Webwhompers

Thanks in part to collaborative filtering, Web-based retailers like Amazon can make money selling "niche" items that are too obscure for traditional brick-and-mortar stores to carry. Chris Anderson coined the term long tail to describe how selling lots of different niche items can add up to gross sales on par with a few old-fashioned blockbusters.

Two outstanding introductions to the long tail are

• The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. Wired, Oct 2004. "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream."
• Going Long, by John Cassidy. The New Yorker, July 2006. A cautionary review of the book-length 2006 version of Anderson's original Wired article. "The least convincing part of Anderson’s book is his treatment of what he calls 'the short head,' the part of the curve where popular products reside."

Cassidy sums up the technology that makes the long tail possible:

• Cheap computer hardware, which reduces the cost of making and storing information products;
• Ubiquitous broadband, which cuts the cost of distribution;
• Elaborate “filters,” such as search engines, blogs, and online reviews, which help to match supply and demand.

 Anderson draws the canonical long tail, which emerges when the above forces are all in place:

Click on the above image to see the full slide show on Wired.