Even before the publication of his breakthrough book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson has consistently used his Long Tail blog as a way to generate conversation around the themes found in the book and point out interesting new examples that he has uncovered in the business world. To his credit, Chris has been unafraid to take on his critics and understand their points of view in order to better fine-tune his own arguments. Now comes perhaps the biggest challenge - a Harvard Business School associate professor who apparently worked with Chris on some of the original research for the Long Tail book has just published a controversial, detailed and well-researched article in the Harvard Business Review deconstructing the Long Tail argument.

To his credit, Chris has fully linked to the article and point-by-point, examined the arguments contained within the HBR article. A fascinating read overall, especially if you're interested in seeing the give-and-take between two talented thinkers.

While you're at it, check out the new paperback version of The Long Tail, now available for pre-order on Amazon.

[images: The Long Tail]

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a book review of Year Million, a collection of essays by 14 prominent futurists and thinkers who collectively ponder the fate of mankind, one million years hence. Suffice it to say, the thinkers were encouraged to come up with some fairly outlandish predictions - like this one from computer scientist Robert Bradbury, who predicts the creation of the "matryoshka brain":

"Inevitably, we will leave our bodies entirely behind and evolve into radically different entities. Picture a vast shell-like form surrounding the sun and absorbing all its energy. This is called a Dyson sphere, after Freeman Dyson, the physicist who conceived of it... Now imagine a bunch of nested Dyson spheres that divert all that solar energy into information processing. Borrowing the term for Russian dolls, Mr. Bradbury calls this a 'matrioshka' brain."

If you've never seen a real Russian matryoshka doll, they're great fun -- and you can even pick them up on Etsy these days. In Moscow, the so-called "nesting dolls" (a translation that I've always abhorred) are found in countless flavors and assortments that might appeal to tourists (including ones devoted to NBA basketball stars and Disney characters). The last time I was in Russia, a favorite was the Putin matryoshka - a huge Putin, which opened up to a smaller Yeltsin, which opened up to an even smaller Gorbachev, which opened up to an even smaller Brezhnev, which opened up to an even smaller Kruschchev, which opened up to an even smaller Stalin, which opened up to an even smaller Lenin...

[image: Matryoshka Doll via Etsy]

In the current issue of Contagious Magazine (subscription required), Noah Brier and Faris Yakob of Naked Communications have prepared a tour de force article about the new age of social (meta)data. Data is no longer just boring old data -- it is now a wonderfully fluid and shareable construct that is open to a rich number of interpretations (and re-interpretations). Prior to Web 2.0, if you mentioned the word "data" to a colleague, you were likely to receive either a blank stare or one of those "please, don't go there" type of looks.

Now, thanks to pioneers like Jonathan Harris and Hans Rosling, data is a construct that can be celebrated visually through rich infographics and real-time visualization tools. Anyway - if all this is not so clear - the Contagious Magazine article includes a splendid number of visual examples from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Nikon. (And, of course, examples from the great Edward Tufte.)

p.s. Kudos to Noah & Faris for sneaking in an obscure reference to French Deconstructionist thinker Jacques Derrida at the end of the article: "This blending of signifier and signified is peculiarly modern - words have no real connection to the concepts they represent." Ah, the joys of modern literary theory, updated for Web 2.0!

With Internet Week in New York culminating tonight with the presentation of the 12th Annual Webby Awards to the most innovative websites in the world, it's the time of the year when people talk about unique and innovative websites. For me, it has been a chance to reflect on how fortunate I am to be contributing to two amazing sites that have been recognized by the awards panel as being best in class.

Within the Financial Services category, the TradeKing Community was selected as an Official Honoree. Within the Business Blog category, the Futurelab Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog was one of the five official nominees, losing by a razor-thin margin to the FT.com Alphaville blog.

A big hat tip to the folks at TradeKing and Futurelab!

Largely as an outgrowth of client work over the past quarter, I've put together a brief overview of four business trends that are worth keeping an eye on over the remainder of 2008:

(1) Social Data
(2) Micro-Payments for Online Social Experiences
(3) Content Mashups
(4) "Live" experiences (that really aren't "live")

The "social data" trend is one that I think is completely off the radar of many people, but this is a concept that continues to come up in different projects that I've worked on over the past six months - including a data visualization project for a huge financial services company and a website re-design for a multi-billion-dollar information/data provider. Of course, Google has already jumped into the "social data" game, with the acquisition of Gapminder. (Think about it -- Google could have the ability to sell ads against not only text, but also data!). Even the U.S. Census Bureau, I think, has started to "open" up its huge data collection to the online world.

[Link: SlideShare presentation]

Malcolm Gladwell returns to the pages of The New Yorker with a story about "innovation multiples" -- independent discoveries or inventions that occurred at the same time, but in different places. As Gladwell points out, these multiples are actually surprisingly common throughout history:

"This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland."

So does the sheer number of multiples mean that some scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable? As Gladwell suggests, could these innovations be "in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place"? If they are, it could mean that the romantic idea of solitary genius is vastly overstated: "A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

UPDATE: Jason Kottke links to Malcolm Gladwell's new book, now available on Amazon.com ahead of a late Fall release

[image: In the Air]

While the initial hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life has somewhat faded over the past year, it's exciting to see that CINEMAX plans to run a 10-part documentary film about Second Life ("Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey") starting this Thursday. It's innovative enough to do a film about virtual worlds, but what makes this film especially stand out is that it is shot entirely inside Second Life, machinima-style.

Last year, I had the unique opportunity to work with a talented machinima director on a similar type of project for a major client, and it's really extraordinary the effort and time that goes into filming inside Second Life. There are sets, actors, scripts -- basically, anything that goes into making a traditional film. Mad props to Douglas Gayeton for getting this film made and finding a cable TV sponsor (CINEMAX) bold enough to show it.

[image: Molotov Alva]

The Wall Street Journal recently unveiled its picks for the best business gurus in the world. These gurus - led by Gary Hamel, Thomas Friedman, Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell - regularly command $75,000 speaking fees and million-dollar book deals, in addition to the undying appreciation of top corporate CEOs around the world. While most of the names in the Top 20 are instantly recognizable to just about anyone who picks up FORTUNE or Business Week from time to time, there were definitely a few names that sent me scurrying to Google to find out more (Ikujiro Nonaka, anyone?).

[image: Big Ideas]