Sometimes it happens.

There are Boidem columns that tend to branch out in numerous directions, and then there are columns which try as they may seem to be incapable of straying from the main idea. There are columns that meander along a stream of thought that leads to (even for me) unexpected territory, and others that stick to the straight and narrow. This particular column seems to be of that latter, one-trick pony, type. If, as I've already noted, the Long Tail is little more than an iteration of the Power Law, that's perhaps to be expected. Eyeballs aren't shelves, and while they don't exactly occupy physical space, they basically "suffer" from the same problem - there's only so much to go around. And that sort of brings things back to where we started - the question of how (or whether) the internet lost its tail. There's nothing illegitimate in one of these columns focusing exclusively (for a change) on one basic issue, particularly when that issue is the ongoing retreat of the web from what some of us saw as one of its central tenets. Still, I can't say that when I started writing I saw this happening.



Go to: The tailless wooly internet behemoth.