This was at the core of the confusion over the definition of the Long Tail (absolute numbers are still meaningful in marketplaces where the number of products grows by orders of magnitude overnight, but percentages are not) and it continues to come up in conversation every day.
People want to generalize—“most Wikipedia pages are wrong”; “most YouTube videos are crap”—but the first rule of open systems is that you can’t generalize about open systems.
So here are five words that I would suggest are usually meaningless in a world where the populations we’re talking about are limitless in size and diversity and doubling overnight (just add the word “blogs” after any of them and you’ll see what I mean)…
The Long Tail: Thirteen words that lose their meaning when the denominator approaches infinity
So I have avoided linking to Chris Anderson for years because of this very reason…people don’t understand the actual underlying point that he made about power laws and his book was so popular that just uttering “long tail” makes you look like a blowhard (whether you use it correctly or not).
However, this post sets EVERYthing straight and I recommend it for marketing people and techies alike ;-)
