Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

*Shrug* ... Closer to home, as a more often, err, "debated" example, roughly 50% of the population of the world is female, but that's not the demographics of the top-tier power-holders.

I don't disagree with your remarks. But merely to amplify, I'd say it's best to think of the power-law curve as a rebuttal, not the last word. It's a crude approximation. But it captures *more* of the structure, much more accurately, than any idea of a flat equal system. That's it's core meaning.

I've got more to say on this topic but must run to meet folks for lunch now. Wanted to give the correct URL for the notes on the Livejournal-focused meeting of the Berkman bloggers:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdaymeetings/stories/storyReader$330

D'oh. I've fixed the url in the post. Thanks, Erica.

Ok, here's the more :)

Some of my LJ friends have been talking about this too, actually, both online and off, in relation specifically to our multifandom community (where I first connected to many of my online friends) and in general for the net as a whole.

One friend brought up another of Shirky's essays: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. We were using it largely to discuss various factors that fall into the 3 Shirky talks about that sabotage what's otherwise an excellent online community. It has a lot in common with The Tyrrany of Structurelessness (also an excellent article/seminal for social movement theory, personal favorite, etc.) – the problems are definitely of a social group nature, not just an online nature.

IMHO Shirky’s group essay much more closely applies to LJ than the power law (maybe I’m misreading by interpreting the long tail in the context of the power law). The thing a power law analysis consistently forgets about LJ users is that for the vast majority, their target audience is a small one, and their *desired* audience is a small one. Hence the number of friends-locked journals, including my own. Problems of scale lead users to seek out smaller groups, and for many of the major uses of LJ, size/popularity leads to more problems of scale than the user desires. Almost everyone I know on LJ who has a public journal with a friends list over say 250 also has at least one other, smaller, usually locked journal where they feel less burdened by their readership.

If we really want to consider how LJ embodies and exemplifies the long tail, though, it's absolutely important to think about the interplay between online and offline worlds on LJ. In my groups of LJ friends, by this point, I now know nearly everyone I consider myself close to in some offline way or another - from having met them once or twice as part of my or their trip somewhere, to becoming neighbors with them and seeing them on the bus and having drinks regularly, to having invited offline-originating friends into an online social sphere. Choosing to trust the friend of a friend enough to go from befriending them on LJ to let them onto a filter on which I am more honest, for example, generally happens because I met the person offline as well. So the connections online are intermediated and strengthened by the connections offline. Of course conversely, sometimes an offline interaction affects not only the online relationship of the people in question but their entire social circle.

Spinning off on another tangent, more in line with the fractals stuff we talked about this morning, I think about how I choose which blogs and Livejournals to follow most regularly. I don't follow boingboing daily, for example, because I have a friend on LJ who does, and I know I can trust her personal filter to be similar enough to my own that she'll point to anything on boingboing that I'm likely to find compelling. So she reads BB for me, and for several other of her readers, and I have the positive or negative of coming at BB through her lens.

Yet another tangent: A good example of the long tail / fractal communities in action from a fandom and marketing lens is what happened/is happening with Firefly, which was canceled on TV but gained most of its fans in its DVD release, and spawned enough fan devotion to convince a major studio to make it into a movie - which they are now relying on fans to start the buzz for by throwing us some early bones (including a very very early prerelease). I often think that if content-owners fully understood the power of the level of devotion to their products that's created when fans feel a sense of ownership, including freedom to play in the sandbox, there wouldn't be C&Ds against fanfiction or other fan uses.

I could ramble on. But I won’t. I really need to finish setting up my own blog for this sort of thing.

"All of these people who are talking about the value and the virtue of the long tail have the unique quality of not being part of it."

-- from a conference talk by Stephen Downes, and quoted in The New Gatekeepers, Part 6

Erica, up to you to be part of the long tail or the fractal tail. You get your BoingBoing from a friend, or you get your NYT Op-Ed from a friend; either way these are gatekeeper systems. It's a chain of trust, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But with a truly flat system, we would not need gatekeepers. That has certain virtues as well.

David-- "When marketing folks don't understand that, they confuse the long tail with an opportunity to do one-to-one marketing, treating each person as a 'market of one,' instead of seeing that the ones are in conversation with other ones." I'm struggling here to distinguish the light side of marketing from the dark. Google brings up this article Applying the Cluetrain Manifesto to One-to-One Web Marketing and this Computer User article "Weinberger, who actually endorses certain one-to-one techniques such as collaborative filtering..."

I await Anderson's book for the long tail to be written into existence.

I've commented on this here.

(The answer is, of course, when he's a bloody awful poet called William.)

Jon, I write a lot of shit and some of it is contradictory, some of it looks contradictory because my forms of expression aren't consistent or I'm weighting points differently, or because I'm a crappy writer and thinker. So, what's the problem with thinking that 1:1 misses the social, conversational, lumpy nature of markets but still thinking that some 1:1 techniques are more useful than others? Collaborative filtering, for example, "personalizes" marketing offers but does so on the basis of social analysis.

The link you provided is broken and I couldn't find the post you were referring to. Nor could I find the article on personalization I wrote for the old personalization.com site, which is now, alas, gone. I did find this article, however: http://www.darwinmag.com/read/0502/contact_advertising.htmlMaybe it will help clear up "my position" on 1:1. (The quotation marks are there because I don't actually have a single coherent position. On anything.)

As for the Stephen Downes quote: It's a clever observation but it's ad hominem and demonstrably false. Perhaps we THINK we only hear the head of the curve talking about x because we're only listening to the head of the curve. That is, in fact, the whole point about the curve having a head, isn't it?

Jon: I don't view it as gatekeeping - unless you're also of the school that librarians are gatekeepers rather than facilitators. I have limited blogreading time in my day; I figure enough other people are reading BoingBoing that I don't have to - if anything important enough to me is said there, or on any number of other A-list blogs I don't read, I assume within a day or two it will percolate through my networks through people who do read it, and whose filter between what they read and what they then repost resembles what mine would be if I were to read BoingBoing.

There's no added value in waiting for a friend to essentially re-aggregate BB's posts in her own words. That's not the point of reading it through her. There *is* significant value added in having friends who act as filters. If the blogosphere is ever to be less dominated by the top 100, or even the top 1000, it will *depend* on more users trusting this filter effect. If I can only read 100 blogs in a day, personally, I'd prefer that the vast majority of them *not* be the things "everyone" is reading. The news & commentary that's important to me is an amalgam of issues of both very global importance (ie internet & IP issues; US/international politics), and very local importance (whether any of my friends are going to the Buffy Sing-Along this Friday; whether so-and-so has had her baby yet; what my friend Ana thinks about the latest set of posts from BoingBoing). Does that clarify it more?

Let me try to shed some light here in general elucidation. A major problem is that different people use the various terms with differing intent.

As I see it, we start from what I call "blog blather": It's A New Era. Emergent Democracy. No Gatekeepers. Yadda yadda yadda.

The ideology here is one of presumed equality, meritocracy, cheap revolution (society is changing dramatically, but nobody is getting shot, it's all done by computer).

Then - power-law - it becomes clear that blogdom (in terms of writing for a general audience) is really thoroughly clubby, oligarchic, crony-filled, gatekeeper-ridden, to an extent arguably even *worse* than older media. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Every rich vs. poor cliche will be run (the wealthy earned it, the others are shiftless and lazy, have a good attitude and be optimistic, don't think about it, are you some sort of Communist?, etc.).

This inequality really upsets a lot of people, on many levels. There's much intellectual denial. Of course the entire complexity of human relationships can't be described in one curve. But it sure can distinguish between a nonhierarchical fantasy, versus the reality of a few Big Heads and everyone else.

Part of the denial is to make a big fuss over the simplicity of the model. Maybe you don't want to be read (ok, but what if you do?). There's not just one hierarchy (correct, so what?). You can be a big fish in a small pond (but what if the pond *I* want is already bigfished?). And so on.

The "Long Tail" is a mixture of the above denial thinking, based on the statistical fallacy of comparing the total number of Z-listers to the audience of any one A-lister, combined with the trivial business truth that it's possible to also make good money via a little profit on many items versus a large profit on a few items.

This segues into studying how small groups socialize. Especially if you want to sell them a movie or a political candidate by the use of word-of-mouth marketing.

Basically, to say "There's a lot of complexity in the socialization of small groups", and elaborate on it, is a worthwhile statement - but because of the ideological denial, it's often coming across as in part "The Big Heads don't really matter".

Seth, if you don't mind ignoring your post for a second... since I agree with it, but we've been there before.

David-- My quarrel with marketing sages is not based on intent but on vocabulary. I could not find a contradictory statement of yours here, but what I found is that certain terms like "one-to-one" mean nothing at all and can then be used by anybody to mean anything, which explains why someone else could nonchalantly mix-and-match it with the Cluetrain Manifesto (here is the link which I botched earlier.) Also the word "blog" also suffers from contending definitions. On the other hand, "collaborative filtering" and "viral marketing" have sharp technical definitions, and are often used responsibly to convey what they mean.

Now let's take the "long tail", and this will get to the exchange with Erica. The "long tail" has no meaning, other than being the part of the power curve away from the power. Which is why folks like Stephen Downes have not much use for it. Suppose that Chris Anderson had gotten nostalgiac, and instead picked a word like "mosaic" (small pieces artfully joined?) This may not be the image he was looking for, as it suggests a top-down architect, but it would have been more attractive a collective symbol. Where can one really take the image of a "long tail" other than whipping it or stomping on it? That is the value of marketers, which I recognize as an engineer: to find a sublime concept which naturally represents something complex.

Erica, thank you for posing the question of are they gatekeepers or facilitators. Both influence what you read. In one case there is a contract of a subscription, in the other case there is a contract of friendship; and I hesitate to call the subscription model corrupt or outdated, as is the common ethos of the blogosphere.

Jon

If you drop http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml into the wayback machine archive http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and hit "take me back" then you have LiveJournal user statistics (gender, age, location, activity) over the past five years. Good for a bit messing around if you have a day to spare with your spreadsheet (or a couple of willing research students/assistants/interns)