Chris Anderson has put up a couple of excellent posts
recently (big surprise there). The first
had to do with some poor guy’s misinterpretation of the long tail phenomenon,
the second to do with tribal culture. What
made the posts so compelling was not Chris’ clarification of what the long tail
means, but rather his insight as to how consumers locate the signal amid all of
the noise and how signal identification is a complex and often unintuitive
process.
We have traditionally been defined by our commonality. And while commonality is still important (we
are social creatures after all), we are beginning to find commonality with very
specific groups on an ad hoc basis. Online, I can be friends with someone due to a single commonality and
interact with them only in relation to that interest. I can compartmentalize my relationships very
effectively.
Anyway, this has specific implications for the efficient
location of long tail video. Niche
content is hard to find without the help of those that have already blazed the
path to it. But finding the ideal
trailblazers can also be challenging. Because it’s not just in locating the individual with a common interest,
it’s in identifying whether you trust that individual’s interpretation of
relevance for that specific topic. He
may be a master in his field, but his tastes and interests may still diverge
dramatically from your own. You can have
a common interest while also having a difference of opinion.
Chris sums it up nicely:
“Here's my take on what the Long
Tail is doing to pop culture. Rather than the scary fragmentation of our
society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think
we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic
proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of
it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously,
often overlapping (geek culture and Lego), often not (tennis and punk-funk).
What's interesting is that the same
Long Tail forces and technologies that are leading to an explosion of variety
and abundant choice in the content we consume are also helping to connect us to
other consumers, whether through Amazon and Netflix reviews, blogs, p2p
networks or playlist sharing. I've described this in the past, somewhat
obscurely, as the rise of orthogonal
trust networks, which are the new recommendation and word-of-mouth
effects that will drive demand down the tail from hits to niches.”
Another quote:
“A tail without a head is too noisy
and apparently random to get consumer traction; people need to start with the
familiar and then move, via trusted recommendations, to the unfamiliar.
Likewise a head without a tail is too limited in choice; the odds of finding a
niche you want are too low to bother exploring much beyond what you already
know.”
It is critical to start any relationship with some
commonality. As it relates to locating
content in the long tail, I need to have watched some of the same content and
found some commonality in our views of that content. I don’t need to become the guy’s best friend. These relationships can be highly segmented
and ad hoc, but without a sense of the individual’s “track record” with common
experiences, it is impossible to form a trust relationship for the journey down
the tail.
This is the problem I see with many long tail distribution
services out there (especially in video). While each has the goal of providing a simple mechanisms for publishing media,
few seem to have given much thought to how published content will be located by
consumers. They seem to believe that
long tail video has such inherently high value that people will spend the time
to find those golden nuggets; they won’t (or at least most won’t). The whole point of long tail video is that a
vast majority of it will be completely irrelevant, but some of it will also be
highly relevant. But the simplicity of
finding that stuff defines the ultimate utility of the network, not the simple
aggregation of the assets.
In most services there is no commonality, there is no
community. RSS is nice, but it doesn’t
make any decisions about what’s delivered, it just tells you that it’s
there. Tagging is certainly a
methodology that can yield interesting results, but only once the network
achieves a certain scale. Getting to
that scale requires people to find the service valuable. Search is also a good tool, but it still
requires scale in the network to deliver real value. Try finding really great video in many of
these sites and it will take some time. It’s there (in many cases); it’s just not very easy to access.
The problem is that these networks not only lack the
trailblazers, they lack any structure in the terrain. They start with no landmarks of any
kind. Until these services begin to give
people some reference points around which communities and conversations can
form, they will have trouble reaching the critical mass that is a prerequisite
to a vibrant long tail marketplace. Otherwise, it just a waste of our time and
attention.
Tags | longtail , rss
, tags , chrisanderson , community
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