Sometimes I think the Long Tail is more of a curse than a blessing. It puts so many forks in every possible road that nobody is likely to follow the same route for long. Instead the freeways of common interest that existed prior to internet “communities”, there is a dense mesh of criss-crossing footpaths (so dense it might as well be a solid sheet of pavement) scattered with isolated obsessive nerds.

Do I want to go back to the constricted choices of the pre-internet days? Probably not. There are costs, though, and I feel them most acutely when I finish reading something difficult and fascinating and start flipping through my mental rolodex in search of someone to hash through it with me.