The fact that I am writing this post is an example, I guess, of the long tail of the internet in action.
I started off with Stephen Downes’ OLDaily in my email box. Obsolete technology I know, but a veritable life raft for me! The title of the item says Maybe Blogging is Dead After All (or Our Conceptualization Is)
That led me off to Alan Levine’s blog posting with the same title. And that’s where I met the concept of “the long tail” for the second time in 2 days - and I can’t for the life of me remember where the first was.
Part of the discussion seems to be about the changing use of authoring technologies. Not only are there now alternatives to the blog, but the way people are using blogging is changing too. According to my blog archives, I began this blog in September 2006, which puts me I suppose into the ranks of those who have been blogging for a relatively long time.
Many people 2 years ago began their blog as a personal journal, with little expectation that it would have much of an audience. However many have now moved on from their blog into the mini-blogging provided by Twitter and similar tools. I think we can see this is the decline of the percentage of active bloggers. But just as many are replacing their personal blog with other tools, educators are beginning to see the usefulness of blogging for lesson planning, for literacy activities, for recording internet journeys, and informing the wider community.
You are probably wondering why I referred to the “long tail” earlier on. I’m not even sure that I am using the term correctly. What I am referring to is the way you can start off in one blog and then move almost seamlessly into another, branching off into another and so on. The blogging world facilitates this as we link to specific posts in each other’s blogs, and to online resources. The result is the beginning of a community.
John Seely Brown says “The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web – this very long tail of interests – into a “circle of knowledge-building and sharing.”
Other links you might like to check:
Minds on Fire: Open Education, The Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
The long tail cometh in education.. but slowly
Richard Anderson talks about the challenges provided by the “Long tail of Knowledge”.
3 Comments
I’ve been in the long tail of blogging a little bit longer than you, Kerrie so here are a couple of links that helped me get a grasp of the concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002177.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Thanks for those links Graham.
I loved the gaping void cartoon.
I think the changes to the blogosphere are very complex - as in for example the reasons why some people have turned from writing a blog to more instant (and shorter) means of communication like Twitter. Perhaps they just found blogging too time consuming, a bit lonely (because people cruise and read but don’t take time to make a comment like you did), perhaps their life became more stressful, they changed jobs, who knows?
Certainly we only have so many hours in the day, and blogs that we monitored a few months ago may not be on our list of regular checks now. With a growing number of blogs to choose from, this may mean that a blog that attracted thousands of readers a week may decline in readership quite markedly. But the adage that if there is nothing of interest on the blog then “they will not come” is quite true.
Very good information, I just found the site and im amazed with the quality of the content here. Keep up the good work.
One Trackback/Pingback
[…] Skip navigation About « The long tail of the internet […]
Post a Comment