Those two adjectives are about the last ones I would reach for to describe Stephen Downes.
But how long and drawn out is the “long tail” may be relative. But these are the words of the June 5, 2006 Time Magazine article on the Long-Tail phenomena– see the very last paragraph in Long Tail’s Tribe:
Take Stephen Downes, a senior officer of Canada’s National Research Council, whose arcane, overlooked blog is a classic long-tail story. “I live in the long tail,” Downes said at a blogging event in Vancouver last year. And not necessarily by choice. “[Bloggers] who are in the long tail would probably rather not be part of it,” he said. “They simply want to be read.” As an earlier catchphrase put it, if the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog
[emphasis added].
Arcane? Overlooked? Are you taking this as a badge of of rebel insignia, Stephen, or is it just more fodder for American journalism? And if you are “arcane, and overlooked”, then I am nano-scopic and indistinguishable form cosmic dust.
Lucky I always pack a nanoscope.
To quote the venerable Bill and Ted – “All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”
I read this as a long conversation on the long tail reduced to a one-liner captured from a tlk I gave more than a year ago. Nothing more.
Condensed talk- just add water?
I’m not sure, Stephen, but I think Alan may have been joking.