I found myself on a myspace page with this:

My wife Amanda and I met through yoga, and we both teach at Yoga Toes Studio which we opened about 7 years ago in Northern California. I started combing Yoga and rap music about 5 years ago, and have been performing ever since.

This is the Long Tail at work. I don't do Yoga, don't live in Northern California, and I've never met this man. But he produces content - and I've now seen & heard some of that content.

How did it happen?

My RSS reading list includes Lawrence Lessig (Law Prof @ Stanford University), who linked to a video:

Catchy tune, well done graphics, and good interplay between the music and the audio snippets. It interested me enough that I followed the link to the site hosting the video: vimeo, followed a link there to the video creator's website and found the myspace link.

I didn't see this video on any "mass" media (NBC News, CBC or BBC - none of which I watch regularly). I didn't catch it on John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. I didn't read it off a news website.

I found the myspace page of a Yoga-owner-instructor-slash-rapper-slash-democratic-supporter (whose latest album includes tracks with titles like "Ganesh is Fresh," "Chakra Beatbox," and "Shanti-Peace Out"). My small slice of life in Canada to his in Northern California.

Notes & Links

• I post this mainly after reading Nick Carr's argument that the long tail is losing import: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/the_centripetal.php
  I don't disagree with his point that "big media" has hit the web in a big way (whether it was non-web media coming to the web or web media that has gotten big). BUT, I think there will always be more small players on the web than in traditional mediums. It's easier to get a following online than offline. Cost is lower, methods for subscription & following are higher, there are more online eyeballs looking for something new and marketing is better/easier.
• Apparently Wired magazine has a similarly-themed article this month (somehow I haven't seen it yet - odd) entitled "Kill your Blog": http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2008/10/blogging-is-alive-and-well.html
• HatTip: Lawrence Lessig's Blog: http://lessig.org/blog/2008/10/extremely_well_done.html
• I mentioned my reading list in my recent review of Google Reader: /2008/9/20/reviews-using-google-reader-to-manage-blogs--rss
• All posts tagged rss