Navigating the Rapids of the Long Tail down to the Sea

In 2004, the idea of the Long Tail was promoted in a Wired article by Chris Anderson.  The idea was catchy and the somewhat anecdotal evidence was appealing to many, including myself, blogging about it in 2005.

The Long Tail meme seems to have reached its use-by date.  Hannah McNamee writes, What Happened To The Long Tail (and LongTail.com)?

Although it is considered ironic that Chris Anderson’s own web site of that name has disappeared, I don’t think that defeats the long-tail idea.  Appealing to a power curve model may have been inappropriate, and assuming the long tail is a bigger market is perhaps a grave misunderstanding of how it works.  Yet the long tail does persist, and the ability to search the Internet supports its visibility.  That’s different than being a guide to undertaking eCommerce and making more money.  It is more like having an antiquarian bookstore and a deep social resource, a kind of living almanac, encyclopedia, and yellow pages at our fingertips.  

I am a serious Internet inhabitant, and the ability to connect internationally and temporally is something I am able to thrive with.  I am a long-tail persona among long-tail communities.  Operating without that is unimaginable.  The opportunity has only been available for the last 25 years, mostly in retirement, of my 62-year vocation and I cherish it.

On the downside, apparently spammers do succeed to achieve a long-tail economy, as do opportunistic security/privacy intruders.

Back Story

In addressing the Uncomfortable Truth that Links Are Not Forever, I remarked that I periodically receive emails about broken links in 15-year-old blog posts.  That happened once again regarding links in my 2005-04-02 post on The Long Tail Meme.  On examination of that page I also detected broken links, now repaired, to my own archives under a domain name I have since abandoned in favor of another.

In the latest case, I was offered a substitute for the link to a now-absent web site.  Unfortunately, that breaks the time sense of my 2005 post.  I have provided that link in this new post instead.

I remain heartened that my document-engineering of blogs has the files be on a server that I lease and back up to my private web-development machine, all under source-code control.  Those ancient-in-Internet-terms posts will remain accessible about as long as I do.  I have a virtual Windows XP running obsoleted software that preserves the document-engineering approach that I have sustained all this time and affords means to repair link rot.

I don’t have that capability with my current use of blogger (or of GitHub).  What I do have, instead, is my own archive of Live Writer originals (for Blogger posts and reposts from other blogs) or Markdown files (in the case of GitHub published pages).  I can repost and make repairs, and I can move posts where Live Writer or Markdown remain workable. I am going through an adjustment period; my efforts have not settled down to some convergent consistency just yet.