I believe there’s incongruity between the flat world and the long tail concept.

Friedman (The World is Flat) was talking about standardization (flattener) - the production of an animations were done around the world thanks to standardized work flow software and VPN connection; 24/7 call support were done in India thanks to standardized network system transmit voice signal thousands miles away; and you are reading my blah-blah-blah here thanks to people in Netscape sort out the web browsing standards.

It’s all about the standards.

Then come Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, and of course, Seth Godin’s The Small is the New Big. they talked about non standards, creativity (which i think is evil when facing standardization), and of course, small player making big waves in the market. all this happened on the Internet - the flat world.

Irony? to flattern the world you need to standardize things; and when you are living in a standardized world, you tried to un-standardize things.

The world is flat - big players like Microsoft, Apples, and IBM are set the standards in the early age; then small players who lived well under big player’s standard turned big - Apache, Google, Linux; and then again, smaller players like you and me keep un-standardize things on- and offline by the way we use our money and throw out our creativity on blogs, forums, and open source codes.

Speaking of creativity, i think this’s a good one, isn’t? Good dog huh~

Image sourced from Richard Jackson’s Dining Room. the world is flat - now go visit his work showed in France exhibition (21/6 - 31/7) online at here.

Ever wonder whose choice is that when you purchase something - is that your choice, or the marketer’s choice?

• When you light up the cigarate in your mouth for the first time
• When you put yourself deeply in debt for your new car
• When you spent hundreds for your CK shirt
• When you bought another pair of Nike sneakers
• When you crunch in another McDonalds burger
• When you drink up another can of Coca-Cola
• When you toss up your Carlsberg and have another hang over Saturday

Did you really make up these unreasonable decision that(might) spoil our health/financial/life quality? to spend unwisely, to take up junk foods, to numb yourself with alcohol, did you really choose yourself to do so, or it’s the marketers who’re holding the ball? There’s ethic guide for every professionals, do we have one for marketers, especially Internet marketers, as well?

Yap once told me that he read a news about a singaporean, who’s so crazy about making money online and went all out buying courses and attending seminars on the subject. after years of trying, he fails to make a dime online… but then, he started to compile what he learned and sell his own make-money-online course on the Internet, and only then, he made a fortune online. can you imagine that? a person that couldn’t make a dime get rich by teaching others earn money online. and on a bigger scale, the same go with Mcdonalds, CocaCola, Marlboro, BAT, Pepsi, Carlsberg… big cooperations that’re cause (directly, or indirectly?) most diabetis, heart attack, high colestrol cases thru out the whole world.

Imagine what if one day it’s legal to promote heroin in the market, are we going to see something like this?

Perhaps we should rethink what’s the responsibility a marketer should held.

There’s an old saying among chinese that reading a good book is like learning from a wise man.

Learning most things in my life via books, i couldn’t agree more with the sayings until one day i realized that publishing a book is couldn’t be done by the author alone. before the book is published, the author’s writing probably gone thru a number of checking and editing by the editors, the publishers, as well as the marketers. in fact, the original idea of the book could had changed entirely due to market consideration or just because the publisher didn’t like it, before it’s been published.

In result, we are actually ‘learning’ from the publisher (that wants to make money from you); to the marketer (with only business in mind); or to the editors; but not the book author when we read a book. yes, we just missed the original raw idea of the author for most cases. In certain situation, i even think the author don’t even know what’s his book about, especially those best sellers.

Come’on, do you think robert kiyosaki and donal trump really sit down and discuss every paragraph of their book ‘why we want you to be rich’? don’t be silly, i bet 90% (or more!) of the book is written by their shadow writter - the publisher just utilise their reputation to market the book!

Want to ‘talk’ to the author and get his(or her) raw opinion about something? read his(or her) blog. only in the blog platform, authors are able to write with less consideration on publisher or book marketer’s preferences. and only in such platform, author and readers are able to throw out comments, questions, and discussion to each others.

As said, direct interaction with everyone, is the least we can benefit from the flat world. perhaps someone can help me to reconstruct the old chinese saying about blog (instead of book)?