February 25, 2005
Critical Mass and the Long Tail
Cognitive Dissonance » Critical Mass and the Long Tail
The notion of critical mass and the long tail seems somehow disconnected. The nature of the long tail is the sparse connection. How can there be critical mass in the long tail?
When I say critical mass, I am talking about the overall number of people who are reading and publishing blogs. That critical mass (i.e. the whole population rather than a geographically constrained subset) is what makes the long tail so important for retailers like Amazon and Ebay. In other words, the critical mass is the entire population in the curve, including those on the high-end (most popular blogs) and those trailing out near the end of the tail (with few readers, like me).
If you read the article on Wired, note that Amazon is approaching a point where the majority of its business comes from books (or other items) that are the very low sellers. This phenomenon only occurred when their catalog contained a sufficiently large number of these less popular items combined with the ability to reach a critical mass of consumers. Similarly, there will always be the more popular blogs in the spike at the high end of the ed tech spectrum but, it is when the population becomes sufficiently large with people writing with little or no audience on many, many topics that we will really see the value of blogging.
Take this conversation, for example. It may not be of interest to very many people but it has managed to connect at least three of us (and maybe a few lurkers). When there are many of these specialized discussions happening at the same time around ed tech issues, that's when blogs (or other technologies) have the greatest ability to enrich our field.
Posted by Rovy at February 25, 2005 7:33 AM