Seeing beyond the tail to the dog

<![CDATA[Tim Bray writes:

The Long Tail is one the few things about the blogosphere that seems new. Here’s an obvious question: is there any structure lurking in that Long Tail, or is it just an undifferentiated skinny pointy blob? The answer starts here.

I think that the Long Tail is actually a tangled mess of microcommunities and subcultures and tribes and hobbies and fanatics. Julie Leung writes about the community of mommie-bloggers that the New York Times wrote up as a big deal, but it’s really a big deal as an example of the structures out there in the tail.

Following up on this posting in Browse, I think the tail is a topology, not a curve. I’ve been writing about this for a long time, but am not much of a sloganeer, nor have I ever wanted to be, but there is a long answer to the question of whether the long tail of the power law curve is even disorganized and need of organizing. That’s a business question, not a matter of the nature of the long tail. It’s a topology with rolling hills and valleys of influence, where erosion and time take tolls on a site’s ranking. It’s 3D, not 2D. It’s a badlands we can get lost in, especially if we rely on a badly conceived map, yet we’re at the same stage in understanding that territory as in the time of the Catalan Atlas.
]]>