1st entry

At a loss for how to begin, I will start, artlessly, with what's going on.

I'm reading The Long Tail, a book I've looking forward to reading for a while. It's in the vein of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point et al. One of these books (often started as New Yorker articles) that take one clever idea and spin it out into book length. Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying it. Much as I enjoyed the other ones I mentioned. I just don't feel like it's world-changing.

So this one (if you haven't heard about it), describes the "new" economy which allows for the sale of many more items to much smaller numbers of people than the "old" blockbuster economy of a few giant hits ever allowed.

For example, a record store can only stock so many CDs so they stock the 10% most popular ones. iTunes can "stock" everything at 0 cost so they can offer you 90% of the music out there. Then, a funny thing happens. People actually buy almost everything that they put up. There is at least one person out there interested in the least popular song ever recorded. That's the big idea. You can make as much (or more) money selling millions of songs to one or two people each as you can selling one or two songs to millions of people each.

As long as you can keep your costs down. That's where the internet comes in. So you sell bits, not atoms (free) and you distribute over the internet, not by truck (nearly free) and you can make money even if you only sell one or two copies a year. Pretty cool.

And the lesson applies to everything. Music, books, information...

It's really the fault of the book that I'm typing this now. He talks a lot about the power of blogs and the recommendation revolution where people need advice and filters to sort through all the crap at the long end of the tail. It's all well and good to have all the information in the world at your fingertips, but how are you going to find anything useful?

That's not to say that I intend to actually write anything useful...but we'll see.