Long Tails and Wise Crowds: Some Pre-qualification Necessary
Sunday, July 16, 2006
So, I'm just getting into James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. I know I'm a Johnny-come-lately to blogging about this book, but as I encounter the pre-qualifications of what makes a crowd smart, I keep coming running into similarities to what makes a market have a long tail. With The Long Tail, the qualifiers are increasingly simple means of production, distribution and filters, turning making the supply-side virtually infinite. Because online shopping is striving to become a mere 25% of all commerce, long tail markets are still the exception and not the rule. Admittedly, it will be becoming more so over time, because improving technology dictates improving supply-side capabilities. But today, the long tail is mostly an eBusiness phenomenon.
Similarly, the absolutely counterintuitive notions of the wise crowd are predicated on a diverse sampling of people. If the crowd is too homogeneous, such as everyone being smart, the crowd actually gets stupider, because cohesion and bias sets in. James refers to the bad decisions leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion as an example. The same people who thought up the idea were the ones consulted on whether they thought it could work, and vital facts were left out of the decision making process had they used a larger sampling of people, such as the intelligence branch of the CIA or the Cuban desk of the State Department. So, just because you have a crowd and an independent voting mechanism doesn't mean you have superior predictive or decision making capabilities.
And that has been on my mind recently, thinking about Digg. Digg has many of the things going for it that one would think necessary to create a Wikipedia-like phenomenon. There was a debate recently of whether Digg was better than The New York Times, and could one day have a larger audience and influence. This brought me back to making Digg part of my daily read, least I get left out. I quickly took it off again, realizing the signal-to-noise ratio was excessive for the finite time I was willing to allocate. Linux stories, no matter how small, are considered front page material by the Digg audience, while actual newsworthy stories, even in technology, faced a difficult challenge in rising to the top.
It was with this perspective that I watched with interest as Jason Calacanis helped AOL launch the new Digg-like Netscape, but with Anchor picks. I thought, OK, here's where the wisdom of the crowd could be brought to bear on news, but without the anti-Microsoft Geek agenda bias. Not because of the Anchors, but rather because of the broader and more diverse sampling of audience a site like Netscape could bring to bear on the problem. It's too early to draw any conclusions, and I certainly wouldn't replace the Yahoo top-headline RSS news feed on my mobile phone with the Netscape feed yet. But the fact that technology news is getting mixed right in with politics and natural disasters is an interesting sign. Considering it's the Time Warner conglomerate behind this, I think they could have given the endeavor an even better chance by picking a more news-oriented domain from their portfolio, like Time.com. It may have less traffic (according to Alexa), but it's probably a better audience for this sort of experiment. Now, that would have made news, and really tested the viability of the new news dynamic.
So, my summer reading list also includes Inside the Tornado and The Tipping Point, two books which I know are all about pre-qualification. Not every company finds themselves inside the tornado having to deal with hypergrowth. And since the bust, it's even fewer. But still, it does happen, such as with MySpace. And Connors may have such a case in HitTail--only time will tell. But I'm VERY interested in those pre-qualifications that the Tornado book deals with.
Similarly with The Tipping Point, not every industry undergoes rapid change analogous to the outbreak of an epidemic. It's only when such-and-such conditions are met (the pre-qualifications) that you reach a point of no return. It may take overcoming much initial resistance before a process is set irrevocably in motion. I revert back to the Google example. Google taking over the world was not inevitable in its early days as seems intuitively obvious today. DogPile and Mamma seemed MUCH better than Google to the casual observer in those early days. A lot of people had to be convinced to look closer before dismissing this minimalist colorform-esque site. What exactly were the pre-qualifying factors that ALLOWED Google to overcome and reach the tipping point? I need to know.
So my final point is that these generalizations about disruptions to the shape of business, culture and our lives always seem to require pre-qualification, which has something of a dampening effect. If every new business concept were as transforming as the hype accompanying the launch and the book's success, then society would be getting transformed and re-transformed at a more rapid pace. In the face of books like The Long Tail, The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm and others of that ilk, I'm constantly in conflict over how much I buy into the pontifications of business guru, and recently deceased, Peter Drucker. I REALLY believe most of what Drucker has to say about the underlying tenants of business, success and change. And in the end, I think Peter Drucker was right about most things: you might say about the first 20% of things that make 80% of the difference. And you'll really appreciate the irony of that statement if you're a longtailer.Labels: blog, digg, The Long Tail
posted by Mike Levin
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1 Comments:
Mike,
I have lived through the hyper groth stages at both Oracle and Netscape. If you need an eye witness account, just send me an email
irwin at navagility dot com
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