The Long Tail

USA Today has published some excerpts from a recent Churchill Club panel on "What's ahead for [the] Net [and] digital entertainment". Here are my favorite quotes from the piece:

"I want TiVo for BitTorrent."
-- Roger McNamee

"The search tools that you use to find information, like Google and so on, don't generally work in video."
-- Michael Ramsay

"What's been wrong is that capital, the money, has always been tied to distribution. The reason my firm [Elevation Partners] exists is to change that, to put the capital with the content, with the creative people."
-- Roger McNamee

"People still hate computers and can barely figure out what we're talking about. I want to see my grandfather blog about the war or make a movie about his experiences in his life before it's too late. People are missing that boat. We're designing (technology) for the young males and the hard-core-technology demographic."
-- Blake Ross

That last one resonates especially well with me. My friend Loren recently said, "I think old people should blog." I agree; there's so much information, so many great stories locked up in the heads of people who've been through amazing stretches of history, it seems a shame that most of it will be lost simply because they didn't tell anyone who would record it.

On that note, if you haven't already, go read Art Spiegelman's MAUS, the only comic book graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize... so far. (Well, we can always hope, can't we?)