I’m seeing a lot of write-ups about The Long Tail these days. Has anyone else noticed that this is just a refinement and extension of Content is Not King?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:54 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/430.
Yes.
Posted by: at March 18, 2005 09:14 PMNot until you mentioned it, and I'm not sure if I correctly understand why you say this.
My guess is that the many niche small peer to peer communications are the Long Tail, and "Content" is the smaller number of best seller mass market communications.
Sort of in the same way as insects are 80% of the animal biomass of the planet IIRC, and humans form considerably less than the remaining 20%.
Checking Wikipedia on biomass I found: "The most successful animal of the earth, in terms of biomass, is the Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, with a biomass of probably over 500 million tonnes, roughly twice the total biomass of humans."
I guess the whales were right to choose them for food.
Small size times large numbers is the way to make significant mass.
But where would the whales be if the krill where to die off and be replaced by something more diverse? In the same state the telcos are as the vast oceans of commodity call minutes that used to attract monopoly rents dry up and are replaced with the hugely diverse requirements of open progressive systems.
hmm, I thought it was quite a strong response that Content is king.