Monday, March 30, 2009

Lecture 12: "I am the Long Tail" by Kieren Boddy

I am the long tail, apparently. I guess that it's true, in some respect, that I am in the sense that I am an individual with individual needs and the only way to fulfill them without much effort is through providers who disseminated through the long tail.

I still use "mass dissemination" medium to obtain goods and services i.e. Tesco (offline) and Waterstones (offline), but niche goods are obtained through digital medium. These niche "long tail" sources, through the medium of the Internet are as follows:
- News: BBC News Online, Fox News, Guardian Online News (Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell (I get around going to the Guardian website by using the relevant RSS feed and adding them to my http://zeusthunderbolt.soup.io Tumbler website)),also comidey news such as The Onion for "news"/entertainment
- Movies: DVD's, primarily bought from thrift stores, though quite a lot of my film and television series collections are from online sources, many of which have not been dubbed or translated in English yet.
- Games: Bought offline, again at thrift stores, but there are a few which are niche which are from online only sources, such as MMORPG game EVE Online, STEAM games such as Half-Life 2 etc, and World of Warcraft.
- Groceries: N/A, I do all my grocery shopping offline
- travel: online timetables, but I usually go in person to buy tickets as I do not trust some websites that I have never used before.
- Information: as with News, I get information from the BBC Website. I also get it from niche blogs such as BoingBoing (good articles from Cory Doctorow), Webcomics, some newspaper websites and from social media websites such as facebook, information about friends and events and such.

How this affects me? Well, it affects me by making me used to having such a slue of information and it makes me frustrated when I do not have access to the internet and these online sources.

Link: http://www.eveonline.com
Image:


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