The Long Tail: Blog #5

1. The Long Tail is an interesting topic because it shows internet users that products never really die out as long as there are customization options available to them, or if the product just simply exists forever.  An example of this would be something like the iTunes download store where the head of the tail is the initial downloads on release of an album, and as the product declines in popularity people will still buy it and this creates a long tail because the product is there for an indefinite amount of time. This can also apply to YouTube videos and anything of the like because something can still accrue views even after it has been posted and hyped up for a while.  Perhaps someone didn't find the channel till later on in their YouTube browsing and decided to share it with their friends who had not seen it yet creating more and more views which results in a long tail. Plus the internet gives a place for niche music and channels to pop up creating another facet of the long tail and allowing people to find exactly what they need rather than the thing that is popular with everyone. 

2. As for being an online consumer I fit into the Calculated Category in which people look at performance of a certain good, and the cost rather than the brand of the good.  I am very much like this because if you can get increased performance out of an item for the same price as another brand why would you just stick to just one brand? It seems a little silly to do this, and I fit into this group mostly because I purchase computer parts all the time and at the end of the day the brand doesn't matter; the performance of the particular part does. I would also say that this fits into the bargainer category because I'm not brand reliant and like to look for the best deal.

Trust me? Trust me.

Privacy-Enhanced Personalization brings up some very good points throughout the article, but the biggest point for me personally was the fact that trust plays a huge part in who people choose to give their data to.  Companies must create a safe environment for someone's credentials if they want to gain access to a person's information. If the company is notorious for having their databases hacked or do not spend very much money on internet privacy then it is more likely that users will not want to subscribe to their services. This notion raises the point that companies must care about privacy more than the subscriber to be able to gain more subscribers and have people feel comfortable with using their services actively.

Recently company databases have been hacked and denied service by certain groups of hackers that want to gain the data that these companies have gained.  There is an interesting value assigned to people's data in the sense that everyone wants it and these hackers now have the ability to sell it off to those willing to pay top dollar for it. If this is the state of how people's information is being used by hackers and certain companies that data mine people's credentials, and hackers are able to get into anything that they want to if they put their minds to it then is trust really going to be worth it in the future if hackers can find people's data whenever they want?  It seems scary, but really the only thing to do against this is to have a back up plan when the data is compromised, and accept that privacy is dead as we know it and just take comfort in the fact that hackers don't want to target us because we're miniscule.  Will there ever be a way to totally stop hackers?