More on this to come, but I hereby offer up the neologism, “blogtailing,” and its related usage, “Blogtailer.”
This word sort of sums up the idea I’ve been pounding for a while now: that sooner rather than later the blogger will be able to become a little retailer; selling products that they blog about rather than giving them away (particularly in the case of MP3 blogs). The blogtailer would keep a percentage of the transaction, with the remainder being divided between the content owner(s). Certainly, infrastructure is needed to perform the back-end functions, but we’re getting darn close on this - uh…The Cloud.
This dovetails with Hugh MacLeod’s concept of Global Micro Brands that I’ve been consumed with recently.
I like the term blogtailing not only because of its play on retailing, but also because it incorporates the word “tail” (blogtailing). While there has (somewhat correctly) been a bunch of recent push-back with regards to the whole idea of the Long Tail, certainly the idea has merit, and certainly more and more people are making their wares available to a large body of potential customers.[*]
In any case, I give you… Blogtailing.
We shall see. I’ll know it has succeeded when I type the word “blogtailing” and my spell checker doesn’t underline it in red.
______________
[*]
I think what caused at least some of the backlash around the Long Tail (aside from the fact that you basically could have gotten the gist of the concept from reading the freely available Wired blog post rather than buying the book) is that people thought that just because there was a potentially unlimited demand curve, that you wouldn’t have to market whatever it was that was resting upon the hinter regions of said Tail. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth; you have to market harder. It’s just that now, with the ability to not be bogged down by physical inventory, if you do market successfully, you might reach a wide audience.
