The news item was indeed the validation of long tail in advertising..62% of the revenues came from adsense as compared to 25% couple of years back. Reminds me of Goto.com case where the revenues from syndicate business reached 90% of their total and the management for some reason decided to concentrate on syndicate business ..Thus goto.com as a search destination slowly vanished…Such situation will never happen with google..or will it ?

via NYT : A Star Is Made Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers. Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated.

Malcolm Gladwell shares his views on Prodigy - Quite an insightful article Link : The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters

Here’s an account of how pixar became what it is today Link : The Pixar Story

It’s only few companies that achieve $5 billion in revenue in the first 5 years of its operations. One such company is Google. John Battle in his book “The Search” has used Google as a background and has narrated a beautiful account of the most important facets of the internet industry. He gives the reasoning that search as a problem is only 5% solved and says that innovations in search technologies is going to make web experience 95% more richer that what exists today.