Cultural Tourism

The links to the right, below ‘Cultural Tourism,’ contain examples of some of our current thinking. When we are not building online stores or web sites, or even hanging around in clubs soaking up great music, we worry about where all this online stuff is heading. On a good day we are very lucid and brilliant, on others just plain dull. Whatever the flavor we will post our thoughts and ideas here regularly as well as post articles that we believe are useful to our clients and our readers. We are also proud to push Portland and its creative community out into the world of zeros and ones because we never know who’s spiders are crawling around our site. Please explore.

Audiosticks

In this space very soon will be a list of some of our favorite reading – books, magazines, blogs, text messages and emails that we receive or come across. James Fallows, in the January 1st ‘06 edition of the NY Times writes about “a book by Jeff Hawkins, best known as the inventor of the Palm Pilot. The book, written with Sandra Blakeslee, is called “On Intelligence,” and it is about the connection between deep brain structure and some peculiarities of human thought. It asks, for instance, why the first few notes of a song you heard decades ago can instantly bring all the lyrics to mind, when you can’t remember the computer password you created yesterday. His answers have implications for the future of computing.” We’ll be seeking this one out. Update, it’s available and here’s the link

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine has finally delivered his long-awaited book, The Long Tail. Anderson’s basic theory is based on a simple question – in the modern marketplace, what happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? The answer lies in the premise of the ‘economics of abundance,’ where the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? He shows how the internet has created a new world where the sales of millions of quirky items along the ‘tail’ equal the sales of a few items at the ‘head,’ hence the term The Long Tail.

Here’s a couple of examples of the Tail in action:

Life-Expectancy of Bestsellers Plummets, Finds Study

Bestseller Study: Long Tail = Shorter Head