Remixes & The Long Trail

Someone mailed me today to say that all blogs are remixes and packaged rehashes - I have enormous respect for him and his idea.While I see his point, I disagreed with it completely.The Long Tail is now Big Business. .Brian Dear writes,about the Long Trail. "Remix" is the theme of the Etech conference "Remix your hardware", "Remix your software", "Remix your web".The thing about remixing is that it makes something new out of something old. The act of remixing itself is nothing new. Remixing even in media is nothing new. Remixing in music in particular Mash-ups, remixes, all that stuff has been around for decades. The path hewn by the pioneers of remixing goes way back. It's a long trail.
The Long Trail is about the unevenly-distributed future. Stuff that's coming on your radar today came on someone else's radar days, or weeks, or months, or years, or decades, ago. Stuff being presented at the ETech conference is for the most part remixes of work done over the past years to decades. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is interesting when the conference is called "Emerging Technology". Thanks to blogs and a saturation of news and technology websites, one knows a lot of what's going on.
Pito Salas offers an excellent perspective with a counterview saying criticisms that new products getting launched are similar to doctoral thesis published long back miss the key point that,sometimes the kernel of an idea came from some other project. Often things are invented simultaneously in different domains. while certain products 'perfect' what was done already in a more primitive way - A'successful' product has a relatively small bit of 'science' or 'invention' or 'creativity' and a ton of great engineering, not to mention marketing, sales and business strategy. So there's nothing new under the sun, it's all just remixes. But that doesn't necessarily make it unimportant!
My Take: I totally agree - not everything need to be fresh creations, nor we should always overlook what currently exists - part of new growth shall be extensions of what exist and intersection of what currently exists would lead to newer ideas or products - so i think we should never underestimate to ability to build on what exists and by all means encourage looking over the shoulders of giants and the ability to build on others thoughts. Innovation would not come out of vaccum.