if my lack of a good title is any indication, i was not a huge fan of this weeks unlecture. not sure what it was about it, it just wasn’t as good as the previous ones. and i’ve really been enjoying our symposiums but something this week just didn’t seem to flow and thus we resulted in a lack of interesting blog post title. i feel ashamed. hopefully this won’t happen again.

onto the unlecture itself. we began with discussing the difference between a scaled network and a scale-free network. as you can assume from those two titles, a scaled network is limited while a scale free is unlimited. take the roadways of Australia and the internet for example. Australia, being an island, only has a limited number of roads and links it can have inside it, mainly because cars cannot travel on water. but the internet can keep expanding forever. it has no boundaries. the difference with these two is also that of the centre. an example from the symposium was the melbourne metro lines. if something were to happen at flinders street station (which is pretty much the centre of the train network), all trains would stop. but if a site online crashes, nothing stops, everything can just move around it because of the limitless amount of other links that exist. however, contrary to this, i personally feel that if google broke down, even for a day or a few hours, not only would the internet stop but the the whole world would stop working. but that’s not necessarily because of the structure of the internet, its just because the whole world relies on google for pretty much everything.

the other interesting point with the scale free network was the elimination of shelf space. this is where the long tail comes into play because with the digitalisation of pretty much everything, all those items of clothes, songs, movies or tv shows that get lost in the long tail can be found and bought and enjoyed, all because the retailer doesn’t have to pay for shelf space online. now, for me, this is great, because i am not a lover of most things deemed “mainstream”. i mean, i’m not into ridiculously obscure things that you could not find in a shopping centre if you tried. i’m probably jsut a little bit down th long tail, not down in the pointy end. but for me it is still much easier to find what i like online, and far more abundant too, than if i were to go into a store looking for it. this for me is more relevant with the television so called “shelf-space” where, as adrian put it, channels can only broadcast 24 hours of tv a day and thus, what they broadcast must sell (or be seen). and my shows do not fall under the category of “must watch tv”. ever wondered why there is so much reality tv competition on tv? yeah, it’s crap. but it draws in those big numbers. forget the little shows *cough* supernatural *cough*, it’s all about the ratings. and thats the beauty of stuff like youtube (or, you know, those lovely streaming sites with every episode of every show ever) which has unlimited content because it is not restricted by hours or ratings or ads. in conclusion, the digitalisation of the world has drastically reduced the problem of product scarcity. there is just more out there.