Chris Blackwell’s Domain

Every once in a while a book comes along that refocuses your attitudes and changes the way you look at the world. The Long Tail for me was one of those books. The Long Tail is written by Chris Anderson who is the Chief Editor at Wired Magazine. That alone gives him a unique perspective on the world from a technologist and as a writer. Chris defines the Long Tail as a deminishing demand curve in which lesser known products are found furthur and furthur down the demand curve (the yellow area in the diagram below represents the long tail).

Chris argues that as more and more choice is becoming available to us, we are choosing products that are more tailored to ourselves and thus going down the demand curve. The book uses excellent case studies to demonstrate power of this demand. Chris focuses on the success of Netflix and Amazon as great examples of the Long Tail’s power. He continually demonstrates how a digital or virtual inventory has many advantages over a traditional inventory system, and how this will keep the Long Tail growing.

I loved this book because of it’s simplicity and how Chris takes every day examples and demonstrates how our wants are changing even if we don’t even realize it. This book is only a couple of years old but some of the “future predictions” that Chris makes have already started to come true. He predicts that in the future companies like Apple and Netflix will start to deliver movies and TV shows over the Internet (did anyone say AppleTV?). I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves digital media, but also to anyone who is in retail or marketing, and wants to start thinking about plans and strategies for the future.

Have you ever watched the television show Clean Sweep on TLC? Well, the host of that television show, Peter Walsh, has take his experience and turned it into the bestselling book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. The book teaches you how to cleanup your house and live a more clutter free lifestyle. I love the clutter free lifestyle and try very hard to keep my house clutter free, but this book opened my eyes to some things even I was doing wrong.

The book itself is broken down into a very easy to follow structure. Part one of the book starts with some case studies telling us how clutter can take control of your life. Then he goes into explaining why you have to remove the clutter from your life, and how you can live a better life clutter free. Part two of the book moves into his six step process for removing all the “stuff” from your house. This six step process is the bulk of the book and is very logically put together. Peter does a great job of breaking down each step and how you need to go about it, even in different scenarios and situations.

Conclusions

This is a very good book for anyone who loves living clutter free, likes to increase their productivity, and generally wants to live a better life. I highly recommend picking this book up, and maybe even a few extra copies for some disorganized friends or family members.