For the initial afternoon session, attendees at Mplanet 2006 had their choice of three sessions. I decided to attend the session with Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine and Jason Zajac from Yahoo!. You may know Chris from this book he wrote about the Long Tail. Jason is the general manager for Yahoo!'s Social Media divsion.

The initial remarks were made by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. As an introduction to his Long Tail theory Chris reviewed the history of media/distrubution, from the days of the Catholic Church (the only had one book) to the creation of broadcast media. Broadcast brought in the notion of one to many. However the cost of broadcast advertising has limited the number of companies that can participate. This brought us to the era of the blockbuster. The culmination of this was the release of n Sync's No Strings Attached album. This album set the all-time record for album sales, and it will most likely never be broken.

I'm getting lost......I want to pay too much attention to Chris, so I'm going to be just posting some quotes.....

Today we're living in a culture that is fragmenting.

Chris discussed measuring word of mouth via second-week drop off of major films. Word of mouth is spreading more quickly than ever. If a film is poor the word will spread quickly. This is customers biting back.

For the longest time the customer choice was limited by the distribution economy. Traditional retailers are scared to stock product that the mass audience does not want to buy.

What they've learned with the long tail is that for a music service like Rhapsody, half of the market is product that was not traditionally available.

We're living in a world where links bring reputation. 60% of Wired's traffic comes from inbound links. Those links are important because that link represents a recommendation, most likely by an individual.

In traditional media, we used to compete with giants, now we compete with an army of minnows.

Your brand isn't what you say it is, it's what Google says it is.

Chris was joined on stage by Jason Zajac from Yahoo! Jason and Chris began a dialogue about using some of the new long-tail specific tools. The first case-study Jason highlighted was the Nikon Stunning campaign on Flickr.

Panels like this are great when one of the participants is a journalist, like Chris. You always end up with good, though-provoking discussion.

Once again, I am getting behind....I will post more notes later.