When I mention "the long tail" to some people - they roll their eyes and go "oh yeah - that book". When you ask further you realize that they liked the book but think that it was all focused about amazon. This is understandable - since a lot of this book focuses on this - but the reader has missed the genius of "the long tail" and will miss the genius of his next book "free".

Firstly:

An open source book -Whilst Chris is the author of the book - it is essentially and open source development - the book is the result of his blog - to which thousands of people contributed ideas and criticisms. It is similar to a project like linux - lots of people working together to create a book - overseen by an architect. His second book will also use a blog - although I suspect he will have SEO problems with the word "free" and needs to invent a new term - possibly something like freeconomy or fre or fr2e

A free podcast about the the FR2E book

The principles are axioms: The principles discussed in this book apply to many web apps.

The long tail explains why in a search frontend cache

  • 8 million queries - I get a cache hit rate of 31%
  • 64 million entries - I get a cache hit rate of 35%.

Lots of users are searching for previously unseen queries. [note: previously unseen queries - means say 8 hours, since I don't want the cache to get stale]

It explains the problem of "should I cache this last query" - I simply don't know if someone will search for it again in the future.

The long tail explains - why I would want to encourage users down the long tail - users find more value in niche content.

The long tail explains:

why you don't want to discourage poor UGC content on your site and instead want to focus on creating powerful filters that can match the correct content with the correct user - ie. what you classify as poor content, may be highly valuable content to others - the site should simply not be showing you this content. The cost of storing the content is very small as its is not limited by physical "bookshelf space"

The long tail explains what will happen to consumption if the filters and content matching improve - it suggests "a couch potato will still watch the same number of hours of tv, irrespective of the number of channels", amazon users by books more valuable to themselves (and amazon can charge a premium on this niche content).

The long tail is a fractal - no matter how custom your field - you will still find a long tail. take for example "blogs on mobile css".

    The Free book

    I hope will explain why:

    • why yahoo.com has free news, mail, games - they are like a free paper magazine - giving away content to get eyeballs (readership).
    • why open source exists
    • The motivation of why people contribute to answers.yahoo.com. For:
      • reputation
      • attention
      • respect
      • fame
      • fun