Jargon watch: The Long Tail
August 30th, 2005 | by Tim Wilson |
It seems like “the long tail” is popping up everywhere these days so I guess this is a good time for a jargon watch post about it. The long tail literally refers to the general shape of a sloping probability function. Not surprisingly, the interesting part goes beyond the mathematical equation to a principle that seems to be describing elements of a new economy.
The easiest way to think about the long tail is to put it in terms of popularity. Consider the market for DVDs. The left side of the graph represents the Hollywood blockbuster movies and the extreme right end of the graph represents a home movie of the type you might find at ourmedia.org. The point is that without the Internet and the means to find obscure films, the right three-fourths of the graph wouldn’t exist at all. Netflix illustrates nicely how this works. I’ve rated 169 movies on the Netflix site over the last year or so and when I log in to Netflix now I get 243 recommendations. Within two clicks I find a film called Rashomon by acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa that the Netflix system thinks I will like based on my previous ratings and the ratings of others who’ve rating movies similarly. Now I’m not saying that Kurosawa’s film is equivalent to somebody’s home video, but I’m reasonable sure that I wouldn’t have found it at my local Blockbuster.
A couple key points:
- There are more “things” in the tail than there are in the left side. That could refer to movies, musicians, podcasts, or blogs.
- Most of the things in the tail aren’t very good, but the important point is that a few of them are really good.
- Thanks to easy information access it’s possible for bloggers, musicians, etc. to create content for a small audience…and that’s OK.
So let’s bring this back to the world of educational technology. The most obvious point is that there are a lot of great thinkers out there blogging and working in the long tail. If you restrict your students to using a traditional textbook they will never find the gems out there in the tail where so many fresh perspectives and new ideas can be found. We don’t need to wait for information to show up in dead tree form anymore. This blog is great example of the long tail. I’ve never published a book or an article in the education literature (…yet), but that hasn’t stopped me from blabbing on and on for the whole world to see. If you’ve ever found anything worth reading on this site, you’ve benefited from the long tail.
For more information about the long tail you can check out the Wikipedia article or an IT Conversations podcast of a presentation called Economics of the Long Tail by Chris Anderson, the originator of the long tail concept.
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