A piece of (the long) tail

Have been watching with great interest as this concept -- the long tail -- finds a voice. Have also been flogging it personally with my colleagues not accepting it's buzzword quality. Now that The Economist has run this piece: Profiting from obscurity, is that vindication? The lead:

DISRUPTIVE technologies, learning curves, tipping points--every so often a trendy new term enters the business lexicon and becomes a staple of business plans, conference speeches and PowerPoint presentations. The latest example, generating buzz among entrepreneurs, technologists and bloggers, is the idea of the "long tai". The term is not new, having long been used in statistics to refer to a feature of "power-law" distributions, such as the frequency with which different words are used in English: there are a few common words that are used a great deal, and a long tail of increasingly obscure words that are used less often. But the idea is now in vogue because of its particular relevance to the economics of e-commerce.

Posted by Grayson at May 10, 2005 06:09 PM