A combination of capitalizing on the ‘channel of one’ (acting as a ‘repeater’ to the message), where we’re talking about a cost model, it’s better to get smaller and smaller pieces of market that you’d not otherwise get, than to not get it at all. Do away with penny’s? In the banking industry you can make millions off of a fraction of a penny. So what happens if you apply that to a ‘wide distribution’ model? If somehow Disney could put a tracer on their content (including character images) and they make a fraction of a penny off of its use (sound like the music industry?), then they’re better off than spinning negative cycles to protect it.

Embrace the Dark Side: That’s where the long tail is…that’s how Amazon did it — if you’re good at selling books, sell everyone’s books, not just your own. Embrace your own competencies and leverage them even if you put your own competition on the channel.

That was the moment I knew Bill Gates had arrived. He was always making money hand over fist, but I remember the day I saw the change. One year at a Gartner conference, Bill was on a panel with a bunch of his competitors. The Gartner analysts had demeanors to try and get a rise out of panelist. Bill was typically willing to comply. But not this year. Where I’d typically see him want to leap out of his chair and grab his competition by the throat (you could feel the tension even though he was sitting perfectly still in his chair), that was clearly not the case this one year. Then Bill made a statement that explained his composure. He’d realized that is “isn’t a zero sum game”. That when his competition wins, the pie gets bigger and even if their share of the market doesn’t change, they’re all making more money.

More seriously, the blogosphere is still “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”, as William James described the world of an infant, which all of social software still is. Indeed, the technologies available to us to decipher and navigate the confusion also – and even more – allow us to add to the confusion. Syndication, in particular, can add order, but it also adds multiplicity and random, or at least unplanned, juxtapositions.

As to being juxtaposed w/ “Amanda” — I can’t figure out why that seems a problem to people like Shel Israel or Brian Oberkirch (if in fact that’s who he wants to avoid blogrolling with — gosh, I hope it’s not me!).

The construction of an elaborate, pseudonymous personality is a great tradition in both literature and journalism. Does it bug people that it’s a man passing as a woman, I wonder (i.e. “A man, duh”)? I didn’t “get it” right away myself, I must say, and wrote a blistering comment critique on one of her posts. She sent me a one-word email: “What?” I thought that was a great response and got over myself.