Tyler Cowen agrees with and expands on Chris Anderson’s response to Anita Elberse’s article arguing against the existence of a “long tail” effect enabled by online retailing.
Tyler Cowen agrees with and expands on Chris Anderson’s response to Anita Elberse’s article arguing against the existence of a “long tail” effect enabled by online retailing.
My previous post on the Boing Boing controversy generated some pushback from readers who argue that deleting posts is changing history, and that bloggers just shouldn’t do it. (As I mentioned in the comments, I have never gone back and deleted old posts and don’t foresee doing so.)
I agree completely with the idea that deleting old content breaks the web and can be seen as an attempt to change history. It’s Orwellian to go back and alter or delete content when your opinion changes. If a newspaper went back and removed all of the stories in favor of the war in Iraq, it would lose any standing it might have as a respectable media outlet. And I feel the same way about blogs. Deleting old content is in all likelihood an act of dishonesty.
However, the way search engines work these days makes things a bit more complicated. Google’s great innovation in indexing Web sites was to use inbound links to sites as a metric for the significance of a Web site. The more sites link to your site, the higher your rank in search engine results, and being linked to by more popular sites is more helpful.
Google’s algorithm doesn’t care whether I link to a racist Web site to denounce it or ridicule it. It treats that link as it would any other link to that Web site — a vote for its significance. This strikes me as a fundamental problem without a really good solution. If I linked to one of my favorite blogs many times, and and later its domain expired and was purchased by a site that promotes bigotry, what should I do? Leaving the links in place lends the credibility of my site to that site in the eyes of the search engines, even though the content has changed completely. A human reader following a link would clearly understand from context that something had changed about the link destination, but the indexers probably would not.
In this day and age an outbound link to another site has a real cash value, and given that, I’m not sure what the correct behavior is for a Web site that links to others. I wouldn’t give $5 a month to a cause I fundamentally disagree with, should I provide that value or more to a Web site I don’t agree with by leaving links in place that don’t lead to the same content that they once did? It strikes me as a real ethical conundrum.
Perhaps the right answer is to excise the links from the old posts and to add a note explaining why the links were removed. Then the content is not fundamentally altered, and the behavior of the blogger is fully explained. That seems like a better compromise than just deleting entire posts.
Harvard marketing professor Anita Elberse has conducted a study which seems to reveal that customer purchasing behavior with regard to hits is the same online as it is offline. In her Harvard Business Review article, she reports:
For Chris Anderson, the strategic implications of the digital environment seem clear. “The companies that will prosper,” he declares, “will be those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches.” But my research indicates otherwise. Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail. In sales of both videos and recorded music—in many ways the perfect products to test the long-tail theory—we see that hits are and probably will remain dominant. That is the reality that should inform retailers as they struggle to offer their customers a satisfying assortment cost-efficiently. And it’s the unavoidable challenge to producers. The companies that will prosper are the ones most capable of capitalizing on individual best sellers.
Chris Anderson, the author of the book The Long Tail, responds to the article on his blog. He argues that her different results are due to differing definitions of “head” and “tail”.
Looks like one of the larger effects of globalization is to decrease the reliance of other countries on the US economy, relative to the overall pie.
To me, the biggest effect of higher oil prices is the havoc they are wreaking on the airline industry. Andrew Leonard looks at state of things on his blog, but I think there’s a lot more analysis to be done. A friend of mine who spent many years working at American Airlines remarked last week that there is not a commercial aircraft in the air that was built for these fuel prices. When you look at the purchasing cycle (and the research and development cycle) for commercial aircraft, you have to wonder how long it’ll be before more economical planes will even be available, if ever?
Aviation Week is predicting carnage for the industry. Oil prices are raising costs for operators and higher ticket prices are reducing demand. If the airlines don’t plan well, they could be flying half-full planes around the country at the highest costs they’ve ever faced. Here are the raw numbers:
There is a consensus among analysts that the average oil price for 2008 will be $107 per barrel. If that becomes a reality, the airline industry will have to shoulder $40 billion in additional costs per year and end up with a $2.6-billion loss for the period. At the current $130-per-barrel price, airlines will post a deficit of almost $7 billion.
But that figure masks the real extent of the problem, says IATA’s chief economist, Brian Pearce, because most European and Asian airlines are still relatively well protected by their hedging portfolios. The true additional cost burden at $130 per barrel is $99 billion on an annual basis, or a 20% increase in total costs.
I think the full implications of skyrocketing air travel prices are hard to impossible to predict. What’s it mean for business travel? For choosing where you want to live? Will we soon be adjusting to a world where air travel is once again a luxury product?
© 2024 rc3.org
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Another look at the long tail
Stanford professor Anand Rajaraman takes a look at the recent debate about the long tail from a different perspective:
If you’re not reading his blog, Datawocky, you’re missing out.