Here’s the little tidbit from Statcounter.com: Jason Kottke made a brief mention of my original power tagging entry, and he ended up sending me almost 2K referrals in 24 hrs. The Flickr entry also benefited from his attention, with some 300 views over the same span.
Now that’s power.
Manas Garg says:
January 27, 2005 at 7:55 am
This echos with the thought I had two days back, about the long tail of content on web. The gist is like this:
I tend to reach the information that is popular. But Going with what is popular has a price. I mostly don't reach what is relevant but not popular. Popularity is a measure of just popularity and not relevance. Popularity merely increases the *chances* of relevance but does not guarentee it. Because popularity of a piece of content, in general, depends on the source of the content, how many people agree with the content, how many people respect the source of the content, popularity of the supporters of the content, the presentation of the content and relevance of the content in the context of overall subject. All this excluding the delibrate attempt to increase content popularity by doing search engine optimization, link exchange, paid promotion etc. So, as you see, relevance of the content is just one of the many factors in determining its popularity.
But I reach the content through popularity index.
The entire post is at http://manasgarg.blogspot.com/2005/01/long-tail-o…
Sometimes I get a feel that blogosphere and folksonomy will change that and provide new structure to patterns of information consumption. And sometimes I feel I am mistaken (considering the spam that we already see here).
sogrady says:
January 27, 2005 at 9:25 pm
good points all around, Manas. i find, however, that my best sources of information are human filters, either Slashdot style groups or individuals on del.icio.us/furl/etc i know either know/trust or have common interests with.
that allows me to filter information pretty successfully.
the other point here vis a vis the long tail is the persistence. the blogs have a much longer lifespan that we expect – and posts are often picked days or weeks after their original publish date.
keeps it interesting.