The Long Tail Blog

You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as © 2005, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein. Best viewed in Firefox.

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Well, I see I have a like-minded new media author in Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He wrote The Long Tail, which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book, published by Hyperion, in early 2006.

According to Mr. Anderson:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. Retrieved http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html on 6 December 2005.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail