Judith is right: my second point (lack of editorial review) undermined the first point
(logrithmic distribution). The power law explanation is the stronger argument.
I deleted the second point.
yrs, andreas www.andreas.com
I had read about the Long Tail, Andreas, yes. Your review interests me, I hadn't thought of various of the points you raise.
I do want to raise a possible objection to one of your points, I quote, perhaps too fully, here:
.This sounds nice, but it isn't true. It's a dream of populism that everyone can make meaningful choices. The US population is 300 million people. If it were true that everyone is equal, then we would have 300 million authors or 300 million musicians. However, society isn't "flat" (where everyone is equal). Human societies form into several dozen clusters with experts at the top of each cluster. The 100,000 new books every year in the USA are produced by less than 0.03% of the US population. Only one person in every ten thousand writes a book. This isn't because it's difficult to write books. Blogs require very little work, yet only a few hundred thousand people write the blogs that everyone else reads.
There's a reason for this. Content produced without selection and filtering by editors and reviewers is generally trivial, uninformed, incorrect, or repetitive. From the Pew study on blogs, we find that the average blogger is a 14-year old girl who writes about her cat. For those of you who know me, I am quite in favor of this
(So am I: Fridays, I hit the web for Friday Cat Blogging)
Isn't the Power Law explanation of the dominance of relatively few bloggers equally plausible, if not more so? (I'm a bit sceptical about the Power Law people in that I think they've reinvented a wheel -- "iron law of oligarchy" -- without looking at its complexities and underpinnings; but they have a point and one that stands independently of the merit of Superbloggers and others.)
Judy
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 3:30 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Long Tail (book review)
Some of you may have heard of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, abook about online business.www.insider-seo.com/book-review-longtail.asp
I wrote a review of it a few days ago.
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