From the monthly archives:
…as the old folks used to say.
Or maybe Eliot Spitzer’s just brain dead.
Am I the only one who thinks this Spitzer prostitute scandal is hilarious? I mean, a governor, former attorney general, and prosecutor, for crying out loud. Did he expect to get away with it forever? What was he thinking? Ah, there’s the rub. His brains had shifted to his…
Yeah, Spitzer’s a fallible human being like the rest of us, but come on!
What a dope.
(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Some corners of the blogosphere are buzzing about a blog post written by Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired magazine. The idea behind his post, “1,000 True Fans,” isn’t new, but it’s timely.
Background: The Long Tail
You’ve probably heard of the “long tail,” an idea popularized by Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief. Anderson argued in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More that the era of the “hit” or “blockbuster” was driven by artificial scarcity. Because of limited physical shelf space, air time, etc., only those products that sold well were given precious space and air time. Owners could not afford to stock items that sold only a few units a year.
The Internet has eliminated this artificial scarcity by opening up a seemingly infinite supply of niche goods and services to consumers. Technology has made producing, storing, and distributing products cheaper. At the head of the demand curve are best-selling products, or hits. In the long tail of the curve are non-hits, products that sell in smaller quantities. Anderson argued that the future of business is in the long tail.
Update (3/10): Amy, honey, please get off the drugs and just sing. Listen to her rendition of The Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Pure gold:
While I’ve been blogging about music and digital technology for the past couple of months, something interesting has been happening. More counties and states have been “cracking down” on illegal aliens and individuals and businesses that hire them.
The DC area has been flooded with illegal aliens, especially Northern Virginia. Prince William County has authorized its law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of people stopped even for minor traffic violations. (Source) Only the federal government can enforce immigration law (and deport people), but local governments are well within their rights to ask about immigration status and to report those who can’t or won’t prove it.
Frankly, this stinks of “too little, too late.” About 20 years too late. Millions upon millions of people are in this country illegally. While local ordinances like Prince William County’s are a necessary step to at least making a dent in the problem, illegal aliens will just pick up and move to “friendlier” counties. (MoCo MD is about to get a lesson in reaping and sowing.) Unless the country has a whole commits itself to securing the borders, stopping illegal “immigration,” and deporting people who don’t belong here, things won’t change.
Why should we expect illegal aliens to respect our laws when legal citizens don’t? It’s very frustrating, which is why I don’t blog about it often anymore. I want to read and write about topics that fuel my emerging fascination with the cultural impact of digital technology.
Illegal “immigration” isn’t one of those topics. 
Everybody’s heard of outsourcing, the fine art of subcontracting jobs and services to third parties.
Computer manufacturers like Dell outsource support services to countries like India, for example, because it’s cheaper than hiring Americans in America to do the job, despite the fact that it frustrates American customers to speak to people with thick accents they can barely understand.
I guess it’s pretty clear how I feel about Dell’s outsourcing practices.
But I digress. “Crowdsourcing” is a newly created word that conveys a similar idea in the context of Web 2.0. Wikipedia is crowdsourcing in its purest form. Founder Jimmy Wales asked the crowd – you, me, and everybody else – to help create an online encyclopedia. Content providers aren’t paid to add or to edit entries (as far as I know). They do it for, well, I don’t exactly know why they do it. They just do.
Also see “A journalist’s guide to crowdsourcing.”
By popular request: The music search engine I blogged about last month was Seeqpod, and the podcast was called The Chillcast.
*Scroll down for updates*
I’m having one of those “wish I’d expressed the idea first” moments.
I listen to a podcast called “Music Career Juice,” by Peter Spellman, owner of Music Business Solutions. In one episode, he talked about the return of music patronage, but with a modern twist.
Centuries ago, artists and musicians depended on churches, royal courts, or wealthy individuals to support their work. Over time, this elitist system waned, giving way to public concert halls where everybody else could pay to attend performances. Recorded music eventually lured people out of concert halls. It was no longer necessary to attend a live performance to hear music.
The digital age has created a new style of patronage system, says Spellman. Instead of receiving support from one exclusive patron, musicians can seek support from thousands of patron-fans. A company called SellaBand allows fans to be modern-day patrons.
Last week, I read a New York Times review of a memoir titled, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, the story of how a “part white, part Native American girl” survived as a foster child in a black home in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles.
According to the review, Margaret B. Jones told “in colorful, streetwise argot” of how she got a gun for her 13th birthday, learned how to cook crack, and saw friends killed and sent to prison. Jones made it out of the ‘hood, attending the University of Oregon on a scholarship.
I smelled a rat.
I’m generally suspicious of memoirs anyway (thanks, James Frey), but this one was stretching it. Now, I don’t know much about “gang culture,” but the story just didn’t ring true. Based on the book review, Jones’s tale seemed like warmed-over TV drama. It sounded to me like Jones was a white girl just pretending, living out some weird fantasy and using the “right” gang slang. (Homies? Do people still use that word?)
It turns out my suspicions were warranted. Today it was revealed that Margaret B. Jones, also known as Margaret Seltzer, made up the whole thing. She’s a white woman who grew up in Sherman Oaks with her biological family and graduated from a private Episcopal day school. Seltzer’s sister saw a New York Times story about baby sis and told the publisher she was a liar. From TimesOnline:
