The long tail is all about capturing and owning a niche, not selling a product to every household in America. Introducing the We are Numbers Project (thank you to Jonathan Stern for introducing me). This project is a perfect example of the vision Chris Anderson laid out in The Long Tail: “…the future of business is selling less of more”.
That’s precisely what this project does. These shirts are each hand-designed by the mysterious Dutch designer Twan Verdonck. Each shirt has a different number starting with Verdonck who is also Number One and counting up from there. Here’s Verdonck designing his Number One shirt:
How is it more of less?
The shirts cost about $38 USD, so they’re not cheap. But they are handmade and they are also your ticket into a global community. When you buy a shirt you send in a picture of you wearing your shirt, which is then uploaded to the website. Instant celebrity/camaradarie! There are only 37 pictures shown right now and the first 100 will be featured in the We Are Numbers Project Book. So you really are getting more for your money than just a t-shirt (and there’s still time to be featured in the book!).
There is also a principle behind the movement. This is Verdonck’s take on the fashion industry:
“I see fashion industry speeding up and seeing people buying t-shirts for one night, I’m asking myself where it ends. Should we create disposable “one night stand” fashion? With low quality, low costs and low ethics. Or are there more sustainable ways to create innovative fashion without the quick degradation of the product?”
Verdonck’s is a vision of sustainability in the face of ‘fast fashion’. He’s also not going for volume, I’m sure he will make as many shirts as there are demand for, but that’s not the business model at this point. He wants quality over quantity.
Tell us what we’re paying for
Communicating the ‘more’ that you are selling is an important aspect of the Long Tail model. People are willing to part with their money but they need to know why they should spend almost 40 bucks on a T-shirt. Verdonck breaks it down on his site, he lists exactly what those 25 Euros will go toward and it’s not just the shirt/labor/shipping. A small fee even goes to support other artists that get involved. Honestly, after reading the laundry list of what goes into the production of these shirts, they seem like a bargain.
So bravo We are Numbers, we can all learn a few things from your clever fashion project.
As a Blog Coach, I talk to people on a daily basis about some of the basics of blogging like: (1.) the transparency, (2.) the authentic voice and (3.) the basics of growing community. There is definitely a learning curve associated with understanding these basics. They are all 3 simple and fairly intuitive, but there is a legacy of corporate secrecy and posturing that make this a difficult leap sometimes.
Client: “You want me to speak using ‘I’ instead of ‘We’?”
Tracksuit CEO: “Yes, I really do.”
Client: “But how? How can I say, ‘We at ________, Inc.‘ without using the royal we?”
Tracksuit CEO: “You don’t have to say, ‘We at ________,Inc.’ You just speak conversationally, be yourself. Come on, I know you’ve read a blog before!”…
And so it goes. Companies really do want to get involved in the blogosphere and the trailblazers who are already here deserve some big credit. It won’t be long, however, before companies won’t have a choice. To compete on the Internet they will have to come to the blogosphere.
If you, or a company you love, is experiencing Corporate Blog Denial - there is help!
My blog is dedicated to winning people over to the Blog mindset and moving them away from the GeoCities Website Model.
“Everyone who wants more community participation, more comments, more
referrals for their business — Marketers, PR folks, Educators, Business
Professionals, and New Bloggers.
AND
Anyone who’s been trying to figure out or explain what a blog is.”
So use this book, my blog and any other resource you can find out there to take your company development to the next level.
As a whole, the business world and the blogosphere are still in the courting stage of their relationship, but expect to see a lot more from this couple about town.
Last night I was at the Semantic Web Launch Party and had a great time and learned a lot (too much). As is with all things in this crazy industry, no matter how much you know or how early you are to the game, you always feel like you’ve missed out on so much. I really feel like a latecomer to the Semantic Web but that’s okay because it isn’t really here yet…or is it?
What is the Semantic Web?
If you’re new to the Semantic Web like me, let me do like Cesar Torres and break it down for you. According to Wikipedia:
“The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.”
Basically, it enables computers to understand what humans are saying or asking for. One quote I overheard last night: “All I want is when I type in ‘Rover’ for it to know whether I’m talking about the Mars Rover or Rover the dog.” This, I think, sums it up nicely. Most of the talk last night was about Semantic Search: being able to type in any question and have the search engine know what you mean. But there was also talk about Semantic Markup, the practice of including descriptive HTML ‘wrappers’ when you’re writing code. This will tell the search engines what to do with this information and will bring us one step closer to Semantic Search.
Semantic Web is already here?
One of the speakers was Christopher St. John who recently (like yesterday) developed Tessera:
“an experiment in wrapping the distributed social web (XFN, FOAF, hCard, etc) with OpenSocial, the API everybody-but-Facebook is using to expose out their social networking platform.”
Tessera goes through the Social Networks that use OpenSocial (LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, etc.) and collects the information that has been shared. He mentions that Facebook does not use this. Christopher doesn’t like the way Facebook has a lockdown on our Social information. Tessera is designed to circumvent the lockdown and free you up to share your information on any Social Network, knowing that it will all be available on Tessera.
The implications for this are huge and I can’t wait to see more. We weren’t able to see a demo because the Boom Boom Room at Union Park doesn’t have wi-fi. No wi-fi at a GeekAustin event? If you think that’s odd then check out this photo:
There’s Christopher sitting down answering our questions, doing a great job of competing
with the ‘artwork’ (That’s me with the bag on my shoulder) picture by Michelle_Greer
We were talking about high level Web applications in Bordello-like surroundings. John Erik Metcalf ensured me that the next event would be taking place at Startup District HQ!
by Tracksuit CEO
The Tracksuit CEO doesn’t do websites
I have had several people lately, when they find out what industry I work in, ask me if I ‘do websites’. My unequivocal answer is that I don’t build websites, I destroy them…and replace them with a blog. In fact, there are very few websites that would not benefit from moving toward the dynamic content management style of a blog, while moving away from the static, faceless webpages we are so familiar with.
Working against the GeoCities Mindset
I remember when I was younger, in the early days of the Internet, my friends and I would ask each other, “What’s your webpage?”. And unfortunately, that’s the model that so many people are still working from; I call it the GeoCities Model. You design a welcome page with some information and graphics on it and it doesn’t change unless you change your address or you’re able to bribe your friend, the graphic designer, to make you a new logo. Your webpage is your greeting page (some sites still say “welcome” on them) and from here you have to click on links to get to any information of real value.
What about Flash intros? Flash intros look great, they can be slick and professional and compelling. But why would anyone want to come back to a website to watch a flash intro more than once? And why would anyone want to press “Skip Flash Intro” to get to a website that they need real information from? What a waste of time! Flash intros, no matter how well produced, are operating on the old GeoCities Model.
When did it all change?
Actually, it all changed right under our very noses. When the online shopping cart was first introduced, that’s when we witnessed the future of the web. The content management system that was used for shopping carts is very similar to the content management system that is now used for blogs. But instead of managing product information, the blog manages words, ideas and intellectual property.
And the blog put easy to install and update tools into the hands of non-programmers. My clients tell me they would like a website that is easy to update and I tell them they want a blog.
So this is my cursory introduction into how the Internet has changed. This week I’m going to be focusing on how you can replace most any website with a blog. The power of dynamic content has shown us that we need to change the way we look at the web.
So Technorati just received $7.6m more funding and everyone is wondering if they will use this new money for good or evil. Or rather, will they recapture the respect they seem to have lost from the blogosphere?
Chris Brogan doesn’t know what they will do with the money but he does know what he thinks they should do. He thinks they should definitely buy Twingly. Brogan sees Twingly as an early Technorati, a service that is constantly finding ways to interact with the ever changing blog world. Their widget showing which blogs are linking to your post is on my ‘Widgets to try’ list.
In our world of constant web service buy-ups, surely we all have our own take on what will be the next big acquisition. My personal favorite service that is ripe to be bought up is my good friends Diigo. I think they are poised to be purchased by Google. Google needs an answer to Yahoo’s Del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks just isn’t cutting it.
I can’t say enough good things about Diigo; whose live blogroll widget is always right here in my sidebar (under Tracksuit CEO is Reading)
So what is your take on this? What’s the next web app that will (or should) be snatched up? And who do you think will be facilitating this friendly/hostile takeover?
authentic voice and (3.) the basics of growing community. There is definitely a learning curve associated with understanding these basics. They are all 3 simple and fairly intuitive, but there is a legacy of corporate secrecy and posturing that make this a difficult leap sometimes.
