Why should you care about Blogging?

Have you ever heard of the "long tail" concept? Let me attempt to paraphrase it.

If you use the analogy of a book store, they have limited space so they can only hold 30,000 to 40,000 books. Therefore, they are likely to stock only the most popular titles or top sellers. However, Amazon doesn't have this physical restriction because there's no bricks and motar stores. They actually make more money with the niche books then they do on best sellers. As a vitual book store they can afford to do it. The point is that servicing a niche market can be very profitable.

If you look at media today and plot it on a graph you would have a declining line starting high and falling to the right. The Top shows like Lost or 24 would dominate the top part of the graph and as you move right or into lesser known shows the eye balls decline. The popular shows are few in number and as you move right there more and more shows that aren't as popular. It also speaks to what people consider to be important moving to less important.

However, applying the concept of the "long tail" concept to media communications the show on the right is justifiably just as important as the popular show on the left. Imagine that the little guy on the right is someone with a personal blog talking about what they ate for breakfast or their cat. You might say well it's not for me. Now imagine that one day this guy comes up with the most profound idea ever for this point in time. This information gets shared virally throughout the world and this little blog becomes the most signifigant traffic on the web this day. It shoots up to the level of the most popular shows on the left. It might not sustain the attention of veiwers over the long term. It's an example of a one hit wonder. However, if you step back and look at all these one hit wonders, over time you,and add them up, you start to see how important all of them are to the media landscape. With the power of the interenet you can see how someone can go from being relatively unknown to best known site over night.

See this clip for more info:

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2006/03/rb_06_mar_16.html