Tag Archives: week 2 post

Mass-customization

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This week’s reading bundle included an article entitled “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for Wired in 2004. The article describes the rise of niche markets over purely mainstream entertainment.

The rise is attributed to ‘The Long Tail’, in which selling more is (wouldn’t you guess it) selling more. A business model in which providers make many, many things available, both mainstream and eclectic, to capture a larger audience; a model which had previously been more difficult to accomplish without the Internet marketplace we have today.

In 2004, when the article was published, these 3 rules were listed for the ‘new entertainment industry’:

  1. Make everything available.
  2. Cut the price in half. Then lower it.
  3. Help me find it.

We’re now 11 years past the establishment of the aforementioned article, and with these 3 rules working hand in hand and in full force, there is an audience. We now see online marketplaces gaining steam such as Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify, and brick-and-mortar establishments are also finding ways to break into the booming online marketplace. I certainly remember when my last Blockbuster finally gave in.

Now I’ve seen this model work first hand. Sure, my generation seems to be all about the piracy, but if I can find remastered original doo-wop classics from the 50’s at a good price, then you bet I’ll shell out to have the best quality I can get. I just need to have it available to me.

But with a slight focus on the Blockbuster/piracy/Netflix phenomenon in this post, the Long Tail makes itself completely relevant. For example, comparing what is available to consumers now, it almost seemed silly for Blockbuster to continue with it’s business model without taking into account how they would adapt with the new distribution methods taking shape. Blockbuster did however take into account ‘what customers wanted‘ which to them, was the ‘latest, greatest hit’.

What Anderson’s article presents is that these blockbuster (heh) movies of course had an audience, but if there was no hit, there was no pull. The Forbes article ‘The Internet Didn’t Kill Blockbuster, The Company Did It To Itself‘ describes how Blockbuster could’ve incentivised their customer relations by recommending films that didn’t fall into the ‘blockbuster’ category that was initially bringing the customers into the store, much like the ‘if you liked this, you might like…’ method of recommendations we so often see in online marketplaces.

Though, the Forbes article also states that ‘Blockbuster didn’t lose its customers to Netflix NFLX +4.69% or digital; they’d already long ago stopped belonging to the company in anything other than name.’ I see this to be only half true. While the Forbes article appears to be focusing on Blockbuster’s demise in terms of the customer relations, Blockbuster did in fact lose it’s customers to digital.

Online, the vast, vast array of films available isn’t something that could’ve been available for Blockbuster, at least, not when it was alive. The Long Tail discusses niche markets that would’ve been difficult to tap into while in Blockbuster. Sure, they had arthouse sections and world cinema, but the little corner wasn’t enough for what is actually being produced. And of course, as a brick-and-mortar business, Blockbuster wouldn’t prioritise importing in titles that would only be rented maybe a handful of times a year, they’d lean to getting 40 copies of a summer hit that was sure to bring in the big bucks.

The countless films available to consumers online is possible because it doesn’t cost the online marketplaces much to make it available, at least not as much as a tangible, physical store would. Blockbuster hit the ground running on the idea that consumers would miss something big in the theatres, but they could find those titles in their establishment. What wasn’t taken into account was the larger market they could’ve tapped into, had they changed with the times and not simply continued on as they did.

Blockbuster failed to adapt with the ‘new entertainment industry’. The three rules as stated above could’ve been Blockbuster’s step-by-step comeback. They already had a name and a well-known reputation in their industry, they just failed to change their operations to suit their consumers’ needs.

I found the Anderson reading particularly relatable, and will hopefully be able to discuss more about the different industries and their relationships with The Long Tail.

MyHTML

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As someone who was born in the early 90’s, the Internet was prominent in my juvenile journey. I vaguely recall touching on basic HTML in Year 10 Information Technology, creating web pages that link to more pages, in an endless motion of opening pages featuring only a single link and photo.

If you’d seen me during those formative years of high school, you’d think I had less than zero interest in learning to code, and maybe that was actually the case.

Then came the age of social media. I didn’t get into the social media boom until MySpace gained attention through the up and coming musical acts being found on their many pages. This is where I, and many of my friends, gained a flare for basic HTML.

Profile Edit page of a MySpace profile

The MySpace boxes asking for short descriptions of various interests for display on your profile quickly went from plain text to being riddled with HTML that casual users were learning for the sake of their profiles to pop. Soon after, I found myself being able to write out entire lines of varying text appearances, just to show that I could.

Just to give you a taste of a bit of my overwhelming expertise, the code displayed below:

Screen Shot 2015-01-23 at 3.52.14 pm

shows up on a page like this:

This sentence is here.

This is a link to Google.

In my blogging adventures that I’d previously mentioned on this blog, I’ve also uncovered several Tumblr users that have immense knowledge in creating entire website themes, yet they weren’t schooled professionally in coding, it just came about through trial and error. With the help of the Internet’s many tutorials, getting at least a light grasp in HTML is no longer ridiculously intimidating and easier to accomplish than ever.

What I’ve also discovered is that in my possible future career of being a Public Relations practitioner, HTML experience is vital in getting noticed amongst the sea of applicants. With the world of PR (much like many industries) shifting focus to online counterparts, the ability to code even at a basic level will allow you to stand out in a crowd that may have no experience at all. With employers streamlining competencies, a PR practitioner may find themselves handling various outlets of a campaign that are online, and the basic knowledge can avoid them from being intimidated by a prompt to create HTML material.

Anyway, I guess all this post is uncovering is why I have a (shockingly) basic grasp on HTML which has helped me stay afloat in several classes that require it. Perhaps Networked Media (for which this particular blog has been set up for) will allow me to attain a tighter grasp, and even a further interest in delving deeper into coding.

A close tie of mine has also made an observation regarding our voyages in the class into HTML on her blog, Dale Cridland.

Thinking Out Loud

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In this week’s reading bundle, there was a piece titled ‘The Age of the Essay‘ by Paul Graham. It wove in and out through the history of the essay, how we write them, and why we write them. One thing that resonated with me was the difference of what we’re told an essay is in our early education days, and what an essay should actually be.

“In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.” – Paul Graham, Trying, ‘The Age of the Essay’

The ‘writing for yourself’ notion is what caught my eye as I was a student that heartily enjoyed writing essays, but that enjoyment didn’t arise until I found that my stride was only hit when the writing became for my own understanding. In the early days of being introduced to the very idea of essays, students such as myself were presented the iron-clad structure we were to follow to create a successful essay. Graham identifies them as the “topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion,” which is essentially the only way I was taught to write them.

Though, in the reading Graham is specifically referring to essays written about English Literature. This only resonated with me in terms of essays being written in English class, but the topics were broader. This was the single section in the reading that stood out to me as being dissociative in my experiences. Yet, in the rest of his analysis, especially in terms of being given a clear goal of what you’re writing towards, rang true.

Graham states that “the other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it.” For example I recall being given a prompt about a particular interpretation of a film we had watched, yet that wasn’t the interpretation I had gathered from my viewing. But the prompt was written in such a way that forced adherence by the students to argue for that interpretation.

Reading the above piece by Graham prompted me to think back to the essays I had to write in high school. The first touch I think I had with a differing essay was in Year 12 Media when our prompt was to choose a sub-genre of film that is alien to us and analyse it’s history. When questioned about what we’re supposed to be aiming for with the essay (whether it should be argumentative, expository, persuasive), my teacher just told us that we just need to explore the sub-genre and find what’s interesting about it to us. So essentially, in our Year 12 minds, we’re thinking this teacher is just lazily telling us that we need to teach ourselves about this sub-genre, then again my media teacher was always a bit kookier than the norm.

Anyway, I chose B-Movies because I had just become familiar with Quentin Tarantino and watched interviews with him where he’d consistently reference B-Movies. When I got to the end of the essay, I felt I had explained to myself what makes a B-Movie, in terms of tropes and the like, but also what makes people find genuine entertainment in B-Movies. My curiosity for what I shallowly self-classified as films that fell into the B-Movie genre allowed me to read into many different connections and reasons for why B-Movies are the way they are.

The films that first exposed the notion of a ‘B-Movie’ to me.

“So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you’ve thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.” – Paul Graham, Surprise, ‘The Age of the Essay’

The connection I’m trying to make with this memory and this reading is that Graham is correct in saying that “the best way to get information out of someone is to ask what surprised them.” I wasn’t expecting to find out what was appealing about that genre, I just set out to know more about it, which helped exponentially in rounding out an essay that was more surprising in nature than if I was just given a prompt to argue about that sub-genre.

Graham also touches on the importance of knowing your audience. Being aware that your writing will be read heightens your willingness to think deeper and accentuate your writing ability. Knowing that my essay was eventually going to be read by my teacher, who had made it well known to me that he’s well-versed in B-Movies, gave me added incentive to make sure the work I was churning out was well researched, as well as giving my own understanding of how I saw the genre from my perspective.

I guess I can see why we’re taught to write essays in high school with the intent of defending/arguing a point, as a kind of building block to improve the writing with the predisposed idea that someone will have to be influenced by it in some way. I just wish that Graham’s reading was something that was incorporated into the teachings as well, as a way to broaden the student’s horizon and to remove the daunting pressure when you were given a prompt.