So 30+ minutes of 60 Minutes has elapsed. Katie Couric’s 9/11 expose on the air problems took up the entire first half hour. In her attempt to be a serious journalist, as claimed in her evening news commercials, she ground an important story into repetitive drivel. But, her worse period:

“The role of the EPA is to protect people from the environment.” What? Straight from Katie’s mouth. This is a taped show — can’t they edit something so ludicrous out?

What does it take to be the best television journalist/anchor? It is so sad that we have such low standards for such influential positions… taking the lead from the highest office in the land.

I’m currently undertaking research to probe demand shaping in the long tail. Interestingly, an HBR article presents another alternative to explain demand (rather than supply) effects of the long tail: network theory.

Duncan Watts and Steve Hasker, in Marketing in an Unpredictable World (you’ll need a subscription), explain why it’s difficult to build formulas to predict hits. Namely, social influence creates very complex interactions that are hard to parse and predict in a reliable way. This is interesting because, as Chris Anderson claims, the “free” digital supply of the long tail removes the barriers that shaped the markets of scarcity of old economics, leaving behind a market of abundance. Perhaps, beyond decreasing friction and cost of supply, new forms of communication technology have also turbocharged mechanisms of social influence.

The article is based on research published in Nature of a study of the roles social influence plays in driving aggregate consumer demand. The findings “suggest that the success of a particular entertainment product cannot be explained by any measure of intrinsic quality or even by ‘appeal’ — the fit between the product’s attributes and consumers’ preferences.” At face value this may be an artifact of the constrained markets of scarcity in that the supply is artifically small and therefore true demand is unable to emerge. While the study design does limit choice sufficiently that this may be the case, there is another paradoxical implication.

Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Watts report in the Nature study: “when individual decisions are subject to social influence, markets do not simply aggregate pre-existing individual preferences.” What may be happening is that when social influence is apparent in a system of choice, true individual preference/demand is not revealed. This seems obvious enough — any high schooler can verify the claims of peer influence and social editing. However, this may cast shadows on the democratic nature of the filters, discovery engines, rating systems and aggregation platforms of Web 2.0.

Social networking, social ranking and rating, and other collaborative forms of content generation and communication may be governers to long tail and niche growth. If I make it easier for social influence to take effect — the most diggs on digg.com, the most listens on last.fm, or the most popular books on Amazon, all made more viral through email, IM, blogs, social networks, message boards, etc, peer influence may take on more powerful and demand-stifling forms.

Therefore, some of the same technology that is helping to create the long tail may be making it HARDER for individual’s to 1) understand what they desire and 2) act on that desire — due to hypercharged social influence mechanisms — those same systems and filters that drive demand into the long tail.

I’ve been watching Rockstar Supernova over the last five or six weeks. I was surprised by both the quality of the performances, but also how much I like the band members, notably Gilby and Jason. Then, as the votes started coming in, and I started to see who was in the bottom three in votes, I started to question the premise. Then, last night, Tommy Lee made a comment about the fans voting and buying tickets, so they had to listen to the votes.

I know there are issues with the voting system already–and there has been controversy around the system during American Idol seasons. I think there is another more simple question to be answered. Are Rockstar viewers, and more so, the voters, Rockstar Supernova fans? If the show’s live audience is representative of the viewer base, I’d say definitely not. If Supernova is looking for an Audioslave version of Motley Metal Roses, I don’t think they’re watching the show, and I surely wouldn’t trust them to be voting multiple times for their favorites.

I’ll keep probing on this one for hard numbers–but my take: Rockstar Supernova is good evidence of the disconnect between TV audiences, participatory audiences (go with your web2.0 badness!), mobile, and web users. Then lay a taste/preference overlay, ROCK, over all that. It’s a recipe for mediocre… but I guess it is good entertainment. Just not the way to do a rock audition.

I’ve been lost… in the latest Murakami. I’ve been lost as a DEWNster. As well, I’ve found my time caught in Gary Benchley, Making Meaning, and The Shape of Time.

I’ve been in Lost Cities, Lost Towns, and Lost–the ARG.

Never fear. Fulminator will return. I’ve got the Intonation Festival June 24th and 25th and the Pitchfork Music Festival July 29th and 30th to look forward to. Both within a 5 minute walk from my home.

Street teams were on many corners of downtown Chicago today–handing out FREE 8oz bottles (glass) of Coke Blak. How much will this tactic do for the product? I liked the taste–I’d rather have less sugar in it. If it did, I might start to drink this on some afternoons rather than coffee (though I’ll still have my morning joe). So, if the product is appealing, will free samples be a better method to generate adoption than mass advertising or couponing?

Let’s say the cost, including labor and product, of the street team event came out to $2.00 per sample and they handed out 10,000 bottles during a two hour period during the lunch hour in Chicago. Of course, you have the 10,000 people that tried the product. Let’s say 2,000 of them liked it enough to buy. So you invested $20,000 for 2,000 adopters. A decent investment on it’s own. Then you get the network effect of me telling others. I brought the bottle back to my office–and it started a conversation on the elevator among 6 people. So it generated buzz, on the first order of 1 to 6. So in the case of positive interactions, the buzz effect was 12,000 people. There were also indirect effects. My coworkers and I saw at least 10 people walking around with the bottles in the preceding minute before we saw them being handed out. Coke Blak was everywhere during the lunch timeframe. Say that’s another 20 impressions for each bottle handed out–that’s 200,000 impressions in addition to actual product sampling.

A wise investment? Who knows? How many people are blogging about it? 1,912 “coke blak” posts on Technorati. My take? I think it’s a good move on Coke’s part. And as LP says, this should spur Pepsi on to bring Kona back.