jr conlin's ink stained banana

Since hotlinking is bad…

i kinda love how folks are getting so upset about that whole "Long Tail is bogus" story. Then again, i love it when folks completely miss the point.

In a nutshell, nobody should be surprised that big blockbusters and perennial favorites do exceptionally well. They're blockbusters and perennial favorites for a reason. They cater to a demand, otherwise they wouldn't be blockbusters and… ok, you get the point. By the very definition of the word, people like things that are popular, and you can do quite well continually catering only to that.

The point of the Long Tail thing is that you can also do fairly well by providing a good bit of less popular stuff to smaller audiences. Dollars are, in fact, dollars, and while i probably won't give you $20 for the latest Metallica crap, i'll happily turn over that amount for a digital version of Looking for Jack. Are there going to be more folks looking for out of print Australian jazz-pop albums than Mega-Metal fans? No, i can safely say there aren't. Still, if you collect up me, and probably a few hundred other folks interested in other types of music, you'll do just fine thankyouverymuch.

What the long tail specifies is not "Toss out that golden goose for thirty for regular geese, two chicken and a handful of army ants", but more "Your audience also wants a diverse product".

Heh, i even like the comment at the end of the article about how the vast majority of bloggers aren't read. Of course not. Anyone expecting fame, fortune and riches from blogging about their cat is delusional.

Doesn't mean they don't get indexed and added to search results, though, and sometimes those obscure folks actually do have something interesting to say.

Ok, no, not really, but it might happen one day.

Hi Kids, Welcome back to Mr. Conlin's world of Science! Let's see how some of Mr. Conlin's experiments have gone so far, shall we?

• Piwik - This is a nifty little site analytics tool. Do you know what analytics means? No Stevie. It doesn't mean pulling numbers out of there. Yes, even though "anal" is right in the word. You see Site Analytics are how grown up site people like to nurture their faltering egos and secret passions to be an accountant. Yes Jimmy, just like keeping stats for baseball! The nifty thing here is that i get to own my data and not share it with an advertising company! Isn't that cool? Yeah, it uses flash for things instead of Canvas tags, but that's not always such a terrible thing. Mr. Conlin says: Thumbs Up! Go get it.
• jQuery - Hey kids, what do sump pumps, vacuum cleaners and black holes have in common? That's right, they all suck in their own special way. Well, the same thing can be said about javascript frameworks. Each solves a great many really hard problems while leaving others as exercises to the student, particularly a student that's got other things he wants to do. That said, there are some rather clever things that jQuery does. That's right, It lets you pick elements by specifying the CSS rules… And it makes AJAX calls trivial to do… and what else? That's right, it naturalizes XML constructs into walkable DOM elements. Those are all really useful things, aren't they? So, do they offset the fact that you need to re-initialize as jQuery objects things like "this" inside of callbacks? No, not always, but it's still very nice, isn't it? Mr. Conlin says "Go check it out."
• Then there's Weave from Mozilla, which Mr. Conlin liked a lot really, but was a bit upset when the latest version had issues working between platforms and they blanked the old archives of data on the servers. That meant that Mr. Conlin needed to torch his local repository as well, which meant figuring out why Vista no longer did WebDAV automounting without installing a patch, as well as a few extra libraries for Ubuntu, and things STILL don't work as well as they used to… Mr. Conlin needs to just sit in a quiet room with his head between his knees for a while and remember that "beta" means "beta" for a reason. Mr. Conlin suggests you pass on this rev for a bit.

See, experimentation can be fun! Next week we discover the hallucinogenic properties of watching CSPAN-2 for 72 hours.

In mining, there's a problem if the canary stops singing.

In the tech industry, oddly, it's quite the opposite.

In both industries, it's a damn good idea to pay attention to the canaries.

Tonight, i got waxed playing on the Wii against the neighbor kid,
who's four.

i'm old.