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Girls Gone Wild and the Long Tail

I spent about 30 seconds on Thursday thinking about some legitimate journalistic reason to write about the visit of the Girls Gone Wild tour bus in Greensboro. I wanted to get GGW into a headline so that my page views would go up, thanks to the gazillions around the world Googling "Girls Gone Wild."

I didn't come up with anything immediately and quickly moved on to thinking about other things, such as where I was going to take the "kindergarten-style nap in the middle of the day" my horoscope recommended. Then, this morning, Herb Everett sent me this Slate podcast. It tells the effects of The Long Tail, the phenomenon described by Chris Anderson. Part of the discussion is how a 2004 Slate series titled "Dispatches from Girls Gone Wild" by Ariel Levy comes up fourth in a Google search for "girls gone wild." It's a journalistic article and probably not what the 1,700 people who call up the two-year-old series every day are looking for.

Well, there you go. Ain't nothing boring about Greensboro. Heck, the 2005 Greensboro mayor's race was even a category on Jeopardy last night. Seriously.

Oh, my apologies to the Google searchers.

Comments (3)

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Doug Clark said:

Greensboro's 2005 mayoral race was a Jeopardy category. Donald Duck was mentioned, but not Keith Holliday. Go figure.

Sue said:

Jeopardy? Oh, do tell. What was the answer? Or even the question...

John Robinson said:

They were questions based on some of the write-in candidates, Sue. Doug gets it right. And we're working on a short story about it for tomorrow.

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