Chantelle looks at the Barabási readings on networks, paying particular attention to the 80/20 rule (which also describes blogging activity in network media). Kevin also discusses the 80/20 distribution, power laws, preferential attachment and growth. Preferential attachment and growth are important because it is how networks work, and also before being figured out our models for networks tended to think of them as static, and random. Olivia picks up the stuff about power laws, which is the maths behind the long tail. Anna D has a nice post about getting lost and bored, going elsewhere, returning, then a moment where things went click. Louisa discusses 80/20 and wonders if 20% of employees really do generate 80% of profits. Certainly at a university there would be an affinity between 20% producing 80% of the research, and I would suspect research income. Also with the blogs I don’t bother with accurate numbers but there would certainly be no more than 30 very active bloggers in network media out of 130, and in tutorials it is clear that most questions come from a very small group… Samuel mentions power laws and links to A list tech and tech culture blogger Jason Kottke’s post on power laws. Brittany discusses the economics of the long tail, and repeats Anderson’s ‘three rules’.
longtail
Long Tail Vox Pops
Victoria has useful list. Key point? The long tail lets what we might think of as ‘minor’ but deeply important works to find an audience, survive, and be available. Courtney uses the long tail to think about blogs and blogging (blogs absolutely exhibit the long tail stuff), and how the long tail intersects with recommendation systems. Jackie thinks about friendships and connections, and hopefully some of the questions raised will be picked up by the next lot of readings. Dominic picks up on the importance of hubs (dense connectors). It is these hubs that make all the difference in small world networks as it is how you find your way from one point to another. Rebecca My meanwhile discusses Anderson’s three rules of the long tail for online business. Anna C notices that the long tail provides a way to rethink the creative economy online, with crowd sourcing, which didn’t exist when Anderson wrote his article, as a case in point.
Variety (is sometimes good)
Courtney also picks up the video (that Alois and others have found) that is a great info-doco about the network. Monika discusses the long tail and Amazon, though the significance of the long tail is not that old things become hits, but that you can now sell things that aren’t hits, but for all the thousands (or millions) of things that only sell three times a month, that turns out to be more sales than the one book that sells a hundred thousand copies. The value is in the tail… Nga pulls up more stuff that Brian mentioned on the Stuart Hall codes and decoding (though I return to yesterday’s point, if an author has to subject themselves to ‘codes’ to be understood then this is, for me, further evidence that authorial intent is not what matters, codes are social and I have to bow to them, as an author, not they bow to me…), and how tenuous intent is. These blogs for us teachers are a case in point. The variety of interpretations, good and, well, just odd, that are made of what we say are really quite extraordinary in their range. So even in the 50 minutes of that conversation, what we mean goes all over the place with you.
Lauren writes about the unsymposium and wonders about intention and authors and that picture book I showed. What I like is her discussion about authors and intent and then she arrives at “if we write something that allows for different interpretations, we are showing that we are understanding how our audience works. actually, i don’t know. i lost myself just then.”. Notice the last sentence: “i just lost myself then.” If you can get lost in your own writing, and I mean lost as in not sure what’s going on, who’s in control, then again, why do we think authors are any different (they’re not, great authors are people who are OK with this experience of being lost and not in control when they write, their writing writes them as they write it).
Ella does a good job on the ‘long tail’, getting the (economic – which is only one point of significance) importance of the long tail, that the slow sellers actually add up to more than the hits, simply because as the long tail shows, there is just so many things there in the tail. And she’s got a link to Chris Anderson’s video discussing this idea.
Tiana uses Sacha Baron Cohen to make the case you can’t use the work to provide evidence of what the maker thinks or believes. It’s a very good example. Then she picks up that surely authors have some control. Except the sentence is “don’t texts have some sort of aim”. My reply is absolutely yes. Texts do. Texts, not their makers. Their makers are part of it (think back to Actor Network Theory, a novel, a film, works the same way between language, form, maker/s, the work, audience, technology, media, history, genre, style). And once we recognise that texts do this, we can think of them as more like people. They have an unconscious, just like us, and things they want to do. Yes, some of this is what we want to do, but some of it is what it wants to do. I can’t make a film that isn’t a rectangle. No matter what my intent. I can’t write a romance novel that is not then requiring me to subject myself to the codes and conventions of the genre – their intent are what I must negotiate. Tiana then uses the excellent example of persuasive writing, which is supposed to persuade. Yes it is, and we have had rules of rhetoric for 3000 years trying to show us how to do it. If it worked would we need 3000 years of commentary on how to do it? And if we knew how to do it, in other words if it actually worked, then why do most ads, most of the time, miss their mark? (After all this an entire very well funded industry dedicated only to persuasion.)
A Longer Tale
Denham has notes from the long tail reading, pulling out some useful quotes and key points. He notes that this shows that the immaterial network has impacts on real things. (Absolutely, there is nothing immaterial about the internet when we get right down to it.) The idea of the long tail describes the structure of the Web, and the structure of a hypertext such as the academic essay I showed in the unsymposium.
Meanwhile Zoe curates a series of talks, presentations and graphics to sketch out the next two weeks of networked thinking. Jia Li discusses how the long tail provides a new business model. What is important here is how it more or less disrupts some models of retail business, as a simple example (it took all of about 4 years for the iTunes music store to become the world’s largest music retailer). Patrick wonders why there isn’t more of the physical media with attached cloud version, for the one price. Amazon have just announced this with books, buy a book and you get the electronic one too. A lot of music does this, though I think the more common model is to provide bonus material online…
The Long Tail
Lina has a nice dot point summary of the points. The next step is to think about the significance of this, as it turns out that this is the characteristic of what are known as ‘scale free networks’ of which the web is one. Lina, again, who enjoyed the Watts’ reading, with more notes and comments. Arthur has some ramblings on the Watts reading too, and yes, socially we have strong and weak connections, and there are dense clusters which is how the world becomes small (the six degrees scenario).