THE LONGTAIL OF LONG TAILS

The nice thing about running a blog for so long is you'll suddenly see an old entry re-discovered to enjoy another surge of readership, then surge again from the first re-discovery, and so on-- sort of like Chris Anderson's "long tail" model applied to blogging. That phenomena happened to me last week, when a Wired.com article on SL included a link to a 10 month old NWN entry on SL's furry subculture. The article was translated to what's apparently Wired.com's Japanese sister site, and from there, got picked up by a news aggregator for Japanese mobile phones. And just like that, thousands of Tokyo salarymen were suddenly reading about furries in Second Life on the bullet train.

The challenging thing about running a blog is picking up on this effect as it happens, and pointing readers to interesting conversations that unexpectedly start up in Comment threads from entries archived months ago. Sometimes rude, sometimes insightful, new readers to "Furry Like Me" are making their mark now-- read, join in, or both.