovery tools) tend to follow a powerlaw, where marketplaces with poor filters follow the steeper lognormal of the older bricks-and-mortar markets. Again, there’s a whole chapter on this in the book.

Interestingly, the article says that Page and his co-author plan to write a book on this. No doubt they’ll come up with a better title than “Some Online Markets are Better Fit by a Lognormal Than a Powerlaw”, but it will be fun to see how far they can take this.

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