Please note that links on this site to items at Amazon are generally associated with my Amazon Associates account, and I get a small commission on purchases made via that account.
Randy Morin thinks we should do a little chain linking on a slow night in the blogosphere. I'm game.
What you do is simply repost this blog entry as-is on your blog and add your website to the top (or bottom) of the chain of links below. Then email the blog entry to a couple blogger friends. For participating, you'll get a little link love, a.k.a. Google juice.
But if you want to start on a slightly smaller scale, here's another one.
Someone needs to build a cross platform, highly configurable online application that will pull recent inbound links from Technorati and Google blog search, weed out duplicates AND allow the user to select which ones appear in a list that can be easily added to a blog or other web page. It would be a centrally administered and more feature rich version of the list I manage this way. You could also do the same thing for a list of recent inbound comments (pulling the comments directly from the blog- not via a central location like coComment), and allow both lists to be administered from a single web page.
Why you say? Two reasons: spam and demand.
Almost every post of mine gets picked up by at least one spam blog and often 2-3 of them. Contrary to what Scott Karp says, Technorati is doing a ton better at weeding out spam links and keeping accurate link counts, but it is a full scale war, fought every day. Spam is like roaches, there is no way to keep them all out, and so you still have to rely partially on a kill them when you see them approach. That's why Scott's, mine and undoubtedly a ton of people's link counts go up and down like the cast of the Gillmor Gang.
If I am having this problem, I am sure a lot of others are too. A quick survey of some other reasonably popular blogs confirms this.
If there was a way to validate the inbound links that show up in that list, sort of like you can do now with comments and trackbacks, it would allow people to weed out those links before they show up. And it would take away some of the incentive to spam.
People would flock to this program, and people would happily pay a few bucks a month for it. Look at all the great work done at Freshblog and other places trying to find a way to do things like this within the confines of various platform limitations. Give us one stop shopping, and we will give you money.
I'll type my fingers off about it here, as would hordes of other appreciative bloggers.
Those of you lucky enough to be on Wordpress may rightfully say that there are plugins that already do this for you, but there are plenty of people like me who are stuck in Hotel Blogger and elsewhere who would use it. Plus, we're all about cross-platform, right? So if you build it well, we will come. From Blogger and from Wordpress. From all over.
What are you waiting for. Go build it and I'll get ready to send you my subscription fee every month.
Farmgate, one of my daily reads, has an article today on the status and future of cattle farming.
The long and short of it is that drought conditions combined with rising corn prices courtesy of ethanol demand are not doing the cattle farmer any favors. An average $49 profit a head (small to begin with) has turned into a $97 per head loss.
LGMI, which Farmgate describes is accurately as "crop insurance for cowboys," is available in 20 states, including Texas, and can help a little. But it has deductibles and inclusion limits.
The bottom line for cattle farmers is that for the time being a thin margin is getting thinner.
It gets harder and harder for the farmers who have fed this country for 230 years.
Now that Lee Gomes has taken the WBS (World Blogging Slugfest) belt away from Chris Anderson in convincing fashion (it's really not about whether the book moved up the top seller list) we have another heavyweight bout brewing.
Mike Arrington, fresh from his all too brief stint as the blog rage eradicator, and having turned in his badge to rejoin the Gillmor Gang (hopefully with Nick Carr) at the behest of the most enraged of all bloggers (more on that below), takes on Nick Douglas of Valleywag fame over some emails Nick Douglas allegedly sent around inquiring if Mike is an investor in some startups, presumably to see if Mike has any secret investments in the companies he writes about.
I don't know Mike, and I have been critical in the past of what I perceived at the time as a rock star attitude. But I have read enough of his posts to be very surprised if he invested in a company and then wrote about it without disclosing the investment. For one thing, Mike strikes me as an honest guy who, at least most of the time, can still remember what life was like before TechCrunch. I also know that Mike is an attorney - and I know that for him to do something like that would put his law license at risk. Whether he needs it to make a living or not, he probably isn't keen on having it publicly jerked away from him.
So I would put the odds of Mike investing in a company and then writing about it without disclosing that fact at about zero.
And I suspect that Nick Douglas knows this as well. Which means that he either wrote these emails just to stir the pot a little (one of the many things to love about Valleywag is that it occasionally makes great fun of the so-called blogging elite) or for some other reason.
It's the possibility of another reason that I find interesting.
Mike believes that Nick may be taking some preemptive shots in the face of greater competition from the TechCrunch family of blogs. Mike seems pretty angry about the whole thing and even tosses out the L-word (libel).
But there could be more to it. Nick told me tonight that Steve Gillmor called him and "advised" him to stop writing about Mike. Nick tells me that when he told Steve he was going to continue to look into these TechCrunch issues, Steve got huffy and ended the conversation by telling Nick he wouldn't talk to him anymore.
Note to Mike: As stated, I don't believe for a second that you secretly invested in any companies. But you can certainly find a better ambassador than your once and future podcast mate, Steve Gillmor.
Well, OK. So my long lost cousin Bunny had a little somthing to do with it. Maybe no one will notice the fact that almost all of the Rubel photos are him and none of the Newsome photos are me.
A pretty cool little application. Go pick a fight!
Davis Freeberg, who shares my dislike of anything connected to Real Networks, lands some well deserved blows in this very interesting post.
He correctly points out the absurdity of Real's obsession with Microsoft's not even released yet Zune player and then sums up his version of what I have called the Real Player Syndrome in this flurry to the jaw:
"I can't tell you how many times I've had to uninstall their software from my computer. Everytime I swear off their Real player, some clip comes along which I need their proprietary software to use. It's neat that Real wants to put an end to DRM that locks consumers into proprietary systems, but I'd like to see them address their own service before they complain about big bad Microsoft."
Amen brother.
That's why I will forego watching something rather than install what is, in my opinion, computer-hijacking bloatware.
Is it really the application developers who spend countless hours and piles of money creating occasionally amazing products that they turn around and give us for free? No, at least not yet.
Or is it the VC community with a ton of money that needs to be invested somewhere, who are trying and mostly failing to recreate the once lucrative greater fool pipeline to sell these free products to rich fools like Yahoo or poor IPO-happy fools like you and me? No, at least not yet.
Or is it the thoughtful user who takes a free product, mixes in some hard work and self-promotion and becomes a new media star? Yep, at least so far.
If you don't agree, ask yourself this: would you rather be a fledgling Web 2.0 developer, which is the functional equivalent of being in a pick-up basketball game and hoping to make it to the NBA, or would you rather be Mike Arrington or the guys at Techdirt, which is like being Bob Costas?
Would you rather be working on the 5,913th free online calendar application, or would you rather be the woman known as "Forbidden" on MySpace?
One more. Would you rather develop a YouTube clone, or be a film maker growing an audience and a reputation on YouTube's nickel?
The real winners are the people who use the free infrastructure provided by these so-called businesses to create something that is both valuable and portable- a brand. If someone builds a freeway that leads to fame and fortune, it's not the builder who makes the real money, it's the people who ride that freeway as far as it will take them.
It's almost like Web 2.0 has turned business theory upside down. It's not the author of the book that gets the run in Web 2.0, it's the company that binds the book. Maybe that's the price they charge for giving everything away.
If so, that's OK.
Forbidden and others will laugh their way to the bank, while the Web 2.0 companies sit and wait for the next AdSense check to arrive.
Knowing in the back of their minds that the next one might be the last one.
Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post has an article about the crack that has developed in the IM wall thanks to the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo to allow their IM clients to cross proprietary borders and communicate with each other.
In addition to pointing out the fact that users have to have the latest version of each application to speak cross-network and outlining some some hiccups that have occurred thanks to the lack of an open standard and the resulting difficulty in erecting a bridge between two walled-in networks, Rob also describes the main reason my use of IM clients is very limited:
"Unfortunately, both program's installers are as pushy as ever about adding browser toolbars, loading extra start-up software, and changing your home-page and Web-search preferences; choose custom-install to opt out of those intrusions."
I call this the Real Player Syndrome. It's the genesis of my intense dislike of everything Real- well, that and the fact they make you call them to unsubscribe to things you subscribed to online.
In the race to add features, the IM applications have become bloated caricatures of their former selves. People don't want to use IM applications as browser-substitutes. They just want to be able to chat with other people, without network limitations.
And what about AOL? Rob says that AOL may be tiptoeing in the right direction:
"AOL is no longer reflexively hostile to letting outsiders hook into its system, having stopped trying to block AIM-compatible third-party software. But the company has only tiptoed toward interoperability, opening its network strictly to far smaller competitors. For instance, users of Apple's .Mac service have been able to tie into AIM since 2002, and AOL says that by the end of the year, the Google Talk network will also connect to AIM."
It's a risky business for the IM applications with the biggest market share to knock down the walls and allow cross-network communication. But it's inevitable and it will happen.
There's a crack in the wall. Let's sit back and watch it grow.
This is the another installment in my series of favorite records. The list so far is here.
In yesterday's podcast I talked about the Guess Who, and how I believe they are greatly underappreciated, given the incredible amounts of great music (not to mention big hits) they generated in the 60s and 70s. And as luck would have it, we're to the end of the G's in my Top 50 Album series.
The Guess Who made 4 excellent records in a row between 1968 and 1970, starting with Wheatfield Soul (hard to find, except on an oddly paired double album CD) and ending with Share the Land. Any of them could be on this list, but I'm going to settle on just one- Canned Wheat from 1969.
Canned Wheat is the best place to start for those who remember the Guess Who only for their long string of radio hits. This is an excellent rock record that features some fine Guitar work from Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings' great voice.
No Time, the first track, is a classic rock standard, that you've heard before. Minstel Boy is a beautiful and sad number inspired by a Thomas Moore poem. Laughing and Undun, two classic rock gems, follow.
Every other song on this record could easily have been a hit. In fact, this record could be a greatest hits record for a lot of popular bands. And it's just one of 4 great records in a row by this under-appreciated band.
One of the things that impresses me the most about the Guess Who's records is how well they have aged. These records sound like they could have been recorded yesterday. The true sign of musical genius is the ability to make music that still sounds fresh 20 years later. Bob Dylan does it. Springsteen does it.
The theme was great, but under-appreciated, guitarists. I played deep album cuts by Peter Green, Frank Marino, Brownsville Station, Derek & the Dominos, The Guess Who and more. The finale is a 12 minute blues jam by Boz Scaggs.
I also talked a little about HR 5319 (the MySpace Law) and the underground blogosphere.
Dwight Silverman thinks I'm wrong about HR 5319 being a good idea.
Maybe, but here's my thinking- as succinctly as I can describe it.
Yes, in theory, it would be great to have these decisions made at the local level, as Dwight suggests. The thing is, though, that I simply don't trust the local educators to make the right decision. Plus, I know that kids are very, very clever when it comes to getting around obstacles to their desires, and if the blocking was done on some ad hoc basis, kids would find a way around it within the first day.
Let's say it was handled on the local level, and let's say that the principal at my kids' school decided that since her kids are so responsible and all, that she would trust them to police themselves. I know that's not going to work. So what would my choices be? To gut it up and deal with it or yank my kids out of the school they love and move them somewhere else? What if the principal at the new school leaves in a year and the new one changes the policy?
What if changing schools is not financially or geographically feasible?
Again, I simply don't trust local educators to make the right decision every time. Particular when it comes to technology. And I'm unwilling to cede control to them to that degree, regardless of whether they see things my way or not. If you accept the fact that kids shouldn't be hanging out on MySpace at school, then there is no compelling argument against HR 5319.
Now, if I could conceive of one good reason why a kid should be on MySpace at school, then maybe I'd have second thoughts. But I can't. Not for a second.
So while there is some paternalism going on here, on both my and the legislators' part, the overriding good of protecting our kids far outweighs the mild fear that this is the fist step in some Orwellian plan to take away all of our rights.
Kids shouldn't be on MySpace at school. Kids don't always know what's good for them.
The MySpace Law is a good thing that will make schools safer and more productive for our kids.
P.S. Although I suspect he will line up on Dwight's side of the debate, I really want to hear Seth Finkelstein's thoughts on this.
Update: As he mentioned in a comment, Seth posted his thoughts and, as always, makes a lot of good points. I hadn't thought of the Republicans vs Fox angle, but that might just prove to be a very interesting by-product of this debate. Having said that, if the vote was 410-15, a bunch of Democrats must have voted for it too.
I really like this passage from Earl's latest post:
"My ego hopes that the subjects I think are important or interesting are relevant to at least a few other people on this planet. When someone leaves me a comment or links to me I feel I've accomplished that. It may be part of my own sense of mortality. When posting I'm not concerned about popular opinion. People can love to read you even if they're certain you're dead wrong and bound to self-destruct. With different viewpoints comes opportunity for growth. I welcome this."
When people talk back, or comment, or link it is evidence that we're all in this together- and by this I mean the universe as well as the blogosphere.
It's not about money, or fame. It's about belonging.
That's why I write, that's why I read and that's why I link.
When I said the other day that "as soon as the parents of the world (and the legislators they vote for) come to understand the risk their kids are taking by putting their lives online, MySpace will come under increasing pressure to become safer," I didn't realize when would be now.
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes today about House Resolution 5319. If it becomes a law, HR 5319 will require schools and libraries to block social networking sites and chat rooms.
Marshall, not surprisingly, looks at the issue from the perspective of application developers.
Let me give you the parents' perspective. Put very simply, is there anyone with two brain cells to rub together who thinks that kids should spend part of their time at school surfing around MySpace?
Of course not.
I will read the resolution and the portions of the Communications Act it seeks to amend tonight, but based on what I have read so far, this is a good thing.
Some cat with skin in the game, which is reason number one why Variety should have pulled a comment from someone else, had this to say about Amazon's new venture:
"This is all a gamble, but if you're going to gamble, why not do something that nobody has done before?"
I bet that makes Amazon's shareholders feel all giddy inside.
I seriously think this might be a joke. If so, Amazon, you got me.
Steve Rubel writes a very interesting and timely post today about the underground blogosphere- the scads of emails that bloggers send to each other every day.
He describes the underground blogosphere thustly:
"The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are "pitching" their latest posts in hopes of getting a link. Sometimes, bloggers are genuinely looking for good feedback, but more often than not all they are just looking for traffic."
As you might imagine, I have a few thoughts about the underground blogosphere.
First, as I mentioned the other day, I have historically been very hesitant to email other bloggers about posts of mine. After thinking about it a bit, I think the reason is that it can easily (and often correctly) be interpreted as taking advantage of a contact or relationship. Putting it in songwriting terms, as I often do because of the similarities I see between blogging and songwriting, it's sort of like asking another artist who writes his own material to cover your song. Bold, yes. Fruitful, not very.
Steve is one of my blogging mentors, and has been very kind to me as I grow my blog. About the time I was starting to make some progress up blogger's hill, he wrote a post suggesting that emailing the top bloggers in a quest for links was not the way to go. While I questioned the way he said it, I agreed then on this blog and I agree now that emailing wildly is not the way to go. I also know that if you want people to help you, you have to play be their rules. By trying to be considerate and fair, I was able to prove myself wrong, with much help from Steve, Scoble and other mega-bloggers.
As I mentioned the other day, however, like everything else blogging is different than it appears once you get into it, and as a now somewhat established blogger I am always appreciative of emails and Delicious links suggesting topics and posts to write about.
But I still go easy on emailing others about my posts. So how should emailing and the underground blogosphere work as far as blog growth goes?
I'll suggest 5 rules for emailing another blogger about your post.
1) Develop a relationship with the blogger before you email. Link to him. Comment on her blog. Bloggers notice who links to them and who comments on their blogs. When I see someone linking and commenting here, I almost always subscribe to their blog and look for opportunities to create cross-blog conversations. Human nature dictates that you return a favor- no matter how big your linkcount is. Let this work in your favor.
2) Don't just start sending indiscriminate emails to people who don't know you and expect to get link love in return. Broad emailing looks more like spam than information, and it will be treated as such.
3) Be brief, kind and appreciative. Here's the relevant portion of an email I wrote Scoble about my killer podcast application post: "I thought you might be interested in a post I did today about expanding the reach of podcasts." I know Scoble cares about podcasts- I would never email him about a post about something unrelated to his blog and interests.
4) State why the post might be of interest to the recipient. Don't make the recipient read the post just to see if it might be relevant- tell her why it is. Briefly. And remember, you're not trying to sell her anything- you're just giving information.
5) Be patient. I have a mental list of 3-4 newish bloggers I want to link to right now, and I am just waiting until I see an interesting post within a reasonable time after it is posted. I am sure other bloggers have similar lists in their head. It may not seem like it at first, but people will respond if you approach them the right way.
Obviously, these rules don't apply to email for other purposes, or to emails between people who are friends- in that case, email away. We all do that- and that's a large part of the underground blogosphere that Steve wonders about exposing.
Exposing it is a good idea, and I'll have more on that angle later.
Continuing the long tail discussion that I posted about yesterday, Lee Gomes writes an email to Nick Carr clarifying his position and responding to some things Chris Anderson wrote in response to Lee's Wall Street Journal article that began this little brouhaha.
Lee begins by clarifying his point about the effect of the long tail- basically that there may be a shift towards online shopping, but not to the extent Chris claims in his book. Then he takes direct issue with a few of the things Chris wrote yesterday:
"While I am at it, I'd like to correct an extremely serious misrepresentation Chris made at the end of his blog posting, to the effect that Anita Elberse of Harvard "urged" me not to characterize her work the way I did. This is manifestly false."
Lee quotes an email from Professor Elberse thanking him (Lee) for quoting her so accurately and mentions that she corrected Chris about a statement in his response, via a comment to his post. Here is that comment:
"You say "Nielsen VideoScan data (...) is almost entirely taken from bricks-and-mortar sources." I don't think this is entirely correct. The VideoScan data reflect both offline and online sales, and actually break them down by channel. The breakdown is not as detailed as one might wish in an ideal world, but they do allow one to track whether, say, the share of offline sales go down over time. Therefore, I do think the fact that my colleague and I only observe a "slight" shift is meaningful."
While that correction is much more of a clarification than a smackdown, I have to give this round to Gomes. He lands a few blows, including this one:
"While Chris seems to have repealed the'98 Percent Rule' in his interviews with me, he didn't do as much in the book. This is how he begins the book, and any reader, after hearing the 'Rule" described as "nearly universal,' would, if nothing else, assume that it was true at all the examples the book describes. Chris defended the fact that it's not by noting to me that his book wasn't titled 'The 98 Percent Rule;' does this mean that any sentence without 'Long Tail' in [it] can't be assumed to be accurate? He also complains in his blog comments that I didn't mention the 95% play rates at Netflix. But I wasn't trying to show the 'Rule' was NEVER true; he is the one who said it was 'universal.'"
Again, I don't know the exact degree to which consumers are moving from bricks and mortar to the computer, but logic, common sense and experience tells me it is happening. The bigger question, which Nick asked and I discussed yesterday, is how much they have moved and whether the trip is over or just starting.
For the reasons I mentioned yesterday, I am convinced the move online is just starting.
But the only thing we know for sure is that books are written for readers, newspaper articles are written for readers and only time will tell who is ultimately right.
Let me get it out of the way by saying that I think the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape (I still can't believe they're using that name) is nutty. Of course starting a blog network is also nutty and Jason made a ton of money by doing that- so he may be nutty like a fox.
Back to Dave and Kevin.
Kevin says:
"[U]sers like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations. All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren't anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors."
To which Dave correctly points out:
"No doubt Kevin is going to make something like $20 or $30 million when he sells Digg, which seems a pretty likely outcome. What will the users get? It's a bit awkward for him to claim they do it for love if he himself doesn't do it for love."
Clearly there is a "monetary motivation" to Digg, or else the very monetarily motivated VC community would not be funding Digg to the tune of at least $2.8M.
But the problem comes from perception, and the shift therein when what starts out as a labor of love is transformed into a potentially lucrative business.
I have faced the same sort of scrutiny Kevin is under now, albeit on a smaller scale. When I started ACCBoards.Com back in the nineties, it was a labor of love- at first. Then it became the most popular ACC Sports site on the net, and started costing me thousands of dollars a month in server and bandwidth charges. I needed someone to help pay those expenses, so I went out and made content deals with Jefferson Pilot Sports and Cox Media. Before I knew it, my little web site was being talked about during college football games and on SportsCenter. Eventually, after paying costs out of my own pocket to create, develop and operate the site, revenue generated by my content deals and advertising put me into the black. Way into the black, actually.
Then came the offers. I resisted them for years, until I got nervous about Bubble 1.0 and the ability of ad dollars to become infinite (now you see where that recurring theme of mine came from). I signed a deal to sell the site for many, many dollars and much non-dilutable stock- go home money. Bubble 1.0 popped about 6 months too soon, and the sale didn't close.
When things started moving from Kent pays thousands a month to Kent makes thousands a month, a lot of my moderators (volunteers who managed the various message boards) began to ask me the same sort of questions Kevin gets asked now. I tried to answer the questions fairly- I did not play the "but you do it for love" card. Many of my moderators were satisfied, and some of them are still moderating the boards today. But many others decided to jump ship and compete with me, thinking that it was easy money. Some of them were successful and some weren't. But all of them learned that to become successful, you have to work very hard for a very long time and, unless you get some greater fool/VC money, at your expense.
A huge part of Web 2.0 is based on monetizing user-generated content. Digg is no different from Myspace and YouTube in that regard. In fact, even old media makes money by user generated ad sales. That's just the way things work.
I don't buy Kevin's argument about his users doing it for love, but I also know that it's really hard to say "well, I had the idea first and I got here first, and that's just how the world works."
That's the question being asked today by several writers and influential bloggers. It's a question that goes straight to the heart and purpose of blogging, so let's take a look.
It all starts with Chris Anderson's new book The Long Tail, which argues that online sales has a great advantage through infinite "shelf space," which traditional bricks and mortar stores do not have. The ability to market the items that sell less units, combined with the ability to sell to people who are not physically present, gives the online seller a big advantage. Think about it like this. If the slow selling stuff accounts for 30% of sales, that's like having several extra "hot" items available all the time. Plus, that 30% has to come from somewhere, and if it's not coming at the expense of the long tail items, it's coming at the expense of the hot items- the head items, if you will.
I certainly buy into the concept Chris is espousing. It's the very reason why 99% of my non-food purchases are made over the internet. Knowing that Amazon will have what I'm looking for is great incentive to start there first. That's before you even consider the convenience and comparison benefits.
Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal writes in an article about Chris's book:
"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."
Lee goes on to cite examples of how the hot items are still accounting for the large majority of the action at such diverse places as online music, Netflix and Bloglines.
In sum, Lee doesn't buy the long tail argument.
Chris responds on his blog, and rebuts what he describes as Lee's haste to find flaws. He states the case for the long tail items to catching up to the hot items in the near future:
"Although I don't discuss this in detail in the book, in the case of Rhapsody, the trend data suggests that the tail (as defined above) actually will equal the head within five years. Which is why the language Gomes cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future conditional tense ('What happens when the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of a few items that sell millions each?'). I asked him to quote the jacket copy in full context, but it apparently wasn't convenient to his thesis to do so, so he didn't."
Nick Carr takes a look at the arguments and concludes:
"I have no doubt that the Internet has created a Long Tail effect, making it easier for customers to find and buy rare or specialized products. Anderson's book provides pretty compelling evidence that that's true. And it's important. But I'm still not quite sure if it's really important or just mildly important."
Nick goes on to make a very good point about the long tail- that it existed before the internet, just in a different form:
"To get a clear sense of the impact of the Net on the Long Tail, you'd need another statistic: Before the Internet came along, what percentage of total book sales lay outside the 100,000 titles stocked in a typical large bookstore? There have always been specialized bookstores, selling everything from religious and spiritual books to textbooks to foreign-language books to used and out-of-print books to poetry books (though their ranks have been pruned by Amazon and other online sellers). And there have always been small presses - literary, academic and technical - selling books directly, through the mail. And you've always been able to go to a bookstore and order a book that it didn't carry on its shelves. How much of the Long Tail of books represents old demand moving through a new channel, and how much represents new demand?"
As Nick concludes, the long tail was there long before the internet. It's probably a lot bigger now, since supply can and does affect demand. The real question, however, is whether the long tail is fully grown, or just a pup that will grow bigger over time, as Chris suggests.
Only time will tell. My guess is that it will get a whole lot bigger, since there will never again be a generation that isn't completely comfortable with the computer and the internet. For our kids and their kids, computers are not newfangled and sometimes confusing technology. They are like telephones. They are implements to be used for a purpose.
I suspect the long tail will play out a lot like the state of communications did when telephones landed on everyone's wall. There was communication before phones- but not nearly as much. It took longer and the hurdle was so high that the level of communication was kept in check. The effort required precluded it from growing.
I think a lot of the bricks and mortar stores are going to start feeling like letters over the next few years.
I have noticed a big increase in the number of splogs linking to me lately.
Technorati has done a good job off weeding out splogs, but like roaches there are so many of them, it's impossible to keep them all out.
What really irritates me is that one group of splogs creates long links that mess up the formatting of this page. If you wonder why the right column is much wider than it should be, take a look at the splog links that show up in the recent inbound links. I don't know of a way to remove those links from my Technorati search feed, so all I can do is wait for them to rotate off.
The problem is that many of my posts get picked up by these splogs, and as soon as one rotates off, another one appears. I want to show my appreciation to people who link here by having that list, but if I can't solve this formatting problem, I may have to remove the list.
I've said before that blogs are like cars- they bring out the inner asshole in some folks. It's nice to see an A-List blogger like Mike roll down the window and confront the finger waiver in a public forum.
Nick Carr posts his side of the story on his blog.
I have said this about Nick Carr recently on this blog:
"And then there are the pseudo-intellectuals like Andrew Keen (who is the blogosphere's version of the party guest who can't stop talking about how smart he is long enough to notice the PhD's shaking their heads as they walk away). Or the Nick Carr types whose many thoughtful posts get lost in the flood of Mary, Mary posts made in the name of fame or traffic."
And the other day I agreed with Nick's Dell post and added my own thoughts.
So while I disagree with some of Nick's tactics, I also appreciate much of his writing.
In sum, I think Nick is a smart and often thoughtful guy. But he's no smarter than a lot of other bloggers who don't have to put on the Andrew Keen act.
So here's my advice to Nick. When you come to the crossroads of being like Andrew and being like Mike- be like Mike.
Of course Nick will never see this post because I suspect he feels I am not intellectually worthy of his time. It's easy to act that way from the safety of a car...I mean a keyboard.
I just saw an extended preview of the forthcoming season while watching the first episode of Eureka, and it gave me chills. I watched the preview 3 times in a row.
Here it is for your viewing pleasure. Here's the link for the RSS feed.
The Sci-Fi Channel has announced a spin-off prequel, which I am looking forward to.
If you haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, you are lucky, because you have a treat in store.
I've been enjoying Darren Rowse's series about what people would do differently if they were starting their blog now. It's a brilliant series for so many reasons- Darren's blog is well named and one of my long-time reads.
Here's some stuff I'd do differently. Some serious, some in fun. Hopefully you'll be able to tell which is which.
1) I'd do a lot more reading blogs before I started writing one. I read a few blogs before I started blogging, but I didn't really understand the process. I thought blogging was just an easier way to manage content on a personal home page. It's a lot more than that. If I had known what I was doing when I started, I think I would have been accepted by the old school bloggers a lot sooner.
2) I'd start traveling up the hill with other bloggers sooner. Starting a blog is still really hard. It's so much easier when you're doing it with some other folks. Once I starting blogging around with Mathew Ingram, Scott Karp, Phil Sim, Richard Querin and others, it got a lot easier and a lot more fun. If you know that 5-6 other bloggers are reading and linking to your blog from the get-go, you will be way ahead in the conversation building game.
3) I'd start out using Wordpress instead of Blogger, since there is no sane and easy way to move from one to the other.
4) I might be anonymous (in a Thomas Hawk sort of way). I could tell some funny stories if everybody didn't know who I am. And as hard as it may be to believe, I am even more opinionated than I seem. Being public, somewhat high-profile within your industry and employed in a non-tech profession really limits your ability to say certain things. I'm not sure I'd do it, but I might.
5) I'd have blown my vacation money on a few conferences so the people who currently link around my detailed analysis in favor of 10 word posts by their buddies would think I was one of their buddies and ignore other detailed analysis in favor of my 10 word posts.
6) I'd get over my hang-ups about emailing other bloggers about a relevant post of mine. Like newspapers and magazines, popular blogs are always looking for content. I love it when someone emails me about a post of theirs, an application to review or a potential topic for me to write on- it's like they're doing some of my work for me. I used to think emailing was an imposition and a unfair shortcut. That's not true at all.
7) I'd start out assuming a position of authority instead of typing my fingers off and waiting for people to realize that I am an authority.
8) I'd become a cheerleader for Web 2.0 instead of a skeptic. I used to get a lot more free stuff than I do now.
I noticed Dave Taylor's post the other day about Amazon's Omakase Links Program.
Being a long time, but highly uninvolved, Amazon associate, I decided to check it out. I searched all over the place for my Amazon associates log-in information, and once I found it thanks to the wonder of X1, I logged in and went to work.
It took me about 5 minutes to add all the details and configure my Omakase links into a professional looking box that fit nicely in one of the outer columns of this page. I added the code to my blog template and, presto, there it was. I noticed no lag in page loading, and the featured items seemed to change nicely each time the page reloaded.
Then I noticed something strange. Almost all of the featured items were sex-related. There was a playboy video and a bunch of what looked and sounded like soft-core porn fiction. I clicked on a few of the links to make sure they led to Amazon, and they did.
This was the case even though when you configure your Amazon links for the first time, you have to agree not to post anything improper on the page where the links display.
Now I am no prude (far from it, actually), but I have never ordered anything even remotely similar to those items from Amazon and I have never once posted anything on this blog that might confuse some algorithm into thinking that those items are consistent with my readership.
In the interest of fairness, at least one blogger is satisfied with Omakase. Of course she gets the random welding books, while I get the ones with scantily clad women on the cover (which might be fun to read, but not to display on your blog).
After reloading the page a few times to confirm that those items were in permanent and frequent rotation in the featured items, I removed the Omakase code from the page.
Omakase is a neat idea in theory, but Amazon needs to figure out what is and what isn't appropriate to display on a family-oriented, tech and music blog.
The latest IM numbers are out and, as I mentioned the other day, the numbers for Google Talk are bad- in fact they are worse than I thought.
Almost a year after its release amid a buzzing blogosphere, Google Talk has captured a mere 1% of the IM market share. But for constant CPR at the hands of cousin Gmail, one of Google's few successful non-search applications, Google Talk would have almost certainly faded into complete oblivion.
Mike Arrington asked the first question that popped into my head when he wondered where Skype IM falls on the list. According to Business Week, Google Talk is the 10th most (un)popular IM application, so there are at least 6 other applications ahead of it.
The problem, as I pointed out almost a year ago, is that historically the IM clients don't talk to each other, so people have to go where the numbers are- and they aren't at Google Talk. As the walls come down and more of these clients are allowed to communicate with each other, features will matter more and Google Talk will be in last place for a different reason- because it likely won't be invited to the party in time to make a difference.
The Microsoft/Yahoo deal to allow their IM clients to communicate with each other was designed to knock former leader AOL down a few more notches and to nip Google Talk's growth in the bud.
For all these reasons, Google Talk is on the outside looking in.
