From the Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson provides a response to a great HBR article entitled “Should You Invest in The Long Tail?”.

Clearly the focus of the article is about the pressing matters facing producers and retailers, but it’s relevant to all of us Web 2.0 types in any case.

I agree with Chris that it’s great to see a well researched article on the Long Tail beyond the usual examples pointed to in the book itself.

It’d be great to see some research on the real effect of Long Tail discoverability mechanisms such as recommendations, ranking and social collaboration. Where’s the value? Are we doing it right? What else is waiting to happen?

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a lot of the fun of coding – in whatever form that is – is the exploration and discovery of new tools and techniques.

A couple of things that jogged my conscience happened in the last week:

• This month’s Edge had a feature on RuneScape and how they’ve developed a hugely successful MMOG from back-bedroom beginnings.
• Scott Hanselman kicked off his exploration of WPF with the creation of BabySmash and a call to action to help him out with it. Lifehacker have already picked it up.

It reminded me that being a master is an aspiration, but all of the fun is in the journey to that point. I think that technologies like WPF and Silverlight lend themselves to the fun of the journey because they’re directly accessible and efficient but have tons of depth and possibility should you wish to master them. Stuff like this.

With that in mind I started thinking about why I got into programming in the first place. (Professionally it’s because I wasn’t dedicated enough to be a doctor, but that’s a different story.) It boils down to a childhood subscription to Zzap64 magazine, which focused on the Commodore 64, and a 4-part article by Andrew Braybrook on the creation of Paradroid (probably one of the best C64 games ever). I’d already bought Gribbly’s Day Out and thought it was brilliant, so reading about a hero building his new game, and then the game turning out as good as it did was just great. And that’s why I started programming.

Braybrook did some other great stuff too (notably for me was Uridium) but it was the Paradroid article that represented the zeitgeist for me as a kid.

I found the diary on an archive site – you can read it here. Looking at again made me nostalgic, but also inspired by the discovery process, and the hacking that is clear through the writing.

I was pleased that Andrew has a Wikipedia page, though I’m hoping that the note that he now works for an insurance firm is code for “is living in gaming paradise for heroes”.

For my part in this, I’ll be doing more coding, and less thinking about the correctness of the approach in the long term: a limiting factor on my fun. Inspiration is a strange thing.

Scoble debates on whether services such as Twitter should charge their “super-users”. An interesting thought, and it’s not so different to the underlying idea behind Freemium services.

Charging “super-users” might be viable in some situations, but I wonder if the same is true of “super-advocates” on networks. You could argue that Twitter extracts huge value from the super-advocacy of folk like Scoble. Why would they want to charge him? Surely they should reward him with a set of power tools for the service…

The debate moves onto architecture but I don’t seriously think that you could make a viable consumer proposition around the idea of: we have a busted architecture, so we’ll have to charge you for our services. (Sounds like the kind of software I’d make…)

When I think about Freemium services, they make sense when I use one (say, Flickr). $30 per year, no sweat. But when I add a few more: web-hosting, anything from 37signals, maybe even MobileMe :) then actually the cost suddenly begins to become an issue – even if it remains relatively small.

This is maybe not an issue for me personally being the hyper-connected soul that I am, but may create an overall barrier to growth for the Freemium economy in terms of mass-market penetration.

On the other hand, as the ‘alpha-geek’ of my family network a reasonable business model might be to charge me but allow me to provide the same privileges to my family (x users), playing to my super-user capability and also my (super-)advocacy in telling my networks about the service. I assert that this will matter over time as the various social-network models attempt to hold onto your data.

A simple example: since Evan was born, my entire family now use Flickr to keep up to date with her growth– some have even signed up for the Freemium service. Small fry additions to the user base of course, but not in the context of the overall set of super-users.

(I hesitate to say I’m the ‘alpha-geek’ of my social network as of course most of my friends are techies – which reminds me of a line: “Statistically speaking, half of your friends are below average”. But I digress…)

I guess the point is that while there’s money in all those advertising plays, we’re in the early days of business models that will be successful quickly, and those that will be successful over time.

Some interesting chatter on the nature of business models for New Media at Mashable.

The idea of "Free" business models has been gathering pace for some time, and will undoubtedly gather even more as Chris Anderson's book, FREE, is released: you can get the gist of it from this great article. I wonder if the book will be free? Or maybe I'll just have to pay for some of the cooler chapters...

I suppose the takeaways from this right now are:

• The internet is extremely effective at commoditising to zero various capabilities and services you'd have previously expected to pay for (such as video, or more mundane things like bandwidth and storage). You can get all of that for free. More sophisticated offerings are also subject to this commoditisation because of the choice (economics of abundance) for a consumer/user.
• There is a huge psychological gap between nothing and something regardless of how small the something is. Chris identifies this as the cause of failure for micropayments ideas.
• The taxonomy that Chris describes is already beginning to emerge, or is clear and present: "Freemium" services have been around for some time and (to this observer) seem to be growing in presence. Flickr, anything by 37Signals and RememberTheMilk are useful examples.

Staying on the 'someone else is picking up the tab for your free lunch' (the essence of Freemium services) it's worth thinking about who is picking up the tab in the social networking space.

The answer is of course that you are, or at least whoever is contributing into a social networking service is providing the collateral needed by the provider to drive value from the service.

When I pay $25 for Flickr, I (sort of) understand what I'm giving and what I'm getting. It's much less clear what I'm giving (particularly the 'value over time'), and what the repercussions are for other services.

It is not in the interest of these service providers to provide information they have to other services.

In the middle of this is your/our/my data. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that. Maybe privacy is a generational issue and I'm just getting too old. Perhaps the Freemium offering for social networking sites is that (for $25...) they can guarantee that my information is not shared with advertisers, 3rd party developers or whoever - just my friends ;)

At least it may help to solve this particular conundrum.

I was reading the 37Signals piece in Wired and noticed a reference to those eschewing Rails for, for instance, Merb as it was perceived to be more open to other the use of different components for (for example) AJAX and Object Relational Mapping.

I can understand that decision although I've always thought that the point of Rails was that it represents a 'blueprint' for building the sorts of applications that were prevalent, or gaining prevalence at the point that Rails was being constructed. So it's strength is in enabling the construction of those applications quickly.

But the world moves on. So will Rails become a legacy as quickly as it became a star? Is tomorrow's web scattered with 'Rails Relics' as the prevalent web paradigm shifts once more? Hmm...

When I talk about concepts on the web, I talk a lot about The Long Tail (wikipedia link). One of the things I usually say is "Hey, there's not a lot to understand..." and point to the main Pareto Distribution/Long Tail diagram, and also the diagram of the 'Architecture of Participation'.

The power of The Long Tail idea is really in its use to rationalise and understand behaviours on the web - what do consumers do when faced with huge amounts of choice and how that impacts your business.

So it was interesting to see this 'How to make a living as an artist' idea from BoingBoing. The full article (actually the whole blog) is worth a read:

But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive.  You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

In response to my Bliki post, Steve suggested the use of Twitter to capture the random stream of thoughts I'm looking to organise. Not a bad idea. I already use Twitter (you can follow me here), though I'm not sure what for, so it seems like it is worth a try. I have an idea for a mash-up that might assist with this too, so I can code a little, which is nice.

Now, Steve and others put a lot of work into thinking about the conversation paradigm that Twitter provides.

What do I have to add to that? Well, a story...

Before BabyH was born, LadyH and I went along to the raft of antenatal classes offered by the National Childbirth Trust (NCT). Very good they were too, well done NCT!

Apart from a little education, these classes are designed to generate mini-support groups amongst the attendees for any given course, and in fact this is pretty effective.

So, LadyH spends quite a lot of time emailing baby-related happenings and socialising with the NCT gang. Good for here. I noticed that they predominantly use email and text messaging for this - don't we all - but here it seems there is a good match to Twitter for these reasons:

1. Although we know that all conversations are asynchronous, in fact text messaging sort of demands a response in the short term otherwise it can appear rude. (Don't get me started on the social inappropriateness of texting and the damage it's causing to the social skills and vocabulary of the next generation..!) Actually, a lot of the conversation is just one-way, fire and forget, so the request-response requirement of text messaging is not ideal.
2. Email is not the best mechanism either, as (again the generally accepted norm is that) email requires the construction of some surrounding content "hi, how are you?" around the key fact: in this case "my daughter smiled for the first time today". So even though the fact is of interest to all parties, you wouldn't want to generate a whole email around it, especially with potentially multiple factoids per day per person.
3. I've discovered that mothers of newborn children tend to be quite busy...

Twitter to the rescue: the idea of punching up the interesting stuff, and then being able to duck in and out of that simple stream of information and respond if desired, at any time, and in a simple way seems to be a perfect mechanism for the support group.

Talking of wikinomics, I see that v1.0 of the Wikinomics Playbook is now available. A great vindication of the spirit of the book.

Sometimes I think that Martin Fowler has the right idea with his 'Bliki' approach rather than a Blog. If you know me, you'll know that sometimes my mind races in different directions and as someone remarked the other day "When you go, you really go".

When I'm talking, this means that I can quickly confuse a listener (and probably myself), but it's a weakness I work hard at fixing.

When I'm writing, it usually means that I suffer a sort of block as I can't describe the immediate point owing to a need to think about, explore and relate to the next point on. This suits neither the linear, diary-like format of a blog, nor the general requirement to blog frequently (you'll notice that this blog is fairly staccato).

Maybe a Bliki would solve that as I can just add to the amorphous heap of stuff at any point? Any other ideas out there on a solution to this?

I'm doing a little internal thinking about 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' - something I've touched upon before.

In a moment of flippant typing to the working group I remarked:

"Maybe in the future, you will simply be an XML file (sort of a representation of your CV) consisting of your skills, capabilities, qualifications, and attributes, which is just plugged into an organisational hive. The hive then connects you to relevant vTeams, and as you build reputation, workflows come your way. Meanwhile you can grow your connections, capabilities and reputation. You’re micro-payed per workflow so you can belong to many organisations (subject to XML NDA/Conflict of Interest rulesets) and you can work from anywhere as there’s no notion of an office. Most employees work out of locally sponsored hotdesking cafes scattered like Points of Presence on a CDN. As a result, Starbucks shares rocket and they buy Cisco, Microsoft and Nestle to become the world’s first mega-corporation. 80% of the world’s population work for the new company. When you hit 30 they kill you, if the coffee hasn’t done that already. (OK, the last bit is from Logan’s Run)."

Then I see this piece about 'coffee houses as offices' in yesterday's Times. (As an aside, I loved the quote "they're not selling coffee, they're selling space" for obvious reasons.)

So with all of this stuff about buying Yahoo, maybe we should be looking to the big coffee/fast food chains...

I've often wondered whether it would be possible to run a significant enterprise organisation with no central hub. I can see tons of advantages for the kind of mobile and flexible workforce that we have (for instance) but I'm not sure that some of the central infrastructure could work in this way right now. I'm thinking finance and human resources rather than email and data centres.

I'd also add that I think the dream of working from a cafe sounds better than it is. I do know of a few great spots to hideaway and write, but I find the majority of establishments have significant white noise levels and generally bad acoustics (and music) which kills my ability to think quicker than a cup of camomile tea.