Sunday, October 29, 2006

 

Happiness, Choice and Long Tails

These two make for a couple of really interesting talks from the TED conferences:

Dan Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard, and author of "Stumbling on Happiness." In this memorable talk, filmed at TED2004, he demonstrates just how poor we humans are at predicting (or understanding) what will make us happy. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:02)

http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/happiness_exper.html

Barry Schwartz is a sociology professor at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. In this talk, he persuasively explains how and why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 20:22)

http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/paradox_of_choi.html

How does this map to the "Long Tail" of internet distribution. You know - what Apple, Amazon and YouTube et al do when they make masses of stuff available and build a business selling a little of many many things.

In fact, the internet makes loads more information available. More information is good right? Expanded knowledge and all that.

 

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