The Long Tail: How Technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches. (p. 15). This passage from The Long Tail, pretty much sums it all up. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is a good and worthwhile read for information scientists, computer scientists, ecommerce researchers, and others interested in all areas of Web research. The central premise of the book is that the combination of (1) the Pareto or Zipf distribution (i.e., power law probability distribution) that is characteristic of Web traffic and (2) the direct access to consumers via Web technology has opened up new business opportunities in the ''long tail''. Producers and advertisers no longer have to target ''the big hits'' at the head of the distribution. Instead, they can target the small, niche communities or even individuals in the tail of the distribution. The long tail is has been studied by Web researchers and has been noted in term usage on search engines, access times to servers, and popularity of Web sites. Andersen points out that the long tail also applies to products sold on the Web. He recounts that a sizeable percentage of Amazon sales come from books that only sell a few copies, a large number of songs from Rhapsody get downloaded only once in a month, and a significant number of movies from Netflix only get ordered occasionally. However, since the storage is in digital form for the songs and music (and Amazon out sources the storage of books) there is little additional inventory cost of these items. This phenomenon across all Web companies has led to a broadening of participation by both producers and consumers that would not have happened without the Web. The idea of the long tail is well known, of course. What Anderson has done is present it in an interesting manner and in a Web ecommerce setting. He applies it to Web businesses and then relates the multitude of other factors ongoing that permit the actual implementation of the long tail effect. Anderson also expands on prior work on the long tail by introducing an element of time, given the distribution a three dimensional effect. All in all, it is a nifty idea. The book is comprised of 14 chapters, plus an Introduction. Chapter 1 presents an overview of what the long tail is. Chapter 2 discusses the ''head'', which is the top of the tail where the …

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

(1990). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. American Journalism: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 202-203.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers

Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, and: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America

Even though few books provide such thorough explanations of their principles of composition as this book does, Table of Forms revels in deception. It is, to begin with, a Spineless Book with a spine that has nothing on it. The author, Dominique Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn, is a patently fraudulent pseudonym for William Gillespie. The “fourth edition,” with a 2006 copyright date, is the first fully revised edition, and was released in the spring of 2007. Anyone who has noticed Spineless Books, with its 2,002-word palindrome story 2002 (2002) by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie and its FitzpatrickO’Dinn Prize for rule-driven literature, might be prepared for this audaciously ambitious and beautifully realized collection of poems written by formal constraints, and yet even the most devoted followers and practitioners of such work may cringe at the prospect of having to deal with procedural poetry. Formal work poses two problems: will the forms overpower the poems, making these pieces more interesting as puzzles than as works of art; and, will the act of reading be reduced to a guessing game, in which the reader must solve the puzzle behind the poem or feel stupid at being left out of some joke perpetrated by the poet? Gillespie solves the latter problem by providing a glossary, with definitions and etymology of the methods he uses, and identification of which poems follow which methods. Even when the forms are traditional and obvious (sonnet, sestina, palindrome), this is an essential key, particularly when so many poets take liberties with certain forms, such as the sonnet, as to defy definition. Relieved of having to play the guessing game, I found myself going back and forth from glossary to text, but eventually the elegance and panache of the poetry kept me from checking the glossary until later. Although formal constraints have been around for centuries, Gillespie works in a contemporary tradition whose foremost practitioners are members of the Oulipo, the Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Gillespie’s poetry can seem as feverishly wrought as some works of Ian Monk and at other times as stylishly refined as some works of Harry Mathews, but Table of Forms more resembles Queneau’s 1947 classic, Exercises in Style, where he retells the same vignette in different ways, branding each version with the rhetorical device he uses, as well as the recently re-released Oulipo Compendium (2005) edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, with its definitions and demonstrations of a wealth of formal devices. Occasionally, Gillespie’s terms and definitions vary from what other rhetorical guides offer, but these variations, along with their examples, amplify rather than confuse the issue at hand. As Georges Perec, particularly in his novel Life: A User’s Manual (1978), seems disinclined to limit himself to using “only” one constraint at a time, Gillespie often uses more than one form at once, sometimes combining them, such as in the following heimlich (haiku plus limerick).

The Content of the Form

In the early years of the twentieth century, the unique new medium of motion pictures was the focus of significant theorization and experimentation at the fringes of the American advertising industry. Alongside the growth of the nickelodeon, and the multiple shifts in the American cinema’s business model in the ‘transitional era,’ various individuals at the margins of the advertising industry attempted, and most often failed, to integrate direct consumer-goods advertising regularly into motion picture theaters. Via techniques as diverse as the glass slide, the commercial trailer, and the advertising wall-clock, cinema patrons of the 1910s witnessed various attempts by merchants and manufacturers to intrude upon their attention in the cinema space. Through research in the trade presses of the cinema, advertising, and various consumer goods industries, along with archival ephemera from the advertising companies themselves, this dissertation explores these various on and off-screen tactics for direct advertising attempted in silent cinemas, and their eventual minimization in the American cinema experience. Despite the appeal of the new, popular visual medium of cinema to advertisers, concerns over ticket-prices, advertising circulation, audience irritation, and the potential for theatrical ‘suicide-byadvertising,’ resulted, over a mere fifteen years, in the near abandonment of the cinema as an advertising medium. As a transitional medium between the 19 th century forms of print and billboarding, and 20 th century broadcasting, the silent cinema was an important element in the development of modern advertising theories. INDEX WORDS: Advertising, Silent cinema, Transitional era, Film exhibition, Film spectatorship, American cinema, Magic lantern, Trailer, Animation

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=communication_diss

Jeremy W Groskopf

Papers

Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising