I finished reading The Long Tail over the weekend. The name of the book comes from the increasing importance of the sum of products and services that sell in small numbers. It makes the case that because there are so many of them, adding up these little sales actually makes them more valuable then the small number of products that sell in huge numbers, i.e. the biggest hit is the sum of the non-hits.

Economics traditionally been a study of trade offs of limited resources. The Long Tail looks at the economics of abundance; in storage, bandwidth, and processing. As manufacturing and distribution costs get reduced to near zero, it’s easy to imagine why new rules are necessary. The transition is mostly validated by comparisons between the physical world and the online world. More than just space is a limited resource in the physical world. Other items like category are also limited. You place a product in the most likely place people will look for it. Online, you can tag products so that people can easily find it regardless of how they look for it.

In addition to proving his conclusions with sales data from Amazon, Rhapsody, Netflix, ITunes, and others, author Chris Anderson shows how this happened through a democratization of production, distribution, and connecting the supply to the demand. He attributes these advances to personal computers, the internet, and search tools such as Google.

Having access to more choices means that we’re not dependent on mass media to give us what we want. It also means that previous popularity was just the result of limited choices. Would you be able to read Richer by the Day if only a dozen blogs were distributed on the internet? Would “I Love Lucy have” still have been watched by 75% of homes if they had 100+ channels of cable?

I also enjoyed the insight on the power of large numbers. Looking at the quality of any one blog, for example, could be very wide. But by comparing opinions on multiple blogs, or those with the highest feedback/authority, you probably get a more accurate picture than from any one MSM news site.

With some much additional information, the importance of filters (like Google, Technorati, etc) has increased significantly. They help you separate the good from the bad. With the Long Tail, filters change from trying to predict what people will like to amplifying what they like through positive feedback.

The basic premise of the book could easily have been reduced to an equation that would have made sense to a math geek like me. The commentary that came along for the ride not only made the cause and effect of the equation much more clear, it also opened the subject to a much wider audience.