Long tail

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.



An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."The same could be said for Amazon's book inventory or Netflix's movie inventory. The total volume of low popularity items exceeds the volume of high popularity items.

Taken from:
http://en.wikipedia.org

compiled by
Katarina & Katarina

Crowdsourcing

"Crowdsourcing" is a neologism for a business model that depends on work being done outside the traditional company walls: while outsourcing is typically performed by lower paid professionals, crowdsourcing relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.


I've been developing a book proposal on crowdsourcing for the last several months, a process that reached a happy conclusion last Thursday when Crown Publishing Group bought the rights to publish the book, which is slated to hit shelves in the Spring of 2008.

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions.

Taken from:
www.wired.com
http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com
http://en.wikipedia.org

compiled by
Katarina & Katarina

ASSIGNMENT: NEW WORDS QUEST

Here is a list of some new words/phrases in ICT English:




1 Web 2.0
2 Blogosphere
3 Digerati
4 Avatar
5 Podcast
6 Folksonomy
7 User-generated content
8 Open source
9 Crowdsourcing
10 Long tail

1. Choose a partner, search the web and find the following for two of them:
1) Definition
2) Etymology
3)Two examples of use in sentences
4) One or two examples of typical web sites based on them

Do not forget to cite the source of information.

2. Read the information compiled by other students and choose two words/phrases that you would like to remember.

3. Share your words/phrases with other students. Discuss what makes them interesting for you.