Eran and his partners in supr.c.ilio.us crime are throwing a Long-tail Camp this Friday, or are they
Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it’s the long tail, what can you expect?
They are throwing a party Thursday though
The Launch Party to End All Launch PartiesThursday, November 10, 2005 (8:00 PM)
A couple of weekends ago, at Coffee to the People Eran put the jokes away and helped me understand the mathematics of Long Tail. He said something like “Read the original Wired article. It made sense before every one got mathematically on Long Tail and it still makes sense.” I read it just know, and grabbed a few quotes that ring true to me:
Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.
…
In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.
…
Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.
…
you need both ends of the curve. Their huge libraries of less-mainstream fare set them apart, but hits still matter in attracting consumers in the first place. Great Long Tail businesses can then guide consumers further afield by following the contours of their likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown.
The article was still more verbose and business oriented than I like. I would have liked it more from the “consumer’s” (sic) perspective, but now I get the long-tail and I am ready to party.
What started me looking down the the Long Tail path tonight? A post by Kurt Cagle titled XML and the Long Tail in which he does not mention XML once, and where I discovered that his comment submission is broken.
Previously Kurt let comments rot — he had too much spam. Now, his comment submission is broken altogether. Maybe, it is time to switch to Wordpress.com and try Akismet?
Kurt Cagle, your comment submission is broken on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
I wanted to invite Kurt to Long-tail Camp, and also comment on one part of his essay that distracted me from the otherwise high quality of the post.
This has meant that it is becoming increasingly difficult for software shops to make money, even though the economic difficulties of years past have largely eased.
Understanding XML: XML and the Long Tail
I guess it is all relative. Otherwise Kurt’s piece is an interesting complement to bubble articles. Maybe, I will go into detail on that some other time.
By searching on Long-tail camp I discover hypecamp:
[Dave Winer] finds the combination of blogging and news rooms very exciting.
Note the use of all CAPs, in this camp’s name. That is what differentiates it from other camps. Dave Winer definitely is not a graphic designer, as hypercamp does not yet have a flashy banner.
It sounds like a good fit to the geek-camp meme, and may add a missing element that people like Roland Tanglao have commented on. On Roland’s Rabble Show 1 he commented on the lack of the recording, distributing, and archiving going on at barcamp Amsterdam. Dave Winer’s plan for hypercamp includes making this a priority.
Johan, that’s part of the plan. At each of the three BloggerCons and all the camps I’ve been to, connectivity to the rest of the world has been haphazard and often unreliable. This time it’s one of the primary focuses, the presentations will be webcast and the webcasting will work. Obviously I can’t guarantee that, but I want to park a satellite truck out front if there’s any chance our connectivity will go down. Or have redundancy. We *have* to get this right. It can’t be left as an afterthought.Dave Winer • 11/7/05; 1:12:39 PM
I can’t leave the topic of geek-camps without mentioning Super Happy Dev House 5 (photos) happened this past weekend. I was a little disappointed that it was more pitch, and less depth then the one before. It felt more like what I envision barcamp to be, and less what I want to get from shdh. I had an awesome time, including Perl hacker Elliot Foster hacking my laptop into Ubuntu GNU/Linux submission. It was awesome seeing everyone, and next time I will try harder to stay all night.
All of this comes to the natural conclusion, Onecamp:
The vision is that these “camps” are too open, particularly something like long-tail camp. These free-software guerillas have gone too far!
Onecamp is the camp for corporations and government to take back the web!
oneCamp to rule them all on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
I am all camped out for now — less talk, more development, QA, and partying.
technorati tags: longtail, longtailcamp, supr.c.ilio.us, suprcilious, coffeetothepeople, wired, xml, understandingxm, kurtcagle, wordpress.com, wordpress, akismet, onecamp, hypercamp, davewiner, qa, superhappydevhouse, shdh, barcamp, rolandtanglao, rolandsrabble
One Comment
yes, less talk, more partying.