The Long Tail

Oh, and I forgot to mention this in that post:

Today I started reading The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, WIRED editor. (That despite the fact that I still haven't finished Star Wars: Dark Lord...) And it's really good. Very interesting. Neat graphs.

In essence, with e-retailers like iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, and eBay, if you put the product out there it will find a market, no matter how small, no matter how niche. And with little or no distribution costs and no shelf space to waste, in the past decade or so it's actually started to make economic sense. Rhapsody still regularly sells copies of it's 100,000th most popular song, and so on. The long tail gets very close to zero the farther out from the "hits" you go, but it never quite reaches zero, and you have so much quantity way out there in the tail that combined it can still make up a huge part of, say, Amazon's total revenues.

Very very interesting. And it applies to just about anything these days - Google, Netflix, you name it...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

Last day of being 16...

At 4:30 AM Thursday morning I will officially turn 17 years old. Whoah. That's... old.

And I still haven't gotten version 5.0 of my web site online. What kind of an almost-17-year-old am I!?

Fear not, it's coming soon... I'm getting there... it's already more complete than the current version, which is missing pathetically large chunks of good ol' version 3.0, so I've just got some finishing touches to do.

It'll be up by Thanksgiving at the latest! And this time I mean it... I think...

U.S. Population Reaches 300 Million!

As of mere seconds ago, the United States population has officially hit 300 million!!!

CONGRATULATIONS USA!

(For an analysis of the milestone, and a mildly depressing note that we may have [i]actually[/i] crossed 300 million months ago, see MSNBC.)

LOST (and autographed Path of Destruction)

Last night I finished the first season of Lost... kind of. I think I skipped more episodes than I saw. (That's what you get for watching with friends who've pretty much seen it all. :) ) Oh well, I still get the gist of it. And it's still really good.

"He just..... exploded."
"...yeah...."

Oh, and yesterday I walked into Barnes & Noble on the way home from school and happened to find an autographed Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction sitting there right on the shelf. It was my lucky day... :)