I have been reading "Long Tail[[posterous-content:kjDoEfhcchhpnHHyeDkA]]" by Chris Anderson. A lot of blogs I have been reading recently all talk about the long tail as in the phenomenon and not the book, but when you trace the history of the phenomenon it all points back to this book (or blog)
I thought the book was good, I read it quickly. I found myself saying "well that is obvious" on every other page when Chris was talking about limited choice against infinite choice, aggregators and filters etc, but that is not a bad thing, it points out the obvious to make you realise you can that the answers are right in front of you.
I do feel that it could be shorter, perhaps just reading the blog would have been better for me. That is not say I didn't enjoy it, it is just that I feel that the whole book was very verbose, using words just to fill the pages.
Without realising I had already implemented a "Long Tail" Feature on this blog. In the past I used to constantly put related links, pictures and other artifacts to help the readers of my posts discover more about what I am talking about. The only problem about this was that it bloated each post up to enormous proportions and that is why I made my own mini tag directory (http//:www.kinlan.co.uk/tag/{anytag}), this would link to all related posts that I have made and also related resources. This was actually quite sucsesful and led to me creating Topicala (http://www.topicala.com/) which was my own meta search engine. I use it a lot and a few other people use it. Topicala is a tag directory that allows users to search across many search engines at once to find the information they need in just one place.
Amazon UK LongTail[[posterous-content:qubjjHxGgefiarDtomve]], Amazon USA Long Tail[[posterous-content:kjDoEfhcchhpnHHyeDkA]]
