The largest coffee retailer in the UK is Starbucks, followed by local competitor Costa Coffee. These coffee shops are often side by side in the high street and a visit to both of them during peak periods reveals one of the reasons why Starbucks is the market leader: Division of labour.

The staff at a Starbucks operate as if they were in a small scale assembly line. One person takes an order and another makes the coffee. The same person never does both and everyone knows who is responsible for what.

At Costa Coffee however, chaos reigns. Whoever takes an order might or might not make the coffee and/or handle the transaction of cash.

Anyone who is a regular at both cafes knows that the waiting time at Starbucks is dramatically less than at Costa Coffee and the queues at the latter are therefore always longer (and the resulting idleness of the customer results in speculations such as these!).

Ford did it with auto-manufacturing, McDonald’s did it with hamburgers and now Starbucks are destroying the competition by applying the methodology of assembly lines to making coffee.

One of the potentially most disruptive technologies to emerge in 2005 is Zopa, the peer to peer banking web site.

Traditional banks have been around for hundreds of years and weather they operate solely from the Internet or from branches, they follow the same basic principles, the most important one of being the diversification of risk.

A bank borrows money from the public and lends it to those who need it, making a profit from the difference in interest. Because it has so many lenders and borrowers, it has its eggs in more than one basket.

Zopa’s plan is simple: Allow the general public to diversify the risk of lending money without the middle man.

Zopa allows users to put money up for a loan, which is spread between at least fifty borrowers and vice versa. This is all done with a transparent interest fee of 1%.

What is more, they seem to “get” many aspects of the Internet. They run a friendly, informal blog and their site is friendly, usable and intuitive.

The Guardian recently ran a piece on Zopa, which is an interesting read.

This week the Belgian born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt would have turned 96. Reinhardt was a pioneer of the “gypsy jazz” genre and according to a recent program on the BBC World Service, gypsy jazz has seen a considerable revival the past ten years. This is in part due to the fact that with the Internet, its followers can communicate more easily between themselves and spread the word to others.

The rise in popularity of gypsy jazz represents the cultural aspect of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The long tail as put forth by Anderson is primarily an effect the decreased cost of communications and distribution has on business. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters

That is not the whole story, though. The long tail effect is often accompanied by positive feedback. As more people buy a product, more people hear about it, buy it and so on until a possible “tipping point” style epidemic effect means that the long tail produces a blockbuster.

While we’re on the subject, fans of gypsy jazz should check out the Quecum Bar in London or sample Django’s material on the excellent Last.fm.

Peter Cooper recently commented that the majority of users are missing the point of RSS. This is not entirely surprising since the majority of publishers, even those who specialize in online content, are also missing the point of RSS.

High profile online publishers such as Motley Fool, A List Apart and Slashdot all publish feeds, but don’t use them to their full potential.

Most publications allow readers to filter content by viewing specific categories and contributions by certain authors. Why do these categories and authors almost never have their own RSS feeds?

Peter links to Phil Wainewright’s Death of the RSS reader which states that the RSS reader is dead, mostly because

There just isn’t enough time to scan all those feeds any more.

This is to some extent true. On Slashdot in January there were at most three posts a day in the communications category. For the past three days they’ve had at least 20 posts per day on the front page. Slashdot only publishes a feed for their front page which prevents users from following specific topics without their RSS readers getting flooded with unrelated posts.

Another example is Motley Fool contributor Tim Beyers (3 posts per day max). Because his posts are integrated into the fool.com site, which only publishes a front page RSS feed, he has no feed for readers to subscribe to. In contrast, it is much easier to follow writers who publish personal blogs such as Business 2.0 senior writer Om Malik simply because they have their own RSS feeds that don’t include headlines from their entire publication.

When content providers start providing more specific feeds, content consumption over the web will become more efficient and flexible.

On a positive note: Digg.com gets it right.

Chris Anderson, who originally coined the term “long tail“, has a book coming out this year. According to his blog he has finished the manuscript and The Guardian newspaper has it on its “must read” list of 2006.

[The Long Tail is] supposedly the natural successor to the “tipping point” in the field of big business ideas…

And on the subject of the long tail distribution. The blog search engine Technorati tracks about 25.4 million websites. Assuming most of them are blogs, the long tail really stares you in the face when a new blog such as this one is registered on the site:

Technorati Rank: 1,088,376 (0 links from 0 sites)

Presumably, this means that of the sites being tracked, only 1 in 25 has an incoming link. Jason Kottke analyzed the long tail distribution of Technorati’s top 100 - this is the other end of it.

The Independent is a newspaper here in the U.K. which is in many ways progressive. Its front page design is often quite original and it was the first British newspaper to change its “broadsheet” format to a smaller size, which resulted in a spike in its sales.

For a newspaper that seems unafraid of taking risks and challenging the norm, it’s a shame that they’re not more progressive when in comes to pricing their online content.

The newspaper equivalent of reading a blog is following what a columnist has to say. For a Simon Carr enthusiast who does most of his reading online for example, there are three options:

1. Subscribe for a year for £50,
2. Subscribe for a month for £10 or,
3. buy a single column for £1.

Mr. Carr writes roughly 20 columns a month, which comes to a total of 240 columns a year. The cheapest subscription option for this column is £50 pounds for 240 columns or about 20 pence a pop. In the newsstand The Independent costs 60 pence.

Embracing micropayments is not something the Independent should do because it is progressive or inventive. They should do it because it is the only way a traditional media company, that bases its revenue on written content, can survive.

The Independent is not about to remove its paper from the newsstand and force those who want to read it to subscribe. Why are they doing it online?

The availability and feasibility of micropayments is another matter. Jakob Nielsen advocated for them as early as 1998 but they still haven’t materialized fully.