On the Trail of the Long Tail

Ideas come and ideas go. Sometimes they blaze hot and move fast
through media spaces like print, television, movies, and pop music. Or
they burst onto the Internet and travel the gossip hotline of the
blogosphere. When they acquire an effortless momentum of their own,
keen observers talk about href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/01.html">memeflow. Look,
look, it’s the next big thing: portals, page rank, peer-to-peer,
blogs, RSS, social software, tags. The beat goes on.

But a meme is more
than a passing fancy; it’s a self-replicating, widely adopted idea, an
idea with legs. Memes are of the moment, but their mission is to
evolve and endure.

The notion of memes borrows from the study of genes and genetic
evolution. Genes replicate, evolve, and spread biologically, while
memes are transmitted by human communication.

Over the last few months, you may have noticed the emergence of a
new meme: The Long Tail.

The href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail">long tail is a
familiar statistical truth: Small, everyday events are extremely
common, and big, momentous events (from huge blockbusters to great
catastrophes) are rarities that attract attention. This phenomenon
occurs in the natural world (there are many seismic blips and few
major earthquakes) and in the human realm. You can see it in the
distribution of wealth (there are very few billionaires) or population
(there are very few mega-cities) or popular search queries. Or, you
can see it in href="http://www.wordcount.org/main.php">WordCount, Jonathan
Harris’s interactive widget that displays the frequencies of word use
on the long tail of our language.

Back in October, Wired editor Chris Anderson authored a
thought-provoking and influential article titled href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html">The Long
Tail, and created a companion href="http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/">Long Tail blog,
which he describes as “a public diary on the way to a book.” In recent
years, scientists and statisticians have applied href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/ranking.html">Zipf’s
law, power laws, and Pareto distributions (the old 80/20) to
analyze and explore long-tail statistical phenomena on the Internet
and elsewhere. But Anderson’s riff takes it one step further.

Anderson explores how the Internet has changed the laws of
distribution and the rules of the market. The barriers of time and
geography are down, so is the cost of storage. The limitless shelf
space of online commerce and the availability of powerful search
engines and free or cheap publishing and communication tools (email,
groups, message boards, instant messenger, groups, and weblogs) create
new economic, social, and cultural opportunities and new freedom of
choice.

Suddenly, the mainstream is not the only stream. There’s room now
for babbling brooks, crooked creeks, and tributaries where trends pick
up momentum before they flow downstream. There’s an audience for many
voices –for the eclectic and the unpopular: little blogs and the
micro-communities that cluster round them, small-press books on href="http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-09472-4">oddball
topics, indie music, and href="http://www.netflix.com/AllGenresList?hnjr=8">arcane genre
movies for niche audiences. href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About">Wikipedians
edit thousands of articles on hundreds of thousands of topics. Breadth
of content thrives in environments that are collaborative,
distributed, bottom-up, and driven as much by passion as by
profit.

In a comment to one of Anderson’s blog posts soliciting href="http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/definitions_fin.html">definitions
for the Long Tail, an Amazon employee described the marketplace sea
change this way, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all
yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell
yesterday.“

It’s no longer necessary to focus myopically on bestsellers and
mass appeal, that’s the message. Devoted enthusiasts, href="http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/proameconomy/">professional
amateurs (pro-ams), and like-minded people find each other to
create communities of interest, spread influence, and share
recommendations. Thousands of RSS feeds bloom, and anyone, anywhere
can find them, mix them, and add them to href="http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/index.html">My
Yahoo!. On Yahoo!
Shopping (or Amazon or eBay), merchants add their goods to a
global catalog connecting consumers to any title, any product, any
brand. On Overture,
merchants buy keywords that drive business to an “abundance of
niches.”

There are plenty of pilgrims on the long tail trail. To travel this
road wisely and well, we all need long-tail tools that support
self-expression, personalized search, recommendations, and
trust. Anderson’s vision shows us a horizon as vast and limitless and
rich with possibility as the long tail itself.

What aspect of the Long Tail makes your tail wag? As always, we’d
love to hear your thoughts.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial