The Long Tail

One of the interesting properties of many networks is The Long Tail.

Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia. The same could be said for Amazon's book inventory or Netflix's movie inventory. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.

The following book describes the subject in detail:
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Or check out this blog for intro: Long Tail 101

How 8 Trends are Radically Change Work and Play?

CSC has identified the following eight trends that will change the way we work and play.
Their report and Connected World Blog focuses on these trends:

1. All-IP Enterprise
2. Industry Crossovers
3. Bandwidth at the Edge
4. Networks in New Places
5. Connected Things
6. Liquid Time and Place
7. Pervasive Presence and Location
8. Mobility: The Next Frontier

How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else?

Networks such as the Internet and the Web has a new science.
They conform to surprising laws which are only now becoming clear. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others have discovered some of those laws over just the past couple of years.

What is behind the well know Six Degrees of Separation?
How do popular hubs such as Yahoo emerge?

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means tells a story about the emerging science of these networks.

How to make money in an IP-based World?

The vertically integrated telco business model is under attack. How should they make money in the converged world?

The Telco 2.0 Manifesto by STL provides a great overview of this trend:

"Our belief is that there is a single dominant source of structural change in the communications industry. This trend is the separation of network connectivity from user-facing application services and content. The phenomenon is both technical (“everything over IP”) as well as financial (separate purchase of access and service).

The trend is clear and obvious. Changes to mass user behaviour are already seen (eg. VOIP, P2P music/video downloads, Social Media). Yet few (if any) operators have strategies that can be explicitly traced back to this underlying force."

Check out the Telco 2.0 Blog for the most interesting Telco 2.0 "Business Model Map".

"We think the biggest opportunity [to make money] lies ... where the apps are less tied into the network — but the billing and value-based pricing remain in place."

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2 Gigs Per User a Day

That is the estimated data traffic used by Joost for full screen video.

Does this fit into Your ISP's bandwidth policy? Better check it out.

Who is going to pay for this traffic? P2P distribution is radically cheaper than using your own datacenter - Joost bets on this.

How to Visualize and Navigate the Virtual World?

Traditional ways to navigate in the virtual worlds are

• Hierarchical Directories
• Search Engines
• Hypertext / links (one way)

Additional ways can enhance the navigation experience in Web 2.0 by using:

• Geographical navigation and search (e.g. Google Maps and Google Earth)
• Personal relationships (e.g. Orkut and LinkedIn)
• Tagging (e.g. YouTube and MySpace)
• Recommendations (e.g. Digg, Amazon)
• Collections and Lists (e.g. BlinkList, Amazon)
• Event and Calendars (e.g. Upcoming.org)
• And even by the combination of these like Rollyo (Search Engines + Collections)

One especially nice and interesting way to navigate are Tag Clouds. Check out the Flickr Tag Cloud and a nice article.

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How Much Bandwidth Do We Need?

There are debates about a coming global bandwidth shortage.

Will broadband internet connection become a scarce resource? Very unlikely.
Youtube, Joost and sharing content on P2P surely creates demand for bandwidth. Supply will follow.

What will be the bottleneck of the Net economy if not bandwidth? Is is us, People. Again.
(Did you know that the bandwidth of the human eye is around the speed of an Ethernet connection?)

How many conversations can you have in a day? How many videos or movies can you watch on the net? How much Attention can you pay to your interests?

I recommend you to read this blog entry on Attention Economy - if you have the time.

What happens after we’re all connected?

This is The Question asked by Mark Pesce in his interesting essay.
Connecting billions of people creates an emergent behaviour which he calls “hyperconnectivity”

"Each of us are connected, not just to a few others, but to a billion. We need not be aware of this hyperconnectivity for it to have its full effect. Hyperconnectivity is not a tsunami which overwhelms by sheer force of numbers; rather, it is like a vast sea wherein we all float, supported gently by the efforts of all.

And this sea is full of wonders never dreamt of."