chris anderson on digg, decisions and wired-from poptech

10/24/2006 09:50:00 PM
Last Saturday at PopTech, Chris Anderson did his Long Tail stuff, but wrapped up his talk by explaining how he was using Long Tail thinking at Wired.
He described Wired Magazine as a Faberge Egg, where everything is based on his decisions; what stories run and the order they run in.

Now with Wired.com back in the family fold after having been purchased from Lycos in July, this was the impetus for serious change.

Chris talked about Digg and users ranking the stories. He asked. "Why can't our home page be more like Digg?"

He likened his role as editor to being "Chief Guesser", but in this new world, he suggested this role was redundant. "Why guess if you can measure?", he said.

He described how the old magazine model is one based on scarcity, where its the editor's job to day "no" and contrasted this to the new web model, where it's all about saying "yes".

He suggested that it's now the web, or rather, the audience that works out if its any good or not.

Talking about business planning, he described how in the old world, you used to write business models explaining how you were going to get ROI, now you just do it and see if it works.

According to Chris, everything is bottom-up, including management.

He now does everything his interns tell him to do, they recently suggested doing a press conference in Second Life, which he did.

"Let everything happen and measure it", were his parting words.
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