Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
// October 9th, 2005 // Technology Bits
Casey started spouting to me weeks ago about “The Long Tail”, and it’s significance in our changing online world. I read a bit, was admittedly intrigued, but haven’t thought too much about it until recently.
After noticing Web 2.0 being listed as a top search term on Technorati for the last few weeks I began looking into what this term actually means. Apparently Tim O’Reilly and others have begun talking about the next phase of the Internet. Where are we going, what is successful, and why? Obviously Google is a key part of all of this, but I was somewhat surprised to find discussion also tying back to the long tail.
At this point I realized I needed to know a bit more about this now too, so stumbled into Chris Anderson’s blog, longtail.typepad.com. Anderson discusses at great length Legos, digital music, BitTorrent, software and more. He cites intriguing examples of and detail about how companies are taking advantage of the long tail to make money in ways no one could ever imagine without the Internet and it’s grand reach. Go read his site, learn about this, it is very important.
Not surprisingly, as I began to grasp his concepts I was led right back to O’Reilly and conveniently his “What is Web 2.0?” article. This is also a must read. Let me quickly quote a brainstorm list of services that have transitioned from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Somehow that list really made the Web 2.0 concepts become much clearer. Reading deeper I came upon a comparison that was most clear to me, an ex-advertising programmer:
Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content. DoubleClick’s offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest web sites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.
This was a fantastic hell yeah moment for me, linking back long tail notions to these Web 2.0 ideas.
The next major point he makes is “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” which I compare to the infinite monkey theorem and is my reason why people should blog. He cites the success of Wikipedia, Flikr, open source web development, and more.
A point I find myself arguing at work constantly but didn’t have words for yet is also addressed: “End of the Software Release Cycle”. Read that section, for software developers this is a complete change in mind set, but more importantly, trainers and managers are going to need to get on board or fear missing the boat.
There is a ton of detail to absorb here, I could keep pulling at my favorite gems, but I’ll let you read up yourself. What I will do however is leave you with this final list of core Web 2.0 competencies from the article:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
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