Markus Prior, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton presented some interesting work he did trying to understand if news consumption has changed over the past several decades. We often hear the assertion that people are just consuming less news these days, compounding the problems faced by newspapers. This work is the first I’ve seen to make a real attempt at understanding that assertion.

Markus began his presentation with a chart showing the 50% decline in the network news audience between 1980 and 2005. He followed it, however, with a chart showing a large increase in consumption of cable news when measured by minutes, data which defy conventional wisdom. He noted the impossibility of determining total news consumption, but said that while consumption of paid news is down, overall consumption may very well be up.

What Markus found through his work,though, is that fewer Americans consume more news. When the total population suddenly had more choices (through cable, niche publications, the internet, etc.) those who previously only consumed news because nothing else was available, now filled their time with other types of information and entertainment.

Markus measured a “Relative Entertainment Preference” by asking people what kind of content they like. He found that consumption of news can vary even in the absence of a change in the REP. In other words, it was a change in environment that caused the change in consumption. In a low choice environment more people consumed news, in a high choice environment, less. Given the greater choice (particularly for those with access to new media), those who always were news junkies, are now able to consume even more and are all the more knowledgeable as a result. They are also more likely to vote. He also noted that the population of news junkies was small (he guessed 15 to 20%) and were demographically not very different form the rest of the population. He also said that they were very partisan, but found that this was mainly because those people who were more moderate tended to be pulled away from the news consuming group as choice increased.

Left unanswered in the research was where those non-news junkies went to spend their time. Was it on local news perhaps (since news was here defined as mostly national and international) ? Somewhere else? This is an important question for news companies since finding out how to satisfy those consumers with less interest in news can provide a good foundation on which to expend the resources needed to do that kind of reporting valued by the news junkies. The research may also suggest that more opinionated news may be more appealing to hardcore news types.

In a fine keynote talk by David Robinson I was particularly struck by his description of aggregators (a term he finds less than satisfying) as “asset managers.”

Matthew Hurst noted that content creation is now associated with individuals, not institutions. He also pointed out that data tools such as those he was demonstrating allow consumers to test the assertions of journalists.

Kevin Anderson, a huge Twitter fan, discussed its uses in both social and journalistic situations. He also noted that social networking tools can allow a user to explore a Web site through someone else’s eyes (e.g. seeing what your friends are reading).

Dave Blei explained some of his work uncovering and organizing hidden topical patterns in text. He looked at Daily Kos and Red State to see what topics are found in each and how they differ from each other. He also used dynamic analysis to see how words we use in similar ways change over time. Moving from the 19th century to the 21st we saw words such as “machine,” “engine,” and “steam” replaced by “device” and “silicon.” He also said that he felt it seems like you need someone with expertise in front of these kinds of tools.

JD Lasica made some predictions for the future, which included continued trivialization of news by traditional media, the demise of half of all dailies within 15 years (yikes!), and the rise of opinion, aggregators, niche, and hyperlocal news. He also suggested some approaches for news organizations, which included viewing news as a process or service, not as a finished product.

Ed Tenner discussed the softening of respect for professional journalism and noted some principles for news organizations to follow:

• Emphasise your comparative advantage
• The best new ideas will come from the “outside in.”

He also thought the best source of hope is the possible reversibility of online advertising trends - “what goes down, can come up.”

Not live blogging, but some quick hits from today’s presentations.

Dan Gillmore began with a nice discussion of citizen-media, noting the role of trust and reputation.

Steve Boriss talked about four “advances” that actually set news back:

• The steam engine was harnessed to the printing press (fewer voices because investment was needed to really be heard)
• The Associated Press (one source for international and national news)
• Modern journalism (Lippman’s ideas turned journalism into a science removing the competition of ideas)
• Broadcasting (now government could regulate news)

He said the Internet is now undermining these “advances.” Other points Steve made included the idea that audiences will not change - they are still mostly observers (with some exceptions) and will want experts to create; social media has been oversold; so has citizen journalism.

Reihan Salam from The Atlantic made an interesting point about audiences taking ownership of publications, as well as creating publications.

The second session was the one in which I participated and, since it dealt with the economics of news, revolved at least partly around concerns that the industry will no longe be able to produce the kind of investigative and other news that results from “real journalism.” Eric Alterman was quite pessimistic on this point while Gordon Crovitz and I were more optimistic. This conversation led to a question about how we can create more demand for news. This prompted me to add that I could think of no other product with which the product managers sit around wondering how to independently create demand for their product instead of thinking about how to improve their product to the point where demand rises. I suggested that this kind of hand-wringing gets in the way of creating a better news product. (I suspect Eric may have disagreed!)

Finally, there was some discussion of government funding for ailing media companies, a notion with which Gordon and I disagreed, while Eric thought it merited some consideration.

Busy days have led to incredibly light posting, but I’m headed to Princeton University for the Future of News workshop. Hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy, the workshop covers two days (May 14th and 15th) with a schedule of four panels and two featured talks. I’ll be on the “Economics of News” panel with Gordon Crovitz and Eric Alterman. I’m really looking forward to the event and assuming that I don’t get sucked in too deeply, I’ll try to live-blog at least some of the panels.

Kevin Kelly has a great post on editors vs. the hive mind. Kelly begins by explaining that as the amount of bottom-up content on the web exploded, he believed that “the need for some top-down selection and guidance would only increase in value. As the amount of content expanded, the demand for some intelligent guidance and selection would be worth a lot to some people.” He was shocked, then, “to see the Wikipedia disprove this notion, and show how well the bottom could work without any editors at all.” But, he goes on to say, “the supposed paragon of adhocracy — the Wikipedia itself — is itself far from strictly bottom-up. In fact a close inspection of Wikipedia’s process reveals that it has an elite at its center, (and that it does have an elite center is news to most). Turns out there is far more deliberate top-down design management going on than first appears. This is why Wikipedia has worked in such a short time.”

From here, Kelly begins to build an explanation of the forces at play by drawing an analogy to evolution and intelligent design. Pure hive mind systems may eventually evolve into a valuable end-state, but they do it in biological time - relative eons when compared to internet time. No one can wait that long, so enter intelligent design.

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.

What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.
2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors
3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
…ad infinitum.

The key, then, is to find just that right combination of hive mind and intelligent design. This searching is going on everywhere now, with a great example being Citizendium’s effort to improve upon Wikipedia.

We mostly find legacy companies tending toward an overabundance of design, while new toddler companies place an emphasis on the hive mind. Somewhere in the middle lies the right mix, but that somewhere changes over time. As the new variable in the equation, the hive mind is underestimated by most, leaving those “hive mind centric” applications to achieve real innovation and garner the strongest accolades. The problem for legacy companies is that their perception of how far the hive mind can take us is too conservative. Add that conservatism to institutional constraints on audience control and a legacy company that feels like it’s pushing the envelop is often just pulling its head out of the sand. With many bottom up applications available as examples, companies with deep expertise in editing should have an advantage over pure hive mind companies at taking some of these models and applying judicious amounts of intelligent design. The challenge, though, is one of attitude.

In a recent interview on Video Nuze, Bob Pittman, former President and COO of America Online and a co-founder of MTV, explained why he likes (and why his Pilot Group is buying) broadcast TV stations.

We have focused on small market television, where local advertising is the predominant revenue stream. We have done that because we believe national advertisers will slow down spending in economic downturns, whereas in local market when you’re dealing with a local retailer he still has to sell everything that’s on the shelf, come good times or bad. And we believe that in small markets, newspapers and yellow pages are getting wildly disproportionate share of the revenue, so we think there’s a great growth opportunity as well. In smaller markets the station’s coverage area nicely matches the advertiser’s reach goals. It’s also a fantastic free cash flow business.

He also says they are setting up “what are in essence ‘newspapers online.’”

Interesting that Pittman would see newspapers as vulnerable to attack by local broadcasters, while I think the situation is just the opposite. An explanation comes when he explains why he doesn’t believe online video will have a great effect on broadcast TV:

Well, you may occasionally watch a program online if you can’t get to your TV, or it wasn’t available, or you’re a little geeky, but as a replacement offering, I don’t think so. TVs are big screen, public viewing devices, computers are not. They’re 18 inches away and are private experiences, you don’t want people looking over your shoulder at it. They’re completely separate uses and devices, so to try to put the wrong kind of programming on either one limits your audience severely.

While he accepts that things may change if online video can be brought to the TV screen, he believes that the process to do that will be too difficult for the average consumer, severely limiting its impact.

The problem is that Pittman is thinking two years out when he should be thinking 5 or 10 years out. He’s right - the ability to watch tiny videos on a computer screen won’t hurt TV, but that’s simply a short-term development phase we’re going through. We will be able to watch good quality video on TV screens in the not too distant future, and that’s when the world changes for broadcast stations.

It’s good to know that Pittman has so much faith in what newspapers are currently doing online that he wants his stations to emulate them, but that too, is a phase. A large dose of video must be a part of any successful media company’s future, in preparation for the day when large capital investment in equipment and licenses is no longer necessary to bring consumers their “TV” news. TV broadcast stations can certainly participate, but in this battle I like the chances of newspapers.

One final quote, that should make anyone in the newspaper industry cringe:

People keep talking about Internet as if it’s competing with TV. But what the Internet has really done is replace print - things like yellow pages, newspapers and traditional research books. It’s also replaced communications - phone calls, voice mail. So when you hear these stories about the Internet replacing TV, I think they’ve got it all wrong.

Yes, people do keep talking…

While discussing EveryBlock with a colleague, he said that he was somewhat less than enamored with the site (and some others like it) because it really just provides data. He said that he doesn’t simply want data, but he wants to know what it means and why he should care. By way of a related example, he pointed to Consumer Reports which certainly gives its subscribers data, but through its rating system it also tells them what it means and why they should care. Consumer Reports, of course, is one of the few web sites that can charge for consumer content.

Consumer Reports is a nice success story for paid content, but it also has some pretty unique content. A lot of time and effort and money is put into creating objective ratings of products, ratings which can’t be replicated through simple consumer reviews. Interestingly, objectivity is a trait CR shares with news companies. While both claim to be objective, however, CR’s objectivity ends once the analysis is done. The value is created because CR takes a stand on the products it reviews. News companies, on the other hand, try to maintain their objectivity throughout all of their reporting. Could it be that value would be added if they more frequently took positions on subjects they cover? The popularity of blogs, talk radio, and certain newspapers and cable networks with points of view suggest some movement in that direction.

Perhaps more important, though, is that Consumer Reports’ content is actionable. A consumer typically reads a review or checks ratings when she is ready to buy, and CR’s reviews and ratings help prepare her to act. So much of what we find on the web is nice to know, interesting, and makes me feel smart and part of my community, but ends there. CR data helps me save money, make the best purchase decision, or keeps me from making a mistake. For that, people pay.

So, back to EveryBlock data. EveryBlock data is not particularly actionable, even though it may have some information I’d like to take into account when, say, buying a house. I certainly agree that this data would be more valuable if I was provided with some context and helped to understand what it tells me, but I still do find some of it useful. Take, for example, zoning agenda items or liquor license status changes. I suppose if I were renting an apartment and not particularly invested in my neighborhood, I wouldn’t be too interested in that data. If, on the other hand, I owned a home and planned to stay there for a while, I’d really be interested in that stuff. In fact, when I used to receive township newsletters, I turned first to zoning changes and then development plans. And I’d surely want to know if a business near my home was applying for a liquor license. Ultimately, the value of this data depends on your own personal circumstances.

As for the complaint that EveryBlock kind of sites simply give you data without analysis or meaning, I’d argue that that’s exactly what users could provide. Just as open source code applications can be enhanced through community trouble shooting and development, so can this kind of neighborhood data be enhanced through community analysis. The user who notices that an increase in a neighborhood’s liquor licenses coincides with an increase in DUIs and crime can do his own analysis to highlight what he sees as a cause and effect. If the data is out there with more eyes looking it over, more relationships and other information are likely to be found. Yes, good journalism can provide this kind of analysis and add lots of value to a local site, but good journalism can’t be everywhere and putting the data out there for the entire community to see doesn’t preclude analysis by news organizations. It just might, however, allow a user to unearth some important information on his own. In this world, value comes from supplying data, providing a platform for users to comment and analyze, and from journalists learning from and following up on what users unearth.

Today’s big news was the launch of EveryBlock. A product of a team of developers including wunderkind of the moment, Adrain Holovaty, the site launched to a great deal of fanfare. Covering Chicago, San Francisco, and New York (to start), EveryBlock provides local news and information down to the block level. The information comes from a myriad of sources, including newspapers, blogs, Craigslist, Yelp, and government databases. Brad Flora on The Methods Blog has a great rundown of the site and the information it contains.

TechCrunch also covers the launch and as is usually the case, the readers’ comments are a highlight of the post. A lot of the early, cynical comments suggest that much of this has been done before and wonders how the site can make money. Holovaty answers by pointing out that much of EveryBlock’s government data existed in inconvenient formats (e.g. pdf files) and hadn’t been aggregated before. As for making money, well, Holovaty notes that the project is non-profit.

I find it really interesting when people see these kinds of information aggregations as yawners. This is because of what they know already exists on the web, as opposed to what actually exists. We’ve become so used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips that unless you’ve ever tried to find some of this stuff, you really don’t know how difficult, or tedious, it is to locate. It means the bar is that much higher for those of us actually trying to bring it all together.

I agree with some of the commenters who think EveryBlock isn’t a business, but that misses the point. The EveryBlock team has put this site together with a goal of “experimenting with new forms of journalism.” (Of course, this doesn’t help those who actually need to make money with new forms of journalism.) This would fit nicely as a feature on a newspaper site, not only as its own section, but also as an engine to power supplementary information for news stories and other items. It would be a great addition to community sites like YourHub and NeighborsGo. Think too about all of that data newspapers collect for feature stories. It’s often some kind of government data that is only used for the original report. With an EveryBlock kind of product that data could be added to the database, making it more and more robust as time goes on.

The EveryBlock team has done a nice job with this site so far and I think it serves the Knight News Challenge’s goal of transforming community news. Experiments like these provide the inspiration, and now it’s up to the next wave to extend and refine.

We’ve been hearing for quite some time about the coming online gold rush driven by local advertising. Borrell Associates, for example, forecasts local online advertising to grow by 48% in 2008. For projections like these to prove true, however, those local advertisers need some encouragement. According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, newspapers seem to be doing an especially poor job of it. An awful lot of small businesses have discovered the value of online advertising, particularly paid search, but a lot more haven’t. It’s the second group that can use the encouragement, but the thought of visiting all of those small advertisers to make a personal pitch is daunting. As a result, as the WSJ article notes, most newspapers initially “focused on selling ads to bigger advertisers who were already buying space in their print products.” Now, facing the possibility of losing the local advertising market to national internet companies, newspapers are scrambling to figure out how to sell the local guys on online ads.

Meanwhile Google, in position to be the king of local advertising through its AdWords, AdSense, and mapping products, has also been thinking about how to reach more local advertisers. They’ve come up with a nifty plan called “The Google Online Marketing Challenge.”

Student teams will receive US$200 of free online advertising with Google AdWords and then work with local businesses to devise effective online marketing campaigns. You will outline a strategy, run your campaign, assess your results and provide the business with recommendations to further develop their online marketing. Teams submit their reports and are judged by a panel of independent academics from all over the world.

You have to admire this marketing program run under the guise of educational service to our nation’s youth. The teams, from Azerbaijan State Economic University to the University of California, Irvine, will fan out all over the globe running online ad campaigns for local advertisers using Google AdWords. Google gives up some AdWords revenue in return, they hope, for student and business owner converts to the power of online advertising.

The winning team will get “a chance to visit the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, and meet the team that created AdWords.” I think I’d rather meet the team that came up with this contest.

As a former employee of a company acquired by TV Guide, I read with interest the AP’s story on Macrovision’s proposed purchase of it’s parent company, Gemstar - TV Guide International. The gist of the story was that TV Guide magazine will face an uncertain future with the new company. Macrovision, which makes anti-piracy tools, wants Gemstar for it’s “intellectual property and interactive programming,” making the TV Guide magazine a bit of a fish out of water in the new organization.

The magazine’s fall has been quick and dramatic. When NewsCorp bought the title in 1988, circulation was about 17 mm. By 2002 it was down to about 9mm, and today it stands at 3.3mm. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that onscreen and online guides are quickly making the magazine obsolete. The AP, not looking for a genius to comment for its story, found Melissa Pordy, director of media investment solutions in North America for advertising agency Cheil Worldwide, who offered that, “It will very quickly become obsolete because of its lack of reinvention. They just didn’t keep up with the change in technology.”

These kinds of quotes drive me nuts. We start by pointing out the obvious, and follow up with something at best baffling, and at worst just plain wrong. How did the magazine not keep up with the change in technology - by failing to buy the latest printing presses? Or did she mean the company didn’t keep up with new technology? If the latter, who does she think developed that interactive programming that Macrovision wants so badly? Just because a product is winding down it’s useful life doesn’t mean that the company that produced it failed to innovate. TV Guide, along with everyone else in the guide business, saw long ago that listings were moving onscreen and online and spent a lot of time and money developing products to meet that demand. And apparently they were successful. The magazine, meanwhile, evolved away from a listings heavy focus and more toward stories and features. Advertisers liked the change and responded with more placements, but apparently the book was still in the red.

Just like saying “Down with the establishment” in the 60’s and “You just don’t get it” in the 90’s, today one must knock print products for failure to adapt in order to be in the “in crowd.” It’s so easy to provide criticism and so difficult to provide solutions. Products die natural deaths and smart companies milk the cash from them in their twilight years while working hard to birth their progeny.

TV Guide may have missed some opportunities to prolong the magazine’s life, but would be dying nonetheless. Perhaps Pordy would have preferred that the magazine compete head on with the likes of E! and Entertainment Weekly, but it seems unlikely that would have been a winning strategy. In the end, our understanding of the world just isn’t enhanced by reading another quote on some print product’s failure to adapt to new technology. Just because it’s what all the cool kids are saying doesn’t mean it has value.

Alex Iskold writes on Read/Write Web that there is “a myth floating around that contextual advertising is going to help Facebook justify its $15 billion valuation.” He goes on to say that the reality is much different:

• Facebook does not know much about us
• The data that Facebook has is not structured
• People are not coming to Facebook to click ads

Read the post to see exactly why he makes these assertions and then continue on to the comments to see several readers take him to task for having no real backup for them. My reaction to the post, is that Facebook’s ad programs are in their early stages and it’s too soon to tell just how successful the company will be with its targeted advertising.

While Facebook is currently running ads similar to those found on media and other web sites (presumably cpm and cpa), the buzz is all around its attempts at highly targeted ads. Given how hard the company is pushing the envelope, it clearly feels pressure to justify it’s valuation by bringing to market a highly effective ad program based on social networking. Implicit in this is the notion that the “everyday” kind of ads it’s running now won’t do it. Iskold adds to this idea by suggesting that Facebook users don’t click on ads. Anecdotal evidence would certainly bear this out, but it’s just that - anecdotal.

If Facebook users don’t click on ads, it may not be because they never will, but simply because the wrong ads are displayed. At first blush, the major facebook demographic may seem pretty tight - college students. But this group is really much less targeted than many advertisers want. A myriad of interests bubble beneath the surface, and tapping into those interests is where the real money lies. Facebook should be able to do that because users list their interests, but that has yet to become reality (although it may soon). In the meantime, it’s niche social networks that would seem to hold some real promise.

Niche networks, those based on a shared interest, make obvious what they’re all about, whether it’s a sport, a hobby, or a geographical community. With the network itself doing the initial segmentation work, adding in behavioral targeting only increases the network’s value. While there are a lot of these niche social networks on the web, traditional local media sites, such as newspapers, should be well positioned to create them. With already strong ties to the community, newspapers ought to be able to build sites based on geographical communities as well as interests specific to their market. Let Facebook work the bleeding edge of social network targeting, local media can let the network do the heavy lifting and start to build vibrant local communities of interest that are appealing to advertisers.

Jaron Lanier writes an op-ed in the New York Times disavowing his “Piracy is Your Friend” days, and announces that he now believes content creators should be paid for their work.

Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.

Oddly, Lanier believes that the solution lies with “software engineers and Internet evangelists [who] need to exercise the power they hold as designers.” He goes on to note that people are quite willing to pay for virtual goods online in Second Life, as well as music “within the ecosystem of the iPod.” Although many would like to believe that “We could design information systems so that people can pay for content” and voila, people would, it’s hard to see that actually happening. People can also drive 55mph, exercise regularly, and floss between their teeth, but that doesn’t mean they do. The problem is the abundance and digital nature of content. No popular movement will ever result in paid content, only a change in the underlying economics can do that. As for Second Life and the iPod, there have always been people willing to pay for games, and the iPod became so popular because it provided a portable platform for everyone’s pirated music. iTunes wasn’t even launched until two years after the iPod came out.

When it comes to free content, the genie is out of the bottle, although it’s not clear that the bottle was ever strong enough for the genie. Content aggregators and content consumers delight in criticising the creators (aka MSM) for not understanding the new world, but none of them have exactly stepped up to show everyone how it’s done; how to produce high quality, original content in exchange for online advertising revenue. Until someone does, it seems that the fate of the internet as a vehicle for communicating information is dependent on the success of those creaky old mainstream media companies in finding a solution.

The Economist has a short article on four lessons on innovation we can learn from Apple. The four lessons are fairly standard fare at this point (but still difficult to actually do), but take on a slightly different hue when viewed in the context of Apple.

1. “…innovation can come from without as well as within.” While Apple can seem like a place full of solitary mad scientists locked away in labs, the reality is that “its real skill lies in stitching together its own ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the results in elegant software and stylish design.”
2. Design “new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology.”
3. “Listening to customers is generally a good idea, but it is not the whole story.” “…smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today.”
4. “Fail wisely.”

As I said, you’ve heard these before, but think about 3 and 4. Apple has really made it’s name bringing people things they didn’t know they wanted, but soon couldn’t live without, from the GUI operating system to the iPod (ridiculed at launch). This is one of the more difficult decisions in business - knowing when your new product will be embraced by consumers or if it’s value proposition was never revealed as a desire in market research because, well, it’s not desired. This leads into the fourth point - fail wisely.

We always hear that we must be prepared to fail (although we rarely are), but with Apple that failure has taken on much greater proportions. Remember Lisa, the music phone, and NeXT? Yikes! They were failures. Failures so big they almost brought the company down (NeXT, of course, was a failing Steve Jobs company that Apple acquired for its technology). Ideally, when we’re told to “embrace failure,” we’d like to think we’re embracing smaller failures. It’s unusual, if not impossible, to find a truly innovative company without it’s share of failures. Finding a way to fail small, while leaving the door open to succeeding big, is the trick.

Last month, Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, wrote a New York Times article about some work he and two colleagues did on the predictability of hit songs.  The work had much broader applicability than just music, of course, and offers an explanation of why predicting hits (in music, movies, fashion, etc.) is so difficult.

 After noting that “Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them,” he goes on to say that

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

This idea that what is slightly more popular can become even more popular as a result of that initial popularity, is called “cumulative advantage.”  In the experiment Watts and his colleagues conducted, subjects chose favorite songs in situations in which they knew what songs others had chosen, and in which they did not ( the actual experiment was a bit more complicated, of course). 

In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

The results suggested that predicting the future is not just difficult, but impossible, no matter how much knowledge we have or analysis we do.  Because we can always create a story after the fact about why something was successful, or a hit, we rarely lose our belief in the predictability of the world.  As Watts says, we can’t stop trying to predict the future, but we do need to be more skeptical about both predictions and explanations.  That skepticism holds for predictions of failure too.  Perhaps the best way to look for hits is to launch as many new products as possible in ways that allow you to hold back substantial investment until it’s likelihood of success becomes clearer.  A little early humility may go a long way.

We’ve heard a lot about the creative generation lately, much of it revolving around the online work this group does for free. As this trend begins to mature, we’ve seen that creatives are realizing the value of what they do, whether it’s video, blog posts, or graphic design, and are looking for ways to be compensated. Offline, artists and crafters who begin making objects for friends and family, and are encouraged to sell their work, usually end up at craft fairs, hoping some of those in attendance will see value in what they’ve created. An uncertain process to say the least, but one that’s been established for many years.

I recently came across a new site called Mintd, that bills itself as a “a global collaborative space for artists, designers and musicians to sell their work and connect to new markets.” The twist at Mintd is something called a “Lookbook.”

People buy products. They take photos of themselves or their friends with these products, and upload them to the site. Other users can browse these lookbooks, and link to the products the stylist has used. If they subsequently buy the products, the user who submitted the lookbook gets a commission from the price.

The idea seems to be that there is no better way to sell a product than through an endorsement by a happy buyer. So much the better when that endorsement includes pictures of the product in use.

For a consumer, it sounds like an interesting site that could yield some real gems. When I look at it, however, I see it as a real resource for retail buyers. A whole Web site of interesting and unique objects aggregated in what amounts to an online showroom. But what if that buyer is from Target? How could an individual artisan ever hope to supply the large volume required? The Target buyer makes a simple introduction to her preferred China vendor, and everyone is off to the races. If it’s a resource for buyers, it’s competition for vendors. Another sign of how the mom-and-pop shop can compete on a global basis for business once available only to anointed suppliers with large logistical infrastructures.