purple motes

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The long tail has been extensively discussed.  But what about the long tale?  What is the nature and significance of the long tale?

Consider two very long tales. The longest tale printed with a Latin or Cyrillic alphabet is Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus.  This type of work is known among specialists as a "roman de longue haleine" (long-winded novel). First published in Paris, 1649-1653, Artamène consists of ten volumes encompassing 7,443 pages and about 2.1 million words. A second long tale is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, published in London in 1748. Its first edition has seven volumes with a total of 2564 pages and about a million words.[1]

Reading a long tale takes a long time. At current, typical prose reading speed, Artamène would take about 140 hours to read. But in the seventeenth century, books were often read aloud. Reading aloud takes roughly 70% more time than silent reading.[2] Moreover, if reading occurred by candlelight, the need to maintain and trim the candle plausibly might increase reading time by 5%. So reading Artamène could easily have required 250 hours of reading time. Reading Clarissa could easily have required 100 hours of reading time.

While they were long tales, Artamène and Clarissa were also best-sellers of their times. One scholar declared of Artamène:

from 1649 to 1654, from one end of France to the other, at the court and in the most aristocratic circles, as well as among the more cultivated bourgeoisie, at Paris and in the provinces, in all ranks of a society the most polite in the world, one read them not merely with pleasure, one seized upon, one devoured bit by bit as they appeared, every one of those ten great volumes.[3]

In the course of printing, the printer increased the print run for currently printing volumes and printed additional copies of earlier volumes. While printing of the first edition finished in 1653, by 1655 the printer had already produced a complete fourth edition and a printer in England had already printed an English translation of the full, ten-volume work.[4] From 1654 to 1660, Scudéry produced another ten-volume work Clélie, Histoire Romaine. That action testifies to the success of Artamène. Clélie turned out also to be highly popular.[5]

The success of Clarissa can be described more quantitatively. Richardson probably printed 3000 sets of the seven-volume, first edition of Clarissa in 1748.  He printed additional editions of Clarissa in 1749, 1751, and 1759.  These later editions probably amounted in total to about 3000 sets.[6]   Through 1769, a total of eleven editions of Clarissa were printed in London and Dublin.  For comparison, few editions of British novels between 1750 and 1770 had print runs greater than 1,000, and most probably were printed in 500-800 copies.[7]

Just as did Scudéry, Richardson quickly followed one long tale with another.  About five years after writing and publishing Clarissa, Richardson wrote and published a new work, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Its first edition has seven volumes comprising 2459 text pages and about 907,000 words.[8] Three editions comprising 6,500 sets were printed within a year.[9] Both the size and print runs of Grandison suggest the prior success of Clarissa.

The commercial success of Clarissa measures reasonable well against that of Richardson's path-breaking best-seller, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). Pamela probably sold 20,000 two-volume sets within fourteen months after it was first published and had fourteen editions through 1769.[10]  Total volumes sold of Pamela through 1769 probably did not exceed by more than 50% those sold of Clarissa. Moreover, in 1766, the copyright of Pamela sold for £288, while the copyright for Clarissa sold for £600.[11] Both Pamela and Clarissa were best-sellers in America. Pamela, published in the U.S. in 1744, sold more than 10,000 copies through 1749. Clarissa, published in the U.S. in 1786, sold more than 25,000 copies through 1789.[12]

Long tales published in the twentieth century differ significantly from Artamène and Clarissa. Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu has nine volumes totaling about 3,200 pages and 1.5 million words.[13] Despite considerable advances in writing and printing technology, Proust's work was published over a fifteen-year period (1913-1927), while Scudéry's Artamène, about 50% longer, was published over only a five-year period (1649-1653). Moreover, Artamène was a best-seller, while À la recherche du temps perdu was far from a best-seller. The first volume of Proust's work had an initial print run of 1,750 copies, and perhaps 4,100 copies were printed between 1913 and 1918.[14] A best-seller in the U.S. about this time would sell 900,000 copies to a population about twice the size of France's.[15] Other long tales of the twentieth century attracted even less popular attention than Proust's work.

The closest the past century has come to producing a best-selling long tale is J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  The seven Harry Potter books, published from 1997 to 2007, have a total of 4175 pages and about a million words.[16]  The final book in the series broke sales records by selling 2.7 million copies in the U.K. and 8.3 million copies in the U.S. in its first 24-hours on sale.  The Harry Potter series as a whole differs from a long tale in that its volumes were marketed as single works and not widely sold as a set.  Moreover, the Harry Potter series was published over a period more than twice as long as that for Artamène and Clarissa.   Rowling shows no signs of adopting the form of the Harry Potter series as a template for another work.  Instead, Rowling plans to take time off and then write an encyclopedia of Harry Potter characters and places.   The Harry Potter series has not re-established the long tale as a generic type of work.

Vertical integration favors the production of the long tale. The longer the tale, the greater the cost and the risk in printing it.  Richardson was not only an author; he was also a master printer who printed his own works.  Thus he did not have to pay another printer for the cost and risk of printing a long tale.  The more imperfect the market for printing and risk-bearing, the greater the advantage to being able to assume both these functions within an author-printer enterprise.  Richardson produced Clarissa and Grandison with the advantage of vertical integration at a time when transaction costs associated with the nascent novel-printing business were relatively high.

Social influence favors the success of the long tale. Recent research indicates that greater social influence favors greater concentration of demand among the most highly popular works.[17]  Salons and coffee houses were important social institutions in seventeenth-century France and eighteenth-century England. Scudéry herself conducted at her Paris home an important salon known as Samedi:

the main purpose of the salon was for amusement. Among the activities were excursions, elegant dinners, and surprise visits to friends staying in the country. The glory of a certain pastry shop in rue Saint-Honoré that Mlle de Scudéry and her friends loved to frequent has come down to us and we also know of Mme Aragonais' dolls, which the ladies of the Samedi dressed in the current mode. Other diversions were the experiments done by Claude Perrault, architect and anatomist, to observe the chameleon's ability to change to change color according to its environment. ... Poems were exchanged, of course, as were certain gallantries...[18]

The vibrant salon world of seventeenth-century France created extensive, powerful channels for social influence. Social influence arising from these salons, and from Scudéry's position as a leading salonnière, are probably an important part of the explanation for the long tail.

The communication industry has changed greatly since the time of Artamène and Clarissa.   The average duration of online videos watched in the U.S. in March, 2008, was only 2.8 minutes per video.  That's much, much less than the 250 hours it probably took to read the best-seller Artamène in seventeenth-century France.   Less vertical integration on the supply side and less social influence on the demand side may be an important part of the explanation for this huge difference.

Notes:

[1] Artamène is available online. While the authorship of the work is not obvious, most scholars believe that Madeleine de Scudéry wrote it. The online source states that the first edition had 13,095 pages, while the online (1656) edition has 7443 pages. If that's correct, the first edition must have had either a very large typeface or widely spaced lines. Wikipedia lists the word count as 2.1 million. I've verified the plausibility of this figure with page sampling from the online edition. Clarissa is also available online. My page count is first-edition text pages, as documented in Sale (1969) pp. 45-8. The word count is from the online edition; see long-tale data.
[2] Calculation based on a typical reading speed of 250 words per minute, and a typical speed for spoken text of 140 words per minute.
[3] Cousin (1886) v. 1, p. 2.
[4] Newman (2003) p. 1.
[5] Aronson (1978) pp. 54, 82.
[6] Keymer (1994) pp. 392-3. The later figure is based on scaling Rivington's revenue figures.
[7] Raven (1987) pp. 15, 40.
[8] Page count for first edition, based on Sale (1969) pp. 70-4. Word count scaled from words in the online volume 4. See long-tale data.
[9] Eaves and Kimpel (1971) pp. 384, 401.
[10] Keymer and Sabor (2005) p. 20; Raven (1987) p. 15.
[11] Eaves and Kimpel (1971) p. 490.
[12] Mott (1966) p. 304. Grandison, also published in the U.S. in 1786, was a "better seller" (not quite a best-seller) from 1786-1789.
[13] The page count and word count are from Wikipedia, here and here.
[14] Tadié (2000) p. 595. According to a history of Éditions Gallimard, which became Proust's publisher, the company sold more than four million copies of À la recherche du temps perdu (in French, apparently worldwide) in seventy years through its copyright expiration in 1987. A significant share of these copies may have been purchased due to course assignments.
[15] Mott (1966) App. A.
[16] From WikiAnswers here and here. Included in long-tale data.
[17] See Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006).
[18] Aronson (1978) p. 39.

References:

Aronson, Nicole. 1978. Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Cousin, Victor. 1886. La société française au XVIIe siècle d'après Le Grand Cyrus de Mlle de Scudéry. Paris: Perrin & Cie.

Eaves, Thomas Cary Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. 1971. Samuel Richardson: a biography. Oxford: Clarendon.

Keymer, Tom. 1994. "Clarissa's Death, Clarissia's Sale, and the Text of the Second Edition." Review of English Studies, New Series, v. xlv, n. 179, pp. 389-96.

Keymer, Tom, and Peter Sabor. 2005. Pamela in the marketplace: literary controversy and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mott, Frank Luther. 1966. Golden multitudes: the story of best sellers in the United States.

Newman, Karen. 2003. "Volume Editor's Introduction," in Scudéry, Madeleine de, and Karen Newman. 2003. The story of Sapho. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Raven, James. 1987. British fiction, 1750-1770: a chronological check-list of prose fiction printed in Britain and Ireland. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Sale, William Merritt. 1969 [1936]. A Bibliographic Record of His Literary Career with Historical Notes. Archon Books.

Salganik, Matthew J., Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts. 2006. "Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market," Science, 311, 854-856 (2006).

Tadié, Jean-Yves. 2000. Marcel Proust. New York: Viking.

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Fast-paced, consumerist society emphasizes functionalism and results. Hungry? Go to a fast-food restaurant. Want to do something? Figure out how to get it done quickly and with the least amount of effort. The value of everything is instrumental.

Bureaucracy, in contrast, emphasizes the artistic and the beautiful. Long-time bureaucrats have deep appreciation for forms and the aesthetic qualities of experience itself. Rather than doing, bureaucracy is about being on the job.

So if you're applying for a driver's license, filling out a job application, completing your time sheet, or filing health insurance reimbursement forms, take time to appreciate the beauty of the forms in front of you.

Let's Japan ponders a government initiative to get office workers out of suits and into shirt-sleeves shirts without ties. The submitter remarks, "Remove tie. Short sleeve shirt only. Follow the Japanese government rules. But Prime Minister doesn't?" The Prime Minister, in his bureaucratic capacity, should have the same uniform that all other bureaucrats do. I recommend a unisex, short-sleeve, light-blue cotton dress shirt with a pocket protector.

Inside Facebook discusses Facebook's evolving approach to platform governance. In short, less dependence on technology, more dependence on bureaucrats. A shrewd business move from an industry-leading company.

Umair Haque proposes A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. He declares:

What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

That's not an exhaustive list - it's just a beginning.

No one has more experience in organizing organizations than bureaucrats. Thus the first step towards the next Industrial Revolution clearly is a massive employee re-training program to produce a large number of new bureaucrats.

JP Rangaswami at Confused of Calcutta identifies a bureaucratic training sheet that was stolen, surreptitiously hand-copied, and slyly erroneously inserted into an OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manuel. While most of the pseudo-text appears to be authentic, to a well-trained bureaucrat one line sticks out to reveal the deception: "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible." The authentic text would have actually stated, "Bring up relevant issues as frequently as possible."

Ugly Doggy presents an amusing video documenting the difficulty that private advertising agencies have had in designing stop signs. Government bureaucrats have successfully designed stop signs for decades. The private sector should learn from the public sector.

Louise Manning at the Human Imprint considers strengths and weaknesses. She asks:

So, is it a strength or a weakness to be able to apologise when you are in the wrong; a strength or a weakness to avoid conflict rather than create it?

Bureaucrats either always apologize or never apologize, irrespective of whether they are right or wrong. Bureaucrats avoid conflicts. I consider these behaviors to be strengths.

That's all for this month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival's regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of the Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival's category page.

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A man climbs to stand in
a stratospheric wind.
Another scuba-dives through
subterranean streams.
The light at the crosswalk
flashes "Don't Start".

The world is flat.
Journeys to the East
yet returning from the West
only prove this.
The light at the crosswalk
flashes "Don't Start".

Striving cannot turn a
son into a friend, or
another into a mother.
The light at the crosswalk
flashes "Don't Start".

But,
that pond
water striders
pulsing gently
making rain
that day
rain on hot road
smelling like bread
baking.

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The magic lantern was the first device that could display at zero marginal cost many large images to large groups of persons.   Magic lanterns were for sale in London as early as 1663.   They projected an image on a glass slide through a lens to a distant screen.  By the nineteenth century, magic lanterns had became a popular means for displaying images in a wide variety of circumstances.  The success of the magic lantern, like the rapid rise of commercial photography, indicates high popular demand for images.

In eighteenth-century Europe, itinerant "showmen" offered shows using magic lanterns.  The early showmen in London were called Galantee showmen or Savoyards.  These names suggest that they were predominately foreign.  By 1788, Galantee showmen were sufficiently well-recognized in London to be used by a leading caricaturist to satirize a leading political figure.  He was depicted "exhibiting, by means of a magic-lantern, the magnified figures of different objects on the wall."[1] The above image shows a wooden magic lantern that itinerant showmen used. It included protected storage and display spaces for the glass slides and was carried on the showman's back.[2]

Projected-image shows began in Japan in 1803. Called utsushi-e, they employed multiple, hand-held projection devices (furo) made of wood. The Minwa-za Company of Tokyo has brilliantly recreated utsushi-e performances. The above video clip, from a Minwa-za Company performance, suggests the popular appeal of utsushi-e.[3] Compared to glove puppet shows, utsushi-e performances are starker -- the lit figures contrast sharply against the black background and change discontinuously with the switching of the glass slides.

By the mid-nineteenth century, magic lanterns spanned a wide range of business possibilities.  About 1850, a street worker in London remembered his work in the 1830s:

A month before Christmas ... we went with a galantee show of a magic lantern. We showed it on a white sheet, or on the ceiling, big or little, in the houses of the gentlefolk and the schools where there was a breaking-up; it was shown by way of a treat to the scholars. There was Harlequin, and Billy Button, and suchlike. We had 10s. 6d. and 15s., for each performance, and did very well indeed. I have that galantee show still, but it brings in little now. ... The galantee show don't answer, because magic lanterns are so cheap in the shops. When we started, magic lanterns wasn't common, but we can't keep hold of a good thing long in these times. It was a regular Christmas thing once - the galantee show. I can make, in a holiday time, 20s. a week at present; but that's only at holiday times, and is just a mere casualty a few times a year.[4]

To compete with the cheap, popular magic lanterns available in stores, successful magic lantern shows invested more in their shows -- more powerful lanterns, better quality slides, and well-practiced musical and acting routines as part of the show.  In London, the most highly capitalized show was at the Royal Polytechnic Institute:

From 1838 to 1876, the Polytechnic produced extraordinary shows that dazzled two generations. The shows used giant lanterns with slides that were sometimes two feet long. Over 900 "Polytechnic" slides were exquisitely painted by the specialist firm of Childe and Hill, and Childe's dissolving views and elaborate special effects were an important part of the shows' popularity. The program was changed regularly during the year and included battlefront reports of the current wars, and fairy tales such as "Aladdin's Lamp." The highlight of the year was The Christmas Special, featuring (of course) Dickens' classics like "Gabriel Grubb."[5]

Following the first public use of limelight -- intense white light thrown off from limestone heated in an oxygen-hydrogen burner -- in the Covent Garden Theatre in London in 1837, powerful magic lanterns like the Polytechnic's put lantern slides "in the limelight".

Magic lantern shows were highly popular in the U.S.   At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 30,000 to 60,000 lantern showmen.  For comparison, in 1900 about 27,000 persons were photographers, and about 36,000 persons in total were journalists, authors, and scientists. [6]  Measured by employment, putting on image shows was a bigger business than photographing and writing.  Public libraries collected and circulated lantern slides.   In 1914, well past the peak popularity of magic lanterns, 6% of items circulated from the Cincinnati Public Library were lantern slides.  Vast numbers of lanterns slides have survived to the present time.  At the Magic Lantern Society's recent Thirteenth International Magic Lantern Convention, many magic lanterns slides from the early twentieth century could be bought, some for as little as a dollar.

Notes:

[1] James Sayer's caricature of Edmund Burke, as described in The Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1849, p. 238.

[2] Deac Rossell presented and described this image in his fascinating presentation, "Laterna Magica," at the National Gallery of Art, July 13, 2008. Rossell emphasized that the device was well-designed to meet the particular needs of itinerant showmen.

[3] From The Minwa-Za Company of Tokyo's performance of "Daruma Yawa" at the Freer Gallery, Washington, DC, July 10, 2008. Machiko Kusahara offers much information about utsushi-e at the Media Art Plaza.

[4] From Henry Mayhew, The Morning Chronicle, Labour and the Poor, 1849-50, Letter LII, May 16, 1850.

[5] From Terry Borton, "Traditional Holiday Magic Lantern Shows," Bulletin of The League of Historic American Theaters, Nov. 1998, available here.

[6] Id. is the source for the estimate of lanternists.  The figures for photographers, journalists, authors, and scientists are from the U.S. Census of 1900.  For occupational census counts for photographers and authors (and related occupations) from 1850 to 2000, see Tables C1 and C2 in Galbi, Douglas (2003), "Copyright and Creativity: Photographers and Authors." The American Magic-Lantern Theater recreates high-quality U.S. magic lanterns shows from the 1890s. See trailer.

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You can tell a man’s age
by the count of blankets
like the rings of a tree
that wrap around him,
by the width of his bark,
by the thickness of the life
that will flow from his heart
if you tap it.

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Getting a good, well-understood model often takes you three-quarters of the way toward solving a class of problems.   Persons' choices among a large number of symbolic items still lacks a good, well-understood model for business analysis.

Among a set of similarly instantiated symbolic items in a given domain of choice, item popularity vs item rank in log-log coordinates typically can be well described by a straight line.  Put differently, a power-law distribution typically provides a reasonably good model for the aggregate pattern of choices.   In a comment referring to a graph of Facebook app popularity, Chris Anderson seems to describe his Long Tail theory as equivalent to observing a straight line in log-log space:

A Long Tail is a powerlaw distribution, which looks exactly like what you've shown. All powerlaws have a huge drop-off like that--but the tail being long (get it?) the area under what appears to almost nothing adds up to a lot. The only way you can tell whether it really does conform to the theory or not is to plot it log-log and see if it's a straight line.

At least under one definition of heavy-tailed distribution, all power laws are heavy-tailed. This meaning of heavy-tailed largely concerns the interpretation of observables and the management of risk.  Heavy-tailed distributions are associated with rarely observed, difficult-to-predict outcomes that can dominate values of concern, such as aggregate profits.  From this perspective, power laws and other extreme-value distributions are characteristic features of blockbuster-oriented, highly unpredictable businesses.[1]

As Anand Rajaraman insightfully observes, the Internet has produced powerful tools for communicating among persons and for observing and aggregating users' choices and ratings.  The process that produces blockbusters now depends more on influence among users.  Experiments indicate that increasing social influence increases the unpredictability of success.[2]  But even when blockbusters depend on more centralized, directed marketing campaigns, blockbusters have always been highly unpredictable.[3]

The slope of the approximating straight line for item popularity vs item rank in log-log coordinates offers a rough means for distinguishing between a blockbuster-oriented business and a niche-oriented business.  The less the absolute value of the slope, the more business is distributed across relatively low popularity items.  An even simpler index is the popularity of the most popular item.  That's the intercept of the item-popularity vs item-rank line where the x-axis goes from 1 to the number of items available.  But this extremely simple index ignores most of the data: unusual circumstances may determine the popularity of the most popular item and make the approximating line fit badly for the top-ranked item.  Thus the slope of the approximating line is probably a better, simple description of the business.[4]

Evidence is mixed on the evolving importance of blockbuster businesses relative to niche businesses in symbolic economies.   Because a large number of possible names has been freely available since the invention of language (supply side), studying the distribution of chosen names is a good way to isolate demand-side factors in mass symbolic choice.  In England over the past thousand years, given names show a remarkable flattening in the approximating power law beginning about the time of the Industrial Revolution and continuing to the present.  On the other hand, experiments indicate that increasing social influence increases the steepness of the slope, meaning social influence makes popular items relatively more popular. [5] The Internet is plausibly associated with greater social influence, which may be sufficient to reverse apparent long-term trends toward diversification in symbolic choices.

A recent study of business data would have made a greater contribution to understandings symbolic economics with more attention to defining useful statistics.   The study reported that among more than a million tracks offered through Rapsody in 2006, "the top 10% of titles accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% of titles for 32% of all plays."  For just under 16,000 movie titles offered through Quickflix in 2006, "the top 10% of DVDs accounted for 48% of all rentals, and the top 1% for 18% of all rentals."[6] A problem with these statistics is that the total number of titles on offer is changing greatly.  Hence statistics such as the "top 10% of titles" and "the top 10% of DVDs" lack enduring significance.  Because humans have physically limited brains and communication capabilities,  rapidly increasing the total number of symbolic items that persons could choose isn't likely to affect the aggregate pattern of actual choices among relatively popular items.

Nielsen VideoScan indicates an increasing number of titles are rarely chosen:

The number of titles that sold only a few copies almost doubled for any given week from 2000 to 2005. In the same period, however, the number of titles with no sales at all in a given week quadrupled. Thus the tail represents a rapidly increasing number of titles that sell very rarely or never. ... Moreover, we determined that this is not simply a function of the sharp increase in the number of titles that have come onto the market in recent years, or of the transition from VHS to DVD; it is the truth of the long tail.[7]

The author did not describe how the analysis separated the effects of the sharp increases in total titles from actual choices.   Disentangling the effects of an increase in titles is a difficult problem.   That the form of the author's statistics depend strongly on the total number of titles suggests that the author hasn't actually figured out how to do that.

Some data indicate a growing business in a small number of titles.  With respect to Nielsen Videoscan data:

success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve. From 2000 to 2005 the number of titles in the top 10% of weekly sales dropped by more than 50%—an increase in concentration that is common in winner-take-all markets.

The effect seems not to be consistent with a linear popularity model.  With respect to Nielsen Videoscan data, the author observes:

The importance of individual best sellers is not diminishing over time. It is growing.

But with respect to Nielsen Soundscan data, the author notes:

although today’s hits may no longer reach the sales volumes typical of the pre-piracy era, an ever smaller set of top titles continues to account for a large chunk of the overall demand for music.

If individual hits decrease in popularity, but an ever smaller set of top titles continues to account for the same large share of demand, than a linear popularity model doesn't describe well what's happening.   Perhaps the decrease in sales volume for hits (individual best-sellers) refers to a decrease in the overall demand for (commercially sold) music.

The aggregate characteristics of persons' choices among a nearly infinite set of symbolic goods isn't well-understood.  But the importance of such choices clearly is increasing.  As is conventional, I'll end this post with a call for more research, and for more support for regulators.

Notes:

[1] See De Vany, Arthur S. Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. Contemporary political economy series. London: Routledge, 2004, and Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.

[2] See Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts, "Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market" Science, 311, 854-856 (2006).

[3] Extensive marketing and promotion may be necessary for traditional-media blockbusters, but it is not sufficient.  See, e.g. De Vany (2004).

[4] Viewed as a distribution of popularity shares, a power-law approximation for item popularity vs. item rank has only one free parameter.  The minimum item rank is necessary one (the most popular item) and the total popularity shares must sum to one.   But remember that an approximating line is a model, a tool for analysis, a means for organizing fruitful comparison and discussion.   The slope of a linear approximation to the popularity distribution for a range of items of practical interest seems to me to best serve this purpose.

[5] Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006).

[6] See Anita Elberse, "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" Harvard Business School Review, July-Aug. 2008.

[7]  This and subsequent quotes are from Elberse (2008).

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To increase my regulatory expertise, I recently attended a four-day VHSL Basketball Officials Camp.  The camp included both class sessions with top officials and on-court practice.   The supervising officials provided extensive feedback on mechanics and calls.  One supervising official told me bluntly to drop my laissez-faire approach and put some air in my whistle.  By the end of the camp I was more actively managing the competition.  Overall, the camp was excellent.  It made me a better official.

Better officials benefit all players.  Better officials make for better games.

[video embedded above]

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