Chris Anderson says "Steal my book"

Chris Anderson is happy that his book is now available on BitTorrent. The reason for his happiness makes me happy.

"My publishers want to make money, and I like them so I usually do what it takes to keep them happy, but in truth I just want to be read/listened to by the largest number of people. Leave it to me to figure out how to convert that reputational currency into cash--just get me in front of the biggest audience and I'll do the rest. My agent doesn't want to hear this, but I'd rather take a smaller up-front advance or lower royalties in exchange for more liberty in distributing free versions, because I think I'll actually be better off in the end.

As Tim O'Reilly puts it, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy".

As I always say - people just want to be heard.

I have had a fascination with this idea ever since my first major project - both on real radio and online which boasted huge levels of audience interaction (forums, chat, participant generated content etc) back in 1997. The slogan - "Don't just listen - Be Heard".

It has been a constant theme in my work.

Chris won't go hungry because of this little breach in his rights. He will only earn more audience and a louder voice. He will make his money from better jobs, more opportunities and a bigger booking fees.

The reality is though, us other content creators who are far less well known will have to find another way to make money from the long tail.

A touching tale of Recommendation

This is a sweet story of love between a woman and her Amazon Recommendation Engine on The Onion.

"Pamela Meyers was delighted to receive yet another thoughtful CD recommendation from Amazon.com Friday, confirming that the online retail giant has a more thorough, individualized, and nuanced understanding of Meyers' taste than the man who occasionally claims to love her, husband Dean Meyers.

While the powerful algorithms that power Amazon's recommendations generator do not have the advantage of being able to observe Meyers' body language, verbal intonation, or current personal possessions, they have nonetheless proven more effective than Dean, who bases his gift-giving choices primarily on what is needed around the house, what he would like to own, and, most notably, what objects are nearby.

I don't know how Amazon picked up on my growing interest in world music so quickly, but I absolutely love this traditional Celtic CD," Meyers said. "I like it so much more than that Keith Urban thing Dean got me. I'm really not sure what made him think I like country music

It was nice to know that on my birthday, someone or something was out there thinking about me, and what boxed sets I wanted,"

This is a sweet story (in a strange, Amazon loves me more than my husband sorta way). Now imagine this sort of power across your entire Attention Profile.

Remember though... Touchstone is NOT a Recommendation Engine.

Via The Long Tail.

Follow up: Making money in the long tail

Guy Kawasaki has posted a follow up to his post 'A review of my first year of blogging' which sparked a flurry of interest from bloggers because it revealed just how little Guy actually makes from advertising on his blog (and by implication, how little money there is in online advertising)

The new post - entitled 'The Short Tale: Much Ado about Not Much' goes further - explaining that he did not mean to cause any controversy and explained, if not for money, why exactly Guy blogs.

He says:

In case you’re interested, the reasons that I blog are:

1. To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.
   
2. To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”
   
3. To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.
   
4. To test ideas with “reality checks.” How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?
   
5. To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?
   
6. To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”

As I explained - I personally never imagined that individual bloggers would blog for the advertising revenue. Not successfully anyway.

In case you're interested - here's the reasons I personally blog here on the Touchstone blog.

1. To join the daily discussion about topics and issues I am passionate about.
   
2. To explain to our testers/users, partners, investors and anyone else who will listen why we should all be paying attention to Attention.
   
3. To keep everyone up-to-date about our challenges, goals and intentions with Touchstone (as guy says, how else can you get such a large focus group).
   
4. It helps me structure my thoughts and clearly express them for our team and the wider community to see.
   
5. To encourage people to connect with me if they have similar ideas or potential opportunities that could benefit us both.
   
6. To be heard...

Making money from the long tail...

There have been a number of posts lately about the profitability of the long tail.

First Guy Kawasaki posts his year in review where he mentions how little he makes from his very successful blog.

Then Chris Anderson posts called "Don't quite your day job" a reaction to Guy's blog revenue talking about the long tail and its profitability.

Then Chris makes a follow up post where he clearly explains who in the long-tail ecosystem can make money, and why those that can't, shouldn't worry anyway because direct revenue is not the main motivating force or reward.

This is how he explains it:

1. Consumers. Effect: Largely cultural. People have more choice, so individual taste increasingly satisfied even if the effect is an increasingly fragmented culture.
   
2. Aggregators. Effect: Largely economic. It's never been easier to assemble vast variety and create tools for organizing it, from search to recommendations. Increased variety plus increased demand for variety equals opportunity. Also note that just as one size doesn't fit all for products, nor does it for aggregators. I think the winner-take-all examples of eBay, Amazon, iTunes and Google are a first-inning phenomena. Specialized niche aggregators (think: vertical search, such as the real estate service Zillow) are on the rise.
   
3. Producers. Effect: Largely non-economic. I responded to a good Nick Carr post on this last year with the following: "For producers, Long Tail benefits are not primarily about direct revenues. Sure, Google Adsense on the average blog will generate risible returns, and the average band on MySpace probably won't sell enough CDs to pay back their recording costs, much less quit their day jobs. But the ability to unitize such microcelebrity can be significant elsewhere. A blog is a great personal branding vehicle, leading to anything from job offers to consulting gigs. And most band's MySpace pages are intended to bring fans to live shows, which are the market most bands care most about. When you look at the non-monetary economy of reputation, the Long Tail looks a lot more inviting for its inhabitants."
   
   

Nik Cubrilovic still holds onto the hope that producers can indeed make money from blogging and suggests some alternatives to AdSense which should be more profitable.

But of course, each of these commentators have day jobs.

There were some posts from bloggers who do basically make a business out of their blogs. First Yaro Stark who posts "Is Professional Blogging a Sustainable Business Model" and Darren Rowse with a post called "Does AdSense Suck for Bloggers?".

This is an interesting topic to me because I have had a number of conversations with friends, partners, investors etc about 'where the money is' in this emerging marketplace.

My feeling is more closely aligned with Chris Anderson's. Participants who create long-tail content are not doing it for money. We don't write open source code, contribute to wikipedia or blog about our lives for cash. We do it because we want to contribute - both to our egos and to the world. We want to be heard.

Professional producers, however, need to pay the bills. But unfortunately they are finding it hard to monetize their 'participants'. That's why I think aggregators should give something back. But that's a post for another time.

I am not dumb - I am wired

Chris Anderson recently posted a pair of articles about a Transparent Wired Magazine. What would that look like? The first post resembles my Media 2.0 roadmap. Read Post 1 and Post 2 here.

Post 2, is far more interesting however. He talks about revealing the internal staff hierarchy to the world, exposing internal staff wikis and scratchpads, publishing drafts and transcripts as they are created, giving users the power to rate comments and include them as part of the story, use their recently acquisition of reddit (or similar paradigm) to actually decide what makes it into the magazine, and my personal favorite - wikify everything.

Imagine that - a place where the articles on a given topic no longer represent a moment in time, but rather an evolving commentary on a given subject. Is this actually feasible? Would the result become unbearably long and detailed?

Something David Dobbs writes in response is very interesting...

Some of the unease rises from concerns that might seem vain or proud: I like to think that in many cases I really AM more qualified than others to write about a given subject and (more to the point) that doing a ton of research on a subject — reading hundreds of pages and talking to highly informed and involved people —gives me a deeper and more nuanced view of a subject that gives the resulting story a certain priority in placement and attention. Indeed, that's precisely what publishing is all about.

He does go on to admit:

(Yes, it's also about power and hoarding information that can then be packaged and sold, yada yada. I'll raise my hand and confess I'm almost certainly unwittingly doing all those things -- but then, so does a farmer or carpenter or plumber.)

I would argue that recently (and maybe for long, long time) in the 24 hour news cycle, the TV media especially has completely failed to provide any real context and neunce to ongoing stories. They seem to glob onto any piece of sensational news and fail to give it any broader meaning.

They use prejudicial words without giving any thought to their bias and they fail to consider the real impacts for real people.

As Chris is suggesting in his posts, Wired and other print journalists could be great at creating over-arching summaries or focusing a community around a topic and then summarizing the conversation at the end. Nuance, however, seems to come from bloggers - not professionals.

He also argues against publishing transcripts because...

Lots of ums and ungrammatical sentences and sentence fragments. Lots of digressions, side comments, and stupid failed wisecracks. All that clutter of broken strings and floating particles makes little sense if encountered on paper by a reader who wasn't present but makes complete sense (well, nearly complete sense) to the person who was there in the conversation.

I think that, unfortunately, Mr Dobbs is making the same mistake that most mainstream media outlets (including TV networks) make. They think we are dumb.

Transcripts reveal something about an interviewee that the resulting article cannot. It reveals character, personality and context.

I have been interviewed many times and, with no disrespect to my journalist friends, my quotes are often taken out of context for the purposes of narrative flow. That's fine for articles - but in this new transparent world - I'd like the option of digging deeper.