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Seth Godin, author of marketing-bestseller “Purple Cow” and more recently “small is the new big”, is doing a phone-in Q&A session limited to 31 persons.

The goal is to give people a chance to ask specific questions (about your organization, your site or your kewpie doll collection, whatever). The session will be off the record, and no archive will be available. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but it promises to be pretty interesting, useful and perhaps provocative (in a good way).

the only requirement to participate, is to buy 11 copies of his new book. this seems like quite a low barrier for getting your product/organization/you-name-it smashed by a high-profile ‘marketing-wizard’ … seriously, this sounds like a good opportunity, a pity that it’ll be off-record.

Today I started reading ‘The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More’ by Chris Anderson (editor in chief at Wired magazine). the ‘long tail’-meme, very popular especially among media- and internet-economists, is a metaphor for all products not found in bestseller-lists, but still accountable for a reasonable part of sales numbers. Anderson, who coined the term, basically describes how markets are reshaped by digital distribution, and how combined sales of lesser-popular products can equal or even outperform the sales of top-hits.

the most apparent examples of long-tail-economies are music, books and videos. while brick-and-mortar shops, with their finite amout of shelf-space, have to limit their available selection to products which are most likely to be big-sellers, digital distributors like iTunes, Rhapsody or youtube don’t face such restrictions: since the cost of storage is ever decreasing, they can offer virtually any song or video ever produced. Anderson’s studies show, that almost all products, how obscure they may be, find at least a small audience. together those niche-products are responsible for up to 50% of total-sales. based on a Wired-article and publicly developed on Anderson’s blog longtail.com, the book backs this claims with empirical studies.

after reading the first chapters of ‘The Long Tail’, I couldn’t resist to test its basic assumption against real-life data, namely PLAY.FM’s access-stats of july 2006 (disclaimer: I’m founding member of PLAY.FM and currently responsible for website-development). PLAY.FM is a web-radio & audio-archive focussed on electronic music, currently hosting more than 4.000 DJ-mixes which are freely available for on-demand-access. receiving about 2mio pageviews per month, PLAY.FM is aimed towards the global community of electronic music-lovers.

analysis of PLAY.FM’s access-logs approves Anderson’s thesis: during the last 29 days, almost all sets available were accessed at least one time - this is especially remarkable as there are many live-recordings dating back several years - still these rarities got some ‘air’play. furthermore, PLAY.FM’s ‘body’ (like visualized above) consists of only 5% of all DJ-mixes, while the other 95% generate an equal amount of playing time.

further information on ‘The Long Tail’ can be found at Squidoo.

PayPerPost is a service currently in beta trying to connect advertisers with bloggers seeking for revenue from their blogging-activities. advertisers offer ‘opportunities’ to bloggers, defining the requirements a blog-post has to meet in order to get paid for it (f.e. linking to a product-website, reviewing a product or writing about personal experiences with a product or service). while PayPerPost promises to review oppportunities and ban offers which would “require bloggers to be dishonest”, popular bloggers have already expressed their antipathy for the service (read Robert Scoble or TechCrunch).

PayPerPost is currenlty available to US-bloggers only.

Update: here is an interesting snippet out of PayPerPost’s terms-of-use for advertiser:

You acknowledge that PayPerPost bloggers are independent third-parties and not directly controlled by PayPerPost. As a consequence, any blog postings of your content or product(s) will inherently risk negative or unflattering comments about your content, product(s) or company. You specifically acknowledge and agree that PayPerPost has no control over any Posts that may be available or published on any blog (or otherwise), and that you are solely responsible (and assume all liability and risk) for determining whether or not such Posts are appropriate or acceptable to you.

Guy Kawasaki posted an awesome interview he did with Dr. Sandor Gardos. Dr. Gardos is a licensed clinical psychologist, sex therapist as well as a board-certified sexologist…and he is founder and CEO of MyPleasure.com, an online sextoy-retailer best known for its ‘Rabbit Pearl‘-vibrator featured on TV-show ‘Sex and the City’. as Dr. Gardos’ scientifc background suggests, MyPleasure isn’t just about selling plastic, but puts emphasise on sexual education by providing articels and advice. the interview highlights many areas of online-retail, not restricted to the busniess-area MyPleasure operates in.

S. Gardos: I was always a bit of a geek- I learned to program on a TRS-80 - so when the Internet starting reaching mass consciousness, I realized this was going to be THE way that most people would get their sexual information in the future. I wrote a paper on the topic about fifteen years ago in which I predicted things like online dating, chat rooms devoted to special sexual interests, and ubiquitous availability of sex education.

I should have saved the rejection letters from the journals I submitted it to. I still remember my favorite peer-review: “This is a superb paper and as soon as the Journal of _____ starts publishing science-fiction, it should absolutely be considered.”

Undeterred, I created the first web site on the Internet that explained what sex therapy was. I even offered a consultation service. This was back in the day when a new website was actually news! So I got a lot of publicity and that led to a string of opportunities being the producer, editor, or “sexpert,” for pretty much every major web site at the time (e.g. Time-Warner’s Pathfinder, About, WebMD, AOL, Excite, Oxygen).

as TechCrunch reported earlier today, Google launched its b2c payment-service Google Checkout. Checkout is an intermediary layer between buyers and sellers similar to PayPal, allowing buyers to do payments to a single trusted entity (=Google) while trading with any number of sellers. the latter use mediating services obviously to lower the barriere for potential customers in doing e-commerce. since Google currently is probably the nets best-known brand, I can imagine that Checkout will drive people into webshops which have been skeptical on online-shopping until now.

read Dave Winer’s post about Checkout for a very different opinion - he basically states that Google turned evil some time ago and doesn’t earn the trust needed for this sort of payment-service. he may be right, but public trust isn’t necessarily affected by the tech-elite’s opinion…

update: another interesting article on Google Checkout can be found at the commerce360-blog.

Carson Systems (makers of DropSend) finally unveiled the core-purpose of their soon-to-be-going-beta web-application Amigo. Amigo basically is a matching-service, connecting newsletter-publishers offering ad-space in their email-newsletters and advertisers looking for a precisely targeted audience. the idea seems to make sense, especially for those publishing to smaller address-pools, who are currently having a hard time to market their ad-space. what remains unknown is the sice of the slice, Carson’s gonna keep for each deal. another concern that comes to mind: with the ongoing adaption of RSS, email-newsletters could become ultimately obsolete.

since february 06, Carson Systems is documenting the development of Amigo in great detail on their blog barenakedapp.com - an interesting read for everyone involved in the creation of web-apps!

more business-news from Second Life, as Mark Wallace from 3pointD.com reports, that Universal Motown Records Group launched their permanent residence ‘SoundScape’ within the virtual world. two major opening events are scheduled for this week, featuring meet-and-greets with platinum-selling hiphop-star Chamillionaire (june 25th, 1:00pm SLT) and rockband Hinder (june 26th). The SoundScape is a venue featuring a stage enabled for live audio- and video-broadcasts (screenshot by Mark), VIP-rooms and - of course - stores (cross-linked with the Universal-website).

As Mark points out, low server-performance - not uncommon in popular parts of Second Life - could undermine the attempts of media-companies like Universal trying to establish their virtual presence. when I visited SoundScape today, Universal-exectutives were busy preparing the events. however, I was lucky to speak to Dire Lobo from InWorld Studios, the company designing SoundScape. Dire told me that the events will be limited to 120 visitors, tickets will be available on-site on friday 23rd, 8am SLT.

ps: I’ll cover more news on Second Life during the next weeks, since I’m preparing an article for thegap. those of you interested in the topic should definitely subscribe to Mark’s blog, 3pointD.com!

jeremy pepper wrote an interesting post about trademark infringements in the virtual world of Second Life.

for those who haven’t been on the ‘grid’: players of Second Life spend a good amount of online-time and -money on shopping virtual clothing, accessories, vehicles and more. these items are created by other players (often professional 3d-/graphics-designers), who are selling them online. the punchline being, that the in-game currency, ‘Linden-$’, is convertible to realife US-Dollars using a creditcard.

with more than 130.000 regular players willing to spend several millions (reallife!) Dollars a month, Second Life allows top-designers to make a living of their virtual sales. naturally, many designers are tempted to include reallife-brands on their items to increase both their authenticity and monetary value. roaming one of the countless virtual shopping-malls, users will find Nike-sneakers (screenshot below), Adidas-jackets, Rolex-watches or Mercedes-SUVs - copycats, each infringing the reallife-brand it’s modelled after.

until today, these issues don’t appear on the affected companies radars - maybe because the virtual prizes are ludicrously low (a pair of fake Nike’s goes for 300 Linden-$, that’s about 1 US-$), but rather due to the fact that there is no real loss involved (no one would buy a virtual shirt instead of a real one, right? ).

however, the latter argument is quickly becoming obsolete, as American Apparel just has opened a virtual store in Second Life (screenshot below), selling virtual counterparts of their popular clothing. the polygon-showcases are cleverly linked with AA’s webshop, encouraging customers to buy both virtual and real items. the store was designed by grid-superstar Aimee Weber, who herself created a popular (virtual!) collection under the label *PREEN*.

the AA-store demonstrates how-to migrate reallife-business to Second Life, and could turn out to be an example for other brands, not only in fashion. however, it remains open, if Linden Labs, the company running the virtual world, will be able to ensure the legal conditions for sustainable trade - companies willing to-do business will demand enforcement of both their trademark- and copyright-claims, something that is hardly implemented yet.

visit American Apparel in Second Life at Lerappa (114, 121, 24)!

calm down, bill gates isn’t leaving microsoft for some arbitrary podcast-startup …but still: in a press-conference earlier today, gates announced that in july 2008, he will step down from his role as chief software architect, transforming his fulltime-work at microsoft to parttime. to the applause of the blogosphere (see crunchnotes for an early example), ray ozzie will take over gates’ job. as gates stated, the reason for the shift is his drive to get stronger involved in the gates foundation. he will, however, remain as a chairman and senior advisor at microsoft.
if you don’t believe what you just read, watch the videostream of the conference, as pointed out on techcrunch…

the earthlink/podshow “make advertising better”-challenge is finally online. participiants are encouraged to produce audio-clips in the categories ‘jingle’, ’spot’ and ‘endorsement’ until july 4th. every week, one clip in each category wins 250 US$, the overall winning clip is entitled to 2.000 US$. ladies and gentlemen, plug in your microphones!