Analyzing Anderson's Long Tail...
If Newton claimed that the reason why he achieved what he achieved was: ~"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."... I can't help but think what Anderson's book would be if you substract from it:
- The almost religious admiration that he seems to have for google. I can NOT believe that he didn't mention youtube at all in his entire book.. and it took him almost 100 pages to even mention technorati.. that seems short-sighted to me.
- the obvious influence that Kevin Kelly's book from a decade ago had on him ("Out of control", and especially "New rules for the new economy"... he hardly gets enough for the economy of abundance as opposed to scarcity. It was way more clear for me when I read in longtail.com his review of Kelly's book one decade later
- Alvin Toffler's entire work, from "The Third Wave", but in particular "Powershift"
Once those three things are substracted, other than the cute graphical depiction of what mainstream misses, few things seem really noteworthy.
However, if you haven't read those, The Long Tail would work as a good way of catching up on an interesting megatrend.
- The almost religious admiration that he seems to have for google. I can NOT believe that he didn't mention youtube at all in his entire book.. and it took him almost 100 pages to even mention technorati.. that seems short-sighted to me.
- the obvious influence that Kevin Kelly's book from a decade ago had on him ("Out of control", and especially "New rules for the new economy"... he hardly gets enough for the economy of abundance as opposed to scarcity. It was way more clear for me when I read in longtail.com his review of Kelly's book one decade later
- Alvin Toffler's entire work, from "The Third Wave", but in particular "Powershift"
Once those three things are substracted, other than the cute graphical depiction of what mainstream misses, few things seem really noteworthy.
However, if you haven't read those, The Long Tail would work as a good way of catching up on an interesting megatrend.
posted by dave at 5:29 PM
1 Comments:
I never really liked Frank Sinatra´s songs. Until I heard almost by accident the first tunes from Michael Bublé.
Sometimes the one person that has the ability to summarize and reshape information that was generated weeks or even decades ago in a beautiful and interesting mashup is the real genius.
I didn´t read any of these books, but I did read (actually heard the audiobook) the Long Tail very recently and I found it very insteresting... interesting enough to make me curious about these other books too.
Not trying to defend Anderson... but I suspect that he did not mention YouTube because by the time he wrote the book YouTube was nothing much larger than one more Web2.0 promise.
And the irony is that YouTube now belongs to Google. :-)
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