One of the heartening things about going through old posts – for the mundane purposes of code fiddling – is seeing how after only a week or so most of them have a handful of new-format hits. This is down to the magical “related posts” function, which has turned out, quite by accident, to be the perfect way of packaging our massive stockhouse of old content. What used to be a grey, mildewed warehouse, drearily arranged into a blank list of months, has become a dusty attic full of treasure.
This is also an example of HOTT media/marketing theory the “long tail” – the bulk of content providers’ business coming from niche demand rather than mass demand (though as theorist Chris Anderson is keen to point out, this doesn’t mean the ‘end of the hit’). Describing FT as a ‘business’ is black comedy but it is true that our regular readers seem to be coming for the new stuff and staying for a drift through the back pages.