Chapter 4: Three Forces of the Long Tail

Chapter 4 is an important chapter which helps explain the forces driving the long tail phenomenon. There are lots of blogs discussing this book and ironically it's now a "hit" in Amazon, as the #1 book. I've taken an excerpt from John Hagel's blog explaining these 3 forces:

1. Democratizing of the tools of production – especially affordable digital technology that makes it economically feasible to make products, even in small quantities. In Chris’s words, this results in “more stuff, which lengthens the Tail”.
   
   Wikipedia (wiki is Hawaiian word for quick or fast) is an example of Force #1, democratizing tools of production, with an open source version of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Adobe's Photoshop can turn an amateur artist into a graphics designer. Blogs provide a venue for amateur writers, Youtube does the same for video producers, etc. Lulu.com can turn your book into a paper/hardback and give it an ISBN# -- all for less than US$200 (pg 76)!
   
   
2. Democratizing distribution – here Chris places particular emphasis on the role of a variety of Internet aggregators in creating “infinite shelf space” businesses where virtually every product in a category can be economically accessed. Again, to quote Chris, this creates “more access to niches, which fattens the Tail”.
   
   Amazon.com, iTunes, Myspace, eBay etc all work on Force #2, providing shelf-space for sellers who originally couldn't get the attention of record labels, publishers, etc. In the future, a force in Southeast Asia, would serve this function for independent music artists in a portal called mobiuslive.net.
   
   
3. Connecting supply and demand – Chris focuses here on the emergence of businesses and taste makers that act as filters, helping to cost-effectively and flexibly connect people with available goods, no matter how narrow the interest or specialized the product. These filters can take a variety of forms, including search algorithms, sorting algorithms, editorial recommendations and customer reviews. Chris suggests that more efficient tools to connect supply and demand “drives business from hits to niches”.
   
   Force #3 is related to #2, but deal specifically with the Internet's ability to match supply with demand unimpeded from the limitations of geography, as the whole world gets online. This requires very sophisticated search engines like Google that are getting smarter in understanding the actual "intent" of the consumer (ie based on a search criteria and context, regardless of language), Google search will be able to assess whether your search for "Lincoln" relates to a US President or a luxury car.
   
   On the supply side, niches are growing much faster than the retailers ability to categorize products such as music. For example, Rhapsody has hundreds of genres of songs compared to dozens in a typical record store. This makes a website's search functionality a critical component of the user experience. Web 2.0 Tag clouds are now common features in websites where a commonly searched category, e.g. 'Pop' for music, would be highlighted, usually in larger font from other common search categories.