There are plenty of articles abound, from those who are critic and dismount Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory, and even those who still believe there is something there. Hard economic facts have basically proven the theory wrong. The analysis so far doesn’t address the ‘why’, only the blinding truth of the real numbers – in my view, the problem is a universal lack of time.

Essentially, even though in the ‘Tail’ there may live hundreds of thousands or even millions of undiscovered songs (to take a practical example), it’s literally impossible that a human could listen to them all and make purchases based on the discoveries. Even if you categorize music in ‘country’ or ‘rock & roll’ groups, there is still a vast selection that you could never hope to listen to in its entirety. Another practical example: you would need seven solid days of non-stop listening to hear through an 8GB iPod’s memory (2000 songs), so how can you hope to listen through a catalog as huge as any of the online music stores? What happens is most people stay with the ‘most popular’, or ‘new releases’ categories, which are usually influenced by the market in order to push known artists or commercial hits to the top. It’s very unlikely that some kid from some unknown town in Idaho would make it to the ‘new releases’ section of iTunes.

Finally, I recommend reading the Long Tail with Tom Slee’s critical reader’s companion.

Still running on June’s 3.0 release – and boy, am I glad I didn’t upgrade to 4.0, mainly due to lack of time. In hindsight, it seems that there are so many problems with Parallels 4.0 that I’m going to try VMWare Fusion instead. The world looks slowly more perpendicular…

It seems weird, and I really don’t want to put everyone in the same bag, as I’ve had the pleasure to work with some really excellent and cool people from Germany, so I’m really curious as to why ALL (seriously, it really is all of them!) trolls who simply post stupid, senseless and made-to-piss-off comments on my posts come from there. There has also been some trouble in other places with regard to commenters or even admins that are from Germany. What is it with these people? Move to Spain, eat some paella and drink some sangria, I think you really need it! Feel free to troll this post too, I’ll be happy to delete your comments after having a good laugh.

It’s curious that over the last few weeks, and possibly due to the crisis mass-hysteria, the few LinkedIn groups I am a member of have turned into job posting boards, mainly for people looking for work, with headlines such as:

Are you looking for an experienced Content , Business Development or Product Manager ? Look no further.

What this is doing as a thread topic in a wireless-related discussion group escapes me, but I see it more and more in the daily email digest. There isn’t anything wrong with this per se, other than swaying the forums/groups off-topic.