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The Long Tail

By Tony Pearson posted Wed December 13, 2006 02:27 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


Chris Anderson, of Wired magazine, wrote a great article called The Long Tail.

This article became a book by the same name published earlier this year, and I just discovered it on a recent visit to Second Life. A lot of IBMers are now alsoSecond Lifers, and I suspect it is just a matter of time before we are conductingour customer briefings there, and getting our year-end bonuses paid directly in Linden bucks.(Those of you not familiar with Second Life can watch this 3-minute video fromthe folks at Text100)

Anyways, the Long Tail describes the new economy of entertainment thanks to digitalstorage. Here are some of the key insights.

  • In the past, entertainment was all about hits: hit songs, hit movies,hit novels, and this was primarily because of the economic realities restricted byphysical space. Chris writes: "An average movie theater will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that's essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that's the rent for a half inch of shelf space."
  • Things have changed. To drive the point home, Robbie Vann-Adibe (CEO of eCast), poses the trick question"What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?" The answer will surprise you. Write down your guess first, then go read here. His digital jukeboxes are able to play from a list of150,000 songs, not the few hundred you'd find at the Tap Room which is rated as having the best jukebox in Tucson.
  • The phenomenon is not just limited to music. "Take books," Chris writes, "The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are..."

This has incredible implications for the storage industry. For one, content providers are going to dig deep into their archives to digitize and deliver "long tail" offerings. If they don't have a deep archive, many will start to build one. Second, the need to search through that large volume of content will become more critical. Classifying and indexing with the appropriate tags and metadata will be an important task.

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Archive User
Tue December 19, 2006 11:30 AM

Have you found any links between "The Long Tail", Web 2.0 and Storage?Jeremiah Owyang, late of HDS and now of PodTech, refers to these connections continually in his blog:http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/
In Jeremiah's post today:"Brand Measurement in word of mouth network important. A new industry emerges: “Social Media Measurement”"http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/12/19/brand-measurement-in-word-of-mouth-network-important-a-new-industry-emerges-social-media-measurement/he talks about a new meaningful way to "harness data culled online". It might already be on your own Storage but who is going to know? And after it is collected it might need to be analyzed in comparison or Context to other already gathered Information.
When business was focused on the "Top Whatever" because they saw no way to cheaply market outside the "Top Whatever", nor did they have any Data to point elsewhere, nor were they looking, they were home free. That will all change dramatically with Web 2.0 and people learning how to use "The Long Tail" Strategy for their own business.
IT could have been pointing the way to this years ago. IT has been caught up in the "latest" Technology rather than "What business Information are we Storing that some bright BI person might find useful?". Partnering with the Lines of Business never seemed to enter the minds of the IT people, other than to get funding.
How does IT justify its existence? By providing the "Enabling" Technology? Isn't that like your car telling you why you should keep it?

Archive User
Mon December 18, 2006 01:53 PM

Tony,
I just finished "The Long Tail" too. It's a must-read for anyone in IT today. Like you said, it opens your mind to the infinite possibilities, especially for storage.
Of several thoughts I had reading the book, one was with regard to "filtering" and "recommendations" which is one of the factors that drives the long tail.
My thought is that only people with strong opinions are going to "rate" a product - those that hate it - and those that love it. I'm not sure if that is a problem or not, but I don't think the author gave that point much thought.
P.S. - Very cool to see you have a blog. Found it via an email I got recently. Don't let you fame go to your head -- oops - that already happened.
P.P.S. - We met at TopGun in DC recently.