Sturgeon’s law is a simple observation that “ninety percent of everything is crap”. What he is getting at is that in any media form that only ten percent of stuff created is valuable or holds substance. We the “ninety percent of crap” out there its becoming harder to find the ten percent that we are looking for. Filters as mentioned in class are a tool use to sift out only the “good stuff” or the important stuff we are trying to find. The internet has tons of filters that help narrow or search for content with key words. Also tags on blogs and various social media sites help in the process. For example if wanted to search for best nikon lens in google. The search engine finds articles and websites and highlights the key works BEST, NIKON, LENS. People creating the content on the web usually try to factor in the keys words so people can stumble upon there content and not remain in the 90%.
I am working on a blog for another class that is based on my thesis work, and I’ve just started making good use of tags and key words within my blog. Something else we haven’t talked about before in class is the use of hashtags on Twitter. I think this is similar in that people can filter out conversations in order to read content that is important to them. For instance, I use the hashtag #qrcodes in my tweets about QR codes. Because of this, I was just recently featured in The QR Today user-created QR code newspaper online. I think as long as people take advantage of these filters online, it can work in nearly everyone’s favor.
I think that probably if something is considered to be in the “90%”, that it’s not going to eventually be in the “10%.” An artist might go from doing amateur “90%” work to doing more professional and recognizable “10%” work, but that also all depends on the viewers and what they like. Like stated in my blog, what might be crap to one person could go be gold to another. Artists go from the long tail to the short tail, or vice versa.