13 Mar 2007 2045H

The long tail

Have you ever seen the movie Uzumaki? It’s a pretty creepy tale about spirals, spirals everywhere, a curse of spirals actually. In a weirdly twisted (heh, sorry) way, Uzumaki wouldn’t have even have come to my attention if it were not for “the long tail” which is like these spirals. One begins to see the effects of the long tail graph everywhere, in search query logs, various kinds of distributions that rely on popularity or have a certain amount of complexity, say, the popularity of dishes that people order from the Daily Specials card on the menu of a Greek diner, or the orders based on Amazon recommendations.

Part of my obsession is that I’ve become really interested in the use of quantitative data in the improvement of the user experience for a number of years now, because I simply think numbers are poorly understood and under-used in our interdiscipline. As such, sexy constructs like the “long tail,” which is another name for Zipf, Pareto, or power law distribution, take on this kind of mythical largeness in my imagination. One of my favorite quotes about the long tail, allegedly attributed to an Amazon employee, is: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” And that describes exactly what the long tail is.

Wikipedia has a great article that serves as a starter, leads you to this Clay Shirky article, and then inevitably, to Chris Anderson’s Wired story on the long tail, his ChangeThis manifesto, and hopefully to his book.

Looks promising.

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