Daily Blague

¶ Have you met the best of the right-wing pundits, R. Robot? Mr/s Robot is a "rhetoric simulator" that has been fed Newt Gingrich's style manual for praising coreligionists while demonizing liberals. The perfect send-up of insulting conservative twaddle, it demonstrates the level of critical thinking that you will find at such sites as Powerline. In other words, Mr/s Robot doesn't think very clearly but s/he's burning with passion for sure.

¶ At kootke.org this morning, I discovered a site, Long Tail, that is hosted by the editor of Wired, Chris Anderson. The title refers to the extended, flattening end of the Pareto Curve, which shows, among other things, that in any scale-free network (eg the Web) there will be only a handful of very busy nodes (eg Web sites) and a galaxy of quiet ones (eg the Web log that you are currently visiting). I believe that Mr Anderson is on to something that I've been expecting, in my intuitive, uninstructed way since I started playing with my new Peanut in 1985. The spread of computational power is slowly undermining mass marketing, which attends to the eighty percent of stuff that nearly everybody wants or needs while ignoring the fragmented remainder. This remainder constitutes the long tail, and the Web has made it possible (for the first time in history) for the twenty percent of stuff that almost everybody does not want or need to find the handful of people who do. The everyday word for this is "niche marketing," but the term is fundamentally stupid, relying as it does on an architectural term that suggests nothing about networks. Naturally, this reshaping of markets starts at the top, among relatively affluent and educated computer users. But it will spread throughout civilization wherever electricity is available.