Recently, "the long tail" has started creeping back into conversations. I'm not sure why, maybe Chris Anderson's recent Wired cover story has something to do with it.
In any event, I've noticed that the longer the term's been in the mainstream, the more diluted its meaning has become, to the point where Zipf's law and the power-law distributions seem to have been largely forgotten. I jotted down this graph:
Don't get me wrong, I understand the value of books like The Long Tail and The Tipping Point. Without them, a lot of interesting and important ideas would never make it mainstream. I guess I just wish that the underlying concepts were remembered as much as the buzz words that seem to replace them.
1 comments:
Let me see if I got this straight-- are you saying that the phrase "the long tail" has been used, lately, in such a way that be can be described by a long-tail graph, and that the correctness of its usage also follows such a graph? Cause dude, that's deep. Its almost fractal.
Post a Comment