Chris Anderson is author of The Long Tail, one of the more revelatory analyses of the impact of new information technologies on our culture. The essential idea is that stuff that exists several standard deviations from the mean of any useful bell curve is forced out of existence by pre-Information Age dynamics. For example, stuff that’s much better than the average, but priced higher, is forced off of store shelves by standard bricks-and-morter distribution dynamics (as is stuff that’s pretty much rotten but cheap, as well as stuff that appeals to small segments of the overall marketplace.) But in an information age, when “clicks-and-morter” distribution channels evolve, those products can sell in numbers that are adequate to keep their suppliers solvent.
In his latest post on Long Tail dynamics, Chris addresses the common charge that “the Long Tail is full of crap.” Indeed it is, agrees Chris. But the long tail is a diamond mine, not a gravel pit, and the crap is just something we have to sift through. And the tools we have, e.g. information filters, properly applied, allow us to do just that.
On a store shelf or in any other limited means of distribution, the ratio of good to bad matters because it’s a zero sum game. Space for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures the other. If there are ten crappy toys for each good one in the aisle, you’ll think poorly of the toy store and be discouraged from browsing. Likewise it’s no fun to flip through bin after bin of CDs if you haven’t heard of any of them.
But where you have unlimited shelf space, it’s an infinite sum game. The billions of crappy web pages about whatever are not a problem in the way that billions of crappy CDs on the Tower Records shelves would be. Inventory is “non-rivalrous” and the ratio of good to bad is simply a signal-to-noise problem, solvable with information tools.
Chris Anderson is always insightful and interesting. He’s a good writer, and this is a good post. When I first read about the Long Tail, I had a “yeah, yeah” response. But the more I consider the notion, and the more often I catch Chris’s posts, the more I realize that this concept is much more than marketing hype. Chris is onto something that has applicability to all sorts of essential human enterprises—politics, journalism, art and entertainment, religion, as well as marketing. It’s real, and it’s important, and understanding it has changed my perception of all sorts of things, from my Macintosh to the just-concluded deal to save the filibuster.
BTW, the new post also contains a few charts that are models of informational utility.
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