…Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in “cultural lockstepâ€?. And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be “those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches.”

Economist.com – Profiting from obscurity

…Certain behaviors are rewarded with links in weblogging; certain behaviors are not. It’s just that a certain class of weblogger (white, male, Western, educated, charismatic, pugnacious) has defined the ‘winning’ behavior in weblogging and what must be done to ‘earn’ a link, and this is what we need to change, if change it we can. We have to start valuing the poet, the teenage girl, the middle aged gardener, as much as we value the pundits, whether political or technological.

Bottom line: I want to be respected, I want to be heard, I want to be seen. I want to be visible, but I don’t want to be you.

But I digress, and badly. I’ve been chastized on this in the past, and how I am taking much of this personally. “But”?, I respond, blinking in puzzlement, “It is personal.”? Still, this was about blogrolls and whether to drop them or not, and how this could impact on the hotshot lists and will this end up making everything better – or, at least, more equal.

My short answer is: I don’t know.

Burningbird: Ms Pancake

Read it and think.

She may claim not to know, but she gives thought provoking points for keeping or removing them. Do blogrolls contribute to less voices being heard? Do they encourage the worst or best in us?

For the longest time I had my personal blogroll off the front page of the site. I’m now convinced to put it back there, along with my favorite links. I feel, however, that in some cases, blogrolls can help solidify and surface communities and are a very important tool to do so.

Related: rebecca blood reflecting on her idealism. via dangerousmeta.

From Ajaxian Blog coverage of the Ajax Summit. Which, turns out, was an invite-only event.

Read some bits on Milk Factory and how they have used blogs in their business over at Dogma Radio. via Roland Tanglao.

Brahahahaha: “Long-tail webloggers, Dave Rogers, Al Hawkins and Doug Miller today met for an emergent, flat, virtual conference using the multi-person audio chat facility built into Apple’s flat-world dominating Tiger OS.” read the rest.

There’s some truth to that buzzword-ridden sentence 🙂

Related: Chris Anderson reveals the origins of identifying “The Long Tail”.

Wired News: “Yahoo is introducing an online music subscription service that will enable consumers to download thousands of songs onto their portable MP3 players for $60 annually”.

IzPack looks like a great option to create installers for Java based aplications where the VM is already available.