Stop Me If This Sounds Familiar

The thing I find most interesting about The Long Tail is how much it reinforces the positions I've presented to the SEC Spring Meeting or CoSIDA. One of those points at the 2007 SEC was to understand the fact that we as SIDs are outnumbered. That's a pleasant way of saying surrounded.

From Chris Anderson's book:

Once, the power of newspapers came from their command over their tools of production. As the saying went, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” But starting in the early 1990s, news started coming on screens, not just smudgy pages. And suddenly, anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection had the power of the press.

I've also used the Dan Rather analogy -- he was the most traditional, and taken down by those that were derisively called the Pajamaistas. Anderson quotes Richard Posner:

“Bloggers can specialize in particular topics to an extent that few journalists employed by media companies can. . . . A newspaper will not hire a journalist for his knowledge of old typewriters, but plenty of people in the blogosphere have the esoteric knowledge, and it was they who brought down Dan Rather.”

It's validating stuff, but more important, with a major author like Anderson saying it, perhaps others will begin to listen.