The Long Tail

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail. Touching the Void was published in 1988, an account of mountain climbing in the Peruvian Andes. In the mid-1990s, Jon Krakauer published Into Thin Air, an account about a disastrous day at Mt. Everest. Through the magic of word-of-keyboard recommendations at sites like Amazon.com, The Long Tail suddenly started to sell again and today (according to this article) outsells Into Thin Air 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.

This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

Read the complete article at Wired.

Dumb move by AMEX on paperless billing

Apparently, someone at AMEX has gotten the idea that their paperless billing was too easy. Instead of being able to pull up a statement online in HTML, they are switching to only allowing PDF downloads of statements. I don't really have anything against PDF, except that it kills the utility of being able to log on and check out my bill online. Instead I'd have to log on, click around, download the PDF, and then wait for Adobe's ever-more-bloated Acrobat Reader to fire up.

Ok, perhaps I do have something against PDF.

In any event, I assume that this was a cost cutting measure for AMEX. Instead, at least in my single solitary case, it's going to cost them more since I declined to continue receiving paperless billing.

Petty, petty, petty I know it's the only way you catch the attention of beancounters. Logic certainly doesn't work.

Google does SMS

From the Google Blog, Google is now supporting SMS queries.

Eek