The Long Tail, How Endless Choice is creating unlimited demand , by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine.

There are two types of people in the world, those who have never heard of the long tail, those who’ve heard it hyped to death.

This is an interesting read, a book that heralds the end of a best seller obsessed world which itself became a best seller. An argument that tired formulas/ and hyped imitations no longer work which has ironically been the focus of much hype . Anderson’s idea, originally set out in an article in Wired Magazine is that “Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody”. Now however the virtual world offers us not only an almost limitless catalogue of physical things (Amazon) but an almost limitless catalogue of virtual things which can be delivered frictionlessly, but intelligent ways of searching through almost limitless choice (Amazon recommendations).

Those in retail business are familiar with a power law graph, the vast majority of sales come from a few items, with big profits tailing off rapidly. That long tail represents previously untapped possibilities according to Anderson.

The idea can be (and has been) conveyed in an article, so why write a book? Anderson does a good job of seeking out real world examples of long tail economics. Disappointingly for those who hoped to dig into the statistics Anderson remains true to his journalistic role of presenting the Big Idea without such distractions such as statistics, power laws or log functions. He claims its because he was sworn to secrecy by various large corporations, as if that’s ever stopped a journalist.

Its a good aeroplane read, I finished it in two sittings: a flight to from Cape Town to Johannesburg and back, it required about 3 hours in total.

Yesterday I posted my review of The World is Flat.

My post attracted a comment that seems to be no more than a machine generated link i.e. blogspam.

That is not unusual. What is unusual is that the link attracted my interest and so I decided (foolishly perhaps) to see where it lead. Where it lead was to an advertisement for a book entitled ‘The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman’ by Ronald Aronica , Mtetwa Ramdoo.

It seems to be a critique of Friedman’s best seller, which briefly refutes Friedman, and then goes on to list issues the authors suggest on the central issues of globalisation which were ignored by Friedman, citing experts on globalisation such as Stiglitz.

In all it looks like an interesting read. Why I am conflicted is that I don’t approve of bot generated links.

One of the reasons that I don’t approve of bot generated links is that they tend to have nothing to do with the subject matter of a site, being placed either randomly or with really poor key word association.

Should that change when the key word is spot on, and I and readers are given the chance to access information which we weren’t aware of before the bot generated link?

I am not sure, so I’ve disallowed the comment but I’ve now blogged about the alternative title so that anyone who wanted to find it could do so.

This is not unrelated to Friedman’s work, and globalisation, because it returns us to the question: because you can do something, should you?

Edited to add: apparently it was not a bot, see the comment below.