Armbruster post

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Chris Armbruster's recent post to this list is thoughtful and 
worth studying, but there is a comment in it that seems off base 
to me:

"Yet, another part of the logic of the internet would seem to be 
that in scholarly communication "content holding" is a shrinking 
business model."

I'm afraid that when we invoke "the logic of the internet [sic]" 
we should think whose logic we are applying.  The Internet is 
maturing; it is going (to use a very American metaphor) from the 
Wild West to a fenced-in open range.  This is as to be expected, 
as the more nodes one connects to a network, the greater the 
primacy of a very small number of nodes.  This is why for all the 
many Internet companies started up in the Internet boom years, 
the online world is now dominated by a very small number: 
Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Google, and perhaps two or three 
others.  In economics terms, this is a matter network effects and 
the law of increasing terms, about the only two economic terms I 
routinely hear people use in Silicon Valley.  (Well, then there 
is IPO.)  This point was captured several years ago in an essay, 
which I cite repeatedly, by Clay Shirky on "Power Laws", which 
can be found at http://shirky.com.

The problem with "public good" arguments about the evolution of 
the Internet and scholarly communications is that they fly in the 
face of how large networks operate.  This is a game about the 
Short Head, not the Long Tail. The Short Head may not necessarily 
be dominated by commercial entities such as Elsevier and The 
Nature Publishing Group, but it will be dominated.

Joe Esposito