Short News 10/09/2007

in the long run, the market price of most music is going to be zero. I think Arrington actually focuses too much on piracy. Yes, in the short run peer-to-peer networks are an important source of price pressure. But the far more important factor is the sheer number of people who want to be rock stars. Now that the bottleneck of CD production and distribution has been removed, any musician can reach an infe number of fans at zero cost. As a result, more and more musicians will find it in their self-interest to voluntarily give music away for free as a means of building up their fan base. Over time, consumers will get used to music being free

Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper last week that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled „Blockbuster Culture’s Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity„

Perhaps more importantly, the „Long Tail“ of diverse discovery is an important part of the meritocratic and democratic promise of the new web.

If other metrics are considered, and surely they are in any sophisticated recommendation engine, then what’s called „Attention Data“ can help augment recommendations beyond merely what’s most popular among people with similar interests.

Well this was fast. Today Thomas Frütel announced the launch of Yaggs, a human powered search engine (or more precisely: a human powered directory of search results for popular search queries) based on the idea of Mahalo which launched only 4 months ago.