Persistent presence: The long tail of the blog

Dr. David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and has contributed to NPR's All Things Considered and the Harvard Business Review, among many other publications. He publishes an influential technology newsletter and a daily weblog, called JOHO, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.

Bruce Taylor spoke with Dr. Weinberger about the "long tail" of weblogging. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Bruce Taylor: Can you give us a state of the blogging phenomenon today and what it signals as a sea change culturally?

David Weinberger: I think there are some really interesting and important things about weblogs that explain both why they've been taken up not with just great rapidity, but with such enormous enthusiasm, and why the media is paying a peculiar kind of attention to them.

Clay Shirky's power law curve shows that there are a relative handful of weblogs that are very highly read, and then there's an elbow and the curve flattens out. And most weblogs, the vast, vast, vast majority of them (the long tail, as Chris Anderson of Wired called it) are read by a few people. So the media looks at that curve and it says, "Aha! On the left-hand side where the big-time bloggers are, those are being read by hundreds of thousands of people. They're like media. Weblogs are like media!" Maybe they're competitive, maybe they're helpful to media, but they look like media to the media. And so then the media asks, well, the media-ish questions like, are they credible, are they edited. Those are media questions that have very little to do with the social phenomenon of weblogging that is the long tail of weblogging.

Taylor: So when you say the social phenomena is the long tail, what do you mean by that? What's it signalling as opposed to the hockey stick part of the curve?

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