The Long Tail
This great article in last December's Wired explains a concept called "the long tail." Picture a line graph with a nice high peak at the far left, then the line swoops down and trails off, but doesn't hit the bottom. Then instead of a "top sellers" or "top rentals" graph line that ends, picture the tail going on nearly forever, just paralleling the bottom axis of the graph. That's the long tail. And there's money -- and a chance for service, for meeting a need -- in it. Netflix (sp?) exploits the long tail well because it can have a near-forver supply of all of those "obscure" things that make up the tail, things that lots of people do want, there are just not enough of them to warrent keeping the Bollywood flic or lesser anime.
Capital City weather: cloudy and 70s; forsythia and redbuds blooming
2 comments:
Isn't the library the ultimate end of the "long tail"? A repository for all the things that people want (to see, read, listen-to, or burn illegally to CD), but not enough to pay for them?
P.
Public libraries are at the high end of the graph: limited space and money means we keep only what's most popular, what's most likely to sell.
Research libraries (NYPublic, academic libraries) get closer.
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