The Long Tail
One of the useful things about horrendous flights across America and the infernal realms of chaos that are Washington, Chicago and Denver airports is that it’s easy to catch up on reading.
So I read a couple of useful books (and one useless one: Michael Crichton's Congo. I mention this because it concerns a professor called Peter Elliot who takes a ‘talking’ gorilla to Africa and I used to work with a guy called Peter Elliot who had a propensity for African holidays. Weird...)
Anyway – to the point: The Long Tail was one of those useful books. It’s Chris Anderson’s book from the original article of some time ago covering the idea of the 'economics of abundance' and how consumer's behave when presented with unlimited choice. Short answer: 'hit' sales items become less important and behaviour fragments into niches, thus almost all catalogue sells some quantity or other rather than a traditional retail 80/20 sales split.
This is a really important book if you work in the media business, or any other business with long-tail revenue potential (also known as a back-catalogue...). Read it - you can rip through it in a few hours. There’s also a great diagram nugget on ‘The Architecture of Participation’ which is worth seeing.
This is particularly relevant from a development perspective as - given this behaviour - navigation in terms of faceted browsing, filtering, recommendations and so on become extremely important to ensure navigability and thus sales. These techniques are visible across the web today - searching, keyword tagging, 'people who bought this...', user reviews - but perhaps there are other techniques out there, better execution methods for these techniques, or methods to aggregate these techniques that can provide THE compelling navigator for a world of infinite choice.
