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Just saw (via Joi Ito) that Chris Anderson is expanding his Wired Magazine article on “The Long Tail” into a book-length project. He’s set up a Typepad blog and writes of his topic: “It’s a rich seam. This is the place where I’m going to collect everything I can about it.” Looking through his entries thus far, it seems like he’s already doing more than that, using the blog not just as a container to hold found material, but as a public space in which to wrestle with ideas and engage in a dialogue with readers before writing the book. I’ve come across a few other examples of this sort of thing (most notably The Red Couch, where Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are pitching, researching and writing a book in as visible a way as possible), and it raises a few questions about The Way Books Are Written.

The book writing process is traditionally a long, messy, and solitary one, and writers are often loath to let anyone take a peek at how their particular sausages are made. Moreover, there’s a certain fearful ethic of privacy that many hold dear – if I spread my ideas everywhere, why would somebody want to buy the finished book? Worse, what if somebody steals my ideas?

I’m reminded of a conversation I had a year and a half ago at the 4S conference in Atlanta, in which I argued for the usefulness of a blog as a primary form of discourse, not simply a support for traditional scholarly forms like journal articles or manuscripts. The response was that those traditional forms are the currency of the scholarly world; quite literally, they buy you tangible things like jobs and funding, and if you don’t throw all your effort into creating those articles and manuscripts others will use your ideas to do so, usurping your reward. My counter-argument was that people can only take credit for your ideas if you haven’t laid claim to them first, and that blogs offer a much quicker and efficient way to “own” an idea than the slow, cumbersome publishing process. Moreover, you shift the focus from ideas as commodified entities in and of themselves to yourself as a thinker and writer who creates such ideas (in essence, a shift from a focus on goods to one on services), which resonates with some other ideas I’ve had.

This, in essence, is what I see Chris Anderson doing. His new “The Long Tail” blog isn’t merely ancillary to his eventual book; rather, it’s a distinct and separate first step in a project that is greater than any one book, his project to build and “own” an idea, with potential rewards that far surpass mere book sales.

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