Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Links du jour
Here's what I've been doing elsewhere (namely, my job, at Linux Journal and IT Garage):
tmmysf
Frank Paynter's Why Do We Blog? is up. Here's a (long) list of contributors.
Hugh MacLeod's reason explains the headline above. Speaks to the Bonus links: Dave and Shelley both say they blog for the same reason.
wtr?
Via BusinessWire (so it has to be true): HighBeam Research Teams with Webblogger Christopher Locke, Creates New Blogging Tools; Locke Showcases HighBeam Research Tools on New Blog, ChiefBloggingOfficer.com
That would, yes, be the Christopher Locke, alter id of RageBoy (or is it verse vica?), who also reports on the matter. The employer/sponsor/crazyass money behind this is HighBeam Research, which can search a major heap of offweb documents, among other things.
What a (hopefully) long strange trip it will be.
Wag the curve
The concept behind the long tail is the flip side of something mathematicians and econo-mists have known about for some time, called the "Power Law". Here's how it works. Take 1,000 bloggers. (They should be easy to find.) Allow them each 10 links to any other of the same 1,000. One blogger will win the majority of links, because the others will rate him or her more highly than others. Then there will be nine of so others who fall into a second tier, who get a fraction of the first one's popularity. Then there will be 90 more making up the third tier. And of course 900 more who don't stand out particularly. The curve showing the number of links will have that dramatic falling-off shape so familiar from graphs of the exponential functions.
The Power Law always used to concentrate on the top 10: yet in real life, those 900 bloggers have useful things to say too. And the long tail of books, records and DVDs Amazon offers is what keeps it atop the real stores, which have to order your book if they don't have it on the shelves.
For mass media companies struggling to cope with a public increasingly distracted by the googleplex of internet sites, and their ever-expanding content, the long tail presents a problem only if you're stuck in the past, where the "short head" of top sites, blockbuster films and hit bands is all you can see.
There's much more, all good. RTWT.
And when you're done with that, dig what's happened to the "long tail" meme. Right now Google finds 328,000 results for a "long tail" (in quotes) search. At the top is Chris Anderson's piece by that title, from the October issue of Wired Magazine. It's an extremely important piece. Take this one paragraph:
Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.
This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.
One reason they're profound is that we can't help wanting to filter our understanding of abundance through our understanding of scarcity. Works in some ways, but fails spectacularly in others.
As kragen points out in The long tail of ecommerce (in The Now Economy), the Long Tail conversation we've been having in the blogosphere goes back to Dave Sifry's talk at eTech in February. That was when he showed how, on the one hand, blogs like BoingBoing and sites like Slashdot were right up there with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in terms of authority, as defined (by both Google and Technorati) by the sum of inbound links pointing to them. (Discredit where due: the Journal and the Times hide most of their archives behind a costwall, resulting in the form of diminished authority I called "printwash" back in May.
Kragen also points to this item by David Weinberger, and this one by Joi Ito, which points to this amazing piece of prophesy about the death and resurrection of the music industry, published in 1991. Its penultimate paragraph:
How many more performers must be sacrificed on the altar of our nostalgic wish to see 'one nation under a groove'? To stay sane, to stay plausible, pop artists must drop their claims to universal stardom. Let's abandon the nostalgia, let's drop the rhetoric, let's restructure the music industry. We now have a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, 'unpopular' pop musics, each perfectly customised to our elective cults.
Now go to Robin Good's The Blogs' Long Tail: Blogs and RSS Profit Potential, which sources Mary Meeker's excellent report from Morgan Stanley on the subject. Lots of fodder there too (even if it is a .pdf).
Free money
Marc Canter: Paying Bloggers to Blog.
We’re going to pay bloggers $800 a month to talk about the companies products — even if they don’t say everything kindly.
To hire bloggers means you’re hiring their integrity. So to demand (like most of you would) that they ONLY can blog something positive about your products, would refute the whole reason for hiring them in the first place.
The source is Marqui.com, about which Marc, teasingly, says almost nothing in his post.
But the wind chill was just 125°
Says here in WikiPedia that the highest temperature ever recorded in North America outside of Death Valley was in the ultramild climate zone outside our front door here in Santa Barbara. A temperature of 133°F, 56°C was reached on June 17, 1859 in the midst of "Sundowner" winds (blowing from the interior deserts), now better known as Santa Ana Winds.