Reading: Cantata-140 (Philip K. Dick)

A couple of days before Christmas, I picked up a copy of one of the Philip K. Dick books not in my collection---Cantata-140. Another entertaining read!

Move ahead to the future with a black man running for President in a very over populated country. This was an interesting parallel to Barack Obama running for President. The solution to overcrowded was to move people to a parallel world. Of course there were a number of problems with this that had to be resolved that made it entertaining.

Tags: Books

Reading: The Long Tail

One of my Christmas gifts was The Long Tail. What is the long tail? It is the part of a smoothly-decaying curve that extends out to infinity. The tail is often time dependent, for example the number of people that see a hit movie. The tail can also compare the sales/usage of some items. For example, sales of albums by Garth Brooks, Allan Jackson, Kris Kristofferson, and Terry Bradshaw. Albums by both Terry Bradshaw and Kris Kristofferson would be on the right of the curve and significantly lower than sales of albums by Garth Brooks or Allan Jackson (if Garth Brooks releases a new album, it will sell many millions and will be at the head of the curve). Wonder how many people picked up copies of albums by Terry Bradshaw after Don Imus pulled out the covers and played music from them on his show?

Wikipedia has a very good description of the long tail. It's the short version. The book describes numerous examples of the long tail in various fields.

Bottom line: A business can make quite a bit of money selling many items in the long tail. This is part of Amazon's success---they can sell many obscure books/CDs/DVDs that a typical store does not have room to store.

Tags: Books

Web 2.0 in the Comics

Web 2.0 has become a joke in at least two of the major online geek comics--both BLaugh and User Friendly have both taken a turn at Web 2.0. Needless to say, I still don't think much of the use of the term Web 2.0.

Blogging

Since my normal daily work is finished (sort of) for the next three weeks or so, I thought I would post a few things that I've been saving for the blog:

• Twins
• Web 2.0
• Some development stuff
  

"Twins?" you say. We are going to be adding two more granddaughters to the family in late spring. We should be getting a more definitive picture (sonogram) in the near future.