the great gray beast

Clive Barker best described February as the great gray beast. A monstrous month where the pleasures of Christmas were dimming from memory but the promise of summer was so remote as to be mythical. February ate me up and spit me back out somewhere towards the end of March.

If you have also been eaten by the great gray beast, you may have missed some interesting ideas that are floating about and about to break through to the general public conciousness.

The first is podcasting. Podcasting is attaching a feed to an audio file, so that interested listners can retrieve new audio files whenever they are ready. Generally this is being applied in a 'talk radio' manner - discussion of specific topics, current events or one on one interviews. I've also seen it applied to music and to 'theatre of the mind' type presentations. Personally, I dislike the name as it unduly ties the concept to a specific product - but I think the concept is about to soar in a major way. Expect to hear a lot about podcasting in months to come - especially once the traditional media becomes wary of it as they have of bloggers.

The next is the Long Tail. The Long Tail was an article by Wired Magazine's editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, outlining how the internet has and can change the economics of supply and demand. A large chain bookstore would typically stock over 100,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon.com's sales stem from books outside of it's top 100,000. Lots of little niche sales more than match the sales of the hits. Chris is exploring the implications and reach of this concept in his blog, whilst penning a book on the subject. In the meanwhile, expect to hear the term start cropping up in board rooms with greater frequency.