Chipping the web: November 20th
November 21st, 2008 7:00:08 am pst by 
Sterling Camden
- Long Tail stops wagging
That isn't a long tail after all, it's a poop trail.
Tags: longtail chrisanderson whimsley - Time to look busy.
"Always look on the bright side of life"
Tags: blogging layoffs economy - Pair Programming – Marketing FAIL
Why pair programming works, and why people think it doesn't.
Thanks, Reg.
Tags: aaronerickson pairprogramming agile xp collaboration programming development marketing - That’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature Request
Fatal error message? Corrupted database? Features.
Tags: codinghorror development bugtracking - Let me google that for you
Oh, I will use this! Yes, I will use this often!
Tags: google help sarcasm - Employees sue for unpaid Windows Vista overtime
I just use all that extra boot time to catch up on my reading. Proust today, Rand tomorrow.
Via the Code Project.
Tags: microsoft windows vista timemanagement - Tagging game
Martin responds to my tag. Mmmm… pancakes…
Tags: modifoo meme random - 10 People with Unbelievable Medical Conditions – Oddee.com (medical …
Allergic to water? That's almost as inconvenient as the lady who's allergic to EMF.
Tags: medical allergy disorders
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I’ve never been comfortable with this “long tail” metaphor, anyway. If you think of things in terms of a head and a long tail, and you’re not the head, you don’t have a business model. Instead, you have become a groupie.
I, personally, think of this as a network, not a serpent. I position myself within it by the choices I make with regards to how I deal with others and what I offer. That will prove wildly successful at some point, or it won’t. C’est la vie. Success is personally defined, anyway.
“Success is personally defined, anyway”
Right — so it defies being plotted on a graph.
In addition to that, I find the linked analysis of the situation somewhat simplistic and annoying:
Anybody who thought “the long tail” meant you could become rich by being a fan is deluded or stupid.
Declaring “it’s all over for the long tail” assumes that the person who needs to be told this is exactly that kind of deluded and stupid.
There can be other advantages to jumping into “the long tail” than being a groupie that hopes to get rich off of hero worship.
I didn’t get that from the article, but I entered with my own pre-definition of the term (having read Anderson’s book) — that making money off the long tail means catering to the non-celebrity market. All those items that are loved by only a few. But the data seems to show that there’s not really enough of those to survive on. I’m still open to other conclusions, though.
Hmm.
I knew that. I just forgot about it.
Well, in that case, I just think the article in question is full of shit.
Whimsley? or his quotations from Anderson?
Specifically, the notion that “it’s all over for the long tail”. From what you’ve said about the ideas underlying the discussion, the only way I can see to interpret that is that niche markets don’t work.
I suspect, if that’s the case, part of the problem is that people don’t realize that all they’re talking about is the viability of niche markets.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that there are no valid niche markets — I think it has to do with the expectation level that Anderson’s book set. Therein he basically claimed that there’s more business in the long tail than there is in the head, provided you can reach it and service it. But the numbers for that claim don’t seem to add up.
Sure, Amazon makes a lot of money selling books that nobody else can afford to carry. But could they stay in business if that was all they offered? They still need the big hits, too.
There are successful companies who serve only a niche, but the key to their success is not to expect too much.
I’m not so sure it isn’t true that there’s more business in the tail than in the head, though. The fact is that the head is dominated by a couple of big players, and the way Western economies work at present, it’s very, very difficult for competitors to arise. Our semi-managed economy is heavily weighted in favor of huge public corporations and against anyone and anything else.
If things got loosened up a bit more, there’d be more room for smaller competitors to get in on the action, and next thing ya know there’d be a feeding frenzy, followed by a whole lot of people discovering the real money is in the niche markets.
Blame the unfree market, not Andersen.
I enjoyed a lot of this, Chip! I’m still giggling over the google one!
I really do plan to use that one, as long as the recipient has a sense of humor.
But irony has a way of striking first — just yesterday I asked a colleague a question, and he replied “first result on Google”.