10th Symposium… Essay and Long tail.

Can’t believe its week 10 already, just two more week to go!

This week symposium Adrian and the rest of the tutor discussed how to make the final essay. They advised us to do in the reverse cone instead of the usual cone.

Normally we use the ‘normal cone’ where we started the essay broadly and as we reach the end/conclusion it get narrower and deeper. But this time, Adrian suggested the other way around, which is starting broadly and reaching a broader ending. He gave an example of ‘Why do you cycle through the side of the river?’ which resulting a lot of answers. Betty gave the suggestion to use footnote.

Enough of that, the real symposium is about the long tail from the reading. In statistic, the distribution of sales not all the same, there are high sales part which we called the heads and the low distribution sales which we call the long tail as the  numbers are a lot. In the symposium it is discussed that hypertext is like the long tail – only few can link to the important bits but there are many links that leads to other links which is not to important. Basically our web culture is ‘destroying’ the market theory, why?  Because in the web everything is equal, the fee for the shelves between the high hits (head)  and low hits (long tail)  is the same with each other. The network allow people to ‘live’ forever, you don’t have to live in the ‘head’ area to survive, you can be in the bottom and wait till someday someone will recognize your work. One example to explain this is the iTunes, they allow everyone to have same shelves.