Dr. Forbush Thinks

Yesterday I listened to a talk given by Chris Anderson, the author of the book, “The Long Tail.” He also has a blog over @ The Long Tail.

The idea behind his book is quite simple, yet it is also quite eye opening. Basically Chris tells us that all markets can be described as a power curve. OK, the mathematicians out there know what I’m talking about, but the rest of you are lost. So, imagine a piece of graph paper with an x and a y axis. The x-axis runs across the bottom of the graph and it describes items of different types arranged in order of popularity. The items to the left are the most popular and the items to the right are the least popular. Now, imagine the y-axis representing sales of those items. Obviously the most popular items sells the most and it will be plotted as the highest on the y-axis. So, now if you plot the points on the graph you should find that all the items lie on a curve that has a very long tail to the right.

If you are still following me, then I can assume that the math I’ve already described wasn’t to complicated so I’ll go on assuming that it isn’t.

The point that Chris makes is that in the last century mass marketing has concentrated on the few items to the left hand side of the graph and it has ignored the items to the right hand side of the graph, even though 80% of the potential market is ignored while 20% of the market is pushed with unrelenting marketing and advertising. This brings up many questions, including: “why is so much marketing money wasted on pushing items that are already popular?” It obviously has to do with what is desired by the business side of the equation, rather than what is desired for the customer side of the equation. The market shape described by Chris is not just hypothetical, it has been observed by the sales of music. The thousands of titles that are now available on line represent a market that is unencumbered by distribution of rare titles. And what is observed is a power curve with a very long tail.

One can imagine that the sales of 1000 individual rare one of type songs costs the same as selling 1000 copies of the most popular title. In the “old days” before the Internet, however it would have been difficult to know where to ship a single copy of some rare song so that the person who wants it would be able to find it on the self of the record store that he frequented. So, the idea of matching a person to a rare infrequently desired item is much easier.

Although music was the example that Chris used, this idea applies to all markets. Amazon.com showed us this with books, and E-Bay shows us this with the diversity of matching even rarer more random types of items. This long tail is the future and many new companies know this and they are acting on their own ideas related to targeting this long tail.

The key to using this information is the method needed to match the people to the items in the long tail. If we think of a plot of “all items transacted” we would start with the most popular item that is bought and sold. I have no idea what it is, but surely someone does. Maybe it is waste. Out in the tail there are cupcakes and coffeecakes sold once a year at the school Christmas fundraiser. Even further out there are even rarer transactions. If someone wants to make money out on the tail there needs to be a way to collect the things together in some way so that one can sell a lot of these rare items. For example, someone could start a business that specializes in selling home baked goods. They could collect a large number of potential bakers together online and they would submit web pages describing their food. The potential business would be a way to match all of these potential bakers with those that appreciate home baked food shipped overnight by FedEx or some other overnight shipping company.

Imagine the problems solved by the collection of all of these potential bakers. A person is not limited to one person or another person, but they could select from thousands of potential dishes or deserts. The person who cooks the meal no longer needs to advertise or search for business. Instead they rely on getting a hit on their item advertised at a place where people who are looking for food are shopping. Assuming that the business creator works out the shipping problem, then this model could offer unlimited diversity of food to a potential customer. Of course this model might not work for all food from anywhere around the world, but it is true that it increases the diversity available to the people that it can reach.

Now, this curve is not static. Items become popular and they become less desirable. This happens for various reasons. Some items just might be better than all other similar items. Word of mouth spreads this information, and the best item is sought by the majority of those looking for that type of item. Another way that an item becomes popular is by forced marketing where an item is advertised so much that people are unaware of any similar items in the market. People who need that type of item will select the only item they believe to be available fitting the desired class.

The point here is that there will be a large number of new potential business opportunities that are available looking for people to start new businesses. The idea is to create new ways to get diverse goods aggregated into groups that people will be able to search for particular rare items. There might be an opportunity for an online model train scenery supplier that collects artists together that will produce specialized pieces on demand. Or, it might be political blogs that aggregate all of the best writing on particular ideologically specific areas. Oh, I guess that’s been done already. Well, there are still phrenology and numerology aggregates that don’t exist yet.

:-}



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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics

I checked this movie out from the library several weeks ago. As sometimes happens I didn’t get a chance to watch the entire movie with the family. In fact, I began to watch the movie the night before I needed to turn it in. After watching about 30 minutes of it my wife and daughter came home and chaos ensued. Of course I needed to return the movie the next day, because the library wouldn’t allow it to be renewed.

So, I was left with the first 30 minutes of the movie for a few weeks while I waited for the movie to become available at the library again. My thoughts at this point were that the movie was funny in a strange way. It wasn’t quite 3 Stooges humor, and it wasn’t Monty Python either. Instead it was a surreal comedy based loosely on the adventures of Odysseus. The closest description would be Moulon Rouge meets the Odyssey.

The main character Everett Ulysses has a large vocabulary and a command of the English language. But, when it comes to human nature he only has an inkling of understanding. However, his two partners make him look like a genius. The three men manage to break out of a prison camp, shackled together with chains. Everett Ulysses has a plan, and the gift of persuasion, which take the men on an adventure through 1930s Mississippi. First they meet a blind man on a railroad pushcart who tells them that they will not find the treasure they seek and they will see a cow on a roof. Everett Ulysses is the skeptic while the others believe the man’s supernatural ability. In fact, Everett Ulysses, is the typical skeptic is almost every instance while his cohorts are deceived in almost every case.

Last week I was able to check out the movie once again. Aside from one very violent episode where a crazy Baby Face Nelson machine guns a cow and another car runs into several cows the movie seemed fairly tame. There was a bit of colorful language, but my kids have mostly heard this in school so it didn’t seem any worse than any other PG-13 movie. At least the first 30 minutes that I had seen wasn’t so bad. So, I thought that I could share the PG-13 movie with the family.

I thought that they would enjoy some of the slapstick comedy, being teenagers and all. One scene where the three guys are sitting around the campfire eating gopher on a stick was sure to be a hit, I thought. After all, we have about a thousand gophers living in our back yard and we joke about running a gopher farm all the time. It turns out that the movie was a bit too surreal for them, because they kept complaining that it wasn’t realistic. I kept saying that it was supposed to be unrealistic, which was the point. When we reached the scene with the gopher on a stick there wasn’t much reaction, so I knew that we weren’t going to finish the movie. The final straw was a scene where John Goodman, a Bible salesman, beats up Everett Ulysses and one of his sidekicks. Pete, his other sidekick was believed to be turned into a frog that was being kept in a shoebox. John Goodman believes that these guys have money in the shoebox, and when he discovers the frog he gets so mad that he squishes the frog in his hand and throws the body against a tree. This gruesome scene caused the kids to say that it was enough and we didn’t finish watching the rest of the film.

Unfortunately we hadn’t seen the rest of the movie, so we didn’t know that this was the most gruesome and final gruesome scene of the movie. Last night I found this out when I finally finished watching the movie.

The climax of the surrealism would be a wedding rehearsal dinner the night before Everett Ulysses’ wife is about to marry a more successful man. We find out that Everett Ulysses did not really steal 1.2 million dollars and bury it by his cabin. Instead, Everett Ulysses broke out of prison in order to get back to his wife so he can prevent the wedding from taking place. This pre-wedding party is being held in a huge hall, where the Governor and his opponent in the upcoming election have both been invited. The music from the wedding is live and being broadcast over the radio. If this doesn’t sound surreal enough, imagine that the threesome have picked up a black guitar player who sold his soul to the Devil. This foursome, in an effort to come up with some money recorded a song at a radio station in the middle of nowhere for ten bucks apiece. By the time of the pre-wedding party the song they recorded has become a hit record and the group known as the Soggy Bottom Boys becomes a huge excitement as they play their hit in front of all the guests. Even more surrealism is added to the mix when the Gubernatorial Candidate, a KKK member, and leading in the polls, becomes outraged that the Soggy Bottom Boys is seen to be integrated. In his rant he professes to be a Klan member over the radio and current Governor takes charge by exposing his challanger as a racist.

The funny thing here is that the two candidates are both undesirable, but the current Governor uses his cronyism to his advantage and also to the ex-cons advantage who are pardoned and given jobs in his government.

If you like what I have written, then you’ll like the movie. If you’d rather watch something more believable then I would say you’d be happier passing on this film.



Movies, O Brother, Surrealism

Another Guide

Now that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has made a temporary jump from geek culture to mainstream culture with the release of the movie I'll discuss the religious aspect of the movie. The book, TV and radio have all had a chance to influence our society with this obscure science fiction. But, what made Douglas Adam's work separate from other science fiction is that he didn't take himself serious but he raised serious questions.

In fact, it's a bit surprising that the Fundamentalist Christians aren't jumping up and down protesting this movie. After all it challenges the fundamental idea that God created us for a purpose. This whole series of stories is based on the idea that earth is a tiny bit of the entire universe. In fact the Earth itself is a bio-computer, which was programmed to solve a problem. The solution to the problem is heralded in geek circles as the meaning of life, and its answer is 42. Of course the problem the bio-computer Earth was asked to solve was finally discovered to be 6 X 9. Most people should recognize that the solution actually doesn't match the problem, unless you are calculating it in base 13.

The whole point of this little story is to point out that our life on Earth could really be pointless.

But the thing that Fundamentalist Christians would surely be upset about if they thought about this is that the premise of the story is that there is a book that guides us through all the problems in the Galaxy. It is an enormous book containing more than a million pages, but it is contained in a little PDA. This is obviously a thinly veiled jab at the book that Christians tend to wave in everyone's face proclaiming truth. The point Douglas Adams is trying to make here is that if there really were a book that had all the answers in it what would it be like. The answer is nothing at all like the Bible.

Douglas Adams continues to slam culture and religion throughout this story in so many situations and ways that it is hard to imagine how a 2 hour movie could be made out of all this material. But, on the other hand, weeding everything except the essential premise out of the movie make it accessible to the short attention span general population who may not think much about its attack on religion.

Douglas Adams asks all the important questions surrounding human existence on this planet in this galaxy. His irreverent answers offer those who are willing to listen an alternative explanation to many of these questions. But, everyone can always say that those answers are truly wrong, because we know that they have never been proven correct. However, instead of simply being a silly story of impossibility it becomes a story of hope.

Hope is a feeling that is the opposite of despair. To look around the world and see people fighting and killing each other over religion and ideology most people feel despair. The reaction of many people is to ignore the world and find another place away from the world to put effort and energy. But, this reaction is like putting ones head in the sand. Douglas Adams manages to proclaim all religion pointless and offer hope that there really is a plan beyond this Earth. It may be just as silly as the religions of the world, but at least it will be the truth.

Weekend Reflections

I had two interesting experiences over the weekend that seem to be related.

First, I finally saw the movie “Saved!” This is a wonderful movie that every teen should see. The movie hits on most of the issues that are foremost in the minds of teens today. The movie is set in a “the best” Christian High School in town. Some of the students begin to discover the hypocrisy of this Christian School and a few others have already come to terms with the hypocrisy. But, the movie also deals with the classic high school click phenomena as well as teen pregnancy and homosexuality. It is quite amazing how all of these topics can be dealt with in 90 minutes.

There are several “great” lines or scenes in the movie that get one to think about the world we live in. At the beginning of the movie a “good” Christian girl Mary is at the top of the High School food chain. She is a member of the “in” senior click who have called themselves, “The Christian Jewels.” She has a boyfriend who secretly reveals to her that he thinks he may be gay. Mary conks her head and believes she sees a vision of Christ telling her to save her friend. In the convoluted way that teens sometimes think she comes to the conclusion that she needs to convince her gay boyfriend that girls are better by having sex with him. Obviously this does not change her boyfriend, and now Mary finds herself pregnant. I love this whole convoluted way of thinking this through. Even though it is a totally ridiculous idea, in the context of Christian thinking and lack of sex education classes it is a totally plausible conclusion based on the information available. It also serves as a good vehicle for discussion with your teen who will unsuspectingly watch the movie with you thinking that it’s really funny, but most likely ask some questions either during the movie or at the end.

Of course, the best line in the whole movie is: “There is only one reason a Christian girl goes to the Planned Parenthood Center.” “To drop off a pipe bomb?” “Well, maybe there are two reasons.”

Second, I heard an interesting interview with an author of a new book titled, “Freakonomics.” This book explores some of the reasons that things happen without the political bias. An example of something that happened is the drop in the crime rate in the 1990s. Politicians claim that they were responsible for the drop in crime, but none of their explanations seem to hold water. Republicans claim that they got tough on crime, but the statistics don’t bare that out. Democrats held the presidency and the Attorney general, but no new policies can be correlated to the drop in crime. The authors of this book put forward a theory that the increase in abortion rates in the 1970s lead to the fall in crime rates in the 1990s. Because women weren’t forced to take care of unwanted children the number of unwanted children went down. Unwanted children are more likely to act out and eventually find their way into crime because they are seeking someone to want them. The authors argue that this hypothesis doesn’t support the pro-life or pro-choice sides of the abortion debate. Anti-abortion groups can still claim that the death of 800,000 fetuses does not justify the saving of 1,000 lives by murder prevention. I would argue that it shows that we should work together to find ways to make sure that every child is wanted. If a mother finds herself pregnant and she knows that she can not take care of the child every effort must be made to find a caring home for that child so the child feels wanted. This analysis shows us a key issue that seems to be missed in the discussion – Children need to be wanted.

I went to the library yesterday and ran across the John Waters movie “Hairspray.” I had heard about this movie and I have heard John Waters interviewed a few times, so I thought it would be interesting to see the movie. Based on what I had heard I was prepared for some outrageous bizarre movie, or maybe a bit of schlock. I wasn’t quite sure, because I never seen a John Waters movie. But he was strange in his interviews, so I thought that his work should reflect that.

I put the movie into the DVD player and I heard the “Hairspray” theme song, which didn’t sound too very odd. So, I started out being surprised that the movie wasn’t as bizarre as I had expected. In knew that the movie featured a strange array of actors, so I waited to see how these people came across on my TV screen. Divine, Sonny Bono, and Debbie Harry were a strange collection to start with. I had seen Divine in some other strange movie that I don’t remember now. Sonny Bono is a strange character beginning with his career with Cher then moving into his conservative legislature experience. And, Debbie Harry has a small place in my heart, because she is a fellow Ohio native that I respect.

The plot of the movie is actually a typical hero triumph over evil plot. But, the rest of the movie is far from typical.

The hero of the movie is an overweight, female teen. The setting of the movie is early 1960s Baltimore. The villains in the movie are several, society in general.

But, the movie is a strange concoction of fantasy and reality. The fantasy part is that an overweight female teen is so wise to know how good should be able to put and end to racism by enabling black kids to come dance to black music on TV. She is wise enough to know that overweight couch potatoes want to watch her dance on TV so they can live their fantasy through her. She is wise enough to know that the owner of hefty women’s wear store would want advertising on a teen dance show. All of these things could only be realized in a fantasy world. But the world is also exaggerated in a way that racism can be understood as fear of the unknown where the cure is clearly enlightenment. The movie frames racism as a black and white issue with an obvious solution. This is clearly a nice alternative to modern movies that embrace the reality of the gray world. I am not saying that all movies need to frame problems as black and white issues, but this is a refreshing change of pace movie.

But, the final breakthrough in this movie is the realism. Realism in a fantasy movie seems to be a contradiction, but the realism is the realism of the characters. Hairspray gives us very real characters that live in a very non-real world. Of course we have the overweight heroin. We also have the nasty habit of the heroin’s sidekick who continuously takes a piece of candy out of her mouth and replaces it over and over again. The red dye of the candy has stained her fingers. We have the realism of the heroin’s rival puking from riding an amusement park ride.

Hairspray may not have been the best film I ever saw, but it is a very good social commentary set in the exaggerated fantasy world of the early 1960s.