I was poking through the satellite radio stations on my Sirius radio when, whoa, Jason Calacanis’ voice was speaking at Maryam and I over Gillmor Gang. OK, that’s weird.
But then I switch over to NPR and, whoa, Chris Anderson is on talking about the Long Tail.
Hey, Chris, can you get the Wall Street Journal to say our book sucks too? ; )
All your media are belong to us. Or, there’s snakes in the ************* plane. Or something like that.
Anyway, there is a serious (er, Sirius) point to all this.
The online (er “new”) media is starting to leak into the mainstream “old” media.
What I think everyone is missing in the “Digg” version of the world is that we’ve built a farm system for media now that anyone can make media.
I’ve been listening to a LOT of “anyone media” and I can tell you that the Long Tail will NOT roar here. Most video blogs and podcasts just aren’t high enough quality to get a large audience. But, don’t write them off cause of that. The Long Tail does have a huge positive aspect:
The Long Tail is a stair system to the head!
Someone who does have talent can use it to walk up the curve from where only family and friends will watch all the way up to main stream media where millions are listening.
If you think Ze Frank is gonna remain in the Long Tail for very long your latte is a lot stronger than mine is today – by the way, don’t miss the announcement that he made in today’s show, he’s building social software to let you do things with people near you. We all know that people who don’t blink are gonna take over the media world.
Now, if you’re content to have your video blog stay at #1309 out of the 1,400 on vlogmap, then that’s cool. But some really have dreams of being at the head of the tail. Why? Cause that’s where the money is.
I learned that in the book business. The books who are in the top 5 on Amazon make many times more than books that hang out around #1,000 to #5,000 as we’ve been doing lately. And, being at #5,000 is a great honor cause there’s more than one million books on Amazon.
I’m looking for people who are walking up the Long Tail. Are you? Give me a call.
Oh, and unlike other community sites I believe deeply that you should get paid for the value you’re creating for the company that you’re adding to (Leo Laporte makes a good case for the other point of view). There are ways to hand out goodies equally to all members, but to say “I ain’t paying anyone” seems to me to be the kind of capitalist who just wants free materials and huge profits. It’s why I hated the time I heard all the CEOs say “user generated content” at the Google Zeitgeist conference last year since they were all seeing huge profit possibilities by having users do the work and they just collect the profits.
Anyway, we’re here in Silicon Valley and I’m overwhelmed with email. So, I’m gonna take a few days off of blogging and catch up with that.
Tag:
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok: 
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
Go to Scobleizer …
