My, those Blogospherians have a long tail

I went out to Palo Alto last week for the Media Center’s Technology, Business and Policy for Senior Executives conference. Overall, it was fascinating and informative. Maybe a tad frightening, too.

There was a lot going on there and I made a lot of notes. My main concern is that the folks in the room might be drinking a bit too much of the RSS/Blogosphere/User Generated Content Kool-Aid that was being passed around. While I see the value and importance of all these memes, I’m also not convinced they’re as widespread or popular as the Blogosphere seems to think.

I created a few posts that try to pull things together. One lists worthwhile sites/concepts that I made a note to check out once I got back. Another lists cool quotes from the conference, and the last is a glossary of interesting jargon I picked up.

The highlights, by far, were presentations by Dan Gillmor, former columnist/blogger for the San Jose Mercury News, and Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief at Wired magazine.

I think I betrayed myself as something of a heretic during Gillmor’s talk when I called him on a few things, particularly his belief that the masses are ready to rise up and start creating their own content. I related our experiences trying to get football coaches and other community group leaders to update sites with information. Some do it with a religious fervor. Others (most?) get abandoned quickly and turn into cyber ghost towns rather than online communities. While I really see the importance of user generated content and think the media should be providing opportunities for people to create their own content, I also think we need to be aware that creating content is a lot like, well, work. Most folks would sooner leave it up to someone else. I also thought it odd that Gillmore seemed to want to blame Lauren Rich Fine (Wall Street analyst who follows the newspaper industry) and her ilk for the media’s slow move toward user-generated content. I told him I don’t think Fine gives a flip about that. She’s certainly not discouraging it. She’s watching our business and analyzing its potential for profit and to grow audience. Maybe he’d be happier if she were some sort of cheerleader? Not certain. I just don’t see how she’s in any way, shape or form stopping the media from embracing grassroots journalism. If there’s a barrier there, it’s the media’s long (often arrogant) tradition and resistance to change.

The comments were part of a thread of corporate media bashing that ran throughout the conference. It came to a head when Brad deGraf, founder of Media Venture Collective, droned on about how all that’s evil emanates from corporate news companies, “the Wal-Mart of our media landscape.”

Disruptive technology will save us, he argued.

Uh, maybe. But I’m thinking that the things disrupting big media look a lot like, well, the thing they’re disrupting. At least structurally. Think Yahoo!, Google, Ebay, Amazon. These aren’t grassroots organizations by any stretch. They might have started small, but so did E.W. Scripps, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst once upon a time.

Despite all that, I really liked Gillmor. He’s incredibly sincere and genuine, and he didn’t get defensive at all when I asked my questions and challenged him. He’s quit the Merc and has struck out on his own, though he’s still casting around for a business plan and how he intends to turn his call to grassroots journalism into a self-sustaining business. I hope he succeeds. There’s plenty of merit in his ideas.

As for Chris Anderson, I first heard about his work during the Online Publishers Association conference last fall. I had quit reading Wired (I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was their long treatise during the dot com surge on how the so-called new economy might keep rising, playing by a new set of economic laws that would break out of the traditional cyclical nature of economies), so I hadn’t seen Anderson’s original piece when it was published. But it already was causing a buzz at OPA. And it’s absolutely fascinating.

In a nutshell, Anderson argues that if you chart entertainment sales (think CDs or DVDs), there’s a fat part of the graph that represents the popular, blockbuster type of stuff. But there’s a long tail of more obscure material that emanates out from this fat part. Brick and mortar stores, limited by shelf space, focus on that fat part of the tail, knowing they can turn inventory and make a profit that way. But with the dawn of the Internet and the ability to offer limitless inventory, consumers will dive down into tail and make a lot of purchases. More, in fact, than are represented by the real popular stuff.

Now he’s working on a book, trying to extend his findings to other aspects of culture and media. It’s really pretty revolutionary, and I think it’s what was fueling a lot of the optimism in the room re: we’re on the cusp of a consumer and media culture that no longer panders to the lowest-common denominator. Even this premise makes me wonder, though. People still tend to move in masses and packs, and while this opens up a lot of great alternatives, will we still, in aggregate, bow to the hit makers? Does it matter if we do? Now the non-hits can have as much economic impact as the hits. And that’s pretty revolutionary.

So overall, the conference was invigorating. And a bit frightening in two respects:

1. The corporate media have a long way to go to leverage the power of the tail and the blogosphere. Our very survival might be at stake. But I think we also need to make sure we don’t lose sight of our role as filter and information provider. No one wants to drink from a firehose. Newspapers can and should be doing what they’ve always done best — help people get at what they really need/want in this flow of grassroots information that’s surging across the Internet. We just need to make sure we’re not looking soley to traditional sources of news and information while we’re applying the filters and generating our content. In fact, Anderson says a critical component of the long tail is and will be recommendations. People will act on recommendations from blogs, their friends and peers and, if we do our jobs, the media.

2. There was an evangelical feeling in the room, especially among some of the startups, that reminded me hauntingly of the stuff I saw during the dot com, pre-bomb. The half-baked business plans. The wide, sweeping declarations that everything is changed. The folks who are blogging, even if they are in the millions, are still a small percentage of the population at large. And while they are becoming major opinion makers, they’re still more of an interesting trend than a watershed event — so far. The vast majority of people don’t even know what an RSS feed is, yet along how to manage dozens of them to get the information they want. The most telling moment came when, in a moment of candor, one of the vendors in the room admitted to me that his business plan was to be acquired by a Google or a Yahoo! or an Amazon. (In fact, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines, which was just acquired by Ask Jeeves, was one of the speakers.) While this is an interesting approach, I’m not sure it constitutes a sustainable business model.

In all, it was time well spent. It definitely got the wheels turning …