Seth Godin and Chris Anderson keep talking about the long tail. What if the long tail didn’t matter? What if they were all wrong?
I understand the long tail. The long tail generally refers to the distribution of information as the currency of the web. Meaning access to information is worth something. And providing such access gives you value. So by monetizing the long tail it means you find a niche that is worth snagging and you own every aspect of it. The long tail implies that certain niches are ‘owned’ by the wealth owners such as those who routinely dominate information online. Good examples of information domination include Wikipedia.
But what if search were not so much about pagerank and authority and the Google dominance and more about the story telling that goes on. What if information were prioritized not by popularity but by relevance to YOU. Would the long tail be important at all ? Because what is important to you is definetly different than what’s important to me.
Deep down I think I just wish there were another player in search besides The Google. The long tail sure as heck wouldn’t mean as much. Thanks Yahoo and MSN for dropping the ball on this one.
Here’s the question of the day:
Would your online business survive without Google Search?
Originally posted on December 20, 2006 @ 1:13 am
The new version of Blogger is metaphorically bursting with features, from the big guns like drag-and-drop template editing and post labels (which are perfect, by the way, for indexing the 131 historical figures you may have written about), to little polishes like a better-designed Dashboard or that you no longer need to solve a word verification CAPTCHA to post a comment on your own blog.
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Ed Kohler of the 
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