Arranged by @vero, the event was very well attended with standing room only by the end.

I enjoyed @garethr‘s talk on Asynchronous Messaging for Web Apps, it was a great intro taster to the subject. You can view his slides here.

Then we had a lightning talk from @martinkl about his new browser testing software Go Test It, and a lady called Helen from @HoldsworthPR on a startups conference being held soon.

There was also plenty of opportunity to socialise and have a few beers (shame I was driving). Good to see so many locals in attendance as well as a few of us from further afield.

I shall keep my eye out for the next one. Stay informed by reading the Cambridge Geek Nights blog, and come along next time if you are in the area! You can also follow the tweets here.

• To raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses
• To provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and activists
• To preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world
• To collaborate with other digital rights and related organisations
• To nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots activists to technical and legal experts

[Becky explains the work of the Open Rights Group]

[Attentive audience]

The ORG’s website is well worth a read if you are interested in any issues regarding digital rights of various kinds.

I’ve gone for a non web-related topic as I figure I’ll be teaching many of the attendees how to suck eggs if I talk about web standards or css. Others have said that some of the most interesting topics last time round were those which were a bit off the beaten track. So here’s hoping it will go down well.

Geek/Girlgeek Dinners
I notice there are a couple of geeky dinners coming up soon. They seem to have shot themselves in the foot slightly in that they’re both on the same day! So, clone yourself or toss a coin to decided which of the following you’d rather attend on 21st February:

• London Girl Geek Dinner 10 Sponsored by Amazon!
  The speaker for the evening is Jeff Barr from Amazon and he will be speaking on web services.
• Geekdinner with Tara Hunt & Chris Messina of Citizen Agency
  Both Tara and Chris are best described as Upstanding Citizens of the Internet world. They are well known for looking at the longer term view and talk with words like vision, attention to detail, community, sustainable, open, higher purpose, etc.

Unfortunately, I’m unable to attend either event as I’m already busy, but I will be keen to read any blogs about them afterwards. Please let me know if you write a review.

WSG London #3 – Accessibility
Stuart has put together another great programme for the forthcoming WSG meeting on 28th February. Now that’s one I will be able to attend, and am looking forward to what Anne McMeekin, Niqui Merret and Mike Davies have to say on the subject.

It was nice to catch up with existing friends; Sheila Farrell, Robert Lee-Cann, Ross Bruniges, Ian Forrester and Chris Heilmann, plus make some new ones! I had interesting chats with:

• Laurence Postgate about freelancing, design, beer and rugby
• Paul Boag on freelance photography
• Molly about her nomadic lifestyle!
• Andy Mitchell about beer and geeks
• Eystein Alnæs on web design, Norway and Huskies
• David Long about blogging and design
• Frances Berriman on girlie geeks

So there we are, a good group of names I can now put faces to – see you at the next one folks!

Oh, and fresh from the recent Microformats WSG-meet, I’ve marked this up with a load of hCard info

Emerging from my exile, I’m blinking in the bright light of day and trying to catch up with a bit of blog reading, writing and other pc-related stuff.

Olly Hodgson has some excellent links, which I’ve been following up, and then generally getting lost in the blogsphere. I’m also waiting with baited breath to see how The CSS Div almost got himself killed…

Here’s a few good posts about accessibility issues:

• Bruce Lawson talks about making accessible PDFs
• Punkchip gets to grips with relative & absolute units and makes some excellent suggestions about Accessible Radio Buttons and Checkboxes
• A List Apart gives us What Is Web Accessibility? and Working with Others: Accessibility and User Research
• And Rob Cherny has an interesting post entitled Ajax and Accessibility: You’re Doing it Wrong (Hijax)

As an antidote to my recent exile, I’m also being very sociable this week, with the upcoming events in London to attend – WSG London #2 – Microformats and the London Geek Dinner with Molly H. Will report back on them later in the week.

Thursday 19th October
Web Standards Group Meeting # 2 where Microformats will be discussed. See Muffinresearch.co.uk for more details.

Friday 20th October
London Geek Dinner, special guest Molly E. Holzschlag. See the Geek Dinner website for more details.

Both events look like a good evening; perhaps I’ll see some of you there.

London Geek Picnic
When: Saturday, 26th August @ 15:00 – 22:00ish
Where: Hyde Park, London
More details from: London Geek Dinner blog

London Geek Dinner with Ben Metcalf
When: Friday, 1st September @ 18:30 – 23:00 ish
Where: The Bottlescrue, 53 – 60 Holburn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2FD
More details from: London Geek Dinner blog

Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer Redux (No.2)
When: Monday, 11th September @ 19:30 – 23:00ish
Where: All Bar One, 36-38 Dean Street, London W1D 4PS
More details from: Roger Kondrat’s Technological Winter blog.

Our guest speaker, Chris Anderson, arrived a little later than planned due to transport problems, but began speaking around 8:30pm to an attentive audience eager to hear his take on The Long Tail theory of market forces. Here is a resume of my notes:

He began by commenting that Capital One credit card in the States was one of the first companies to embrace The Long Tail principle. Originally, they would offer low-rate credit cards to customers considered to be low risk, medium rates to medium risk people and no credit card to high-risk customers. Once they embraced the long-tail principal, they soon learned to slice the market into thinner slices – with a sliding scale of rates dependent on the customer’s circumstances. Soon other credit card companies followed. Insurance is a similar market which has not really been tapped so far – partly because the greater risk customer is unwilling to pay the required premiums to acquire cover.

The key to Long Tail theory is that One Size Doesn’t Fit All – scaling down is they key. In these days of easier supply chains, it’s much easier to service the niche market as well as the “hits” end of popularity. The Bottom-Up pyramid model for marketing is different in that it advocates making one product so cheap that anyone can afford it, whereas the Long Tail is about selling fewer units of more things.

The natural shape of consumer demand is more niche-heavy than you would expect, if consumers can find what they are looking for (eBay and google are good examples of facilitating this). A question was put that “does Google have a monopoly and does it restrict the market for people finding niche products (especially with AdSense incorporated). Chris thought the answer was “no”.

TV is one of the most expensive production costs/sales ratio of any product. In times past, a programme might only have been broadcast a couple of times, but now syndication of archive material is the Long Tail of the broadcast chain. Similarly, on-demand services are allowing consumers more choice in what they watch (niche programmes) and when. One example given was the ability to watch Cricket in the US over the internet – unheard of a few years ago.

The BBC is one of the leaders in the UK of making use of Long Tail principal. They have spent millions of pounds digitising archive material without knowing what the demand for it might be, but are now beginning to reap the rewards. Chris thinks is it worth looking to them for leadership and Best Practice in the area. Reuters and ITN are also jumping on the bandwagon for archive distribution. [As an aside, Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General gave two speeches in the Spring which are quite relevent to this debate, and he coined the phrase BBC2.0 in one, which seems appropriate. They were the RTS Baird Lecture given in March 06, and the RTS Fleming Memorial Lecture in April 06, both available to read from the BBC's Freedom of Information website].

A question was put that, in the light of the Media being propped up with Advertising via trusted brands (in TV, radio and in print), it’s impossible to measure their effectiveness at present. How long does the current business model have before it collapses? Chris thought that, even though the advertising & media industry is very conservative, it could be a generation before this business model ceases to be operable.

The next question considered “what’s in it for content producers”. Chris highlighted the opportunities to distribute cult, low-budget films online, without having to have the marketing budgets of the big studios; this goes for music too. A band such as the Arctic Monkeys started distributing in the niche markets, then became a grass-roots hit, then might decay in popularity over time (shows the Long Tail can have precursors too).

Not only does the Long Tail prevail in terms of hits vs niche markets, it also prevails over time – in other words, today’s hit can become tomorrow’s niche.

Someone asked “where does the tail fall off” – well of course, with a power law, the answer is never. There will always be a market for the niches, no matter how small. Where the cutoff comes in terms of viability depends on your motivating factors – commercial reasons for a product are very different from consumers reasons – and you cannot always anticipate the “value” of something – it’s not always measured in economic terms, sometimes things are done for reasons of expression, reputation etc. The Long Tail is perfect for these instances which would not necessarily be viable in purely economic terms.

The market for Hits and Niches co-exists, and in the long term that won’t change. New Hits achieved via word-of-mouth can still be achieved. However, these bottom-up hits are likely to get bigger, while the conventional top-down hits get smaller.

Someone asked what the most interesting markets were currently applying the Long Tailed phenomenon. Chris cited the growing trend in the USA for Micro-brewed beer – now there are around 40 varieties of specialist beer where there used to be only 4 big players. He also mentioned The Pentagon investigating Long Tailed Warfare – but did not elaborate too much (maybe he would have had to kill us?)!

I’m till having aggro with Technorati, as posted yesterday.

Without me doing very much, recent posts on RugbyMad seem to be indexed (I’ve not tagged any posts on that blog yet) but further back than a couple of weeks and there’s nothing found when searching. Meanwhile, the scoped search for this blog still seems to do five parts of naff all. Hopefully they will sort it soon.

On a more positive note, I’d like to thank Roger Kondrat for giving this blog a plug over at Technological Winter, and his help with aiding this relative blogging-newbie overcome the trials and tribulations of the technology

Tonight I’m off to the London Geeks’ Dinner to hear Chris Anderson speak on the The Long Tail as a sales model, which I hope will be interesting. I’ll post my thoughts soon.