Denham has notes from the long tail reading, pulling out some useful quotes and key points. He notes that this shows that the immaterial network has impacts on real things. (Absolutely, there is nothing immaterial about the internet when we get right down to it.) The idea of the long tail describes the structure of the Web, and the structure of a hypertext such as the academic essay I showed in the unsymposium.

Meanwhile Zoe curates a series of talks, presentations and graphics to sketch out the next two weeks of networked thinking. Jia Li discusses how the long tail provides a new business model. What is important here is how it more or less disrupts some models of retail business, as a simple example (it took all of about 4 years for the iTunes music store to become the world’s largest music retailer). Patrick wonders why there isn’t more of the physical media with attached cloud version, for the one price. Amazon have just announced this with books, buy a book and you get the electronic one too. A lot of music does this, though I think the more common model is to provide bonus material online…