Talk:Long tail/Archives/2012

The Long Tail, Long Tail, or Long tail?
I'm pretty sure this article should move, as the initial article doesn't pass the "capitalised in running text" test, nor does it seem to be specifically the name of a work, but I'm in two minds as to where. Is the "proper noun" sense really primary? I'd be inclined to believe it just had more media coverage, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Alai 23:43, 27 May 2005 (UTC)


 * A case could be made for all three. The article is a composite of different meanings. The proper noun usage is the most well know in the wider public sphere. Stbalbach 01:17, 28 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Six years later the Long Tail is the title and Long tail is a disambiguation page. That seems right to me ... --P64 (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Merge tag
That should not be done. "The Long Tail" as a proper noun with capital letters as first popularized by Chris Anderson goes way beyond any statistical definition. If Chris had called it "The Long Toenail" would you still suggest merger? The fact they have the same name doesnt mean they should be in the same article, they are different concepts. Stbalbach 15:41, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Please don't merge the two, they're completely different concepts. People suggesting merging should probably understand what the two means before suggesting something this absurd!

Fillums
Would the post-mortal success of films such as "John Carpenter's The Thing", "It's a Wonderful Life", "Night of the Living Dead" and so forth be a good example of a "long tail"? "Donnie Darko", there's another one. I suppose it would only count in a single form of market, i.e. video distribution cannot be a "long tail" for cinematic exhibition, because they are different markets entirely. Perhaps a better example would be films which open poorly in several cinemas but then play continual packed houses in one or two cinemas, such as "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" or... "The Exorcist", in Britain, when it was banned on video. -Ashley Pomeroy 14:05, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

English word frequency
The numbers that appear in "Such distributions are surprisingly common. In standard English, the word the..." does not look correct. The link that is given does not contain such information (frequencies) and many other links contain completely different numbers. Example: http://www.duboislc.org/EducationWatch/First100Words.html

MeirM 22:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

This Article May Not Fit in the Long Tail
Ironically, this was one of the top results for articles when I did the google search "From wikipedia, the free encyclpedia" in quotes with "site:wikipedia.org" -- which turns up english articles with high ranking in the google page indexes. So the quote from this article "while this page might be on the far right in the yellow," probably doesn't apply. Or does it? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.19.220.226 (talk • contribs).


 * Interesting, never heard of that Google trick to find a way to rank Wikipedia articles. Yeah, ironically the book or the meme in general is not in the long tail either. -- Stbalbach 14:30, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Pizza, Television and The Long Tail
What type of Pizza is usually on sale? Pepperoni. Is pepperoni usually on sale because it's the most popular, or is it the most popular because it's usually on sale? What about all the other pizza toppings? Are they collectively a massive Long Tail in sales?

Television networks like to cater to a very narrow range of ages and what types of shows the TV ratings tell them that narrow range likes. But they're missing the big market in the highly differentiated Long Tail.

One only needs to compare the postings on the official FOX board for Firefly VS their board for The X Files. The number of posts on the Firefly board nearly equalled the total number of posts on The X Files board (which had been available for several years) before Firefly was cancelled.

Some data mining would've provided to FOX some very good statistical information on exactly who was watching Firefly. Instead, FOX chose to use the Nielsen Media Research data, which at that time (except during 'sweeps') polled only between 10,000 and 15,000 housholds each week, and did not include data from other sources such as TiVo (I've read that NMR recently cut a deal with TiVo for their data) which reported that Firefly was at times the #1 show put on Season Pass to record every episode.

Ignoring the data at the ends of a bell curve graph can be ignoring the largest portion of the market for your company. Focussing only on the big lump in the middle is easy, but there's a lot of 'fine gold' to be found in The Long Tail!

Killing a product that doesn't immediately show a large interest from the narrow range is a dumb move. Instead, figure out how to shift the focus to the people who are buying it.

Even worse is killing a product that shows a large interest, but not in the market segment you targeted. An example is the Nickelodeon animated TV series "Invader Zim". The target was pre-teen children but the largest viewer group was older teens and adults. (The exact market other networks love to have such response from.) Instead of taking advantage of that by moving the show to a timeslot even better for the audience it attracted, Nickelodeon cancelled it. Chasing the tail then cutting it off when you find out that the tail doesn't care but the body likes your product and wants more is just as dumb as ignoring the tail completely. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.136.145.205 (talk • contribs).


 * Pizza sounds like a good field study. -- Stbalbach 15:35, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Save the Long Tail
Is there some way to incorporate into this article something about the proposed changes to the internet by big media companies who want to charge extra for websites to use "their pipes"? The whole thing regarding net neutrality...

Cuz the long tail will be almost totally curtailed if net neutrality is not maintained.

What do people think? I know some nit-pickers are going to say this is opinion, but in reality I think it is fact that the long tail will not be possible since the cost of inventory, the cost of having a website that people can actually view in a reasonable period of time will be higher than what would allow for the long tail.

209.162.21.173 22:30, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

oops, forgot to sign in. this was my post Misterman8 22:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If you can source it and attribute who talked about it. It's probably not the right article to go into much detail, network neutrality would be the better place to expand on it. -- Stbalbach 15:15, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Long tail and Service Industry
It is generally believed that it is better to have a few large clients than many small clients. In services such as consultancy, which are dependent on individual expertise is the Long Tail a workable proposition? It might be correct if the marketing and servicing overheads are the same regardless of the size of a client. However, what is the experience in the real life?

Pramodkhambete 05:37, 21 December 2006 (UTC)Pramod

Wikipedia as an example
While it's plausible that wikipedia benefits from the long tail, are there any reliable sources stating this? Andjam 08:24, 27 December 2006 (UTC)


 * -- Stbalbach 16:31, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Also on this note, forgive me if it's a settled issue, but I got a bit of a bad taste reading the Encyclopedia Britannica comparison in this article ("In the same sense, the user-edited Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low-popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.[5]"). Even if it is true, it sounds a bit like Wikipedia tooting its own horn, especially considering the back-and-forth animus this site has with ye olde Brittain. Either way, imo it really doesn't add enough insight to justify having it as a separate example. What do others think? Kenn 14:53, 07 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Three complaints (incl. me) and no defenders in 6 months. I'm removing it, since it's a self-reference based on Alexa research that could easily be avoided. -- nae'blis 21:22, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Who coined "the Long Tail"?
I find a 2004 attribution for "coining" the phrase hard to believe. The reference only proves that he claims to have coined it... It was in use well before this... didn't this guy write the first book on it rather than coin it? --BozMo talk 15:46, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Perhaps "popularized" would be better than coined? --BozMo talk 16:15, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree in part. The Pareto/Bradford distribution is decades old, and the tail has been referred to as a long one many times, I'm sure.  (See, e.g., Marcia Bates' "After the Dot-Bomb" in First Monday, 2002: "In ordinary language, Bradford distributions do not have the conventional bulge in the middle, but instead have very long tails.")  That being said, it's application as a specific economic advantage/approach of online businesses (and with Capital Letters) is seemingly new to Chris Anderson.  I suggest a revision to separate the history of the term from its meaning (currently muddled together places like the "Chris Anderson and Clay Shirky" section) and to include more references to such phrasing prior to those two.  I may do it myself this weekend when I have some down time, but I wouldn't bet on it.  --CrazyDreamer (talk) 13:12, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree that "coined the phrase" is hard to prove. I have worked in the UK Finance Sector ... since before the internet existed !!! ... and I find the use of Long Tail in current 'popular' culture to mean predominantly 'e-commerce based' as misleading, although I recognise the advances in popularisation of the topic that Anderson et al have made. Mandelbrot and many others have been associated with 'fat', 'long', 'heavy' and 'right' tails since the 50s and 60s, hence my inclusion of a few new references at the beginning of the introduction. I hope that my links also improves the cross-referencing of other Wikipedia articles which will allow the Reader to expore further and develop a more balanced perspective.--RonaldDrewman (talk) 13:10, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Long tail in XYZ Industry
Looks like someone did a cut-paste of a health care industry analysis. It's not really encyclopedic or written appropriate for Wikipedia (and its source and origins unknown). It's also not clear that we want to get into lengthy discussions of the long tail on a industry specific basis, the long tail applies everywhere. This material would be better as an external link. -- Stbalbach 02:03, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Also reverted the long tail and the airline industry. This is an encyclopedia article not a book or market research report. The long tail can be applied to 100s of industries. -- Stbalbach 00:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I just reverted a similar section on Nonprofits. Not only id it seem unencyclopedic, but the sources provided were not specific enough to find the supporting mterial and were from websites that I do not think can be considered reliable. -- Siobhan Hansa 14:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Reverted a section on "Capital Equipment Industries". -- Stbalbach 23:36, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Anderson was the first one to apply the term in this way. Usually it refers to a statistical distribution. But these days it has become a mainstream term in explaining a major benefit of the internet and Anderson is credited with this. It was a fascinating book too! You should read it. It is exactly what the Wikipedia is all about (and Netflix and Amazon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Susanthedefender (talk • contribs) 19:58, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Communications theories... urgent!!!
with application to various communication theories, to support whether you agree that Internet articles have limited effects on the audience. Explain. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 60.53.206.142 (talk) 07:00, 11 April 2007 (UTC).

Blog/Coined
Two issues here: -- Stbalbach 19:41, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) The blog. Internet sites are OK when they are a self published site by a well known and published author. The blog is by Chris, about Chris, and the citation is being used to reference something Chris said about himself on his own site. The internet source rule is to prevent random people from being authoritative "just because its on the Internet". In the case of Chris's blog, these are his own words and they are online and verifiable. The only reason to consider it unreliable would be if there was some doubt that it really was Chris's blog, that is was someone else faking being Chris, which is obviously not the case here.
 * 2) Primary source. Primary sources are allowed on Wikipedia so long as they are "descriptive claims" that can be checked. This is the case (now). It is simply a descriptive claim of what Chris said, and phrased as such, and is verifiable.
 * Someone saying -whether on a blog or in a well respected book- that they are the person who coined a term can not be considered a reliable source for supporting who actually coined the term. There's far too much conflict of interest involved.  You need a neutral source (preferably one who is an expert in etymology) to support such an assertion.  If this is the only reference we have, the sentence needs to be rephrased along the lines of "There is some debate over who first coined the term The Long Tail, though Chris Anderson has taken credit for it." At the moment the article reads like we accept and support his interpretation. -- Siobhan Hansa 22:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The article says:
 * The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was, according to Chris Anderson, first coined[2] by himself.
 * There is no debate or controversy about this statement of fact. -- Stbalbach 14:43, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Since that sentence is all the article says about where the phrase comes from it doesn't give appropriate weight to other opinions. Without independent, reliable sources such a statement should not go unchallenged.  By changing the wording to be less accepting we avoid the promotion of only one point of view. -- Siobhan Hansa 01:20, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There are no other opinions. There is no controversy. Creating controversy where none exists is POV. -- Stbalbach 15:20, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Let's not hide history
The ref to the demand curve has Anderson making the claim in his own words. The article can leave the derivation completely mysterious, by refusing to note that the tail of a demand curve cannot capture the phenomenon in question. But the original derivation was what it was. —71.159.228.238 04:42, 14 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not clear what your getting at. If your saying he stole the concept, well, about 5 different people have said that Chris stole the idea and claim to be the true/original long tail. There may be some truth to it on various levels, but have you read his book? Chris aggregated many ideas at different levels, its more subtle and complex than just a demand curve. -- Stbalbach 04:49, 14 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It is not Anderson who is hiding history here. It is you.  The passage that you keep censoring has nothing to do with theft.  It has to do with confusion — Anderson ' s confusion about the nature of demand curves.  Demand curves represent fungible goods and services; the items in their tails are exactly same as the items everywhere else in the curve.  Whatever merit Anderson's ideas do or don't have, they began in misunderstanding on his part. —75.35.102.170 05:58, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Confusing
In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off."

To the lay person, the above wording (my emphasis) implies that there is a time component to the distribution, i.e. the horizontal axis represents time, which from reading the rest of the article is obviously not the case. Is there any way this could be clarified? 82.113.178.1 14:26, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Long tail, collective intelligence
There are some important terminologies related to web 2.0: Moreover, I now find the interesting rule such that the wider known word, the less correctiness in web 2.0, which is totally different from our knowledge up to now. This is also one of the proof that the long tail rule can be right in some recent areas.
 * Long tail
 * Cllective intelligence

JSK 00:12, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

I want explanation before history
I wonder why the article begins by story: "a phrase first coined by ... in the magazine...". Probably 90% of Wikipedia readers want definition and explanation before any "details".

Here's the structure I would expect here:

1. The Long Tail describes...

2. It was first coined by...

3. Now, if you consider the phrase is so recent that readers must be warned it was use by one person in a specific magazine, just add something like "the phrase doesn't satisfy(...) and is critized by (...)".

I really want to know what is The Long Tail quickly. I would tape "define:long tail" in Google if history comes first in Wikipedia.

''I'm a little tough in this comment, but I haven't edited many articles in WP and I don't want to change the article without your agreement. Perhaps I'm wrong, but please, let me know!'' Jérôme Flipo (talk) 03:10, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

niche?
"to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities."

Hang on, that's not niche, that's anti-niche!! A niche marketing strategy, as I understand it, goes for a tightly defined set of customers, i.e. the top x% where x is a small number. Short Head rather than Long Tail.

I suggest: to describe the relatively unusual strategy of businesses ...

Matt Whyndham (talk) 12:52, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

here is an article debunking the Long Tail
Chopping the Long Tail down to size, Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 7 Nov 2008

76.191.202.13 (talk) 08:07, 10 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I added it in the criticism section. PAR (talk) 09:19, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Statistical meaning
My colleague and I, both with a strong background in statistics, find the paragraph As a rule of thumb, for such population distributions the majority of occurrences (more than half, and where the Pareto principle applies, 80%) are accounted for by the first 20% of items in the distribution. What is unusual about a long-tailed distribution is that the most frequently-occurring 20% of items represent less than 50% of occurrences; or in other words, the least-frequently-occurring 80% of items are more important as a proportion of the total population. to be contradicting itself. Are we wrong? Rabend (talk) 11:15, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Would it be possible to add an actual definition of "long tail"? For many, the verbal explanations via lots of examples will be confusing (I found it utterly unhelpful because I was actually interested in the precise definition). Something like: The distribution of a number X (of occurences, for example) is long-tailed if P(X >= x+y | X >= y ) --> 1 for x--> infinity.

If a long-tailed random variable exceeds some value x, it is likely that it exceeds an even larger value x+y as well (words cited from Bert Zwart, Rare Events)."

Right now, the article is exclusively about applications in marketing. It would be nice to make the article more inclusive so that readers outside of marketing can understand it and benefit from it as well.

Stephan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.211.139.212 (talk) 22:43, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Edit of criticism
Edit - removal of - A 2009 study identifies the consolidation of usage of the Web to a small number of top websites.

The Long Tail is based on the premiss that

- the least-frequently-occurring 80% of items are more important as a proportion of the total population.-

and

-the long tail, represented here by the portion of the curve to the right of the 20th percentile — can become the largest area under the line.-

This is based in a small number of studies of a small area of the internet. Yet the tone of the article suggests that this has general application to the Web. A point that is not refuted or criticized in the article. I wished to critique this point of general application by pointing out that a meta-study of the usage of the web finds that this is not so. May this revision be changed back in order to add balance to the article.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.169.73.141 (talk) 02:06, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi Jamie

Last week I decided to contribute to wikipedia in relation to a subject matter on which I have qualifications, experience and expertise. You have edited the comments on the basis that they are spam, without any reference or comment on this discussion page.

You have not even replied to the justification for the entry on this articles discussion page, as above.

Make we engage in debate on the matter. In order to engage in scientific debate may I ask what are your qualifications, your experience and your area of expertise. I note that none are mentioned on your user page.

In particular do you have qualifications and expertise in statistics, economics, economic history or management sciences. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.59.92.166 (talk) 13:41, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

References cleanup
This article previously had a long list of references that were tagged as needing to be incorporated as inline citations. Where possible, I did this (and deleted irrelevant references). Note that some references were already present in the article text, but the wikimarkup for them was wrong (so I corrected these). --Boxplot (talk) 17:16, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

rename
I think this article should be moved to 'long tail' and the disambiguation page moved to 'long tail (disambiguation)'. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:45, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

why the long tail graph is not a 3d graph?
You have the amount or % of the different products being sold. You have the amount of % of population. And the amount or % of products sold. This would be 3 variables, and you would need a 3d graph — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.78.194.18 (talk) 20:40, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Long Tail proper noun
(continued from section 2)

I think the article should be rearranged to focus on the Long Tail in commercial thought, business economics, etc. That is the primary theme of the article, whence the first and last paragraphs of the lead section, and the first section, give undue emphasis to the statistics, probability, mathematics, etc.

I have added {WP Business} banner. --P64 (talk) 20:42, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved to Long tail and Long tail moved to Long tail (disambiguation) Mike Cline (talk) 13:51, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Long Tail → Long tail –

Given WP:MOSCAPS ("Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization") and WP:TITLE, the lower-case version (which appears at the opening) should be used in the title. There seems no reason to retain the caps, as for the titles of articles on other stats and maths phenomena. Tony  (talk)  09:29, 11 August 2012 (UTC) "Chris Anderson, in his best-selling book, The Long Tail, adopted the term "the long tail" to describe (...)"
 * Support, absolutely no reason for caps. If this was an article about the book, it would be The Long Tail, but it is an article about the phenomenon described by the book (and named by it, or at least, the name was widely popularized by the book).  The article should be edited to use lowercase throughout; the book is rightly credited in the second paragraph, and that seems to be the right place. — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 17:21, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Support – the article was a mass of over-capitalization; I took a pass over it to fix. The author was apparently not familiar with MOS:CAPS, which is not that unusual.  Dicklyon (talk) 18:50, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Quoting one book, to illustrate the different uses of the term:

--Enric Naval (talk) 23:18, 18 August 2012 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Remove or replace reference to netflix
I suggest all references to netflix to be removed or replaced with equal content-on-demand platform. The reason is because netflix runs only on Silverlight, and only on approved machines, employing severe portions of DRM, whilst also ignoring any other non-windows platforms. The version for MAC is running an emulator. It simply does not deserve to be PRed here as "good service". 77.180.188.21 (talk) 19:37, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

old talk (may be unsigned, undated, uncategorized)
The image of the long tail (grey background w/ red and yellow plot) is also found here: http://longtail.typepad.com. I'm not sure who copied the picture from who, but this could be some sort of copyright violation. 68.113.132.119
 * The image was uploaded with the permission of the creator. Stbalbach 03:56, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Could the colors for the two sections be changed a bit so that they are more distinguishable? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kkiptum (talk • contribs) 08:04, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

I would also like to add that the person who chose the color scheme must not be red-green color deficient. For the 5% of the population that is, this makes it very difficult for us to distinguish where green stops and yellow begins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.161.50.116 (talk) 02:55, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Gracious.. is there any way to make the opening paragraph 1) shorter 2) friendly to the general reader 3) encourage and invite the reader to want to read more? The amount of detail and technical talk in the opening paragraph should be very limited .. its purpose is to provide an overview of whats contained in the article body, a summary in simple language, a broad context, inviting the reader who wants to learn more to read further... like peeling an onion.. it really is not a complicated or difficult concept and should not be made so unless the reader wants that level of detail.. --Stbalbach

I hope my addition to the first paragraph (with the accompanying right Skewed graph helps. I have had some very positive feedback from fellow Systems students. --RonaldDrewman (talk) 13:18, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Certainly a problem. The key trouble in the current opening is the word "distribution" which will scare off anybody who's even slightly math phobic. The easy out is to let the entry by about just the one example that Chris Anderson is hot on the trail of; i.e. the long tail of products. That is probably a bad idea because there are so many domains where recognizing the long tail helps to illuminate the discussion. For example "the poor" is the name given the long tail in of the wealth distribution. Possibly we could drag the second paragraph of examples up and introduce them not as examples but as exemplars of a curious phenomenon "A curious pattern has been noticed in diverse systems..." that is then given a more formal name in the second paragraph... "Statistics geeks have names for these things..."

Of course the Anderson meaning for Long Tail is currently dominate in the rest of the article. But the term didn't really have that business buzz meaning until he wrote the article. Prior to that it's most common usage was in wealth, blogs, city size, and vocabularies. Probably in that order.

This is a general problem; how to get terms like this that live on the border between popular science (or even fads) and formal science. The articles on things like power-law aren't particularly user friendly, which is a bummer.
 * Bhyde


 * Thanks for the info, didn't realize "long tail" was in common use before the Wired article, Google search confirms multiple sources (date restricted to pre-Wired article publication date)  .. so we need to restructure the article to better reflect the multiple uses, meanings and implications of the term, depending on the domain of use. It can still be user friendly in the opening (the concept is not difficult), but there should be a seperate section for Chris, and a section for the scientific explanation, etc..  --Stbalbach 07:05, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Chris Anderson here. I'm pretty sure I coined the term, at least in the current proper-noun sense. Of course there had been discussion of the "tail" of curves before, and the observation that some distributions have long tails is not new, either. But "The Long Tail" as a stand-alone description of the universe of niches is my own construction, begining in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of the Wired article. Although there do appear to have been some uses of the term in an economics sense before the piece, I think it's fair to say that its current popular meaning derives from my article and this entry should reflect that. --Zlite 01:12, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ben now ... From my corner of the world it certainly appears that Clay Shirky gets a lot of cred for dragging the term "long tail" into the discussion of the "norati." His very widely discussed essay on power-laws across the blogs uses the term in 2003. It then get's widely used as a way to think about what is sometimes called "citizen media."

But it's not who popularized it that concerns me. What concerns me is that Chris's meaning is tied to taking a sample over a space of products. I find leaving out the blogs very troubling; since the structure of "citizen media" is driven by this effect. It's key to how Wikipedia and the like draw on huge swaths of contributors. I use the term at least twice on my blog in 2003 in discussions about how contributors to open projects, creative markets, and mailing lists are distributed and to make clear that the value contributed from that tail is key. For example I use it to talk about how when font foundries were disrupted by TrueType the long tail of creative designers was key. For example I use to talk about the long tail of contributors to open source projects quite a few times in various ways. For example Microsoft's developer network is all about harvesting the creative energies of a long tail of developer labor.

Focusing the term in on the business model of Amazon, eBay, and Netflix is a boo boo.

-- Bhyde

A case could be made that "The Long Tail" is the name of a magazine article, a blog site, a possible forthcoming book, and a popular concept and thus deserves its own Wikipedia article. It's an article that goes beyond a description of a statistical phenomenon. As well, an aricle called "long tail" (without the "the" and in lower case) should describe the statistical phenomenon and historical use of the term beyond what Chris describes, including Clay Shirky (if he qualifies as expert?). Just some thoughts.

--Stbalbach 23:02, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think I've made the case that "The Long Tail" as a popular neologism predates Chris's work to focus attention on the particular domain of shelf space. Since they are key to understanding world poverty, the value globalization, the function of open systems like wikipedia and open source, even culture I certainly don't want to rain on Chris's parade. I am a strong supporter of popularizing and spreading understanding of how wide spread the syndromes are around the long tail.

But, I think it's a mistake for the ...pedia to adopt Chris's current definition as definitive. It isn't durable. It's too narrow and it's too tied to the buzz he's spinning up. I love the buzz, I just don't think it serves the purposes of the ..pedia to become tied to it.

It appears we have at least four claimants to the term. The Blog space claim (ala Clay), the Shelf space claim (ala Chris), the statistical/mathematics claim, and finally the claimant as a generator of value in social systems. There is probably a five claimant which is meerly an enumeration of striking exemplars. Each of these domains the definitive "the" get's used to mean different things.

That pattern is not unusual with terms, witness the # of entries on most any work in the OED; but it's particularly severe with neologisms.

-- Bhyde

For my part (clay shirky here) when I used the term in |Powerlaws, Weblogs, and Inequality, I didn't think of it as a coinage at all -- linear distributions have heads and tails and the weblog tail is long and flat. As Ben points out, the phrase has been widely used long before now (as we'd expect of two common words in Englich that describe a coherent and widespread phenomena.)

But that kind of originality isn't what's in question, anymore than whether Malcolm Gladwell coined "tipping point" -- he plainly didn't, but he associated that phrase in people's minds with a whole class of phenomena, and did it so successfully that its now hard to have a conversation about at least some of those phenomena without using that phrase (which is frustrating in some ways, as there is never a "point" where anything happens on logistic curves.)

So, I think, with the case of the long tail and The Long Tail. Chris and I and lots of pther people use the phrase to describe a particular kind of distribution, but Chris has taken it in the direction of Tipping Point, a phrase that conjures up a whole complex of related issues, particularly issues of the business aspects of media and culture, that I didn't. So from my pov, Chris should get credit for originality, not of the phrase but of its current application and vividness. This colloquialization will sometimes be problematic for people trying to have more precise conversations, but language is like that, and it seems likely to me that the Long Tail will enter the general lexicon through Chris's work. -clay

Ben again...  Sigh. Chris is not using the phrase to describe a particular kind of distribution. From the about section on thelongtail.com: "The Long Tail is the yellow part of the sales chart at left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them." Chris is using it to describe a syndrome in sales and marketing, a class of business plans. Is a vivid article, a domain name, and a half million dollar book deal the threshold of owning a neologism? I guess so. The harm as I see it is that we will fail to draw upon the understanding that arises from seeing that this pattern appears in ecology, sociology, geology, etc. in effect privatizing the term for that branch of economics occupied by venture capitalists. Certainly this is analogous to the tipping point example. But in that case the term wasn't being dragged off and stripped of a wealth of it's meanings; rather it was being illuminated for the general public. I'm excited that Chris is illuminating this for the public; I'm concerned that one very narrow business planning meaning is where his light has fallen. - Bhyde

Interesting discussion on a number of levels. Ben, I think you may be fighting a losing battle here. Human language is probably the most organic thing in the universe that's not actually alive. As such, nobody gets to decide which neologisms or, as the case may be, solecisms, ought to mean what. This is less a 'neener-neener' than a reality check. As authors of this entry, our responsibility is to supply readers with the definition of the term they are looking up -- *not* the ideal definition (i.e. one that we decide will be more "durable" or inclusive or logical.) The good news is, if the narrow definition becomes a part of the lexicon, it will soon expand of its own accord to fit all the phenomena people see as analagous or equivalent. The various histories of the term are clearly of interest, but the important thing here is to give people a simple and elegant definition of the specific contextualized phrase they're looking up. - HarpooneerX