"'the long tail'… what is that about???" – "aha, there you go, a new business phenomenon… and – WOW – here the author even dusts off my age old economics knowledge – now that is refreshing!.." –

great, great product. – attention through initial irritation. – storytelling to make the point. – and then the final loop back to the cover… FULL STOP – brilliant. all makes sense. ready for instant use. – AND – and this is important: i have learnt something and that something is more than anderson was telling me. – he brought me back to some long forgotten – and long trivialized – economical knowledge, challenged common belief, and made me look at the whole thing in a new light – almost with new eyes.

someone who does that for you – who expands your parameters in such a well digestible way – you will never forget.

the success of the book and the conversational omnipresence of the title tell us something about how good products are made and how excellent brand building is done.

anderson took me to another place, that i did not know i owned it already.

that is masterful.
that is engaging.

brilliantly done.

a whole round of applause!

The reason why Chris’ book was so revolutionary to so many corporations (many of whom to Chris’ point, are attempting to look at concepts such as the long tail and apply them) is that corporations have tended to only look at things in big mass clumps. Unless you were a clump of one million, a big bucket of mass media love, you didn’t factor into their business modeling, their mass marketing and in fact, their mass advertising.

The notion of “an infinite number of niche markets (p. 5)” changes that dynamic to consider something other than this notion of “clump marketing”.

However, to apply business and marketing theories to cultural theory is IMHO a little unfair and I don’t want to speak for anyone, but wasn’t what I took away from reading the Long Tail.

Obviously there are seismic trends that impact our society that cannot be denied and surely are the subjects of Phd’s and cultural studies majors (and probably a few post modernists) around the globe thereby making a universe only of one's problematic.

But I think in this particular case, that the direct tie between the Long Tail and what you were referring to Grant in your original post, may be mixing metaphors or not comparing apples to apples or some other lovely cliché. Either that, or I’m just missing something…