In the evenings, I try to read few blob entries. I’ve been intrigued by how they are like following a bibliographic trail. Tonight, I started with John Blyberg’s entry about the conversation between Michael Casey and Michael Stephens on Library 2.0 on ALA TechSource.
The ALA TechSource posting led me to the wikipedia article about “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail” which ultimately led me to Christ Anderson’s article in Wired “The Long Trail.”
The Wired article is a really fascinating article about the business models that are emerging (or need to emerge) as we move from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance. I finally ended up at Anderson’s blog, The Long Tail…” and read his most recent post: “The Probabilistic Age.”
The purpose of this narrative is to point to the similarity of following a bibliographic trail in a print publication in which the bibliographic trail is documented with traditional footnotes or endnotes. But the differences are significant. I still haven’t completed John Blygerg’s posting. If this had been a print publication, I would probably have finished the original article first, then followed the bibliographic trail….