The LongTailJewel conversation

UPDATE:

Dave points to a PodCast of us talking about this post.

Forgot to post a link to my flickr picture that started all this:

Last week I helped my buddy Dave the LifeKludger clarify and type up some thoughts for a post that he was having some difficulty with.  Dave was keen to follow up on a conversation  with Hugh Macleod over on gapingvoid.  We spent a bunch of time talking on the phone and decided to record a little podcast of our thinking out loud.  Later in the day (after Dave had re-listened) I did some typing into a writely document so Dave could copy/paste into his post.

I then went away for a nice weekend with no internet connectivity and things went a little crazy!

Now we have a bunch of conversations buzzing around similar themes that I will try to pull together here:

Kent's Second Opinion
Doc's Affirmative Traction
Rick Segal's Expanding the Walled Garden

Hugh's post hilights a three card trick based on 'shirky's law: "equality. fairness. opportunity. pick two'.  After some discussion in the comments that tended to slide toward semantics and definitions, Dave composed his post in an attempt to bring some fresh discussion around what we can do to help those without any voice to find one.  If opportunity means something like fame (or google-juice) in the blogosphere, then Dave and I would pick equality and fairness as our 'two'.

Kent's 'second opinion' idea is a good one (and hey, he took the time to listen to our little podcast) and it seems to resonate (or gain traction) with Doc Searls.  But both seem to have chosen 'opportunity' as one of their two 'cards' - the idea of digging deep into the long tail and bringing interesting (jewels?) to share with the 'rest of us'.  It is the 'rest of us' idea which is central to Ricks 'expanding the walled garden' post that runs counter to the 'equality and fairness' that Dave and I want to promote.

So, I guess my point is that if you have chosen equality and fairness as your two cards, come and join the conversation.  What are some smart things we can do to bring more people into the blogosphere, get them posting and make sure that they find at least one interested subscriber before they stop posting?

Fang - Mike Seyfang - LearnDog

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