It's not just US mainstream popular culture that is putting pressure on France to globalize. The machinima film The French Democracy offers an alternative version of the recent riots in France complete with a Manhattan backdrop and English subtitles.

Quite a day for iPod/vPod-related announcements...and its not even 10am yet (well, PST). Among them:

It's a Mod, Mod World: Podcasting has been called the ultimate in personalized media, since most podcasts are produced by amateurs for small, specialized audiences. But the real ultimate in personalization may be a podcast for an audience of one -- you. That's the promise of Modcast, a technology developed by Florida-based Bind that enables a podcast listener to choose which segments of a show to hear, then have a customized audio file generated on the fly. Other companies, such as Podcasternews.com, are also experimenting with modcasting -- which suggests that customization may be a big wave in podcasting's future. TechReview

In Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes, at Linuxworld.com Doc Searl comments on the threats the Internet faces from. In this lengthy piece, Searl suggests that the combination of mergers among broadband carriers and the continued hatred of the Internet by the same entities poses tremendous danger to the future of networked publics. Searl's position is something that I've mentioned before in my response to Chris Anderson's talk on the Long Tail. For in the rapidly elongating Long Tail of microcontent and—as Mimi Ito underscored for us—the even more quickly proliferating cultural sphere of amateur cultural production, we are perversely reversing the undoing of big media that marked the last forty years. If my concern in that post was with what might happen to, say, Indy labels if artists can just go directly to iTunes, or what power entities like Google or even Flickr begin to have over us, Doc Searl reminds us that the much-vaunted free access that we have to the Internet is an illusion, not reality. In an earlier article for Cabinet Magazine, I explored the highly-centralized structure of the Internet itself and, in particular, the peering arrangements and physical structures created by the Tier 1 carriers. This article turns our attention to the last mile. Read on for more.

This is a video of Mike Liebhold's lecture on the Geospatial Web at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

The Pentagon began podcasting on Monday. The 5-minute segments, delivered as radio-style news reports, are produced by the Pentagon Channel, a cable TV channel for military news and information that the Department of Defense launched in May.

http://news.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029694,39194015,00.htm

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

#2 in a series, #3 overall. Another episode of "Song, Interrupted", this time listening to how sleigh bells signal the death of the protagonist in a pair of Steely Dan songs.

Sleigh Bells of Death

Nicolas caught this relevant nugget — a recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (what researcher wouldn't want to be a part of something with a name like that!) on teen content creators. I'm assuming these are digital kids kind of teen content creators.

Quote
Teen Content Creators:

The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with ‘teen content creators’, is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do

thx nicolas

Technorati Tags: digital kids

I seem to be on a roll. Following up on the first podcast (that I had been meaning to do for the last 2 years), I present my second. This one is a longer form piece that started as a written concert review. But text just couldn't really cut it for this application. Enter the podcast, which imho is a perfect medium for this kind of thing. Comments welcome.

Marcus Miller Review

Last month I was ready to upgrade to a new iPod from my third generation model, but the rumor sites began to make noises that an upgrade to 80gb was in the works so I held off.

After the announcement of the video iPod last week I decided that even though I was a little disappointed by the size of the drive, a bigger one would be unlikely before January so I ordered a 60 gb unit from Apple.

I was supposed to get my iPod tomorrow, but FedEx delivered the unit a day early.

Read on for my review of the video iPod after half a day of playing with it.