A final, meta thought about The Long Tail. One of the excellent things about having a blog is that it lets me comment publicly on books that, for understandable reasons, I wouldn't be able to review in a newspaper or magazine. I'm not exactly social friends with Chris, but we've seen each other many times over the past few years at various events, and always enjoyed each other's company, and of course I'm a semi-regular contributor to his magazine. So I wouldn't feel comfortable writing a proper review of his book for, say, The Times Book Review. All of which is perfectly reasonable, except that friends of authors very often have interesting things to say about their friends' books. You don't necessarily have to trust them on the matter of whether or not you should buy the book in question; that's what the unbiased reviewers are for. But in shedding light on a book, or opening up new avenues for discussion, friends often have the most stimulating things to say. Yet before blogs came along, it was much more difficult to publish that kind of response. You could do it in small intellectual journals -- the Partisan Review crowd in the fifties were always commenting on each other's work. But if you wanted to make a short public comment on a friend's book, the primary vehicle you had was blurbing it on the back cover.

Comments

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I am reading How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web by James Gillies, Robert Cailliau ".

I has some very good early discriptions, of the world wide web. Or the vision that Berners Lee had for his original Next browser. It was quite different to the browser that we know today.

Making web pages in the original invention, was a thing taken for granted. The text editor was embedded in everything, on the web. So making your own contributions and such, was easy. Not like in the web we now have today.

Brian O' Hanlon.