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Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Links du jour 
Syndication Nation
| | Mark Glaser: The Media Company I Want to Work For-- Not Someday, But Now. Nice view of where journalism, and journals, are headed, given the nature of supply (writers) as well as demand (readers). Only quibble is with the word "consumers." Old fashioned, that. Along with "audience." The reciprocal of writers is readers. What makes the new world so new is that many readers are also writers. The demand side supplies itself, once again. |
tmmysf
| | 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?
| | 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. |
| | 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. |
| | 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. |
Free money
| | We¹re going to pay bloggers $800 a month to talk about the companies products even if they don¹t say everything kindly. |
| | To hire bloggers means you¹re 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. |
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