A quick refresher: the long tail theory, popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson, says that as digital distribution drives distribution costs to zero, businesses will be able to profit by stocking enormous numbers of obscure titles. These titles, which may only sell one or two copies a year, are the tail of the traditional demand curve--the "long tail."

The HBR study, by Anita Elberse, analyzes data from online music and video stores and suggests … Read more

PopularMedia launching SocialNotes for sharing shopping links

On Monday at Supernova, Google's Joe Kraus gave a hypothetical example of how online shopping could become more social. On Wednesday, I saw the real thing: a new widget from PopularMedia that makes shopping sites a bit more personal.

The SocialNotes product is a widget reminiscent of ShareThis and AddThis; it's code that publishers can drop in to their sites that makes it easy for visitors to send pages off to friends or to embed them in social-network profile pages or blogs. The SocialNotes widget is somewhat more interesting because when the e-mail recipients of a notification go … Read more

PopPhoto shows April Fools spirit

At first glance, you might mistake it for a profile of the latest gimmicky art photographer, but as you read you'll soon discover that you've been suckered by this year's installment of Popular Photography and Imaging's long tradition of April Fools pranks. This year, the magazine chose to pull your leg through its Web site, with a profile of a phoney photographer named Richard Baresall. The tale, complete with the trademark puns and zany humor that have endeared the magazine's editors with generations of photographers, is a bit more risque than I would have expected … Read more

Are you a 21st century digital boy or schizoid man?

Last night a song called "21st Century (Digital Boy)" by Bad Religion just popped into my head. I don't know why, it just did.

The lyrics seem to reject our growing dependency on technology. The chorus begins with "I'm a 21st century digital boy, I don't know how to live (or read) but I've got a lot of toys."… Read more

Even the big guys are splitting their efforts

Search engine optimization is one of those ongoing tasks. SEO only has two directions...forward or backward, and the day you stop paying attention to SEO is the day you start moving backwards.

If you are one of the so-called little guys, you may feel overwhelmed with how you can ever compete against the big guys. Well good news, as you'll see, even some of the big guys miss the mark on some of the most basic concepts.

Canonicalization

Simply put, in regards to SEO, we might describe "canonicalization" as identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source. … Read more

More alternative-energy innumeracy

As an engineer, I hate to see bad engineering treated like a good idea.

I've written recently about questionable proposals for human power generation, electric vehicle recharging and fuel cells. In some cases, there's nothing really wrong with the underlying technology, but it's being implemented and promoted using bad math and misleading promises.

The latest example of innumeracy comes from Shawn Frayne, an independent inventor here in Silicon Valley. Frayne's Windbelt is a low-cost wind-power generator that uses a fluttering membrane instead of rotating blades to convert wind power into mechanical motion; a simple linear generator … Read more

'Popular Mechanics' 2007 Breakthrough Awards announced

Popular Mechanics holds its 2007 Breakthrough Awards tonight to honor the people and products that helped push the limit of technology. The party might be tonight, but we have the information now. Check out our gallery to read about the 10 products Popular Mechanics is honoring tonight.

Be in the know on what's hot and popular

Getting ready for AMA's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conference, which I'm chairing, next month has gotten me thinking about what truly constitutes a "hot topic." Online, folks' interests are fleeting. Remember "the good ol' days" when something was the hot topic for weeks or even months? Now, hot topics can come and pass before you even knew they were hot.

On the upside, the Web has made the tracking and monitoring of what's hot easier than ever before. Wondering what products are taking the world by storm? Can't have your morning … Read more

The 7 best Facebook apps--according to Facebook

After the Always On conference program closed on Wednesday, I headed over to the Lunch 2.0 event (it started at 5 p.m., but who's counting?) at Facebook HQ. When I got there, the room was packed with Facebook employees and builders. (See the video for a peek at the crowd; yes, that's Scoble.) I thought it would be a good opportunity to get the skinny on good Facebook applications. Beyond the statistically popular applications, and the applications you see that your friends are using, I wanted to know what applications Facebook insiders use and like.

Here'… Read more