Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The long tail: how does it relate to social software?. I have been following the concept of the long tail as it relates to business and statistics, and have recently begun to discern how the long tail may relate to social software. The long tail as defined by statistic refers to a distribution effect that can be visualized by the graph at right, in which a small portion of ‘popular’ events occurs very often (red), whereas the vast majority of events occurs far more rarely (yellow). This overall population of rare events, however, is itself quite large — this huge population of low amplitude events is known as the long tail. Send this to Brad in a few days to talk about Tim Bray muses the long tail to be “a tangled mess of microcommunities and subcultures and tribes and hobbies and fanatics.” He goes on to posit that although these informal social communities have always existed, the interlinking power of the web is finally making these structures visible because they “now they span the globe in real-time.” With the advent of social tools on the web, members of the long tail are finding each other and creating bridges, just as higher amplitude members of the yellow end of the distribution curve are finding like-minded members of the long tail and creating pathways to them. Another intersection between social software and the long tail comes to me by way of Seb Paquet, writing about a Popularity Slider feature on upto11.net, which was a social music site also mentioned in response to my post on Webjay as being a service with a folksonomy component (dizzy yet?). The slider allows you to filter what kinds of artist recommendations you receive based on your music preferences. Normally, such a recommender system tends to tip you towards the more popular items at the red end of the distribution, which may not necessarily be as close to what you might actually like as some of the less visible items. The Popularity Slider allows you to essentially truncate the distribution curve in order to filter out the items at the popular (red) end of the graph. This is an incredibly intuitive and useful application of tapping into the benefits of the long tail. How do you see social software relating to the long tail? What benefits are to obtained from tapping in to the less popular end of the spectrum? Weblogs, Inc. RSS feeds brought to you by Userplane Apps: Live communication applications powering the world's leading online communities. [The Social Software Weblog] 6:00:02 PM    comment [] Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. Accurate search engines and other up-to-the-minute content aggregators are drastically changing the game of web design. It's turning into a situation where the information architecture that is most important isn't the one that's on your web site, but the one on everyone else's. Read this article [UIE Research Articles] Reread this frequently and understand its implications 4:21:43 PM    comment [] http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66671,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4 intersting article that looks at the value of IM to change the linguistic practices,  Includes a stat that 70% of respondents were doing something else while in an IM session. 11:48:02 AM    comment [] Going Home - Our Reformation. This should certainly be on your short list. It does provide much on the vision of what might be coming to pass. It certainly represents much of what I would like to see come to pass and what I think might be possible to bring into being. It won't, however, come about simply because we would like it to or simply because we have new enabling tools or concepts. It is going to take work and that work will take place against the active and well-resourced resistance of many who benefit from the status quo and are sorely threatened by these visions of what might be. Going Home - Our Reformation. If you read one thing this week, read this. One commentator described it as "brilliant... and beautiful... and inspiring." It is all of that, and more. It is a vision I support and that I and many other people I cite in this newsletter are working toward. The theme of coming home will likely resonate in my work for a long time. Robert Paterson writes, "Is not our great problem that the great institutions of our time, government, healthcare, education, arts and entertainment, even business, no longer serve us but only themselves? "Is not their organizational doctrine based on a dogma of control? Have they not divorced their world-view from observable reality? Is not this split from the laws of nature their dogma? Are they not prepared to fight to the death to preserve this dogma? Do we not see the entertainment industry as an Inquisition? Do we not see the IP industry as the agent of the controllers and not of the creative? "Is not the new 'big idea' of our time to disintermediate the institutional middleman and to enable direct relationships? Are supermarkets eternal? Do we need factory universities to learn? Is our health dependent on a doctor? Is the news what we see on TV?" Brave, brilliant, breathless stuff. If you miss this article, you are mising the essence of what this whole thing is about. By Robert Paterson, Robert Paterson's Weblog, February 26, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] [McGee's Musings] 10:54:54 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Judy Smith. Last update: 4/22/2005; 5:20:34 PM.