I’ve been intrigued with the concept of the “long tail” ever since I saw an article by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of Wired. If you haven’t heard the phrase, you should definitely read Anderson’s entire article; but in a nutshell, he explores the consequences of an industrial distribution system that focuses a few “block-busters” (e.g., best-selling books, movies by Hollywood super-stars, etc.), and ignores the “long tail” of thousands, perhaps millions, of less-popular choices. That business model has been with us since the beginning of the Industrial Age; but it has been effectively destroyed by the Internet-supported distribution mechanism used by Amazon, NetFlix, iTunes, and other businesses that create “virtual warehouses” with a nearly-infinite range of choices.

But the long tail doesn’t just apply to businesses like Amazon and NetFlix — whose success has obviously had an impact on traditional brick-and-mortar stores that only have enough space to carry the top-selling items (think Barnes & Noble, and Blockbuster). We’re beginning to see more and more discussions about applications that make sense, once you look at them from this perspective. For example, Anderson has two interesting blog-posts, here and here, about the long tail of software development. And just this morning, I noticed an interesting posting on David Weinberger’s JOHO blog about libraries and the long tail. So it’s an area that you should be looking at periodically, either to anticipate competition to your old-style business, or to find opportunities for a long-tail business of your own.

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog site is certainly one key source of information that you should be tracking; and I’m delighted to see that JOHO discusses it too. Anderson has a new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, coming out in July; you can pre-order it now from Amazon, which I’ve already done.

P.S. The “long tail” concept applies to blogging, too. A relatively small number of blogs — probably less than 100 — accounts for well over 90% of the overall blog traffic on the Internet. But there are 20 million blogs out there, published at random intervals by individuals like me. For the blog-publishers, the trick is finding someone who actually cares about what you have to say; and for the blog-readers, the trick is finding and search engines that can help you find the bloggers who actually do have something to say about an area that interests you.