Tuesday, October 11, 2005

The Long Tail and time-shifting

As with podcasting, this work shows that the Long Tail extends over time as well. People will link to work written months earlier, much as podcasting enables listening to time-shifted radio. (Three of the four radio shows I listen to are actually produced at the same time. Using a recording program, I record all of them from different streaming stations and then transfer to my pod-player, for listening during my second-shift "day" job.

I surprised someone by commenting on an article he had written years earlier, which came up as applicable in my search. Means that updating older ideas is now possible - one should keep the original data and simply update at the bottom (or top) so people can see the changes transparently.

The Long Tail:

"Alex Barnett does some analysis on his blog traffic and discovers that the RSS feed flattens the curve. Because the feed 'pushes' all the posts to readers, more of them get read. So there's less inequity between the popular and unpopular ones. Also: 'at least 80% of the traffic I get to posts after 3 months are via the search engines that match niche content with niche interests - the Filters of the web. The rest of the traffic comes after 3 months, from referrers from other blogs and online resources (articles, guides, lists of useful links on a subject, etc.)'"

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