The Media Supermarket

most of them really know what they are talking about. This really contrasts to Seth Godin’s post on “pundits”. Makes you really think…

Just while I thought that The Long Tail would kill all forms of traditional media, Spotrunner has found ways of utilizing The Long Tail to resurrect this (dying?) medium.
It’s quite difficult to imagine how a company can provide a link between a huge number of medium to small (and they have big) advertisers, with highly localized TV networks and stations. But this is exactly what they are doing.
First, the cost of producing the TV ad (which is usually outrageously high) is considerably reduced by providing generic customizable templates. These are premaid ads for certain industries. If you, as an advertiser, see that they represent your business and are suitable for your campaign, they can customize the ad for you. This is done through adding a new voice-over, and inserting your contact information. There is also the option of adding certain images if needed. Advertiser would not want their ads to be shown by other advertisers, you may think. This is true, but when it is a localized ad, there is no problem in showing in another part of the country where audiences don’t watch the same networks.
Spotrunner can get you lower prices, because they usually go for the spots that are not sold, where the TV network can sell them at a low prices, sometimes as low as $18.
Network effects are the only that will improve this service. If a large-enough number of people start using it, and enriching the history of usage, this system should be great. A great suggestion by Mashable was to open up the video library for video producers, so they can participate with their video commercials. They will want to promote their work, and of course get paid for it, and Spotrunner will have free additions to its vast library.
If this is implemented well, it will open up new huge markets not only for amateurs with a good taste, but for professional film / commercial makers as well. The ultimate perfect state would be to become a platform for producers and consumers of TV ads where they can both login in a self service manner, and manage their work from. This would be wonderful to watch, and it would be a true Web 2.0 application, although most of it is not for the web, it will be a great model that uses web 2.0 by linking online and offline media together.
Spotrunner managed to attract some serious investors, and therefore a lot of media coverage (WPP and CBS among others). They also announced in October 2006 that they managed to attract $40 Million in investment. Looks really cool.

Everything is becoming “web-based” and not only that, the network effects and community are magnifying the importance of having shared files, rankings, and habits. Forget about your privacy for just about a century!
The importance of having your files on the web, is that it just adds to your mobility, and flexibility in terms of logistics. Many people work on two computers, one at home and the other at work. Having favorite files in one accessible place really makes things easier, especially while traveling.
This is my review of the service provided by Mediamax, a website owned by Streamload.Mediamax has a great offer for favorites junkies. The cool thing is that the paid versions have the same features, only the storage and sharing rate are different. This depends on your needs.

The above is the main dashboard when you login. The File Manager is the general tab containing all the files you have uploaded. They can also be accessed through their type; music, video, photo, and also mail. Uploaded files can be kept private or published for sharing with other. Each file in this case is given its unique URL.

Features:

Storage: The free version comes with 25GB of storage. The three other versions come with 100 GB ($4.95/month), 250 GB ($9.95/month), and 1000 GB ($29.95/month) of storage.

Uploading: Any person can upload files to your account if they are not registered. This is a great feature for receiving and sharing group projects and keeping everyone in the loop.  

Backup: By downloading their free Mediamax XL software, you can also backup your files on your compuer and synchronize your work with others as well.
There is a more detailed pricing and plan comparison on the pricing page.

This product was featured numerous times in the press, and a lot of buzz has been going out by several of the biggest magazines like PC World and Time. References also available on the site.

What could be imporved: The process of uploading files, especially big ones, especially if you are moving your full library of files is really mundane. Moving between tabs could really be improved by an AJAX interfce without having to refresh the page on clicking each of the tabs. That would really improve the user-experience, and would reduce some of the time spent on uploading. I hope they can do it soon.

I’m starting to depend on Mediamax for keeping my stuff on the web, and I’m enjoying having access to my useful stuff any time, and anywhere. You can register for free to check it out.

Establishing your website, and securing an excellent web presence, is not only becoming a must, it’s becoming really easy, and dirt cheap. The speed at which prices are going down, while features are increasing makes me really wonder how these companies make any money. Although it is becoming a highly sophisticated industry, I believe we should all have the basic knowledge and actually create our site(s) as an extension of our work/personality.
While researching for the best webhosting companies available, I have found one that offers great services and options at very low prices, and flexibility. Bluehost is one of the top rated hosting service providers, and they have great features that can really help one grow their business online, and probably take that hobby one or two steps further. Here are the main features:

Unlimited domains in one account: Many hosting companies will provide you with a certain number of domain names per account. Some of them even limit you to only one. There is no meaning having so much storage space if you have only three sites. Moreover, many companies charge you a setup fee for activating your sites. With Bluehost, you have as many sites as you want.
The value in this feature is that it gives you the freedom to be experimentatl in your approach to building your sites, if it only costs you $10 to start a new site, why not try out that idea you had in your mind? You can also manage these sites through one login.
This can be taken one step further, and you can start selling your services to manage other sites.

Live chat: I’ve tried their live chat system, and it’s good to be able to ask a question on the go, and have your immediate answer.

Huge data transfer: 3,000 GB of data transfer, or bandwidth, is really a huge amount. Judging by the fact that you can use third parties to host your images and videos, like Youtube and Flickr, you will practically not reach that limit, unless you have a very high-traffic portal.

A lot of storage space: 300 GB of storage is quite impressive. Very few websites use that much of disk space on their servers.

Awards: If you want to check out their quality, you can see their awards page. By the way, they claim to have around 285,000 domains hosted. I guess these customers are happy with the service.

$50 Yahoo! and $25 Google advertising credits: These are given for new accounts. If you use this advertising to get some traffic to your site, you can easily get back your investment if you have products to sell, or affiliate programs on your site.

Pricing: $6.95 per month for 24 month accounts and $7.95 per month for 12 month accounts. You don’t pay anything other than the domain name price which is $10 annually. As I mentioned many companies charge around $25 - 30 just for setup.

Free privacy: Again this is a feature offered for free. This is the option of keeping your information private, and not having to deal with spammers.
Try them.

Kevin Ham, the man behind many of these evil (and seriously cool) tactics, has also managed to remain anonymous in this undercover field of business

I’m the kind of person who constantly needs intellectual stimulation. I always need to have a major mental adventure going on in my life. The more the adventure requires me to learn and discover new things, the better. The most boring times in my life, are the moments spent doing or talking about something I really mastered. You can really drive me crazy if you can put me in such a situation. This book is one such endeavor, if I may say. It’s the kind of book that gives you a totally new direction to move in, and I’m quite comfortable doing this. Not only does it show you the untapped direction in which to go, the books explains how to make use of totally new markets, and how to understand, capitalize, and ,most importantly for me, enjoy the new worlds unfolding to us. There are numerous new tails created, and existing tails are elongating.
What exactly is the “long tail”?

According to Hellen Keller,“The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.” This, in a nutshell, is The Long Tail.

Hits and Misses

The culture and economy we are used to live in, depends on the Pareto Principle, more known as the 80-20 principle, which basically states that 80% of the results produced are from the “mighty shoves” of the mighty 20%. If the hits are the products, songs, movies etc. that make it to the top lists, the “misses” are the ones that missed them. A closer look on these two types of products shows that they only missed the shelves, and not necessarily the value we give them. Many products are valuable enough for us to buy them, but we didn’t buy them because they were just not available, due to the tyranny of geography and physical constraints, as Chris Anderson explains.

The culture and economy we are used to live in, depends on the Pareto Principle, more known as the 80-20 principle, which basically states that 80% of the results produced are from the “mighty shoves” of the mighty 20%. If the hits are the products, songs, movies etc. that make it to the top lists, the “misses” are the ones that missed them. A closer look on these two types of products shows that they only missed the shelves, and not necessarily the value we give them. Many products are valuable enough for us to buy them, but we didn’t buy them because they were just not available, due to the tyranny of geography and physical constraints, as Chris Anderson explains.

The Three Forces of The Long Tail

1. Democratize Production: The means of producing goods and services have been dramatically made easy with the new technologies. And since it is easy to produce almost anything (especially intellectual property) the challenge is in the mind of the producer. If you are creative and hard working, you can do some cool stuff.
The means of producing goods and services have been dramatically made easy with the new technologies. And since it is easy to produce almost anything (especially intellectual property) the challenge is in the mind of the producer. If you are creative and hard working, you can do some cool stuff.

2. Democratize Distribution: Making the misses available to whoever wants them, is a key to pushing demand down the tail. Online sales of less-known titles is one of the key drivers. Amazon is one of the prominent examples on this, where they have millions of titles that sell less, but together, they amount to a significant total.

3. Connect Supply and Demand: The ways in which we are making purchase decisions are dramatically changed by these forces. We have recommendation engines, mainly fueled by the history of people’s past decisions. At the same time, those “long tail aggregators” are giving the chance for people to share their reviews, and post their comments for whichever product they have tried. This way, we can get a good amount of information about a certain product in minutes.
I was really surprised to know that Sears had a very long tail of products and an affiliate program back in the beginning of the twentieth century. My initial thought was that such a thing can only be facilitated through the Internet, especially with physical products. There is a detailed explanation of this in the beginning of the book.

Anderson goes on to explain the details of the tail, and its relation to the head. How it behaves in certain industries, and where it might best thrive.

The great thing about this new phenomenon is that it’s not only showing a new way of doing things, this new way is right in the opposite direction of where we were heading in the past. Going for small niches is a really new concept, in contrast to “think big”. The fact that the customers down the tail are people who have special requirements, also means that they are willing to pay a premium to get what they are looking for.
Another important empowerment that these forces provide, is the empowerment for user-generated-content. Again, the first thing that comes to my mind when talking about it, is intellectual content; videos, text, design etc. but there is a great example about LEGO and how they are enabling this. LEGO is giving anyone the option of designing their own pictures or models, uploading them to their website, and getting a map of how the bricks should draw this picture. There is more; this “product” is shipped to the creator, with the picture on the box. This also becomes one of the products that LEGO offer through their website, and they even pay some royalties for the creator of the product if it sells well. Wow!
There is also a great explanation of the long tail of articles, and Wikipedia. An interesting analogy was drawn between Wikipedia and evolution, and the fact that they work extremely well on the macro level, and not necessarily that well in every incident on the micro level. The open source model, makes it a great encyclopedia in terms of flexibility, or more importantly, resilience. There are millions of people contributing, and constantly the articles are updated and improved on by all of us. It’s a great system, and it has this wonderful mechanism that runs it, but, that doesn’t mean that you won’t find crappy articles with very low quality. The best way to use Wikipedia? It is the starting point in your endeavor to understand something, and not the final definitive say on that particular topic. This approach resonates with what Squidoo is actually doing. You provide some links and short summaries related to something you know about, and give the user a starting point and a guide on how to proceed with their quest.

Although these new phenomena seem to just negate our old thinking about the world, they actually don’t. The only thing they do, is that they put some limitations to the theories that we know. Einstein did not negate what Newton taught us. He just proved that these theories apply on the physical level. They just simply are not descriptive of the world on the quantum level.
A paradox seems to pop up when discussing the long tail, and the rise of niches as opposed to hits. Anderson challenges the theory that says that abundant choice is oppressive and leads to less sales. This is based on a study that showed that when people are given six types of jam to taste, they buy more than when they are presented with twenty four. The solution to this, are the recommendation engines. People’s reviews about a certain product give the new comers a glimpse about how well this product is performing. So, if you want to choose the best jam, you can just ask Amazon to give you top selling ones.
But, doesn’t that mean that we are going back to the hits? We are actually asking for the hits this way.
Chris’s answer? This is a hit within a very small niche. The best selling jam, is a hit in the jam category and has nothing to do with food, or general merchandise. Now, a hit is really a meaningful thing, within that niche.
My own theory on this attempts to utilize a group of niche skills, each being average, and maybe the aggregate of these skills amounts to a high quality “long tail person”.

There’s a video discussion done about this book by Anderson, hosted by Google, where he also has an interesting Q&A session that talks about his book.

I gave a presentation about the basics of Web 2.0. I discovered several important things, and experienced important learnings. Thank God I made some good mistakes!

1. Forget about the time, and look at the faces: Give your breaks when you feel the audience needs it. Never mind about what time you planned to give the time out. When they are listening intently and following you, it’s meaningless to stop this. After all, you have spent some good time on building and maintaining their attention. Don’t waste it. It’s like the ace in your hand. Use it wisely.

2. Magnify the relevant comments only : Most of the time you will have some people commenting on what you are saying. Some of it will be relevant and useful, and some will just be people saying whatever comes to their mind. Your response to these comments magnifies their importance to the audience. The audience is yours, and they will pay attention to whatever you tell them. Don’t try to please everyone by attending to whatever they are saying. Make sure you reward the good comments.

3. Talk to faces, not the “audience”: Try to make good use of eye contact. This means that you should connect with as many people as you can by looking in their eyes several seconds and making sure you “attract” them and keep them with you. You need to have this backed up by a logical flow of arguments. The people in the front rows can be powerful anchors for getting others to pay attention too. You can easily look in their eyes.

4. Relax!: Don’t try. Just talk to the audience. Having a loud and clear voice is essential to keeping them with you. But when you talk in a relaxed manner, you convey your confidence and you send out the message that they should listen to you.

Here is the Web 2.0 presentation.

Be like the Internet!
The Internet is definitely one of the main forces, adding to the complexity and uncertainty in our lives. Although it is giving us unprecedented opportunity and threats, what it equally provides to everyone is an increase in the size and number of interactions that we make (with humans and machines).
I can’t understand why many people say that with the advent of the new technologies, the world is becoming smaller. I think the world has become huge, and unintelligibly larger, because of technology. We send and receive hundreds of messages every day, to tens of people, and in several different formats. Each person is the center of their own world, or universe if you will. My world at least is definitely not smaller.
So how do we deal with all this, and what does it require from us as people to do? What kind of attitude do we need to have to thrive, or at least survive, in such circumstances?
The name of this presentation is a part of the answer: Be Like the Internet. The first thing that came to mind when I read this, was that we should be widespread, flexible, scalable, shapeless, and vague.
This presentation is much better in explaining this, especially with creative and descriptive photos that clearly tell you how to “be” like the Internet.
Enjoy!

Question it!
That was the most important lesson I learned from the seminar I attended today, by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of The Art of Living. He gave a one-hour talk about several issues, and gave some tips for life. The idea that really struck me was the following:

We only question the things that are given to us in the positive. We never question the negative stuff.

When someone says, “You were great!” or, “I really admire you!”, we usually reply, “Really??”. But when someone says, “You are really bad at handling things” we immediately believe, and feel the need to defend ourselves and try to prove something.
The next time I am confronted with a negative idea (by anyone or by myself), I’ll face it with the not-so-obvious question, “Are you sure? Do you really think so?”. I’ll keep questioning until they (or I) really start to rethink that idea. And whenever I get a great positive idea, I’m not going to question it, just for a change.
An important thing that this does, is that it immediately interrupts the attacking person’s assault. You give them a totally unexpected response, and you really make them wonder and think about the validity of what they are claiming. A very good sales technique!

This is a seriously inspiring video by two authors who have met because their books were extremely similar. This is also a part of the Authors@Google series.
Marci Alboher, author of One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success and Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich talk about how to live and balance your life and career(s) and share really cool stories about people who are doing this. They also share how they themselves are doing this in their lives.
They validly questioned (threw away, and replaced) some of my basic assumptions about what can and what cannot be done. What should and what should not be approached as possible.
This is very important for me, because I’m always interested in two million things at one time, and this especially resonates with my idea of “The Long Tail Person“.
A very important distinction was drawn by Tim, which I knew before but this time it sunk in more; the distinction between being busy and being productive. If you confine your thinking to your working hours, you will inevitably find ways of filling that time, and be “busy”. If, on the other hand you really focus on what it is you are trying to achieve and do that, you might really be creating more time and space for the things that you want to do.
One of Tim’s main ideas was to think about what you really want to do, and design everything around that.
“Well, what if you don’t know what you want?” asked one of the people. Marci was actually “waiting” for that question, and they both shared some tips:

1. Go back to your childhood, which is the time you did things without being paid for doing them. “Interview your parents”. This is a really nice and easy way of doing this. You immediately discover the things you would love to do when there is nothing you have to do.

2. Experimenting: taking classes that just seem to be interesting to you. This is actually how Marci changed her career from law to writing. She took a course on writing and found out that this something she would really love to do. Tim also points out some insights from his own experimentation. One of the most important is that the experiment is not the same as doing the work. Surfing two hours on Sunday is a lot different from surfing forty hours every week. Keep this in mind during the experiments. Is this something I would like to do throughout the week?

3. Pursuing happiness: Tim gives a very nice way of getting rid of the pursuit of happiness, because it’s just a mental abstraction that might simply not mean anything. Instead, you should pursue excitement. Things that keep you awake at night, and make you really wonder how this might be possible. Another awakening realization for me (by Tim) was that you don’t really need that much money to do the things that you want to do. He shared a cool anecdote about one of his friends, who wanted to work in a field he hated, just because if he worked hard enough for some years, he’d be making 3 - 5 million dollars a year. Tim’s question,”what are you going to do with all that money?”. His friend didn’t have an immediate answer, he made up a goal about “having a long trip to Thailand”. I could have been that friend. Actually I felt it was me talking. Time for action!