Virtual discussion group and the long tail

http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/09/structured-dist.html

I got this from Everything is Miscellaneous but it fits right in with class. Apparently, four bloggers are going to have a semi-formal discussion this week about content and the long tail. I’m not exactly sure what the long tail is…last night was the season premier of Heroes and our anniversary and instead of studying I sat with TC and watched Sunday’s episode of The War but after Rialla’s basketball game tonight I will study the rest of the evening.

I’m not positive, but I think Michael Norman’s brown bag yesterday was about the long tail, although he didn’t use the term. We were talking about the new gateway and access to digital content and Aquabrowser, which is a federated search engine that the university may purchase for the library. Librarians have a bad habit of throwing around terms that I don’t quite understand (like I said in the meeting yesterday, I steal time from work to read blogs, but I work at the circulation desk. It’s not the same.)

[note to myself-there should be research done on the difference in activities and standards between librarians and staff...there was an asinine article by some guy ...I hope I tagged it...talking about librarians as professionals and being very negative. He slammed librarians and it really pissed me off...I can slam them if I want to because I'm in the profession, but he can't because he's not.]

Another virtual community story

I got involved in a short term virtual community (if you can call 2 years short term) a while back.  July 7, 2007 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the authors who shaped my life, Robert A. Heinlein.  A group of fans decided to throw him a birthday party  and what followed was one of the most interesting experiences of my life.  The committee, whose membership stretched from wilds of the Washington D.C. suburbs to the wilds of northwest Canada, operated via email and a mailing list, wiki, live journal, a usenet newsgroup, skype, regular telephone, USPS and telepathy. (Okay, telepathy is a stretch, but Tina came close. )

The Centennial was a rousing success.  Over 700 people from multiple countries were present.  People from all walks of life…authors and astronauts, liberals and libertarians, semanticists and strippers, naval officers and hippies…for one brief moment we were all connected by our love and respect for one man…