WiReD magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has copped to lifting chunks of material for his second book Free from Wikipedia and other sources without credit. But it could be about to get a lot worse.

In addition to the Wikipedia cut’n'pastes, Anderson appears to have lifted passages from several other texts too. And in a quite surreal twist, we discover that the Long Tail author had left a hard drive backup wide open and unsecured for Google to index, then accused one of his accusers of “hacking”.

Does the WiReD editor and New Economy guru need basic lessons in how to use a computer?

Waldo Jaquith of Virginia Quarterly Review unearthed a dozen suspect passages after what he called “a cursory investigation”, and posted his findings here on Tuesday. Wikipedia entries for ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch’, ‘Learning Curve’ and ‘Usury’ had been pasted into Anderson’s book.

In addition to Wikipedia citations, which Anderson reproduced with the errors intact (oops), Jacquith suggests he also lifted from an essay and a recent book. Presented with the evidence, Anderson blamed haste and (curiously) not being able to decide on a presentation format for citations, for his decision to omit the citations altogether. Other examples were “writethroughs”, he said.

Then lit blogger Edward Champion documented several more examples which he says show

“a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.”

Champion’s examples of churnalism include blog posts, a corporate websites and (again) Wikipedia.

Handbags at dawn

In a memorable exchange with the humourless [*] Anderson, Champion responded:

“Even accounting for the fool’s weight that Wikipedia has in even the most generalized research situation, surely an ‘according to Wikipedia’ would have solved the problem. Except that if you actually copped to the fact that you cadged from Wikipedia, you’d be a laughing stock, wouldn’t you? Your ‘expertise’ — that country bumpkin approach to slinging conceptual generalizations around — would be called into question, wouldn’t it?”.

The bit in [our] italics is an early candidate for Quote of the Year.

Champion also discovered that Anderson had shared a backup of his personal hard drive with the entire universe. Anderson said he’d accidentally left the password off the backup, and then accused Champion of depositing files on the hard drive. Paging tech support for Mr Anderson…

And the rest of the iceberg has yet to be measured. One correspondent noted yesterday that in The Long Fail, Anderson’s first hit, Anderson describes a walk he supposedly took around a Wal-Mart in Oakland, where

“There are no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind”

This bears a remarkable resemblance to a 2004 article in Rolling Stone magazine by Warren Cohen, who wrote:

“At a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Thorton, Colorado, for example, there were no copies of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or Nirvana’s Nevermind.”

The papers have been having great fun with the story, which has gained legs because of Anderson’s dog-ate-my-footnotes defence. But maybe they shouldn’t cast the first stone.

Pranking the newspapers by planting phoney material into the Hive Mind’s favourite reference source is an artform, and the papers oblige only too easily. When they’re not cutting and pasting from each other, they’re cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

As we first reported, almost all the British obituary pages fell for the odd fact that Ronnie Hazlehurst had come out of retirement with S Club 7. Tabloid factoids spill from the web straight into print.

And last month an Irish prankster made up quotes for robo-repeaters at the BBC, the Graun, and the Independent (amongst others) to recycle. Newspapers blame the web for their demise, while churning out a crappy version of it in print.

And Anderson’s lame thesis (The Long Tail is now thoroughly shot to pieces, while Free is hedged with qualifications) wouldn’t have got out of the door if the papers had treated them with critical thinking, rather than slack-jawed wonder.

Entitled “The Long Tail of P2P”, the study by Will Page of performing rights society PRS For Music and Eric Garland of P2P research outfit Big Champagne will be aired at The Great Escape music convention tomorrow. It’s a follow-up to Page’s study last year which helped debunk the myth of the “Long Tail”. Page examined song purchases at a large online digital retail store, which showed that out of an inventory of 13 million songs, 10 million had never been downloaded, even once. It suggested that the idea proposed by WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson, who in 2004 urged that the future of business was digital retailers carrying larger inventories of slow-selling items was a Utopian fantasy.

The P2P networks are harder to quantify, but apparently show a similar pattern, where most of the action – and profit – is in the ‘head’. Each Top 100 CD on on PirateBay averaged 58,000 downloads a week, for example. Lady GaGa’s The Fame was downloaded 388,000 times in a week from PirateBay alone. Like its predecessor, the new study also finds that downloads follow a log-normal, rather a Pareto (or “power curve”) distribution as Anderson envisaged. The WiReD man had guessed the shape of the internet – and picked the wrong shape.

Read more at The Register.

“The end came quickly,” as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his “Long Tail”, the idea he’s been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail,” Anderson wrote. “The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change.”

As befits a quasi-religious cult, the straw that broke the Long Tail’s back wasn’t empirical evidence, but the Word of God. The Google God, to be precise – Eric Schmidt. Will Page’s exhaustive analysis of tens of millions of music transactions from a giant digital music store had already prompted a last ditch stand. But it was remarks by Schmidt, however, interviewed by McKinsey, that prompted the downgrade. Schmidt said they make most of the money in the top 10 per cent of advertising inventory.

Anderson also agreed that things were less fair – the “Head” was bigger – thereby destroying the message of salvation implicit in the original theory: that things would get fairer on the Interwebs. (And we’d all ascend to Heaven.)

“So much for ‘democratization’,” comments Tom Slee – who wrote about the post-Page fall-out for us here.

Connoisseurs of Cobblers and (future historians of Web 2.0) may be entertained by the titanic struggle Long Tail disciples now have: it’s men locked in mortal combat with their metaphors.

“If the old economy was a ‘regular body’ that grew a ‘long tail’ then this is the ‘beautiful face’,” pips in one commenter, while another adds:

“I’m tempted to do a comparison between FatHead/LongTail markets and oscillators,” writes one ‘Panayotis’. “I’d love to hear from someone with a more solid background in physics who could take the idea a bit further,” he adds hopefully.

Yeah, oscillators. Why didn’t we think of that?

So for Anderson, it’s on to the next instalment of trying to make the internet’s turds smell like perfume. The Long Tail was a response to a 2003 essay by Clay Shirky which pointed out that Pareto Law distributions (“Power Curves” – with big “heads” and long but insignificant “tails”) abounded on the net. This broke the utopian hearts, hence Anderson’s propaganda offensive.

His forthcoming book begs profitable companies to cross-subsidise Web 2.0 Fails.

It’s called Freetardonomics, apparently

Anderson bet that the orange portion – the “Tail” – has more value than the red portion – the “Head”. But it doesn’t.

Examining tens of millions of transactions from a large digital music provider, economist Will Page with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and Page’s colleague Gary Eggleton, looked to see how large and valuable the “Tail” of digital music may be. They produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows – so large, in fact, that it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM) – and the three revealed their work at the Telco 2.0 conference this week.

They discovered that instead of following a Pareto or “power law” curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all – and the ‘head’ was far more concentrated than the economists expected.

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less?” asks Page. “Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.”

As Andrew Bud explains:

“The Long Tail’s argument is that the pattern of consumption for media is bent out of shape by the limits of the shops selling them. Digital media lets the nature of people’s demand flow free. Well, we now know what the shape of that demand curve looks like.”

Bud told the conference that the basic shape of consumer demand for digital music clearly fits the Log Normal distribution, “with eye-watering accuracy”. That’s no surprise, he says, because so many sales curves he’s seen over the past ten years follow this distribution.

“Now we’ve seen what happens when tens of millions of choices are thrown in the air and people can go pick them up. What was astounding was the degree of inequality between the head and the tail – by a factor of three. It’s specifically the Log Normal shape that leads to a rather poverty stricken Tail.

“There are Tails where the Tail lives as a kind of welfare state. Not this one. You starve in this Tail.”

Brown’s 1956 lognormal curve fits digital sales data much better than “The Long Tail”

This really isn’t the upbeat fairy tale message Anderson has spent four years selling on the conference circuit.

However, as he took his “message” to Davos and beyond, the Long Tail has gradually developed into a ‘Policy Based Evidence Making’. Having convinced himself of the truth of his hypothesis by looking at one US music service, Anderson widened his search for facts that might fit his theory. But he didn’t examine the numbers closely or critically enough, say the economists.

“You need to consider much more than just some flimsy volume-based Rhapsody data if you’re going to say the world’s changed,” says Page. “For instance, understanding value both in terms of retail spend and then marginal profitability to the artist and songwriter would have been a logical extension”

In another surprise, 80 per cent of the revenue came from 52,000 songs. What’s eye-catching about the number? Well, the typical inventory of a conventional high street record store was around 4,000 CDs. Or … around 52,000 songs.

Old Rules rediscovered

Page says the breakthrough had come via Andrew’s father Martin Bud, a businessman and researcher whose work had informed a now obscure tome with a distinctly unsexy name. John Goodell Brown’s Statistical Forecasting for Inventory Control was published in 1957, and is now out of print. But it forecast the digital world far closer than anything in WiReD.

“In many ways, we’ve been in the Long Tail business since 1914″, says Page, referring to the UK copyright collection society the MCPS-PRS Alliance, where he is chief economist. “That’s what collective rights licensing is. It doesn’t matter if a song is a hit or niche, once it’s been licensed under a blanket agreement so there are no barriers to using it.”

And neither lead economist agrees that the Tail will be any more prevalent when P2P file sharing is taken into account. If anything, it’s more pronounced, Page suggests:

“Look at Radiohead’s experiment. Even when they reduced the price of copyright to free, there were 2.3 million downloads in the first three weeks – and 400,000 in a day. This was perhaps the most pirated piece of music of all time – and yet every fan could get it legally without paying. So the black market could potentially be even more concentrated.”

New World, Old Rules

For Page, the grain of truth in the digital music revolution is buried beneath a mountain of nonsense.

With cheap production tools and the internet as a new distribution channel, some costs of production are indeed lowered, and some artists can indeed cut out (or “disintermediate”) the middle man. But those old rules still make a significant difference to your business strategy.

“In particular, the division of labour and economies of scale still have tremendous relevance to understanding today’s market”, Page notes.

The division of labour means it can benefit you to employ a specialist intermediary, while economies of scale mean the bigger you are, the better terms you can negotiate.

“What’s interesting, from a collecting society’s perspective, is that when you have a dramatic increase in both rights holders on one side – more artists and songwriters – and rights users on the other side – an explosion of more digital music start ups – then, regardless of what the Long Tail is or isn’t, the case for a common platform grows. This common platform pools rights, reduces transaction costs and prevents fragmentation – and everyone sees benefits.

“Otherwise those start ups won’t get started – and those performers and songwriters won’t get paid”.

WiReD‘s faith-based economics

Bud is surprisingly generous about Anderson’s book.

“It’s an excellent book and thoughtfully written. But The Long Tail receives very little numerical examination. Saying the Tail has great value is not borne out by the evidence in this case.”

Anderson’s inspiration was the desire to put a positive spin on a depressing observation. An essay by Clay Shirky suggested that weblog readership followed a Pareto Curve (or “Power Law”) – which dismayed many early Web 2.0 evangelists. Early bloggers began to lose faith. The Long Tail helped bolster morale – although its success owed much to sloppy thinking – and in particular, metaphorical logic.

This supposes that because one thing is like another, it exhibits the same characteristics. For example:

• Oranges are nutritious
• Billiard balls are like oranges
• We should eat billiard balls

To see how far this can travel, once borne on the heady vapors of Web 2.0, take this passage by Jack Schofield in The Guardian from 2006:

“The Long Tail is making an impact because it is a powerful idea that provides us with a new(ish) way of looking at the world. Copernicus did the same thing for many people when he pointed out that the earth went round the sun, not vice versa, though no planetary bodies were physically moved in the process.”

The propensity of journalists – even highly experienced journalists – to fantasize about the world rather than examine it critically is one of the defining features of modern technology coverage.

As Andrew Bud puts it -

“The Long Tail created a Movement, and it’s the Long Tail ‘Movement’ that’s in trouble.”

Page is making a habit of debunking the WiReD clique that is the source of so much bad business advice. We published his response to Kevin Kelly (WiReD‘s founding editor) – Can 1,000 fans replace the music business? – here earlier this year. More of his work can be found online here. ®

[Disclosure: your reporter's explanation of Californian technology utopians was credited in this presentation]

Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs, might not speak for all of Universal Music, but he does speak for an important part of it. Kenswil today said labels could no longer “count units” but had to license rights.

The eLabs chief’s comments caused a few jaws to drop here in Cannes, but it’s part of a sea change in strategy at UMG. The DRM gurus have departed – Barney Wragg left Universal last summer – and Universal is striking deals with anyryone who can hold a pen and scrawl an X. Towards the end of 2006, MySpace, YouTube and Microsoft all agreed to pay Universal for rights to their catalog – material crucial to the success of their products or services.

“We can’t think of it as counting unit sales anymore,” said Kenswil. “We have to license … and think like the publishers.”

After initially threatening to sue, Universal granted YouTube a license to its catalog, which permits users to repurpose it to create new content. Asked by a panel moderator at MidemNet how much users were paying for the privilege, Kenswil joked,

“Users are creating free content for YouTube. Maybe the question should be, ‘How much is YouTube paying its users’”, said Kenswil.

That’s a subtle dig at the Web 2.0 idea whereby users produce stuff for nothing for the benefit of hugely profitable multinationals (MySpace is owned by News International, and YouTube by Google) , under the guise of “sharing” or “user generated content”. This approach to business has been dignified with some fairly bogus pseudo-economics, but is better described by the label “digital sharecropping”.

YouTube was granted a blanket master license, but Kenswil said that if artists objected they would request the licensee withdrew the material.

“It’s a whole new revenue stream for our record company,” he said. Kenswil wouldn’t elaborate on how it worked, but said getting the new deals in place was an involved process, and hinted that he’d much prefer not to have to do it company by company.

“The box is getting smaller, so if you don’t think outside of the box your company is going to get smaller.” Kenswil said.

Asked about the “Long Tail”, Kenswil called it “an interesting catchphrase” that wasn’t in itself much help to doing business.

He agreed that “larger virtual shelfspace” meant more products would sell more.

“Universal’s catalog is 300,000, alot smaller than [last.fm's database] 65m. But most of those 65m will be listened to once. That doesn’t make up for the decline in the head.”

Kenswil urged record labels to partner with independents:

“Indies have always been the lifeblood of the industry,” said Kenswil. “It will fall on indies even more than before to find talent”.

The executive’s comments made a discussion that took place just moments earlier seem like it belonged to a different era.

Kicking off proceedings at MidemNet, the Recording Industry Ass. of America’s maximum leader Mitch Bainwol, and the Motion Picture Ass. of America’s executive VP Fritz Attaway took lumps out of Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Electronics Association.

Shapiro said “it’s become a profit center for the RIAA to devastate families.” Bainwol said DRM ” served a legitimate pro-consumer role”, in creating new models. Attaway said DRM wasn’t perfect, but it “was the only tool we had to prevent indiscriminate copying,” and Bainwol accused Shapiro of wanting the destroy the “only way” of doing business the record industry had. Did he just say “the only way”?

Sadly, Shapiro couldn’t counter this absurd accusation.

Happily, within an hour, one of Bainwol’s own board members had.

One of the most talked-about startups came out of the shadows this week, as The Venice Project revealed itself to the world as Joost. The company invited The Reg to its West End offices for a demonstration and a chat with CEO Fredrik de Wahl.

Joost is an interactive, IP-based TV software system from the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, considerably richer after the $2.6bn purchase of the telephony start-up by eBay.

The parallels with the founders’ earlier projects are hard to miss. Joost is P2P PC software; it’s free to download and use and requires no special hardware; it’s based on proprietary software; and the technology is cooler than the business case.

The most striking similarity, however, is that it challenges incumbents’ delivery systems. What Kazaa did to music distribution and Skype did to telephony, Joost wants to do for TV.

Only, this time round, Friis and Zennström are being a lot more co-operative with the incumbents. Around 25 of Joost’s 150 or so staff (no skunkworks project, this) are in London, and the steady stream of visitors from media production companies signals that Joost’s desire to partner from the get go. London is certainly the place to be if you want TV ideas, as it’s the birthplace of so many new formats in recent years, giving the world (for better or worse) reality TV. Sorry, World.

This is a shrewd move by Joost,and probably a necessity. TV is ultimately about watching something compelling, and compelling TV is made by people who know what they’re doing. Despite the buzzword-heavy sales pitch – we heard the words “long tail” and “user empowerment” repeatedly – Joost needs TV production companies and aggregators.

Joost in time
So what is it? Quite simply, Joost turns your PC into an instant, on-demand TV. No set top box is required.

There’s really three parts to the technology. Joost operates a server farm to cache the video, manage seeding, and maintain QoS, but the idea is that much of the content resides on people’s own PCs.

Like Bittorrent it takes advantage of your largely under-utilized uplink. The video is received over a proprietary DRM connection, using encryption of Joost’s own devising. Thirdly, there’s a Mozilla-based client, for advertisers to develop commercials or marketing tools, and software developers to create their on screen widgets. It comes with a chat client, but examples of Joost widgets include giving clips ratings, and noticeboards.

Because it runs on a PC (Windows now, Mac and Linux to come) applications could include anything that’s permitted to access the host’s services. deWahl cited one example, custom remote control app for a phone, similar to Salling’s splendid Clicker program.

From the outset of our demo, it was clear Joost has cracked some fundamentals. TV runs instantly, full screen and at high quality – there’s no lag from activating the TV software to getting something to watch.

It runs in a window too, of course, but there’s no messy furniture. And unlike Bill Gates’ whacky vision of TV, it isn’t a split screen with one half taken up by text ads. The on-screen widgets are discreet, alpha-blended overlays created using SVG and HTML.

So right away, this is YouTube done properly. The chat widget takes us into familiar Interactive TV territory -you can rate clips, chat with friends, and so on.

Joost has already been the subject of some concern, as most new budget broadband users in one of its launch markets, the UK, are capped. Joost uses a lot of bandwidth: a note on the company’s website explains that an hour’s TV downloads up to 320MB and uploads as much as 105MB.

Joost’s CEO Fredrik de Wahl told us the P2P effect, which diminishes bandwidth requirements, only really comes in at peak times, lowering the bandwidth requirement to 220MB an hour. Unless UK ISPs change their policies in response to demand, Joost will remain out of reach. (Joost tells us the bandwidth requirement is a 500kbit/s line – our demonstration was apparently running over WiMAX).

Content

Joost has already been criticized for failing to strike deals with major distributors. But it has already signed up Warner Music and production company Endemol for the beta, which isn’t too shabby, and a good pointer to the future. Production houses such as Endemol stand most to benefit from Joost, as it gives them another route to market.

Will it pay, however? For the established TV players, this is the big question. For Joost, it’s a question of faith. For PC owners, it’s a fairly straightforward win-win.

Let’s break it all down.

Stripping away the endless buzzwords about the “User Empowerment” and “The Long Tail” (De Wahl referred to his server farm as “Long Tail Servers” throughout) Joost’s bet is that targeted advertising will succeed. Joost will take a cut of the advertising.

De Wahl said that TV advertising was currently immensely wasteful, as most people who see a diaper (nappy) advertisement don’t need to buy diapers.

But this is just the start. Adverts could be based on geography, or time. If a heatwave is due, you may prefer to see an ice cream or air conditioning advertisement.

More likely, said de Wahl, they will be based on viewing patterns, as Joost would collect this information and share it with advertisers. This could cause some discombobulation amongst viewers, but then already it’s pretty strange to see children’s toys advertised during Shameless (http://www.shamelessantisocialnetwork.com/). And even stranger to see health foods there.

Your reporter expressed delight at seeing diapers advertised on TV, as it meant that the company hadn’t built up a demographic database of its users, and didn’t know who I was.

De Wahl pledged that data would be anonymized and that Joost would protect users’ privacy.

In another example of how advertisers might gain, De Wahl said, Joost could give audiences access to a global audience. For example, there may not be an audience of 10,000 in the UK for a programme about pottery, but there might be an aggregate audience of 10,000 around the world

But who would translate it into Armenian, we wondered?

That’s where the widgets came in, said de Wahl – as fans could provide the subtitles. Then again, we could be watching an Armenian pottery program with added English subtitles. Be still, my beating heart!

“Because we’re sharing CPMs, we’re driving CPMs higher,” he said. MTV, he claimed, was seeing the same CPM returns on its ad spending through targeted campaigns.

Examples of adverts include Blipverts, Midrolls, Prerolls and Overlays. It’s new territory – search Google today for a combination of this jargon and the only story you’ll find, most probably, is the one you’re reading.

(In Joost-speak, Blipverts, we learn, aren’t the compressed high-speed, subliminal clips of Max Headroom fame – but “brought to you by … ” bookends.)

Then there were more familiar marketing tools – a car show that takes you to a web page, for instance.
Joost in time?

So it’s impressive technology, but is it a business?

Joost is great news for PC users, because it does video so well. It makes Google’s $1.65bn purchase of YouTube look particularly reckless, so much so that we can only presume that Google took a look at The Venice Project and decided it could do better by itself. After all, Joost wants a cut of Google’s advertising market, and anyone operating in that space eventually faces the same bleak choice as a software company competing against Microsoft: sell out, or prepare for destruction.

And it’s not just Google. Hollywood has embraced Bittorrent, and the major telephone incumbents have embraced VoIP, offering a seamless package (BT Fusion), their own cut price packages (everyone else) – or just cutting prices. With TV, and particularly IP-TV, the incumbents are already in the living room, are already interactive, so what don’t they have? When it comes to “user generated content”, Saddam isn’t hanged every night.

(De Wahl said he saw Sling as a “patch”, and left no doubt that he viewed it as temporary. This is risky talk).

There’s a bigger problem, however, and it isn’t just shared by Joost. As channel choices proliferate, and TV is in competition with alternatives such as the net and computer games, so there’s an ever shrinking audience chasing a dwindling pot of money. Joost is potentially good news for original programming producers because it gives them another route to market. But they’re unlikely to adopt a distribution channel that lowers their overall future earnings.

As we’ve seen with so many “empowering” or “revolutionary” technologies, they end up concentrating power with those who already have it. Sor the sad story of the Net Neutrality campaign helped AT&T, here.

Joost’s best hope is to convince advertisers that they can get from here to there, somehow, by converging the web and TV. But then you’ve heard that gag before. PCs don’t belong in the living room, and if they eventually get there, it’ll be without a mouse or keyboard – two things you really need to get the most out of the interactive, or “social TV” elements Joost brings to the party – the chat, ratings and message boards.

I wondered if De Wahl often paused for a moment to think about the negative consequences of the movement to an atomized media, with the emphasis on feeding the “Me, me, me”, that he’s helping bring about. (Time’s Person of the Year is you, you, you (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/18/time_magazine_poty/).) When a few websites destroy a town’s newspaper, this isn’t a net gain. Proliferation drives costs down, and programmes get worse, only there are more of them. Did it keep him awake at night? He couldn’t have looked more surprised if I told him I drank a gallon of seawater every day. Of it didn’t.

He did agree that the mid-market producers were key to Joost’s success, although he called them “mid-tail” (Long Tail, you see). We are prisoners of the metaphors we choose.

De Wahl said he and the founders were motivated by what “TV really should be”, but I don’t think many people share that vision. Substitute the word “PC” or the word “internet” for “TV” and they’re undoubtedly onto a winner.

As for what TV really should be, the answer’s never been in doubt. Good programmes, please.