Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  When The Long Tail Wags The Dog (19 Feb 2006) One of the hot concepts mentioned frequently when discussing Internet businesses and applications for the last year or two has been that of the "Long Tail". It was most recently popularized by Chris Anderson's October 2004 article in Wired called "The Long Tail". I've written about some of value of the long tail, as have many others: See "Small Players Matter" from June 2002 and Jakob Nielsen's email there and his essays with data back to 1997. From what I've seen, most of the writings derived from Anderson's article have to do with the additional value you get by serving the long tail of less-than-very-popular items made more financially viable by the Internet. In this essay I show why it is even more important to serve the long tail in some areas, and how systems that limit the ability to use inexpensively created custom content will have a hard time in the marketplace. I also relate the idea of the long tail to general purpose authoring tools. The essay goes through the background that brought me to these conclusions. Add this article to Del.icio.us Article URL: http://www.bricklin.com/tailwagsdog.htm Read 73 more articles from Dan Bricklin sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy

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