Bill Ives on the Long Tail
About two weeks ago, I pointed to a few posts by David Sifry about the State of the Blogosphere. Sifry’s last post in the series talks about the long tail of conversations in the blogosphere. Bill Ives shares some thoughts and resources about that tail.
When I first read Sifry’s post, I had a swarm of thoughts about the long tail, but I couldn’t type them up at the time, mulled them for a while, and then let them slip away.
Bill’s right: Wikipedia’s look at the statistical distribution of The Long Tail explains the phenomenon in general terms. It reminds me of something a high school algebra teacher always said: “Have you hugged your asymptotes today?”
Somewhere in that long tail is a bunch of librarian weblogs–that’s librarian weblogs in the broad sense of librarians/information professionals who blog, libraries with blogs, and blogs read by information professionals/librarians. If someone looks at which blogs are valuable to information professionals and librarians, the distribution is going to be quite different from the chart Sifry shares.
**j raps fingers on the desk.
I thought I was getting some of my earlier thoughts back, but it didn’t work.
