hans.gerwitz

About a decade after putting up my personal website, I’ve finally come up with a name for it.

Wither “Safely Ignored”? Jason and I had just finished trying to introduce some clients to the 21^st century and the whole Bubble 2.0 universe. This included the usual clue­train rambling about conversing with your customers rather than shouting at them, and a lesson on long tail markets. All part of the usual attempt to shake marketers of their old “push the message to the golden consumer” habits.

Afterwards, we engaged in a bit of catharsis among ourselves. Sure, there is money in the long tail and it’s never wise to ignore any person with an important message, regardless of how obscure they seem.

But not everyone has some­thing important to say. And the short tail of highly-​​influential people are still more likely to spread any given message. There are still a lot of people out there who have small audi­ences and nothing ground­breaking to add to the conver­sa­tional market… witness most Usenet posts from aol.com, most pages on Geocities, most posts on MySpace, and most little personal sites like this one. We may be safely ignored.