Out and about (18:38 pm)…

Tue Nov 22

This web thing is all very well, but will it help me get a seat on a busy train? Or do the washing up? You know, those daily annoyances. MySlave.com? ;0)

The Long Tail…

Tue Nov 22

“The Long Tail” is one of those phrases I’ve been hearing about for a long time, but never known exactly what it means. Of course, I’ve been able to pretty much figure out the meaning from the contexts I’ve found the phrase in, but never actually looked for a decent description.

Today I found this article on Wired.com by Chris Anderson, which may have started off the whole thing. Wow, what a great read, I highly recommend it. You may also like Chris’s long tail blog, which has made it instantly into my my Bloglines list.

The long tail, it appears is the mass of consumers who want access to things (music, films, books etc) that don’t make it onto the shelves of the major high street retailers. We all know that Madonnas latest album will sell loads of copies, and it will be forced down our throat at every opportunity. But how about Palaxy Tracks’s albums? Sure, there may only be 1000 people in the world who would buy a copy, but given low enough overheads, that’s 1000 sales you wouldn’t have otherwise got. The internet can make those overhead costs drop like a stone - giving you access to a worldwide audience instantly, and costing a fraction of the amount of a traditional bricks-and-mortar establishment.

While the opportunities for web developers/entrepeneurs are pretty obvious (my Ideas Book is bulging, in case anyone wants to pay me for some of them), it’s the fact that this is all happening so fast that’s really exciting: the mainstream is melting down.

Silly idea of the day…

Tue Nov 22

Matt Mullenweg may describe it as his silly idea of the day, but I think it’s a great idea. How about getting some site statistics to be emailed to you when you send an email with the subject “request” to “statistics@yoursite.com”?

It would be pretty easy to write an entire little command language that you could call from email (or from an SMS message?) to do anything you want on your site. Some examples:

switchon section november-competition
send last 50 information requests
publish version3
delete product id 32445

How’s about that, then? Clever, clever, clever.

The web on a wing and a prayer…

Tue Nov 22

Seeing as the Opera browser is now available for free, I was wondering how they are going to make money. I know that they are already in discussions with various mobile phone manufacturers about making Opera the browsing software for phones, but now it appears they are taking to the skies.

What a great idea. After all, in-flight movies are OK for some, but the ability to check emails, browse the web and even manage websites would be fantastic for loads of people*. Especially through a standards-compliant browser like Opera.

* Presuming loads of people are like me. Which is, frankly, a scary thought.

Congratulations, Liz and Jason…

Mon Nov 21

The great Jason Santa Maria and his sweetheart got married last month. Jason, being That Way Inclined, wrote a website about it. There’s an idea…